This is not a debate about the current welfare reform proposals – whether the detail is right, whether the time is right as recession looms, whether they will work.

It’s a debate about the future, and establishing the principles that need to underpin our welfare state.

There’s broad agreement about what the welfare state of the future needs to encompass:
• Access to good work, well remunerated, sustainable, with the opportunity for progression
• Services to enable parents to find and keep work (childcare, employment services, access to training and skills, transport, housing, family support)
• Adequate financial support for families whether in or out of work

The arguments I want to make today:
• Have we got the right emphasis in our vision on the role of paid work?
• What’s the right ’deal‘ – if we’re talking of something for something and how to make that fair?
• What are the right processes, incentives, penalties and rewards?
• What’s the purpose of the welfare state, what are the measures of success?

Taking the last first. For CPAG, the purpose is the prevention and eradication of poverty. I buy the language of an ‘enabling‘ welfare state. At the heart of that lie adequate incomes – a prerequisite of poverty prevention and social participation (including looking for paid work – you won’t have the energy to do that if you’re worn out making ends meet). Provision of an adequate safety net is the prerequisite for an enabling welfare state, not a sign that it’s failed.

That financial support needs to be put in place alongside decent jobs: that means obligations and expectations on employers to provide decent pay, prospects, training (especially for those in lower level jobs – yet in most companies the balance of training budgets is weighted towards more senior staff), flexible, family friendly employment, autonomy and control over your work. The rhetoric around individuals in the welfare reform debate has been hard-line – all about rights and responsibilities, conditions and sanctions. We need to be much more demanding of employers and their responsibilities too. We need to face head on the structural injustice in the labour market, the gender pay gap, the so-called ethnic penalty, the fact that disabled people earn less at every level of qualification than those with equivalent qualifications without a disability. That is not a result of lack of individual aspiration – it reflects employer discrimination, geographic pockets of disadvantage, poor practice, and structural inequality. All must be addressed.

But then we must ask – if the workplace is made fairer, if the support is in place, what is it reasonable to expect of individuals? Is work related activity, work activation, rightly the norm for nearly everyone? That’s the thrust of current welfare reform (the design of the Employment and Support Allowance, the new work capability assessment, transferring lone parents and carers onto JSA); and it’s the thrust of the Progress proposals published today too. But that significantly ignores the value we should place on caring. That’s not to trap people in caring roles so that they become too detached from a labour market they may want to re-enter in time. But caring too is working, and the carer and his or her family are best placed to determine when they need to be available to provide that care. If we’re talking of an enabling welfare state, based on individual empowerment and autonomy, you don’t impose that with conditions, you support people in their choices, help them achieve their goals.

Lastly I want to say something about behaviour – of the system, not the individual. The language we use and the processes we put in place need to offer dignity and respect. You don’t give respect in a punitive, stigmatising or infantilising system. Current thinking carries risks.

First, discretion and personalisation of services will be exercised in the context of an unequal bargaining relationship between the claimant and the personal adviser – where is the independent advocacy to protect the vulnerable claimant against the mighty state?

Second, respect is at risk when providers are rewarded for achievement of over-crude results. CPAG has been reviewing the consequences of contracting out labour market services in a number of countries and we are publishing a new report on Monday which will show that privatising employment services doesn’t guarantee improved quality. Contracts need to be vigilantly managed and terms controlled.

And nothing is dignified about living on an inadequate income, unable to provide for your kids.

So, we agree on the importance of jobs, skills, support, and, I’d add, proper attention to the caring role. The argument is about how best to put all that in place.

I hope there’s no argument about the goal: to end poverty for good.