National insurance and ID cards would be more effective than Brexit at tackling people’s anxieties about how the integrity of the British welfare state can best be protected.
The shirkers-versus-strivers narrative around cutting the welfare bill fails to recognise the reality that a quarter of Britons have a disability, and one third have unpaid caring responsibilities.
The system is all but designed to subsidise low wages, disincentivise productivity, and give retirees no stake in the UK maintaining a thriving, dynamic economy.
These proposed powers will apply not only to benefit claimants, but to others who are “linked” to them: the term remains vaguely defined.
The expansion of Universal Support is hugely welcome, as is news of a Chance to Work Guarantee. The Chancellor’s decision to restrict access to higher rate disability benefits, however, is harder to defend.
The Chancellor explains the thinking behind proposed changes in Universal Credit which would restrict access to people who refuse to actively seek work.
The fourth part of our series on reducing demand for government, in which we set out a programme for change – focused on families, civil society and government.
If Britain’s productivity problem could be fixed by politicians tilting at unpopular targets – in this case, an assumed army of scroungers – it would have been fixed long ago.
The measure is just the tip of the British state’s anti-family iceberg. But as with so many of our other problems, it commands strong (if short-sighted) public support.
The fifteenth article in a new series on ConHome about how government might be made smaller, taxpayers better off and and society stronger – through strong families, better schools and good jobs.
The Conservative Party must not get locked into thinking that improving the efficiency of the public sector will make the sums add up either. We need to move away from ‘The Crisis Management State’ to ‘The Preventative State’.
Sharp cliff-edges mean that the partners of high earners could find it very difficult to justify the expense of returning to employment.
Universal Support was always meant to sit alongside Universal Credit, specifically focused on helping written-off groups. But it was cut by an impecunious Treasury.
Recent governments have strained to take ever-larger numbers out of income tax whilst maintaining a large welfare state. The problem is whether this is sustainable.
This move would be perfectly targeted on the people who, by definition, need most income support, and gets to them far more cheaply than a universal tax break would.