“Thinking the Unthinkable”
 
There has been much in the press recently about welfare reform with Gordon Brown appearing to revert to where Tony Blair started a decade ago when he asked his then welfare minister Frank Field to ‘think the unthinkable’ and get a grip on a benefits system that was widely felt to be burgeoning out of control, holding back as many people as it helped and producing a society in which working the system had, for many, become a way of life. British politicians are often attracted to learning from the experience of other countries, and in this context most notably that of the United States (and specifically the experience of the welfare to work reforms enacted during President Clinton’s time in office). To learn from the experience of other societies is sensible but I also believe that in the field of welfare there is much that we can learn from ourselves. From our own history in this area of policy.
 
Most people, when asked when the welfare state began in this country point to its conception as being the Beveridge Report of 1942 and its birth the year 1945 when some but by no means all of its recommendations were implemented by the post war Labour government. Such is the power of that report, in the public consciousness, that it has crowded out virtually all that came before it and turned the date of its publication into a kind of ‘zero hour’ before which it is commonly supposed that welfare hardly existed at all.
 
It is as if, Beveridge did to those in his field what, for other reasons and in different ways, the mighty figure of Shakespeare has done to his many rivals of the Elizabethan stage or Newton and Einstein were to do in the fields of kinetics and relativity – in blunt terms they squeezed the others into being barely discernable.
 
On a narrow definition of state-based welfare we should certainly go back to at least 1908 when the wily Lloyd-George who, (according to how charitable you are feeling) was either spurred on by his conscience or lured on by his innate political savvy (in the face of a growing parliamentary Labour Party backed by 3 million newly enfranchised working men) to team up with Winston Churchill and usher in old age pensions and national insurance. Allow the definition of state to include crown and parish and the welfare state was there in the reign of Elizabeth I and the poor laws. The state substantially drops out of the equation prior to Elizabeth but welfare does not and in its various forms and over many centuries it was primarily the church that provided.
 
There is much to learn from the experience of our forebears over this broader sweep of time. Many parallels between their experiences and observations and our own today. One of the most interesting studies produced prior to Beveridge was that of Edwin Chadwick who was appointed in 1834 to chair a royal commission tasked with looking into the operation of the poor laws. Chadwick was a social reformer, a caring and decent man who had spent much of his life working to improve sanitation recognising as he did the critical link between this area of public policy and the life prospects of the urban poor. His study was extensive and (unlike that of Beveridge) had the benefit of including numerous grass roots interviews. Many of his key observations on welfare were those that we would recognise within public debate today. He reasoned that, in addition to the benefits of the Victorian welfare system, there were substantial costs associated with it and that these costs were not simply monetary. There was a social price to be paid for welfare and in many cases it was a high one. Amongst the shortcomings of the Victorian welfare system he identified the issue of what we now call benefit dependency, argued that it often made recipients unhappy, led in some cases to dishonesty, promoted unemployment, was often co-incident with crime and discouraged individual responsibility.
 
The language of his report reads a little fusty today but the parallels with the present are striking and when one looks at how welfare worked within these earlier periods virtually all the issues we grapple with today were present in the past. The overarching recommendation of Chadwick’s report was that the provision of welfare should be more exacting and less easy to receive. Pretty much where we are in the debate today but unlike Chadwick’s era the scale and extent of the problems have multiplied.
 
As evidence for this I would in part point to the rapid growth in the numbers claiming Incapacity Benefit (“IB”) i.e. those who are deemed physically or mentally unfit to work. This number has grown from around 700,000 when Labour first came to power to over 2.6 million people today. IB has the advantage to the government of keeping the official unemployment figures down but costs the country around £13 billion in direct benefit payments plus of course the costs of administration and the opportunity cost of such a vast number of people being out of the workplace. Across the board the total direct financial cost of welfare is £80 billion a year (enough to run the health service for around 9 months) with one third of British households receiving more than half their income in the form of welfare payments.
 
During my voluntary work with the Social Justice Commission I was fortunate enough to be able to interview some of those working to bring IB claimants back into the workplace. A question I asked each of them was ‘roughly what proportion of IB claimants are incapable of successfully holding down a job, what proportion with a bit of assistance are probably able to work and what proportion have no legitimate reason for being on IB at all.’ The answers clustered around a third, a third, a third. Of course these figures are highly subjective and speculative. They are not underpinned by any rigorous study but the notion that amongst the 2.6 million on IB there are many who should actually be getting a job would seem to be supported by other observations which are of probable relevance. Firstly, the rapid growth in IB claimants (over 300% in 10 years). Could this really simply be a result of people becoming sicker? 2. the clustering of IB claimants around areas of higher unemployment. A staggering statistic being that over one in five working age males (16-64 year olds) in Merthyr Tydfill and the poorer parts of Glasgow are on IB. Whilst it is true that there is a correlation between social deprivation and illness it is hard to imagine these sky-high figures being underpinned by this factor alone. 3. The incidence of multiple generations of the same family being on IB. This could be because these families are subject to a common cause of illness including conditions that are hereditary but this alone is unlikely to explain the high levels involved here. 4 The fact that the most common health problems cited by those on IB are mental anxiety and back pain, neither of which is easily confirmed or otherwise by medical experts. Might the real reason for this explosion in claimants actually be about something else? As Edwin Chadwick observed in 1834 – that claiming is just basically too easy? I believe so.
 
So how should we approach welfare reform today? I believe that we should focus on the following. Firstly, we should respect those who cannot work (with those who are unable to work continuing to be fully supported and being exempted from welfare to work schemes). Secondly, there should be rapid assessments for every recipient of out of work benefit to establish whether they are able to work or not with those deemed able to work being expected to prepare for it with government support provided where necessary. Thirdly, those deemed able to work and who refuse to join a return-to-work programme should lose the right to claim out of work benefits until they do and those who refuse to accept reasonable job offers should lose the right to claim out of work benefits for a significant period. Fourthly, those who remain on the dole for extended periods of time and are deemed able to work should be required to ‘work for the dole’ on community work programmes. Finally, we should involve the voluntary/third sector in the administration of welfare to work programmes (with financial incentives for successful outcomes).
 
There are those who instinctively recoil when it comes to getting tougher in matters of welfare. Those who find it hard to ‘think the unthinkable’. But to them I say think of it like this; tackling welfare reform will allow us to do so much more elsewhere. Like paying more to our impoverished pensioners, removing the indignity of the means testing and plundering of the savings of our elderly when they need to move into a care home at the end of their lives, removing the ‘couple penalty’ in the tax system that punishes those who marry and stay together. Or how about taking more of the poorest families out of taxation altogether and so helping lift more children out of poverty? These are the thoughts that surface in my mind and embolden me when I hear people refer to ‘thinking the unthinkable’.