THE Government this week got tough on worklessness and tough on the causes of worklessness, to adapt a phrase of one of Labour’s more recent prime ministers. As the Government announced what it billed as the “biggest shake-up” in the welfare system in a generation “to get Britain working”, Sir Keir Starmer said: “We’re not prepared to stand back and do nothing while millions of people — especially young people — who have potential to work and live independent lives instead become trapped out of work and abandoned by the system. It would be morally bankrupt to let their life chances waste away.”
Alongside such lofty aspirations sits the simple aim of saving money. Unveiling the Pathways to Work Green Paper in Parliament on Tuesday, the Work and Pensions Secretary, Liz Kendall, lamented “taxpayers paying millions more on the costs of failure, with spending on working-age sickness and disability benefits up £20 billion since the pandemic, set to rise by a further £18 billion by the end of this Parliament to £70 billion a year”. The remedy, as the Government sees it, is to slash the benefits bill by £5 billion by the end of the decade, by, for example, making it more difficult to qualify for Personal Independence Payments and freezing incapacity benefits under Universal Credit.
The disability charity Scope describes Ms Kendall’s plans as “the most devastating cuts to disability benefits on record”, which “will be catastrophic for disabled people’s living standards”. Furthermore, cuts to disability benefits have knock-on effects: as Scope observes, nearly half of the families living in poverty already include someone who is disabled. The children of disabled people will also suffer.
In a speech last year on “fixing the foundations of our country”, Sir Keir said that “those with the broadest shoulders should bear the heavier burden.” Broader shoulders than those of disabled people and their children are not hard to find: those who inherit wealth that they have not worked for; non-domiciled multi-millionaires; those on the highest incomes who avoid paying their fair share of tax. Even voices on the Right have suggested a one-off wealth tax, or raising the highest rate of income tax, as ways to pay for rising defence costs, for example. The Government should also address factors, such as low wages and unaffordable housing, that make people dependent on welfare.
It is, indeed, “morally bankrupt” to allow people’s lives to waste away without work; it is equally morally bankrupt, as the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has stated, to “leave disabled people without support designed to allow them to lead a dignified life, or facing hardship”. Christians have “an unashamed ‘preferential option for the poor’”, Dr Paul Morrison, a policy adviser to the Methodist Church and the Joint Public Issues Team, has observed. It is deeply disappointing that, at present, a Labour Government shows, in Dr Morrison’s words, “a deeply embedded preferential option for the rich”.
