Since the moment last autumn that David Cameron delighted the Tory right by declaring himself a fan of ‘tough love’ US-style welfare reform, the Department for Work and Pensions has been on the frontline of the political battlefield. In January, Gordon Brown used the resignation of Peter Hain to deploy one of his cabinet’s young guns, James Purnell, to the conflict. And the new secretary of state is showing no signs of ceding his opponents an inch of territory.
‘The problem they’ve got,’ says Purnell of the Tories’ welfare proposals, ‘is that our programmes are actually more radical than theirs … They produced all sorts of supposedly tough things that they wanted to do from the American [welfare reform] experience and actually they resiled from it.’ The Tories, he charges, were spooked when they realised that the measures involved ‘things like forcing single parents to go out to work when their children are 12 months old or measures that actually increased poverty in the states that they were looking at’.
Cameron has thus found himself caught in a double bind: ‘They are promoting policies which sound very tough and are dog-whistling to their right wing, but they don’t want to do them in practice because they don’t want to break up their relationships with lobby groups on the other side.’ The Conservatives, he believes, are running scared: ‘they don’t actually follow through with the policies’, knowing the reaction they’ll get when the child poverty, single parent and disability pressure groups set about scrutinising them.
At the same time, though, the Tories are banking on savings from welfare reform ‘so that they can get themselves out of the bind they’ve got themselves into on tax and spending: they keep on promising more spending but they refuse to say where the money would come from’. And Purnell gives notice that the Tories’ ability to identify ‘where on earth these savings are coming from’ could ‘become a quite important issue at the next election’.
The work and pensions secretary is, however, not unaware of the altered terrain on which the battle between Labour and the Tories is being contested. ‘I think David Cameron has stopped banging his head against the brick wall that they were doing at the previous three elections. He does realise that the previous strategy, of basically trying to say the electorate had got it wrong in 1997, doesn’t work. I think what his tactics reflect are a realisation that actually the centre of gravity has changed in this country in the last 10 years.’ The ‘Thatcherite paradigm’ has been replaced by a ‘progressive paradigm’, which Cameron has realised he has to operate within.
The Tory leader’s problem, believes Purnell, is that ‘if people want to have New Labour policies they’re likely to vote for the government to do it for them rather than the opposition.’ And, at the same time, the Tories’ right-wing roots – when they refuse to back university expansion or speak out on immigration or Europe – are continuing to show through. ‘At their best they are imitating us and at their worst they are just what they always used to be,’ he argues.
Nonetheless, Purnell believes that Labour needs to offer ‘a clear idea of the direction of travel’. The government, he says, ‘need to show the reforms that will get you there and that gives people the confidence to stay on the journey with you’. This will encourage people to ‘ignore the events that happen day to day because they’ve got a stake in getting to that destination’. On the other hand, he warns, ‘if you stay in one position, then those events start to have a much bigger focus and people don’t have a stake in where you’re going.’
Purnell is thus keen for Labour to pick up the pace on welfare reform. January’s British Social Attitudes survey, which indicated public attitudes towards poverty hardening, ‘shows that you need to maintain a consensus around what you’re doing in terms of welfare reform,’ believes the work and pensions and secretary. ‘I think more people accept the need for support for people, whether lifting children out of poverty or people unable to work, but the other side of the coin – and it’s one that is sometimes hardest for the left to accept – is that we need to show we are reforming the system so that we are using people’s money effectively.’
Unsurprisingly, therefore, Purnell is happy to declare himself an adherent to the ‘something for something’ welfare philosophy advocated by his predecessor but one, John Hutton. ‘We are going to be looking,’ he suggests, ‘at effectively requiring people to do some work for their benefits, looking at people to do full-time work-related activity … While people have the right to work, they also have the responsibility to work.’ The work and pensions secretary has just announced plans to require 18-year-olds who don’t find a job after six months, and have been out of education or training for six months, to work for their benefits. Purnell has also declared that, from October 2009, the long-term jobless will be expected to undertake work for at least four weeks or have their job seekers’ allowance reduced. He is examining, he suggests, the experiences of Australia and ‘the whole idea about working for the dole’.
In the same spirit, he also defends housing minister Caroline Flint’s controversial remarks about whether new council house tenants should be required to seek work: ‘She was saying that housing is something that is very much sought after … [so] what sort of responsibility do we expect people to discharge in return for that? Clearly it’s looking after your house, being tolerant of your neighbours and behaving in a way that’s acceptable to them. Should looking for work be part of that as well? I think she’s started an important debate on that.’
Purnell does not, however, see welfare reform simply in terms of maintaining public support for the system. ‘Reform is not an alternative to achieving those traditional Labour goals, it’s the way of achieving those traditional goals,’ he argues. It is, for instance, essential in terms of reducing poverty: ‘If you look at the policy we have on single parents at the moment where [they] are only required to work when their youngest child is 16, that’s completely out of step with progressive countries around the world. If you look at Scandinavia or other parts of Europe, typically it’s six or seven-years-old – some countries it’s three or four-years-old. The reason they do that is because actually it’s bad for poverty to have a higher age at which the parent has to look for work. We believe our proposals will lift 70,000 children out of poverty. So when people say that these proposals are punitive actually it’s the opposite: they are designed to get children out of poverty.’
But does Purnell not miss his former post? The secretary of state for culture, media and sport must, after all, count as one of the cabinet’s more agreeable portfolios. ‘I would say anyone who comes into Labour politics would want this job,’ he says of being work and pensions secretary. ‘If you’ve got a political philosophy that you want to implement, there’s nowhere better to do it than this area where you’ve got the ability to really make a difference to the lives of millions of people in our society.’ And with a budget the size of the economy of Portugal, it’s perhaps understandable why Purnell hasn’t found going from minister for fun to minister for funds altogether too disagreeable.