Welfare reform under a Labour government? It just won't happen

But now, after decades of remorseless growth, it has been transformed into a catalyst for the destruction of our civilised society.

It provides perverse incentives towards mass idleness and abuse of public money, it undermines the traditional structure of the family by rewarding fecklessness and irresponsibility. 

One alarming statistic, just released by the Government, epitomises the failure of the welfare state. According to the Depart­ment of Work and Pensions, 80 per cent of all drug addicts in Britain are living on benefits – some 267,000 junkies.

Possessing illegal drugs is, at least in theory, still meant to be a crime, so these people should be heading to prison rather than the benefits office. It is symbolic of the moral wilderness of Labour’s Britain that hard pressed, law-abiding taxpayers should be compelled to subsidise the criminal behaviour of more than a quarter of a

million self-indulgent wastrels.

This is the depressing world that Labour promised to end when it came to power in 1997. Welfare reform was supposed to be the party’s big idea.  

Pledging a radical shake-up of benefits, Tony Blair famously said he would “think the unthinkable” on social security. But the only thing unthinkable has been the rise in the welfare bill, now reaching a mammoth £170billion a year. 

During the past 11 years, Labour has done nothing except indulge in empty rhetoric and bureaucratic tinkering. There has been a plethora of over-hyped schemes such as the New Deal for Lone Parents or Working Tax Credits but the chief result has been to increase the culture of dependency.

Thanks to Labour’s preference for welfare expansion rather than reform, 5.1 million people of working age are now jobless and living on benefits; 2.6 million of them are on incapacity handouts, although the Government’s own adviser David Freud has revealed that two-thirds of these claims are illegitimate. 

Meanwhile, the bureaucracy of the system remains as bloated as ever. Reflecting the values of our age, the Department of Work and Pensions employs more people than the British Army.

James Purnell, the youthful Cabinet Minister in charge of benefits, has promised to succeed where all his Labour

predecessors have failed. Today, Purnell launches his Green Paper on welfare reform which he says will usher in “a revolution” in the system.

Much of the media seems to have fallen for the advance publicity, praising Purnell’s boldness and courage. But, like so many Labour initiatives, the Green Paper hardly lives up to its over-excited billing. 

Far from representing a brave departure from the recent past, the plan is actually the same old recipe of bureaucratic fiddling and attempts to bribe the workshy. 

Running through Purnell’s scheme is the politically correct terror of ever getting really tough with spongers, fraudsters and junkies. Contrary to Purnell’s bullish appearances in the media yesterday, the whole tone of his paper is one of querulous anxiety at being too harsh with claimants.

So, in the weasel prose that is now fashionable in Govern­ment circles, the document talks of “introducing a new regime for drug misusers which provides more tailored and personalised support so that individuals can regain control”. 

Why not just withdraw all their benefits immediately and threaten them with a long spell behind bars? I’m sure most of them would easily regain control in such circumstances.

Many of the proposals are nothing more than the kind of minor structural changes beloved of civil servants to give the illusion of action while maintaining the status quo. Certain benefits are to be renamed – Income Support will become the “Employment Support Allowance”. 

Then there is the typically New Labour deluge of organisational gimmickry, such as the Local Employment Partner­ships, the City Strategy Pathfinders and the new Work-Focused Health-Related Assessment. All this will create more work for officialdom but not for benefits claimants.

We have had to put up with this sort of noisy, jargon­­-riddled nonsense for the past 11 years. What is entirely missing is any urge to remove benefits from those who refuse to work. That is the real key to genuine reform, as shown by the US.  

President Bill Clinton transformed America’s welfare system in the Nineties by strictly limiting the time that claimants were entitled to handouts. In most states, they could not claim for more than two years in succession, or five years in total up to the age of retirement. A lifetime on benefits was no longer an option.  

Contrary to the dire predictions of Left-wingers about mass poverty and rioting, the result was a dramatic fall in welfare rolls as claimants, left with no alternative, suddenly entered the world of work.

But Purnell, so full of bluster about his alleged toughness, has explicitly rejected the US model. Forcing people to work through “the real threat of poverty” is deemed too harsh. In place of time limits, Purnell offers only a plethora of half-baked interventions and sanctions, such as the withdrawal of a week’s benefit for refusing to attend job advice sessions. 

Purnell has taken to boasting that his reforms will fulfil the vision of William Beveridge, the civil servant who in 1942 produced the blueprint for the creation of social security. But Beveridge said that he did not want his system to mean “something for nothing”.

That is precisely what it has become under Labour and, for all the spin of recent days, there is no sign that Purnell’s plan will change anything.