‘In as much as you have done it unto the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me.’ That line from the King James Bible – what Christians call ‘the Golden Rule’ that you should do unto others as you would have done to you – is also a pretty good guide for whether or not a government is civilised. What a government does for the lowest-paid, for those struggling to get by, for those who are out of work altogether, sums up what sort of government it is.
So what sort of government is this? There are two ways to see the universal credit – debated today in the House of Commons – and neither of them reflect well on the Conservatives. There’s the cynic’s interpretation: that the whole policy was a distraction from the real work of cutting costs at the Department for Work and Pensions. The problem is, the universal credit doesn’t even work as an austerity measure. It would require the development of a gargantuan IT system that no one seems certain how to build – and, more importantly, one without a price tag.
No, what the universal credit reveals is that this is a government that simply doesn’t understand the realities of most ordinary people’s lives. They want to move all benefit applications onto the internet, which is eminently reasonable if you think an ‘IT skills crisis’ is what happens when your iPad doesn’t have JavaScript enabled. But I would venture to suggest that if it simply hasn’t occurred to you that not everyone has ready access to the internet, then you’re not a fit and proper person to set welfare policy.
In a move that Citizens Advice estimates would put yet further pressure on the wallets of the low-paid, the universal credit will be paid monthly, not weekly. The government believes that this will better simulate the pattern of paid work. I find it troubling that platitudes about self-reliance and responsibility trip so easily from the mouths of people who’ve apparently never had a paper round, worked in a bar, or done even the briefest of summer jobs, all of which would have meant they wouldn’t have been blindsided by the revelation that most low-paying work is, in fact, paid weekly or fortnightly.
And then there’s the not-inconsiderable problem that it simply doesn’t work; that the sums don’t add up, that the costs are out of control, that the IT system necessary to run it would be an expensive boondoggle for procurement companies, and that it somehow manages to spend more money on government while spending less on people. It’s a series of easy one-liners – put it on the internet to save money, make it monthly like a salary – that fall apart when they come into contact with the reality-based community. That’s why the reforms are being viewed with increasing horror in No 10, while Labour figures are confident that they will be a disaster for the government.
As it happens, I think that the universal credit will be scrapped. There are enough Liberal Democrats who have thought seriously about poverty and welfare reform that it will struggle in parliament, and ultimately the tactical loss of a U-turn is less damaging than actually implementing a system that is both crueller and more expensive than the current one. But the questions that the universal credit fails to answer are still very real, and they’re ones that Labour has to be able to answer, too.
What would a Labour benefit reform look like? It would recognise that many of the costs that the low-paid struggle to meet are costs that are of increasing relevance to the middle, too. Moving to reduce the cost of childcare, and towards universal provision of cheap childcare, could actually reduce the total spend on childcare if implemented sensibly. Equally, bringing down the cost of renting would reduce the eye-watering amount that the government spends on housing benefit.
But most importantly, a Labour benefit reform can’t come from Labour alone. That’s the biggest problem with the universal credit; it’s not a response to the difficulties facing the lowest-paid today. It’s a Conservative fantasy. Labour’s alternative has to be better than that.
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Stephen Bush writes a weekly column for Progress, the Tuesday review, and tweets @stephenkb
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I’ve made a suggestion to the Policy Portal.
The realities are that reform is easy but it’s made difficult through a fear of change and dealing with the concerns of those against them.
A lot of those difficulties can easy be dismissed but more importantly on the issues that do give real concerns resolved but I am not sure if there is the political will to do it.
From the best of intentions, Labour, through Tax Credits and Housing Benefit, managed to create a Welfare State dedicated to subsidising poor employers paying low wages and private landlords charging market rents. Unscambling this will be hard work, but has to be along the lines suggested by the childcare proposal above. There has to be far more publicly owned rented housing and more well-paid jobs. Beveridge never envisaged high levels of unemployment coupled with a low wage economy and we need to revert to the principles he adopted. We’ve signed up to the Tory agenda of using unemployment as a means of reducing working class power for long enough.
We need to attack the benefits that the Bankers receive —I mean tax the bankers and the top earners. Build and prmote affordable housing and facilitate access to decent housing.