Benefits

George Osborne delivered everything we expected, and then some. This was a confident and wide-ranging speech from a Chancellor who has suddenly discovered a central message: what's right about burning £120 million of taxpayers' cash in debt interest payments every day? Wouldn't it be better to get to grips with that waste as soon as possible? And that message percolated down through everything from his attack on Ed Miliband to his case for reforming our public services. "It's like a credit card," Osborne growled, "the longer you leave it, the worse it gets." But if that was the theme of Osborne's symphony, then the motif was certainly welfare.

I have found out a little more about the Universal Credit – and how the arguments over the summer were resolved. First, the backdrop. Money was always going to be a problem. This policy is about saving lives, not money. Right now, we pave the road to welfare dependency, creating a vacuum in the labour market that sucks in workers from overseas. Under Brown, the Treasury accepted this: cheap workers pay tax too, and as do companies who profit from them. Result: tax receipts up, but never fewer than 5 million on out-of-work benefits throught the boom years. The IDS plan was not sprung on Osborne. As I blogged a while ago, it was Osborne who suggested bringing him back – to implement this very policy.

For the briefest of moments, the welfare war seemed to have quietened down. But, this morning, a new front may have flared open. Answering questions from the work and pensions committee, Iain Duncan Smith has struck out against the figures for benefit cuts that emerged at the weekend. The Guardian's Haroon Siddique reports: "During questioning by the work and pensions committee, Duncan Smith was at pains to play down newspaper reports that he and Osborne were at loggerheads with each other. But when asked by committee chair Anne Begg about a variety of figures that had been 'bandied about' including the £11bn savings set out in the June budget and the £4bn, he responded: 'As with regards to figures like 4bn, I simply do not recognise that figure at all.

Conservatives have long been strong on family. They believe that families are the glue that sticks us together, and that traditional nuclear families therefore plays an important role in sticking the whole nation together. As a libertarian, I believe that people should live as they choose. Too many young people of my parents' and grandparents' generations were forced into marriages that were or became deeply unhappy – but divorce was thought scandalous. So people – particularly women, who rarely had independent means or income enough to escape – endured that misery. Many, too, were humiliated, or prosecuted, for conducting relationships that we would happily accept today.

Infamously, George Canning and Viscount Castlereagh fought a duel over a policy disagreement; Iain Duncan Smith and George Osborne will follow suit at this rate. I had thought they’d resolved their differences over the upfront costs of IDS’ welfare reform; but the Mail on Sunday reports otherwise, glorying in the glares, savage bon mots and expletives. This is the conundrum: if IDS doesn’t find £10bn in savings, he will not get the £3bn needed to enact his reforms to make work pay.

The Winter Fuel Allowance was an emotive part of the election campaign, with Labour accusing the Tories of planning to scrap it and David Cameron promising not to. At no point during that debate was it asked whether the WFA was a good way to spend money. Our report earlier this year, Cold Comfort, examined in some detail the demographics of fuel poverty, as well as questioning the logic behind the government’s target. If you take the fuel poverty measure (those spending more than 10% of income on energy) as read, the last government failed utterly to achieve anything on it – as the graph below shows. They introduced the target when fuel poverty was declining sharply and were surprised when it bottomed out and started rising again.

The Winter Fuel Allowance has tapdanced back onto the political landscape today, and it's all thanks to some insightful work by the FT's Alex Barker. He had an article in this morning's pink 'un which suggested that IDS is lobbying to have it, and and some other "middle-class benefits", trimmed to help pay for his benefit reforms. And he's followed that up with a blog-post explaining how even an apparent "cut" in the allowance may not result in savings for the Treasury or the DWP. Strange but true, as they say. This could be a delicate situation for the coalition. In the background to it all is David Cameron's pre-election pledge that the Tories wouldn't cut Winter Fuel Allowance.

Sometimes hope lies in the details. Take this morning's press release from the DWP, for instance. On the surface, it is a response to today's encouraging employment figures. But what it really is is a new way of approaching the problem of worklessness in this country. And all because of its headline: "Figures reveal five million on out of work benefits as Grayling pledges to make work pay." This is, as far as I can remember, the first time that the total out-of-work claimant count has reached the summit of an official release. The last government always knew what the figure was, of course, but never drew much attention to it. Instead, we heard Brown mumbling on about "3 million new jobs," while wilfully ignoring the millions who had been overtaken by globalisation.