Former Liberal Democrat leader opposes the coalition's proposed benefit cap. Photo credit: Liberal Democrats
Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith has described the government’s proposed £26,000 benefit cap for workless families as “quite fair”, and insisted it will not increase child poverty. Speaking on the BBC’s Todays Programme, he said the current system failed to incentivise work, saying it was “utterly wrong” and “desperately needs change.” However, in advance of the House of Lords vote on the cap this evening, bishops, political opponents and some in the political commentariat have heavily criticized the radical reform plans.
Under the proposals, working-age benefits would be capped at £500 per week, or £26,000 a year. This is equivalent to the average wage earned by working households after tax. Duncan Smith does have the public’s backing on welfare reform. A YouGov poll showed that 76 percent of the public are in favour of the benefits cap, including 69 percent of Labour voters. It also shows that 36 per cent would like to see even tougher measures, with no household getting more than £20,000 in welfare payments.
Former Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown has come out against the benefit cap: ”I voted with the Government on everything until now. I see it as my job as an ex-leader to support my successor. But I will not support the benefit cap in its present form.”
Unfair reform. Samira Shackle at The Staggers, The New Statesman rolling blog said the benefit cap is “unfair” because it takes no account how many children a family has, ignores employment history - “a couple who have never worked will end up being less affected than families on a low to middle income who are suddenly affected by unemployment in the recession” – and penalizes those in the south-east (where rents are significantly higher). “Critics have said that this will result in ‘social cleansing’ from inner-city areas – the percentage of privately rented properties in central London available to housing benefit claimants will fall from more than 50 per cent to just 7 per cent”, noted Shackle.
Leaked government analysis showed that the move could push a further 100,000 children into poverty, reported Samira Shackle at The Staggers, The New Statesman rolling blog.
62p a day: Enough to live on? Writing at The Guardian’s Comment is free, liberal economist Tim Leunig drilled down into the numbers and said that, “cutting housing benefit to £100 a week – which is broadly what the cap means if you have four children – makes life impossible. After rent, council tax and utilities, a family with four children would have 62p per person per day to live on. That is physically impossible.” Leunig said, “it is easy to say that people shouldn’t have large families if they can’t afford them. But most affected families could afford their children when they conceived them, and continued to be able to afford them – until they lost their jobs in what has proven to be the worst recession for more than a century.” Leunig insisted that the cap “doesn’t even hit the families the Daily Mail so dislikes – single parents with many children and many fathers who have never worked. Those families, by and large, are sufficiently dysfunctional to be in social housing, and so will not be hit – at least not much – by the reforms. Instead the people hit hardest are stable families previously in work on low to middle incomes – the really squeezed middle, if you like. They were not rich enough to buy a house, and not poor enough to qualify for social housing. As a result they pay a fortune to rent privately and are vulnerable to the cap.” Looking to how the caps might bite, Leunig said that “children will end up sharing a room with multiple siblings, and parents will sleep on a sofa bed in the lounge. Clearly people can live like that, but frankly I thought that overcrowded tenements were something that Britain had left behind.”
End benefits madness now. Leo McKinstry of The Daily Express boomed that Duncan Smith “has to win the war on benefits madness. Swallowing ever-larger sums of taxpayers’ money, it promotes mass idleness, perverse incentives for family breakdown and acts as a magnet for foreign supporters. ” McKinstry took aim at the “moral absurdity and grotesque extravagance of the modern social security system”, and said Duncan Smith “is right to cap benefits at £26,000-a-year, the equivalent of the average salary. Welfare is supposed to be a prop in times of difficulty, not a comfortable lifestyle choice. It is ludicrous there are at least 50,000 households who receive more in benefits than average earnings.” ”The Government must not be swayed from its task. There is nothing moral about subsidising the dependency culture. We will never recover as a country until welfare bills are brought under control”, concluded McKinstry.
