As of yesterday, the Coalition introduces in earnest its roll out of a cap on ‘all benefits’ paid to households suffering with unemployment.Two-adult homes will have to get by on £500 a week, while the figure for single-adult homes is £350. The logic which our political masters have applied, they say, is that no family which is unemployed should receive more than the average wage of one adult who has the fortune to be employed. And I have to say, there is overwhelming public support for the measure.
I therefore decided to conduct an intellectual experiment: could I find a way the policy? The answer was of course a resounding ‘no!’ However, the policy as it is understood is difficult to argue with. After all, many concerns are dealt with by the exemption of the disabled and pensioners from the cap. So on the surface, it appears reasonable that workers should get more than the unemployed, and £26,000 a year for a family of two parents and two children is survivable. And surely few people actually get enough to be affected by the cap. Surely?
Well, no. The biggest problem is that Housing Benefit is included in the cap- a benefit that goes to more employed people than it does unemployed. With housing costs being what they are, and the lack of social housing being so acute, the cap guarantees that nearly any household in the private rented sector in the south of England that suffers unemployment will be plunged into poverty. Employed people will suffer with the separate Housing Benefit gap, but the effect is going to be the same: a formidable benefits trap. The only place the poor can afford to live will be ghetto-like estates (entire towns too, probably) in which employment is a rarity and a cycle of deprivation prevails. This is a recipe for a large and uncontrolable underclass that will make our ‘chav’ (a word I despise, by the way) problem look insignificant.
In addition to that, consider the effect of a £350 a week cap on a single parent who finds him-or-herself unemployed with two or three children to provide for, let alone four or more. I thought the welfare state was supposed to provide additional assistance to single parents, not make life even harder for them. After all, the absent parent is effectively valued, under the cap, at £150 a week. That is curious, as the support given to any children, however many there are, at £200. But that’s enough discussion of figures. I’ve concluded that a fair cap would only apply to the unemployed on a like-for-like basis. That means that Child and Housing Benefit would not be included in the cap… And only a few households would still be affected by it. But with a Work and Pensions Secretary who refuses to look at the facts, but has “confidence that [he is] correct” when challenged with them, I don’t think we’ll see justice being done.
