Another shocking statistic

I found this snippet in the Times:

One in three households across Britain depends on state benefits for at least half its income, according to a report released today by the right-of-centre think-tank Civitas. It says that the figure is far higher for single-parent homes, with 61 per cent relying on state support compared with 9 per cent of two-parent households

(The actual Civitas report says “some 30 per cent of households”, but the editors of the Times clearly feel that percentages are beyond their readership.)

While I have not had the chance to verify this, I find it deeply disturbing. As the welfare state expands, it begins to lose its original purpose of ensuring a healthy and cohesive society in which nobody need want for education, health care, nor for food and shelter if they are out of work. Instead, it has become a massive patronage system, whereby an ever greater proportion of society has become dependent on the state for their living.

At the very least, this places an increasing burden on the more productive elements of society, creating tension between those who pay taxes and those who receive benefits. The contributors become resentful, while the beneficiaries increasingly come to see benefits as a natural state of being – it becomes normal to go through life on welfare. The more people are beneficiaries of the state, the harder it is to reform welfare to reduce costs and encourage greater independence, as those with a vested interest in the status quo gain greater political clout.

More importantly, the creeping expansion of welfare undermines the autonomy which is an essential element of a free society. Instead of individuals being in control of their own destiny, making decisions about how they lead their lives that benefit both themselves and their neighbours, they become vassals of the state, infantilised by permanent paternalism.

The fact that a third of households rely on benefit for over half their income is not a sign of a prosperous society giving generously to the most needy. It is not a sign of the success of our welfare state. It is a sign of terrible failure that in one of the richest countries in the world, a third of households are reliant on hand-outs.

Welfare is a product of state failure. It is time for Reform

Independent liberal think-tank Reform have today launched an excellent report on Reforming Welfare. Britain faces a ballooning welfare crisis. A shocking 5.4 million working-age Britons (14 per cent of the working age population) rely on state aid, over two thirds of them for longer than a period of a year. The UK spends £79 billion on non-pension social security: more than we spend on Education, which Labour promised would be its priority and which in the long-run is the best hope for reducing poverty and benefit-dependency in the future.

The Government is currently failing. Unemployment is falling more slowly since the New Deal has been launched. The number of people on sickness benefits has nearly quadrupled in 25 years, so that 5 per cent of men aged 25-49 are now ill or disabled. Tax credits are now paid both to the unemployed, which was never their purpose, and to those on high-incomes: a third of tax credit spending is paid to those with above average incomes. Despite a 400 per cent increase in welfare spending under Labour, the UK has the worst poverty trap in the OECD.

The state-monopoly approach has not worked. Fortunately, and perhaps at first glance surprisingly, the market offers the solution. The report notes that “paying independent agencies on results is more effective at getting people back into work than paying official agencies flat rates no matter what they do (or don’t) achieve. It has also unleashed a wave of innovation and of flexibility.” Reform offer six recommendations:

• Abandon the state monopoly of provision – the state should put welfare out to tender and invite private and voluntary bodies to bid for the contracts
• Job schemes should be about finding work rather than training, and the unemployed should be required to look for work if they want benefits (this includes those on Incapacity Benefit)
• Reset the benefit levels and tapers to reduce the poverty trap that results from people seeing massive drops in benefits as they work so that they keep little or none of the extra money they earn
• Simplify the system by merging some of the 51 benefits, 26 of which account for less than 1 per cent of spending
• Raise the personal allowance so that somebody working full-time on the minimum wage pays no income tax (a proposal I have made several times before, most recently on 21 November)
• Transform part of National Insurance into a form of unemployment insurance so that individuals who lose their jobs have ownership of a fund to help them during their period of unemployment.

These reforms are urgently needed. Unemployment is rising under the current Government and one in seven adults now rely on state aid. The current system squeezes ever more money out of the hard-pressed middle classes while failing to address the crushing poverty that afflicts the poorest in our society – it is those just below the “poverty line”, and not the chronically poor, that are the focus of this Government’s efforts.

Rather than continue with the state-centric solutions that have been characteristic of this Government, it is time to employ market mechanisms and the innovativeness of enterprise to address this costly and tragic disaster. This report could not come soon enough.