Chancellor George Osborne has determined that £4 billion will be cut from the welfare budget, emphasising that there will be no place for people claiming benefits who can work but refuse to. It is important to note that, as a statement of fact, it is correct that the humble taxpayer cannot continue to pay income to those who refuse to work; however, caution is required when linking that directly to reductions in the welfare budget.
In the same way that it is ludicrous to suggest £123bn could be saved by recouping all tax due, it would be equally ludicrous to suggest there are easy savings to be made by taking “layabouts off budget” (all the more so if suggested by someone who came through private education). If £4bn can be taken off welfare, all well and good, but this will not be achieved merely by removing various unemployment benefits.
The “Breakthrough Northern Ireland” project was launched this week a year ago. During that year, I have come across probably hundreds of people of working age who are not working. However, I would venture to suggest that a majority of them either want to work but cannot (for a variety of reasons), or are caught in such an intergenerational cycle of worklessness that the concept of work simply is not understood – put another way, a majority of the nearly 30% “economically inactive” either directly or indirectly would like to be active. “Lazy layabouts” do exist, but in far smaller proportion than the Daily Mail would have us believe.
Iain Duncan Smith’s proposals in fact require a degree of investment in making certain the State offers every assistance in getting people who are not working but want to (or who would want to) into employment – and examples of successful mentor projects with that objective do exist in Northern Ireland. They also require flexibility in the system (which is revenue-neutral) so that people are not simply “labelled” as “disabled”, “incapacitated” or anything else which hints at inability to work when, in fact, they may well want to work.
In other words, tackling worklessness or “tackling layabouts” is important, but distinct from the efficiency savings agenda.
Ian James Parsley 