Pernicious distortions about welfare conceal its true role
By Karen Buck
—Caroline has been nursing for 15 years, specialising in mental health and caring for often deeply disturbed patients in a secure hospital unit. She cannot make the rent though. Even a former right-to-buy council flat on a London estate can now go for £500 a week or more. She does not lie in behind drawn curtains while the world goes to work (though technically she does, actually – she works shifts) but her life and job are unsustainable without tax credits and help with rent. Caroline’s life has just got a whole lot harder.
George works for the Post Office, but when he was evicted from his flat, because the landlord can make more money by not letting to people who need help with paying the rent, the council accepted him as homeless and decided to send him to Milton Keynes.
Susie has a severely disabled son, now an adult but more dependent than a young child. Behind her curtains, she is not ‘sleeping off a life on benefits’ but almost single-handedly, now and for the rest of her life, caring for someone who can virtually never be alone.
Mohammed, in his late 50s and on job seeker’s allowance, has not had a single job offer in 18 months, and cannot talk about his feelings of desperation and worthlessness without tears. It will not be long before his mortgage assistance will run out and then he will have to take his kids out of school and go: where?
Miriam has just found work as a teaching assistant at the school her children attend, but it was too late to stop them being evicted because their rent is above the permissible limit. The council wanted to send her to Manchester but I presume even they did not argue she could commute.
Have you spotted the scrounger yet? No, probably not. Yet George Osborne and Iain Duncan Smith think they have: all of them. For the government, myth, stereotype and prejudice have trumped evidence in the welfare debate. And in the form of the welfare uprating bill that prejudice has led them to a squeeze both on our very poorest citizens but also on 9.5 million working households, who also depend on tax credits and in-work benefits to top up low wages and offset soaring rents and childcare bills.
The examples quoted are, arguably, all cases of the new landscape of the welfare state failing to do what the public expects it to do. Yes, we are constantly told that the public mood has turned against the benefit system. But this does not even approximate to the complexities of public opinion. Polling for Prospect magazine last year showed very little support for cuts to benefits for disabled people, low-paid workers, carers and pensioners. On the basis of these figures, the policy analyst Declan Gaffney calculated that some 77 per cent of all benefit expenditure goes on ‘popular’ benefits that the public supports.
The sociologist Ben Baumberg has shown that responses to survey questions are highly sensitive to how the question is framed – ask people if they think it is fair that taxpayers’ money goes to scroungers and, no, they will tell you that it is not (and for further essential reading go to the Child Poverty Action Group website for the Double Lockout report, a collection of excellent myth-busting essays). But, as polling for the TUC has shown, ask them if it is right to cut benefits for low-income working families and support for the government melts away. Yet, so dominant is the rhetoric of scrounging, that virtually any question about benefits seems to be immediately interpreted as being about stereotypes of fecklessness.
We are only beginning to wake up to the huge gulf between what people think the benefit system does and what it actually does. The same TUC polling showed that people think 40 per cent of welfare spending goes on JSA when the true figure is three per cent; on average, people think that 27 per cent of expenditure is lost to fraud, when the true figure is 0.7 per cent. And they believe overwhelmingly that people are better off on benefits than in work, quite incorrectly. But politicians have a responsibility to the public to give a truthful account of welfare and not to exploit areas of public ignorance. When the government constantly claims that its universal credit reforms will finally ‘make work pay’ – as if the benefit and tax credit system had not been doing precisely that for years – it is little wonder if the public is confused. When 30 per cent of newspaper stories about benefits concern fraud – and most of these stories originate from political statements rather than the magistrates’ courts – can we be surprised if the public assume this is a much bigger problem than it actually is?
We have to take on the myths that have so distorted the debate and call out those who repeat them. But there is a positive agenda too. Unemployment and underemployment, low wages, eye-wateringly high childcare costs and a crisis of housing affordability are the villains of the piece and Labour’s developing policy agenda in these areas is as central to winning the ‘war of welfare words’ as anything we say about benefits themselves.
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Karen Buck is MP for Westminster North
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