Lawrence Kay

Is Frank Field back? The Labour MP has spent much of his life talking about the poor. Judging by reports today, he might be offered a job chairing a commission on child poverty. This is good news but, as Mr Field has already said, there is not much point in him debating the finer points of poverty definitions. He would need to be given remit to suggest policy. What should those suggestions be? First, he should argue that we need to be a lot less self-indulgent about how we think about child poverty. It may be great to think of ourselves as tackling a major social ill, but the past government’s approach was not nearly as successful as it or its supporters liked to think.

Contrary to what you might think, it is actually quite hard to find someone on benefits who doesn’t want to work. When you ask a claimant whether they would like to, they will invariably say “Yes, I want a job.” At first, this seems like a strange answer: why do we have nearly 6 million people on benefits when so many of them want to work? The answer is simple when you ask a few more questions: they don’t want just any job. They envisage doing what they used to do or would like to try – but aren’t willing to look for anything else. Getting them to try any job in order to be in employment is the key issue for any party that wants to cut the welfare rolls.

This afternoon Jim Knight MP, the minister for welfare reform, proclaimed that the Government wants to turn the Jobcentre Plus network into a careers service for everyone. He said that welfare advisers, who currently try to help get people on benefits back into work, will start to “provide opportunities for progression” for anyone in a job – no matter whether the person is a banker or a bin man. This is a bad idea for a simple reason: it is far more important to help the unemployed back into work than give assistance to people who already have a job. The longer that someone is out of work, the worse their chances of getting back into it.

It is easy to lose money down the back of the sofa, less so to lose a debt.  The Treasury has long tried to hide the value of the pension promises made to public sector workers. Now, though, the present administration or its successor must start to be honest about the true size of the liability which our report today reveals, because, at £1.1 trillion (or 78% of GDP), it is now bigger than the national debt (which stands at £750 billion). It has got this big for several reasons. First, when the government receives contributions from public sector workers for their pension schemes, it spends the money on schools, hospitals and suchlike. Second, even though it does this, the Government still needs to borrow money to pay for all the promises it has made.

In anticipation of the Budget, I wrote last week that Alistair Darling would announce an extra £1.5 billion in funding for the Flexible New Deal, the Government’s welfare-to-work programme that is the equivalent of a shiny, new, environmentally friendly car. The scheme is going to use companies to help people on Jobseeker’s Allowance who have been claiming for 12 months or more find work rather than make them keep going to their Jobcentre Plus – i.e. it is set to allow claimants to trade in their old bangers for something much improved. This is good for them, but the recession has wrecked the Government’s financial plan for the scheme.

To Albert Einstein, an insane person was someone who repeated the same course of action over and over again while expecting a different result each time. He would have found it easy to spot the trait in the British politicians who have attempted to change the benefits system over the past thirty years. As we continue into the recession, the thousands of people who have lost their jobs and claimed Jobseeker’s Allowance (the count is now 1,459,840) are moving into a system that the Government claims will help them find work but will actually fail to do so. This means that many of them are at risk of moving from a short-term, perfectly reasonable need for help in a downturn to long-term dependency on the state. This is what happened in the recessions of 1980s and early 1990s.