Benefits

Last night I went to hear Chris Mould of the Trussell Trust speak at my local church. The scene appeared to confirm every myth Tories tell about themselves. Though it does not make a great noise about it, the Trust represents the Anglican conscience at its active best. On their own, without state support or any of those nanny bureaucracies the right so deplores, the churches have organised more than 400 distribution centres to provide emergency food aid to desperate people. The men and women, who check that clients are truly in need, and hand out food, nappies and sanitary towels, are volunteers, motivated by a concern for others rather than money or recognition. They are a social service as well as the last line of defence against hunger.

The Synthetic Outrage Squad has been out in force over Channel 4’s Benefits Street, dubbing the series 'poverty porn' that 'demonises' a vulnerable group of people. In fact, as someone who’s lived in the city depicted on the programme for most of my life, what I saw not only rings true but also paints a rather flattering picture of life at the bottom in Birmingham. The reality can be much worse. Those who watched the second episode looking for ‘poverty porn’ would have wondered what all the fuss is about.

David Davis is plainly right that the Tories are just testing the water to see how talk about capping child benefit to two children for people on the dole goes down with the punters. And the predictable result is that the water isn’t really all that cold.  The suggestion has gone down nicely with quite a few, especially those – no offence folks! – who sound off on the internet. Any restrictions on welfare are popular; we know that. And it’s all too easy to think of examples of egregious fecundity on the part of people who we would probably prefer not to be parents at all: the child-killer Mick Philpott say, father of 17.

Welfare as we know it is doomed to defeat. It looks like going down to defeat from three major challenges, and each challenge comes from the sea change that is now so marked in public opinion. First, welfare has moved from one based on the duty to contribute before the right to help was conceded. Increasingly benefits are provided only after a test of income. Voters do not approve of this significant change. The next challenge comes from an increasing reluctance by voters to pay an ever growing share of their income in taxes, of which the largest part goes to a form of welfare with which they strongly disagree – means-tested welfare. The third fundamental change is generational.

Jamie Oliver, eh, what a card? Why can't Britain's revolting poor eat better food? If they can afford televisions they can afford mussels and rocket too, don't ya know? Something like that anyway. But instead they loaf in front of the goggle-box stuffing their fat faces with lardy ready-meals and fast food. What is to be done with them? And why can't they be more like the Spanish or the Italians? Never mind that Italian children are more likely to be obese than British children. Never mind, too, that kids in impoverished southern Italy are more likely to be overweight than children in the wealthier north. Instead just fantasise about a future in which poor British families will dine on fresh vegetables and the finest seafood.

Universal pensioner benefits like the Winter Fuel Allowance (WFA) cost the Exchequer over £8 billion a year. This is not a massive sum compared to overall government expenditure but it is absurd that every pensioner gets WFA, even cash millionaires. We must face the fact that this is totally wrong. It is morally and economically wrong that lower-paid people are paying for the benefits of millionaires who are more than capable of paying their own fuel bills. In an ideal world we would stop handing out WFA to people who didn’t need it. But that’s not easy or cost-effective. So we need to look carefully at the WFA and other pensioner benefits currently paid to the very wealthy, like the free bus pass and TV license, and come up with innovative ways to manage the payments.

I'm told there's a joke that does the round in Whitehall, that to err is human, but if you really want to foul things up you need Iain Duncan Smith. I'm afraid a casual glance at DWP's delivery record explains why. On every single one of DWP's five big reforms things are going badly wrong. The human cost of this colossal bodge job is impossible to calculate. But the fiscal cost could be as high as £1.4 billion. Let's start with reform of disability benefits. A vital reform that needs tremendous care. The test itself needs fast and fundamental reform (my speech on the subject is here). But the government's contractor, Atos is running rings around the Government. Anyone taking the test is eight times more likely to end up in a tribunal than in a job.

With the recent anniversary of the Beveridge report, TV channels have been packed with an array of documentaries on our welfare system. Most of these have been fairly hopeless, trying to make their points with extreme cases. Channel 4’s ‘How to get a council house’ was a notable exception. With devastating clarity it showed how our social housing system is nothing of the kind. My grandfather, an electrician, spent most of the Second World War on Malta with the RAF. His house in East London was destroyed by bombing during the war. With no home of his own he stayed with relatives when on leave and happily fell in love with my grandmother who lived next door. They married on VE day and after a few years had a daughter, my mum.

Formulating policy on the back of what you believe human beings ought to be like rather than what they tend to be like can have serious consequences. Mass immigration is a case in point. I have tended to accept the proposition that immigration (the more the merrier) is an inherent good on the grounds that the economic case for it is strong. After all, migrants tend to put more into the pot than they take out and a rapidly ageing population means we require a young and dynamic workforce to pay for pensions further down the road. It is the economic case that explains why, as well as the bleeding heart left, the CBI and the Economist are enthralled at the prospect of greater mass migration to the UK. Economics should not be determinative of policy, however.

According to popular wisdom on the left — and even among some in the Conservative party — this ought to have been a tough week for the government. On Monday, the new £26,000 cap on benefits came into effect and with it a new principle: that no one on welfare should receive more than the average working family. Such a move, it was said, would expose the Conservatives to what is supposed to be their weak point: that they are the ‘nasty party’ who care about money, not people. Yet something remarkable has happened. Iain Duncan Smith’s welfare cap is turning out to be not just the boldest but the most popular reform undertaken by this government.