The need for a new consensus

There is a search party out for some big new idea, an overarching vision that will define and rationalise the whole untidy social security system. Welfare reform was promised at the election, and all heads nodded wisely. The idea that we spend far too much, and don’t spend it well, has been strongly promoted by the Prime Minister himself. Reform can sometimes sound rather more like a threat than a promise.

Although Britain spends less than most other Western nations on social security, although a life on Income Support is undoubtedly one of abject poverty, although we have had a Conservative government for 18 years committed to rooting out fraud and scrounging, the fact remains that there is very little public trust in the integrity and efficiency of the benefit system. Nor is there an obvious guiding principle to encourage support for it and, alas, all too few political advocates over the years willing to promote it. Political capital has all been invested in promising to squeeze, cut or even throttle it. But trust and support for social security urgently needs to be restored, because the real value of benefits will otherwise continue to diminish with the poor getting even poorer, which is not only wicked in itself, but immeasurably damaging to the fabric of society for everyone else. We need to reach a stage where there is broad public support for a strategy of increasing benefits.

For millions of poor people money may not be the only, or even the single most important thing that can improve their quality of life, but money is a sine qua non.

Most people can agree on what the social security system is there to do. It is to give those who genuinely cannot earn their living a decent life roughly comparable with the rest of us – though exactly how much so will always be in dispute. Social security is there to help the truly helpless while weeding out the idlers. However, most people would also agree that the system is Byzantine and incomprehensible. Recent research shows how little its own users understand it.