Welfare Reform: This time it's complicated

The biggest irony of welfare reform: that's it's almost always a problem of incentives

No one believes that the welfare system is working.

Not those who are claiming benefits; not those who are in control of the system and its budget; not those who advocate on behalf of the most vulnerable; not those who pay taxes towards the system (especially – as polling tells us – those on lower wages). No one.

So, given this, change to the system should be universally popular, right?

Wrong.

I am not a policy expert in this area so I am not going to go into detail about the reforms that the government has just announced. From what I have been told by those who are experts there are some good parts and some bad parts. Some good intentions and some penny pinching. For better and measured analysis, I recommend Cradle to Grave by my former boss Andrew Harrop.

What I am going to try to look at here is the politics and humanness of the discussions around welfare giving due humanity to all sides of the debate.

The fact is, for many the words ‘welfare reform’ send shivers down the collective spine. Because whenever reform is mooted what is heard is ‘welfare cuts’. And those hearing this are rarely wrong. And whatever the intention of measures in the long term it is savings that are talked about - bringing down the welfare bill.

Far too often the kind of work needed to fix a broken system is not done when the system can afford to be generous in its existing incarnation. Sleeping dogs are left to lie. Welfare reform only bubbles to the top of the priority list when money is tight and it is seen as a place where savings can be made.

As a result it is only ever approached through this lens. But it is perfectly possible that properly dealing with what is needed at every stage of tackling Beveridge’s evil giant of idleness will cost a large amount of money to do well - at least at first. But if welfare reform is only ever about reducing the benefits bill (with a sideorder of looking tough) then the cheapest - and therefore often bluntest - tools will be chosen.

Take this week’s announcements for example. While yesterday’s (feisty and widely praised) performace from Liz Kendall s was focused on fixing the system for the benefit of users, the briefings to the press have clearly majored on the mooted £5bn of savings expected in the welfare bill. How you think about these things matters. How you set out your terms shapes your thinking. Short term savings will be prioritised over long term improvement. It’s the Vimes Boots theory as applied to government programmes.

It’s not wrong to look at the system as it exists and wonder what that means for the lives of the many more people who are not working. I remember in the 80s a lot of the discussion after pit closures was of men (and it was pretty much all men) who had worked in mines for many years being written off as sick in their 40s and 50s and never returning to work. There was a real understanding of how bad this was for them. We didn’t really use the term mental health so much then, but we knew what we were seeing. Men losing the dignity, structure and pride that a lifetime of work had given their lives. Men becoming shadows of their former selves. Men who felt they had been ‘thrown on the scrap heap’ with all the emotional impact that entails.

It was widely believed that they were put onto sickness benefits because it helped the Thatcher and Major governments to massage down the unemployment numbers - at the time the far more contentious of the two sets of figures. Far easier - given that they also had no intention of investing in these communities to create the kinds of jobs these men could have lived out the rest of their working lives doing - to simply put them on sickness benefits for a few years before they were pensioned off, and forget about any other intervention to improve their lives and their lots.

It’s also pretty human for the lowest paid to look at their neighbours who don’t work and feel at best curiosity about how they manage to live similar lifestyles side-by-side and at worst resentment for those they see as getting something for nothing at their expense. The truth is often - of course - more complex and nuanced and grey areas than that. And many - of course - get to know their neighbours and support them through their struggles rather than judge them. But the polling doesn’t lie and it does tell us that - for many on lower incomes they do think the welfare state is too generous.

Whatever the campaigners will tell you it is not a case, generally, of the cartoonish hyper-wealthy desperate for someone to snatch away the benefits of the poor. In fact, it is often the lower middle class and the upper working class. People with a little bit but not secure in that little bit. People who have always worked and who know they will do so until pension age (that they will then be on benefits - by definition - is completely lost on them. No one sees being a pensioner as being ‘on benefits’).

About 15 - 20 years ago, the campaign communication world was taken by storm by the concept of ‘framing’. Now, don’t get me wrong - framing can be a very useful tool in the communications toolbox. Earlier I talked about how the way we approach welfare reform through the prism of making savings shapes the questions we ask of the system, and what is this if not an understanding of the power of framing?

But as one of the best strategists I know said to me (and gave me permission to nick) what is in the picture matters too. Framing can help to contextualise some issues - especially issues which people are coming to for the first time. But it is not a silver bullet. For too long there has been a sense that if we just change the narrative on welfare people will realise they are wrong. But this has led to an unwillingness to accept that some have real concerns about the welfare state and the impact worklessness has on their communities and neighbourhoods. Changing the narrative subject is not the same as changing a mind.

More than this, there are different ways to think about compassion and the welfare state. When Beveridge, the grandfather of the modern welfare state, wrote his groundbreaking report He spoke of the five “giant evils”: Want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. The welfare state was supposed to help defeat all of these evils. But many modern interpretations argue that too many attempts to deal with the last - idleness - lean into increasing the first - want. We talk about incentivising work, but this doesn’t often mean making work seem more attractive. Rather the focus is on making not working much worse.

All but a very small cohort of people agree that those who can work, should work. Which is fine as far as it goes, but what then becomes contested is who the people who genuinely can’t work are, how they are defined and identified.

It’s a simplification as these groups will blend into each other, but as far as I can see there are four basic groups of people who receive sickness benefits:

1. People who have such severe mental or physical disabilities (or both) that they will never be able to work and need welfare to live a decent standard of life.

2. People with serious mental or physical disabilities which present a barrier to work but who want to work. Some will be in some work, but still need support.

3. People with some level of mental or physical disability which they feel present a barrier to work - or for whom work is an unappealing option.

4. People who have worked the system and are receiving benefits they are not entitled to. (I prevaricated about including this group. I think it is both by far the smallest, and by far the group who get the most tabloid attention and opprobrium. However, in any large beuracracy there will be some people who slip through and pretending this never happens and never could happen damages the credibility of those arguing that groups 1-3 are by far the larger and more important to the conversation).

Group one are the people who will receive the new and more generous benefits without question, Group four are the people any new and additional barriers will be erected to weed out. It is groups two and three that are where the complexities in any (re)design of the welfare system lies.

Work is largely proved to be incredibly beneficial to people. There are days - we all have them in our own work - when we might struggle to agree with that sentiment, but it’s true. Work doesn’t just help us to earn the money we need to pay the bills it helps our physical and mental health, our socialisation, our self esteem and our self development. Work - at its best - is a place where we earn dignity and respect from our peers. it is where we spend the most time with other human beings and - probably quite importantly - not one we have self selected. Work is where we have to learn to navigate how we fit our life and skills with the lives and skills of others. Work is hard, tiring, often challenging. For some those challenges are primarily physical, for others primarily mental. But for nearly all of us some of them are social.

All of the benefits of work, then, should be available to the widest group of people possible. The compassionate approach, it seems to me, is not to pay people to not have these benefits but to make sure that any barriers to such benefits stop those with mental and physical disabilities from accessing them equally to everyone else.

But this is where things get tricky. Becuase many employers are not great at making reasonable adjustments that make it possible for disabled people to fully integrate into their workplaces. So while group two are keen to work, the amount of jobs they are able to do is a small and possibly shrinking pot (Stephen Bush pointed out recently that a lot of ‘soft jobs’ which are easier to do with diasabilities are disappearing through automation).

Equally, one of the barriers for group three is that they may not want to go to work. That could be because - especially for the younger cohort - they have not developed the simple habit of doing so properly. It could also be that some symptoms of some mental illnesses will entrench that illness further. Depression, for example, can absolutely make you feel like you can’t get out of bed. I speak from experience when I tell you that in many cases this is the illness speaking and this is the time when the absolute best thing many of us who suffer from such conditions should absolutely do is to get out of bed. Get out of bed and go to work.

For many that sounds unbelievably harsh. For me, leaving people in bed feels the same. Because I’ve lived through it and I know that I was better out of bed. But how we assess that does seem really complex.

And assessing it well and providing the kind of support that will deal with the current crisis (how can it be described otherwise when not only are we an outlier in how little we have recovered these numbers after Covid but when we have more people in their early 20s out of work than in their early 40s) will be expensive.

If the Labour government wants to show that this week’s changes to benefits are not about saving the Treasury money but instead helping as many people as possible back into work then they will need to invest those savings back into the system where they are better spent and more needed.

If they don’t, yet another round of governmental welfare reform will not have made the case that people being on benefits is not a social evil because of the cost to the state but because of the cost to themselves. And those who think the words ‘welfare refrom’ simply mean cuts to government spending on the backs of the poor will be proved right.

Again.

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