Labour's still happy to steal our cash to encourage idleness

Hugely expensive, gripped by bureaucratic paralysis, riddled with fraud and abuse, it represents an oppressive burden for working people who have to pay for it but receive little real support in return.  

At the same time it promotes mass idleness and fecklessness by lavishing rewards on those who contribute nothing to  society. Once seen as a source of help for the poor, it is now a vehicle for moral and financial bankruptcy. 

This is the destructive system Labour promised to reform.  When he came to power in 1997 tony Blair said that ending the dependency culture would be one of his key priorities.

But since then we have had nothing but endless gimmickry and tinkering. The much vaunted radical change has never materialised. Threats of “crackdowns” have proved hollow. Overhauls of benefits have amounted only to change in name.

Meanwhile the cost of social security has continued to soar inexorably, reaching over £170billion this year. Labour’s latest stab at welfare reform, set out in the Queen’s speech, follows the same depressing pattern of the past decade.

Though hyped by Work and Pensions secretary James Purnell as a dramatic initiative, his proposals are the usual mix of headline-grabbing ploys, bureaucratic fiddling and changes in the titles of handouts. 

Purnell’s department announces with synthetic menace there will be a new “one strike and you’re out rule”, under

which anyone found making a fraudulent claim will lose their benefits for month. is that it?

Any real crackdown would have imposed a far more meaningful sentence After all, social security fraud is a form of theft from the taxpayer.

Purnell’s scheme also requires claimants to take active steps to find work, particularly by attending retrainingclasses, while there may also be sanctions against those refusing to go for job interviews.

In another, typically procedural move the term jobseekers’  allowance will be extended to cover the benefit known as 

income support. It is doubtful if this overhyped package will have much impact at all.

For all its appearance of busy activity, it does nothing to address the central problem of the welfare system:  it allows people to spend a lifetime in the enervating embrace of the state without having to worry about work, accommodation or family responsibilities.

In Purnell’s world scroungers will go through the motions of pretending to look for a job while living comfortably on

benefits since no sanctions are proposed for those who continually refuse to work.  Moreover, the Government’s plan does nothing to address the benefits for either housing or sickness, where some of the worst abuses occur.

Housing benefit costs over £12billion a year, more than is spent on police or prisons, yet has been a prime incentive

towards family breakdown and benefit tourism.

In one particularly outrageous case  it emerged Ealing Council was paying £170,000 a year in housing benefit to toorpakai saiedi, an Afghan single mother with seven children, to accommodate her in an  Edwardian villa in West  London.

So in the madhouse  created by Labour the public is required not only to take on  responsibility for an Afghan family devoid of any connections with this country but also to fork out a sum in rental that would be extortionate even on the seafront in Monte Carlo.

Just as alarming are the ab- surdities in incapacity benefit, which now costs the taxpayer £15billion a year. though this handout is often presented by lobby groups as a support to the disabled, in truth it provides vast scope for spongers.  

According to the Government’s own adviser david Freud, fewer than a third of the 2.7million on incapacity benefit are legitimate claimants. More than 40 per cent are being rewarded for difficult-to-diagnose conditions such as stress or depression, while 100,000 incapacity claimants are drug addicts or alcoholics.

The tragedy is that Labour did not embark on reform during the years of economic boom when it would have been far

easier to tackle the workshy because of the widespread availability of jobs. Instead, it allowed millions to fester on the economic scrapheap while filling vacancies through mass immigration.

The concern now must be that any proposed crackdown will hit not the parasites who milk the system but the decent citizens who have paid their taxes yet suddenly find themselves out of work because of the recession. As usual under Labour, officialdom will go for the wrong target. 

What we need in welfare is genuine reform, not Purnell’s noisy substitute for action. That means going back to the

principles of William Beveridge, the crusading civil servant who was the founding father of the post-war welfare system.

In launching his blueprint in 1944 he said his plan would not give “something for nothing” but instead benefits should only be paid in return for contributions through national insurance.

In the subsequent 60 years the state machine has completely lost sight of the contributory ethic. If we are to cut through the mess we should take at least two steps.  

First, as Beveridge argued, social security should be related to payment of taxes and national insurance so that would rule out the army of junkies, migrants, serial teenage moth- ers and bone idle who leech off the system.

Second, no one should be allowed to claim benefits for more than two years in succession or five years during their working lives. That was the approach introduced in the Us under Bill Clinton and it led to a huge fall in welfare rolls.

“Something for nothing” is precisely what we have now and Labour’s new plan will do nothing to end it.