A History of the War on the 'Sick Note Culture'

1992

The 'war on benefit scroungers', and in particular those 'Going on the sick', started with the-then Secretary of State for Social Security, Peter Lilley, in 1992.

Despite what at the time was presented as a draconian crackdown on IVB claimants, nothing much seems to have changed.

The 2006 Welfare Reform Bill [set] a target of an 80 per cent employment rate amongst working age adults.

To achieve this Pathways to Work [is to] be rolled out across the country by 2008.

The numbers on Incapacity Benefit will need to be reduced by one million.

One million more older people and 300,000 extra lone parents will need to be motivated into work.
[Compass]

NB: No longer available from Compass website

2006

Work and Pensions Secretary, John Hutton, announced a further 'crackdown' in December 2006, which was followd by the publication of the Freud Report

2007

This recommended:

Greater use of private and voluntary sector resources and expertise so harder-to-help benefit claimants receive more employment support.

A new focus on long-term mentoring to tackle the problem of repeat benefit claimants.

Greater rewards for organisations that are successful in helping claimants find and stay in work.

Greater personalisation of employment support, with higher financial incentives for organisations to target resources at the hardest-to-help who need more support before they are ready to return to work.

Retaining Jobcentre Plus’ role in helping customers during the early stages of their period on benefit and creating a new role for the organisation to assess how much support individual claimants are likely to need before they are ready to return to work.

Rebalancing rights and responsibilities in the welfare system - matching increased support with greater obligations on claimants to look for work.

Simplification of the benefits system.

Further changes were announced by Peter Hain in November 2007:

New incapacity benefit tests are to be introduced, which ministers say will mean fewer sick and disabled people will qualify for being unable to work. Work and Pensions Secretary Peter Hain says the changes, introduced next year, will end "sick-note Britain". [BBC]

In the meantime, David Cameron's Tories were taking an active interest in welfare schemes across the pond, and in particular the Wisconsin Works scheme.

Shadow work and pensions secretary, Chris Grayling, told the Telegraph:

2008

Last week I was in New York, meeting the people who run the city's successful programmes to get people off benefits and into work. One of the most impressive of these programmes helps people off their equivalent of incapacity benefit. Their experience is that the majority of claimants can go back into work, even if a medical condition makes it impossible to do the same job they used to. A building worker with a bad back may be able to do something different even if continuing to work on a building site is not realistic. Indeed, they say that, in their experience, one in 10 people should never have been claiming the benefit in the first place.

'Going on the sick' shouldn't be a career option 06 January 2008

Mr Grayling went on to make the claim - which is at variance with the experience of claimants I have met - that:

The majority of people signed on to this benefit by filling in a form and sending in a note from their doctor. Most claimants are then simply left to their own devices ...

The Telegraph returned to its 'campaign' in February 2008:

Up to two thirds of people claiming incapacity benefit are not entitled to the state handout, the Government's new welfare adviser warns today.

David Freud, an investment banker hired by James Purnell, the new Work and Pensions Secretary, said the disability tests used to award state aid were "ludicrous" and could be costing billions of pounds.

More than 2.6 million people claim incapacity benefit at a cost of more than £12 billion a year to the taxpayer.

However, Mr Freud suggested that less than a third may be credible recipients while several hundred thousand work illegally on the black market.

Under his review, the private sector is to be brought in to run large sections of the welfare system and lone parents will be encouraged to work as soon as their children go to school.

People refusing to co-operate and find a job will have their benefits "sliced" under the plan to get about 1.4 million people back to work. The system should be in place within five years, he said.

Private companies will be put in charge of finding jobs for the long-term unemployed. They will be paid by results, with large fees if they succeed in keeping people in work for more than three years and nothing if they do not.

"We can pay masses," Mr Freud said. "I worked out that it is economically rational to spend up to £62,000 on getting the average person on incapacity benefit into the world of work."

1.9m on benefit 'should go back to work'

In a side-swipe at Peter Hain, Mr Freud told the Telegraph:

...there had been a transformation in the Government's approach to welfare since Mr Purnell's appointment. "Purnell is showing astonishing energy - there is going to be a much more single-minded ferocity". Peter Hain, his predecessor, had been more "worried about the Left".

The Economist took a more realistic view of the prospects for success:

Much cited are America's 1996 reforms, which encouraged states to impose time limits on benefits and pay private companies and charities to help people find employment. One such company, America Works, recently offered its expertise to both big British parties.

The firm has found that getting welfare recipients into the rhythm of work by making them show up for a good part of the working week, coaching them for interviews and holding their hands through the early days of a new job are as successful as compulsion in reducing welfare rolls—suggesting that British politicians are thinking along the right lines. But it warns against a preoccupation with pre-job training, which often teaches the wrong skills and misses basic graces (such as time-keeping and not being cheeky to the boss) that many claimants lack.

American employers, it seems, are keener on having a decent, low-hassle workforce than on subsidies for training or incentives to hire the jobless. And they co-operate with welfare-to-work programmes when they get it.

But British employers already have good workers on tap, thanks to the endless stream of eager east Europeans seeking jobs. Whether they can be persuaded to take on long-idle locals instead—even ones who have their hands held—is moot.

Welfare reform - Going to work

Several concluding comments:

• The sweeping claims made about the numbers of claimants who are "swinging the lead" are not matched by any of the forecasts as to the numbers likely to return to work;



• The LSE Depression Report found that there are more mentally ill people on incapacity benefit than there are registered unemployed, but the waiting time for treatment - if available at all - is over nine months.
  Perversely, at a time of growing need, services for the mentally ill are actually being cut back. Karen Reissman    Super Mental Health Hospitals



• The likelihood of a return to full employment - as it was known in the 1950s - is vanishingly remote;



• A Newsnight reporter, speaking from the North East, airily told viewers that industry might have vanished, but there were plenty of jobs in IT and call centres.
  
  This sort of flipancy is challenged by the work of Gareth Williams in South Wales who has made the effort to find out why so many fall into mental illness.
  
  His findings are consistent with the writings of David Smail, Oliver James, and Paedar Kirby.



• The possibility that the minimum wage, and the tax regime [AW] might be changed so as to make work more attractive, do not seem to figure in the thoughts of New Labour or Tory commentators on this subject;



• The sort of approaches suggested by Claus Offe, NEF, and Talis Fotopoulos, are also off the radar. [Alternatives to Welfare]



• The warning from the Crime and Society Foundation of the trade-off between benefits and incarceration rates has also failed to register with the political elite;



• Finally, the intimate involvement of U.S. insurance corporation UnumProvident in Pathways to Work suggests that the familiar "broken privatization" agenda is also in operation.
  
  The grim reality of 'welfare' across the pond - which seems to be the line of travel of the current round of reforms - is examined in greater detail by Johann Hari.

Up to 500,000 wrongly denied incapacity benefit, figures show

In the first attempt to quantify the numbers refused incapacity benefit only to have it restored, Steve Griffiths, a former government consultant, says the figures are "at least half a million" during that period.

Griffiths used official statistics gleaned from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), the tribunal service and social security statistics to get to "at least" 500,000 wrongly barred from incapacity benefit since 1996.

He discovered that at least 300,000 claimants won their tribunals when they appealed.

He says this figure should be added to a different category of at least 200,000 people who have been refused incapacity benefit over the past 15 years but have ended up back on incapacity benefit.

He arrives at this second figure by using DWP research that finds 35% of those removed from incapacity benefit – who cumulatively number more than one million people – have been in such a position ...

The Labour backbencher Jon Cruddas ... said:

"There is a crisis in our country, but it's not simply a crisis of welfare dependency. It's a crisis of mass chronic ill health caused by worklessness and poverty, not a lifestyle choice.

"Economic crisis encourages a search for scapegoats among the poor and dispossessed. A punitive welfare system is a consequence.

"Labour has to change the terms of debate on welfare in this country or we will inexorably head down a dangerous path toward hate politics and social conflict." ...

Guardian  03 Jan 2011

Charity's struggle to meet demand for essentials of cookers, carpets and coats

Every week, Family Action volunteers scrutinise increasingly urgent and bleak applications for emergency welfare grants ...

Every Tuesday morning a group of volunteers ... meet here to scrutinise the forms and approve awards from the trust funds administered by Family Action.

At their last gathering before Christmas, the urgency is poignant.

A string of applications – submitted by social workers, NHS staff, charities and other support groups – are for cookers ...

Carpets are a particular problem ...

Then there are the cases that expose most starkly the kind of poverty many would like to assume cannot exist in the UK: the mothers whose children have no warm clothes to wear outside in the coldest months and must apply for funds to buy shoes, jumpers and coats ...

... the applicants who have been turned down for social fund grants because they have outstanding debts, the ones whose food bills are unaffordably high because they must rely on takeaways with no means to prepare hot food, and those who have no money to cover removal costs when they relocate.

The grants the board make will be delivered swiftly and efficiently ... but all agree they have already seen applications increase.

With the price of white goods rising with the VAT rise, charitable giving falling and interest rates leaving funds low, they fear Tuesday mornings will be bleaker.

Guardian  02 Jan 2011    'Big Society'

Family Action

Prosperous Witney ... services are under strain

State-funded idleness: 1.5m are spending fifth Christmas in a row on sick benefits

Implementing the Washington Consensus with Paul Dacre, social Darwinist

Figures released by the Department of Work and Pensions expose the shocking degree to which a generation of Britons has abandoned work for a life ‘on the sick’.

The statistics show that almost £66billion has been paid out in incapacity benefits alone over the past five years ...

Some 1,478,010 long-term claimants have been on £91.40 a week all that time. A further 500,000 have been claiming it for between two and five years.

The Government believes half the 2.1 million on incapacity benefit could work.

In a sign of how even the young are becoming accustomed to relying on benefits, 468,000 of those who have been claiming incapacity benefit for five years or more – one third of the total – are under the age of 45.

Employment Minister Chris Grayling seized on the figures as evidence that the Coalition is right to demand incapacity claimants undergo a medical assessment to see whether they can work.

"I am on Incapacity benefit and have a genuine need. If I had not been through the system myself (ATOS) and seen for myself that lies are told and things twisted to try to get people off benefit" - tina, london

Same here, I've got written evidence of this and I've been through hell because I have some mental issues and no help, that aren't further being helped by repeated kangaroo court medicals (15 mins with one doctor who cannot be a specialist in every field and who is not a psychiatrist) and the a many months later overturned by an appeal panel (usually three professionals).

The medicals are paid for by results and even if overturned by the appeal panel (which 70% are) they have their money.

- Mark, London, 28/12/2010 11:27

Daily Mail  28 Dec 2010

The Perfect Storm?

ESA: It Doesn't Add Up

Citizens Advice Bureau

New benefit system ... forces sick and disabled into work

It's now officially 'unsustainable' to support disabled people

In the comprehensive spending review in October, the coalition said there would be a review of DLA: these plans have now become clearer with its announcement that it intends to scrap the benefit and replace it with personal independent payment (PIP).

In the executive summary of its DLA consultation document, Maria Miller, minister for disabled people, claims the reason for change is that "the rising caseload and expenditure is unsustainable".

Let's be clear: this increased DLA caseload is not because of fraud.

DLA has one of the lowest fraud rates of any benefits.

In fact, government figures published by the House of Commons work and pensions committee suggest that benefit fraud for DLA, carer's and attendance allowance among others has reduced since 2001 from 2.2% to 0.8% between 2008-2009 (the most recent year for which statistics are available).

But in June, the government declared in its Budget 2010 policy costings document that it hopes to save 20% from its DLA budget by changing the way it is allocated: with fraudulent claims less than minimal, the only way to cut the budget by a fifth is to redraw the boundaries over who is eligible ...

Guardian  08 Dec 2010

Disabled people 'twice as likely' to miss out on careers, courses and holidays

Disabled people claiming benefits face new medical checks

Disability Living Allowance reform

Leonard Cheshire Disability

Disability

Disabled people claiming benefits face new medical checks

Charities alarmed as ministers propose end to automatic right to key allowances ...

Ministers propose to end the automatic right to disability living allowance, worth up to £70 a week for care and up to £50 a week for travel needs.

Claimants will have to wait for a year for the new "personal independence payment" and then submit to a series of tests focusing on "an individual's ability to carry out a range of key activities necessary to everyday life".

A similar system to judge the fitness to work of those claiming disability benefits will have to be overhauled amid mounting evidence that people with serious illnesses are being judged fit when they are not ...

Welfare support will also be conditional on disabled people acting on government instructions to "better manage or improve their situation if appropriate" ...

Guardian  06 Dec 2010

Incapacity benefit tests face overhaul after damning report

Claimants feel unfairly treated by 'impersonal and mechanistic' tests, says independent review ...

The review, conducted by the academic Malcolm Harrington, an occupational health specialist ... found that the assessments, run by a French multinational, Atos Origin, which received £54m from the coalition government for the contract, failed people with mental illnesses and long-term disabilities.

One form which claimants needed to complete ran to 28 pages and almost half "found the questionnaire difficult or impossible to complete".

Another problem was that people were characterised by "descriptors" within a computer system that relied on questions apparently unrelated to work.

In one instance people were asked whether they had "loaded a dishwasher or washing machine" that day.

"It does not bother to ask whether the claimant has a dishwasher or washing machine. That is the danger with computer systems and drop-down menus," said Harrington.

"We want to rely much more on healthcare professionals and assessments."

He pointed out that 40% of those found fit for work by the system appealed and won – and added that 40% of people who went in front of a judge did so with "additional medical information" ...

Guardian  23 Nov 2010    Atos Origin    'Mechanistic modelling'

Recession Shadows America's Middle Class

Pam Brown is one of millions of Americans who ... tumbled from their idyllic middle-class existence to near-poverty -- or beyond.

For many, like Brown, the downfall is a Kafkaesque odyssey, a humiliation hard to comprehend.

Help is not in sight: their government and their society have abandoned them.

Wall Street is preoccupied with chasing new profits again ...

The middle class, the America's backbone, is crumbling ...

Last year the US poverty rate reached 14.3 percent, 1.1 percent higher than in 2008.

Almost five million Americans skidded below the poverty line ... many from hitherto sheltered circles, where poverty was a foreign word.

The number of long-term unemployed keeps rising.

Worst off are families with children. Every fifth child in the US lives in poverty today ... nobody seems to care.

Poverty wasn't an issue during the midterm elections -- and it won't be an issue now that ... the Republican Party have reclaimed the House of Representatives ...

Gdn  09 Nov 2010

Long-term jobless 'could face compulsory manual labour'

Should long-term benefit claimants do community work?

Work-shy will be 'pushed' into working for free

How Britain's new welfare state was born in the USA

These cuts aren't building a 'big society'; they're tearing it down

Two welfare workers describe how the coalition's cuts will undermine their clients' already precarious livelihoods ...

Atos, the company being awarded contracts to find many unfit people capable for work, has a long association in doing assessments of claimants both for IB and DLA.

It does not have a very good reputation in my line of work.

I have attended a number of medical assessments with clients and have had to explain the term "bipolar" to an Italian professional and "Asperger's" to a Greek one – neither of whom seemed to have heard of the terms before, yet here they were passing judgment on my client's fitness to work ...

Guardian  05 Nov 2010    Atos

Three-quarters of incapacity benefit claimants are fit to work, says DWP

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) figures showed that 78% of the 842,100 people reassessed were either fit for work or had closed their claim before medical assessments were complete.

The government is pushing ahead with the programme of reassessing those on the old-style incapacity benefit.

It plans to cut back the wider benefit bill by £18bn ...

Meanwhile, three of Britain's churches accused the chancellor, George Osborne, of exaggerating the scale of benefit fraud in last week's spending review speech, pointing out that official figures were lower than the £5bn claimed by Osborne.

Government sources insisted the inconsistency arose because the chancellor was including the amount wasted through error in his lump sum. The president of the Methodist Conference, Alison Tomlin, said: "Exaggerating benefit fraud points the finger of blame at the poor.

"Let us be clear this recession was not caused by the poor, those on benefits, or even benefit cheats." ...

Guardian  26 Oct 2010    ATOS Origin

Where is this promised land where anyone can find a job?

There is a pernicious – and frankly fairly insulting – assumption that lies at the heart of much government thinking.

It is, as Iain Duncan Smith put it on Thursday night, that "the jobs are out there".

Or, as George Osborne prefers to see it, that unemployment is a "lifestyle choice" taken because of our supposedly lavish welfare payments and, presumably, the innate idleness of sections of the population ...

... do we want the congested, overcrowded south-East to attract yet more people – and for the rest of the kingdom to become depopulated sinks?

Do we abandon Merthyr, Stoke and Knowsley to dereliction? Or should we consider moving the jobs to the people; the lesson we learned from the 1930s' slump?

Independent  23 Oct 2010

The truth about George Osborne's reforms

Most measures unveiled by George Osborne today fall not on higher-rate taxpayers, but on the workless, the infirm and the poor ..

Taking the measures one at a time, the first – and the biggest – was to "time limit contributory employment and support allowance" for one year, that is the benefit formerly known as incapacity benefit.

What this means is that a disabled or seriously sick person who has a working spouse, however low-paid their job may be, will lose their personal entitlement to benefits after a year ...

On housing benefit, already savaged in June, there was a move to link the maximum rents paid for council and housing association properties to the market rent, something which will further encourage the cleansing of the poor out of central London ...

Guardian  20 Oct 2010

New council house tenants face trebling in rents to pay for new homes

Osborne swings the welfare axe

Osborne wields axe

Cameron's Risky Shock Therapy

Claimants to face benefits reassessment

Mental health charity Mind called for a revision of the test before it is rolled out to over 1.5 million claimants nationwide.

Sophie Corlett, Mind's director of external relations, said: "The benefit test being used in the pilots starting today has a fundamental problem when it comes to people with mental health problems - it does not do what it's set up for, which is to distinguish accurately which people can work and which people can't.

"Over half of all benefit claimants have a mental health problem, so it should go without saying that any fitness to work test should thoroughly assess mental health and whether it presents a barrier to work and coping in the workplace. However, many people with mental health issues have found that the impact of their condition on their ability to work is barely recognised.

"The Government wants to toughen up on benefit claimants while supporting those in genuine need - this system doesn't identify those in genuine need.

"The consequences of being wrongly declared fit for work can be devastating. People with mental health problems need vocational and health-related support to get them ready for a job again. Incorrectly putting these people onto Jobseekers Allowance will see a reduction in their benefit, less support for getting a job, greater pressure to get to work sooner, and financial sanctions applied if they fail.

"This could not only throw people into long-term poverty, but the distress could actively make their mental health problems worse, and make it even harder for them to get a job."

Independent  11 Oct 2010

Britain tops jobless league table

Coalition hints at bringing end to universal benefit

David Cameron's claim to lead a "revolution of fairness" will be put to the test this week as the first wave of incapacity benefit claimants are ordered to find a job and the Treasury considers a plan to strip pensioners of universal benefits.

The Prime Minister uses an exclusive article in The Independent on Sunday to insist the fairness of the looming spending cuts cannot be measured by how much money the state spends on welfare ...

... with time running out to find the savings before George Osborne's Commons statement in 10 days' time, a number of earlier policy positions have already been abandoned.

Business Secretary Vince Cable ditched his call for a "graduate tax" to fund university places.

But the move to alter the winter fuel allowance could prove the most explosive ...

It is understood the £250 payment could be limited to people who claim the benefit pension credit, saving £1.5bn a year – more than halving the cost of the scheme.

Liberal Democrats are also pushing for the benefit to be taxed. Mr Cable has acknowledged that it is "odd" that he receives the payment.

Some ministers suggest raising the qualifying age from 60 to 66 – and cutting the basic payment ...

The first wave of long-term claimants of incapacity benefit will be ordered back to work from tomorrow as new figures reveal the bill for keeping two million people on the sick has topped £133bn in the past decade.

Two pilots to reassess claimants for their fitness to work begin in Burnley and Aberdeen, with only those in genuine need allowed on to the employment and support allowance (ESA).

A trial to assess all new claimants for ESA from October 2008 to November 2009 showed only 6 per cent were unable to work at all ...

Independent  10 Oct 2010

New benefits system forces three-quarters of claimants back to work

Statistics and Information on Atos Origin

CAB evidence on medical assessments

Disabled people 'to lose £9bn from cuts'

The Government's proposed benefit reforms will see 3.5 million disabled people lose about £9.2bn of critical support by 2015, a report from Demos claims ...

Demos warns that by 2015, families with disabled children could lose more than £3,000 each, and disabled adults whose partner is a full-time carer could lose about £3,000.

Kitty Ussher, director of Demos, said: "The emerging evidence from recent years is that the only way to get those furthest from the labour market back into work is through individual client-led support.

"Cutting the welfare bill is attractive to government in the current climate, but without better support for individuals it threatens to just exclude people further."

The Independent  09 Oct 2010

Destination Unknown

George Osborne's secret plan to slash sickness benefits

Chancellor plans to slash welfare bill by £2.5bn for people who are disabled or too ill to work ...

Details of the plan, spelled out in a confidential letter from Osborne to Iain Duncan Smith ... will fuel mounting concerns that the government's assault on spending ... will hit those on the lowest incomes the hardest.

Osborne told Duncan Smith:

"Given the pressure on overall public spending in the coming period, we will need to continue developing further options to reform the benefits as part of the spending review process in order to deliver further savings, greater simplicity and stronger work incentives.

"Reform to the employment support allowance is a particular priority and I am pleased that you, the prime minister and I have agreed to press ahead with reforms to the ESA as part of the spending review that will deliver net savings of at least £2.5bn by 2014-15."

In a further extraordinary development, sources within Duncan Smith's department turned their fire on the Treasury, insisting nothing had been decided and suggesting Osborne's department may have leaked the letter to bounce them into accepting the plan ...

Guardian  11 Sept 2010

George Osborne's axe falls early

Welfare spending to be cut by £4bn

Apparently Nick Robinson did not ask George Osborne where all the vacancies are.

Mr Osborne told BBC political editor Nick Robinson that those making a "lifestyle choice to just sit on out-of-work benefits" would be affected.

He described the welfare budget as "completely out of control" ...

Mr Osborne said: "We are going to reform out-of-work benefits so there's a strong incentive for people who can work get work...

"People who think that it's a lifestyle choice just to stay on out-of-work benefits... that lifestyle choice is going to come to an end." ...

BBC News  09 Sept 2010

200,000 face housing benefit cuts

The TUC said some of the most vulnerable people in the country will be hit by proposals for a 10% reduction in the benefit of adults who have been claiming jobseeker's allowance for more than a year.

Disabled workers, lone parents and the recent homeless were among the groups most likely to be affected, said the TUC.

General Secretary Brendan Barber said: "This cut in housing benefit will make a real difference to some of the poorest and most vulnerable adults and families, who will find themselves out of pocket to the tune of nearly £500 a year.

"Long-term unemployment is not a lifestyle choice, it is a debilitating and stressful experience which puts unemployed people and their families at higher risk of poverty, poor health and relationship breakdown.

"The long-term unemployed need help and support to get them back into the labour market. They should not to be blamed for their predicament by having vital benefits cut. This is another example of the Government making struggling families bear the cost of the recession, while the rich have been let off."

uk.news.yahoo.com  06 Sept 2010

28BN TAXPAYER BILL FOR WORKSHY SCROUNGERS

You don't want to claim benefits; if you do you could appear on our front page!

MORE than half a million people have falsely claimed sickness benefits for the last 10 years – at a cost to taxpayers of a massive £28billion.

Two-thirds of Incapacity Benefits claimants unemployed for the whole decade were in fact fit to work, new official figures reveal.

Ministers claimed the figures show that a huge number of people have been allowed to abuse the state payouts system under Labour ...

Fiona McEvoy, of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said:

“These figures are astonishing. It really goes to show how the welfare system has been failing both taxpayers and the benefit claimants who have been marooned on state hand-outs for a decade.

“The Government’s review of Incapacity Benefit is long overdue. It is vital for the economy that these people are helped back into employment.”

The figures show almost 900,000 people have spent a decade living on sickness benefits at a total cost of £42billion ... two-thirds of the 889,000 should have been engaged in some kind of employment, according to new Government tests to root out those fit to work ...

Daily Express  16 Aug 2010    Corporate Media: Manufacturing Consent

David Blunkett set to join Tory war on dole cheats

Dozen it just make you sick

Work Capability Assessment

Work capability assessment: is it working?

Every church should consider a foodbank

This week Steve Chalke, a UN special advisor and founder of Oasis, Stop the Traffik and Faithworks, told Trussell Trust Director Chris Mould that every church should consider having a foodbank.

With a challenging economic climate and government cuts already starting to bite, the need for foodbanks across the UK is greater than ever.

Whilst 69 foodbanks are currently launched nationwide, people are still going hungry in towns without a foodbank.

Trust Director Chris Mould says:

'I spoke to a couple with a young baby at a foodbank about what they would do if there was no foodbank, they said that they would have had to steal something to feed their daughter.

'13 million people live below the poverty line in the UK. It is so easy for people on the breadline to be pushed over the edge meaning that they cannot afford to eat.'

Last summer we helped Chris, April and William after Chris was made redundant and suffered 12 weeks benefit delay.

They were selling their possessions just to put food on the table. April says that the foodbank helped get them through this tough time.

Now, a year later, Chris has a job and they are expecting their second baby.

As more people hit crisis, we want to help more families like Chris and April to get through hard times. This is where UK churches need to help.

The Trussell Trust   06 August 2010

Britons on the breadline

Cameron pledges to protect vulnerable

Cameron: 'We're in this together'

Cameron's cuts: We're not all in this together

We want to work – but government would rather cut costs than help us

Rather than helping disability claimants into work, it is cheaper to cut benefits and set them up to fail in a tough labour market ...

Finding work is difficult enough for the fit and healthy, but if you are one of the 11 million people – from cabinet office estimates – in Britain who is disabled, injured, or suffers from ill-health, then your condition may make it harder to move beyond the interview stage. Enabling most claimants to work means that jobs would have to be tailored to their needs.

This means taking account for weeks and months off work, short days, regular shifts in working hours, work days and deadlines, the distraction of severe pain, post-medication sleepiness or sickness, susceptibility to colds, flu and bugs, and the need for home-working.

At least a couples of these issues will affect most claimants, no matter what their level of mobility.

This fact makes a poor joke of the idea that most disabled people, even if capable of some work-related task, would be able to cope with employment not adjusted to their symptoms.

Employers already complain about statutory maternity leave, so how would they cope with making adjustments to complex and long-term needs, affecting their profitability? And how can people be declared "fit" to work if employers won't give them jobs because of their illness? ... Guardian  03 Aug 2010

Remploy

GMB_Remploy

Disabled to lose their factories

New benefits system forces three-quarters of claimants back to work

Nearly four out of 10 (39 per cent) of the 686,500 applicants for Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) have been judged able to work since the replacement for Incapacity Benefit was introduced in October 2008.

A further 37 per cent stopped their claims before their assessments had been completed.

Only six per cent of ESA claims (or 40,100 cases) from October 2008 to November 2009 were judged to have such severe disabilities that they were eligible for payments of at least £96.85 a week and exempted from work programmes.

A further 14 per cent (or 96,700 cases) were judged unable to hold down a full-time job and received at least £91.40 a week, but were forced to take part in work schemes.

One in three of those judged fit for work appealed against the decision and four in 10 appeals (21,200 cases) resulted in victory for claimants ...

There are 2.2 million people on incapacity benefit and 136,800 now on the new ESA, costing a total of £14bn in 2009-10.

However, campaigners believe the new system is flawed.

Laura Weir, of the Multiple Sclerosis Society, said: "Under this assessment system, more and more people are being found 'fit to work' when in fact they are living with severe health symptoms and disabilities.

"The assessment needs to be independently reviewed to take into consideration long-term, fluctuating conditions with 'hidden' symptoms that are being overlooked, such as fatigue and pain.

We need better-trained staff carrying out these assessments, who are aware of the complex nature of conditions like MS, and more exemptions for people with the most severe symptoms."

A spokeswoman for Citizens Advice Bureau said:

"We have grave concerns about how the work capability assessment for the ESA is working. We have seen cases where medical evidence has not been taken into account. Seriously ill and disabled people are being found fit for work." ...

Independent  28 July 2010    

Threat to outsourced workers’ benefits

Britons on the breadline

Thousands of people could be forced to rely on food parcels because of benefit delays, as the Government's plan to slash the country's welfare bill is put into effect.

Charities that run foodbanks warned this weekend that the prospect of people having to rely on Third World-style food aid – despite Britain being among the richest nations in the world – is a real possibility for 1.5 million people who will be moved off incapacity benefit (IB).

The number of people who are turning to foodbanks as they can't afford to feed their families has soared, rising from 26,000 in 2008-09 to 41,000 in 2009-10 – 37 per cent of whom were referred to foodbanks because of delays with their benefits ...

Chris Mould, director of the Trussell Trust, said: "What worries us is the amount of people who come to us because their benefits status is being reassessed and they've had their benefits stopped; if hundreds of thousands of people are being reassessed, we fear there will be huge problems."

The Government recently announced that everyone on incapacity benefit will have to go through tests known as Work Capability Assessments to see if they are fit for work. The Department for Work and Pensions estimates that, of the 1.5 million people currently on IB, 750,000 will move on to jobseeker's allowance, 300,000 will move on to other benefits, and 450,000 will come off benefits entirely ...

Independent  04 July 2010

Food Stamps USA

Trussell Trust

Ministers consider scheme to hand out food vouchers to unemployed

The line of travel is probably to replace benefits with food stamps.

The government is considering plans to distribute food vouchers to people on the dole as part of a wider drive to empower charities to supplement the support provided by the welfare state.

Iain Duncan Smith, the work and pensions secretary, has given his provisional backing to JobCentre Plus staff handing out vouchers that can be exchanged for food parcels.

The parcels, which contain enough donated items to keep a family fed for six days, are administered from 65 food banks across the country run by the Trussell Trust, a Christian charity ...

The Trussell Trust, which fed 41,000 people last year, already relies upon front-line professionals such as a teachers, social worker and doctors to give the vouchers to people they encounter who do not have enough money to feed themselves.

Until two years ago, a few Jobcentre Plus offices also let their staff distribute vouchers on an ad hoc basis.

That practice, negotiated locally, was stopped by the Labour government in 2008, after a ruling that Jobcentre Plus advisers "must not act as an agent for handing out any form of support, such as food vouchers" on behalf of charities.

Labour ministers were thought to have been concerned that the Trussell Trust parcels would give the impression welfare payments were insufficient ...

Chris Mould, director of the Trussell Trust, said a growing proportion of the charity's clients were "on the edge" because they had been refused a crisis loan or had their benefits halted as officials reassessed their entitlements ...

Figures released by the DWP revealed that 37,000 people waited 17 days or more for their jobseeker's allowance last year, while 20,000 had to wait more than 22 days ...

Guardian  02 July 2010

Living on Nothing but Food Stamps

Trussell Trust

We must not 'park' people on benefits, says Duncan Smith

It's important to offer IDS full marks for realising there's a problem, even if he cannot bring himself to recognise it's one his predecessor - Margaret Thatcher - made infinitely worse when she took the country on a journey to neoliberalism. (Pinochet with strike-breaking police rather than air force jets.)

IDS's speech to The Heritage Foundation in March 2009 provides many clues as to where he is coming from.

Britain is 'broken' - in social terms - and needs:

... a strong family, a completed education, good employment opportunities and freedom from drugs and other addictions ...  [BB]

Only one problem: there aren't the 'good employment opportunities' any more because, as Thatcher's chief economic adviser Alan Budd admitted:

"' ... the 1980s policies of attacking inflation by squeezing the economy and public spending were a cover to bash the workers ... (to create an) ... industrial reserve army' which would undermine the power of labour ... The result: wages stagnated."   [DH]

The implementation of article six of the Washington Consensus since the 1980s has been so successful that IDS has brazen cheek to inform us that he will be "addressing the root causes of poverty at every level"!

So there's going to be full employment under the coalition, is there, Mr Duncan-Smith?

I don't think the IMF and the guys from Davos will be onside with that one, it would seriously damage profits.

The creation of unemployment is policy. Attacking benefit 'scroungers' is simply another deployment of the third face of power.

[IDS] wants to transform his Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) from one which pays out benefits to one with a mission to reduce poverty and remove the barriers to social mobility and equal opportunity.

He will promise to tackle a "culture of dependency" by addressing the root causes of poverty at every level.

The scale of his challenge will be highlighted in a "state of the nation" government report published today showing that: 1.4 million people have been on an

• out-of-work benefit for nine or more of the last 10 years;
• income inequality is now at its highest level since comparable statistics began in 1961;
• social mobility is worse than in the US, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Canada, Finland and Denmark;
• and a higher proportion of children grow up in workless households in the UK than in any other EU country.

Mr Duncan Smith will say:

"A system that was originally designed to help support the poorest in society is now trapping them in the very condition it was supposed to alleviate. Instead of helping, a deeply unfair benefits system too often writes people off.

"The proportion of people parked on inactive benefits has almost tripled in the past 30 years to 41 per cent of the inactive working age population. That is a tragedy. We must be here to help people improve their lives – not just park them on long-term benefits." ...

"For many people, the move from welfare into work means they face losing more than 95p for every additional £1 they earn. As a result, the poor are being taxed at an effective tax rate that far exceeds the wealthy. We have in effect taken away the reward and left people with the risk. That must and will change." ...

Independent  27 May 2010    Blog

IDS ... a worrying ignorance about welfare

Tax credits scheme may be scrapped

Iain Duncan Smith declares war on 'bust' benefits system

Coalition government sets out radical welfare reforms

IDS: I will tackle root causes of poverty

Plan to link retirement age to life expectancy

The last official figures, issued in February, showed that the total was 5.8 million.

There were 1.4 million people on Job Seekers’ Allowance and 2.6 million on Employment Support – formerly known has incapacity benefit. The total also includes people claiming benefits as lone parents, as carers and because of disability.

The Daily Telegraph revealed earlier this year that the state will pay out more in social security benefits than it raises from workers in income tax this year.

In 2009/10, the Treasury is expecting to take in £140.5 billion in gross income tax receipts. Social security benefits are projected to be £164.7 billion.

Official unemployment figures last week said there are now almost 2.5 million people unemployed in Britain.

Neil O’Brien, Director of Policy Exchange, said the benefits data showed that the real number of people not working is much higher than that.

He said: “Any day now the total number on benefits will officially pass the six million mark. The narrow unemployment figures we are used to seeing tell you less and less about the real number of people who are trapped on benefits.”

“Instead of investing in the future, we are paying the price for failing to reform the benefits system.”

“Our unreformed benefits system is too complicated. It gives people too little financial incentive to work, and too little pressure and help to find work. Other countries have successfully reduced the number on benefits. We will need to totally change our benefits system. There’s nothing kind about leaving people to rot on benefits ”

Telegraph 18 August 2009

Six million Britons to claim benefits

Fears of a depression and an anxiety epidemic, caused by the recession, are forcing the government to offer psychological help to millions of people facing unemployment, debt and relationship breakdown. Sufferers will be referred to psychotherapists for expert counselling via an advice network linking Jobcentres, doctors' surgeries and a new NHS Direct hotline.

Under the plan, which will involve training 3,600 more therapists and hundreds more specialist nurses, psychotherapy centres will be established in every primary care trust by the end of next year.

The moves, to be unveiled by health secretary Alan Johnson and work and pensions secretary James Purnell today, reflect growing anxiety in government that there will be a surge of people who become mentally ill and, as a result, could find themselves unemployed for the long term ...

Johnson will announce that 81 "talking-therapy services", offering cognitive behavioural therapy, a method by which people are encouraged to look more at potential solutions than the causes of their difficulties, will be set up this year - a 25% increase on the planned number.

A network of employment support workers will be set up at every centre to give advice on how to get back to work. While doctors will initially put sufferers in touch with therapists, ministers want to move towards a system in which people could refer themselves by walking into centres and asking for treatment.

Ministers have already pledged to invest £173m to plug glaring gaps in the provision of mental health services. But, as unemployment moves past the 2 million mark, much of the funding is to be accelerated and brought forward to this year, with the focus switching to mental health problems ...

The Observer 08 March 2009

Britain 'is true Prozac Nation'

Mentally ill employees to get support at work

Whitehall battle over army of therapists

Affluenza

The Depression Report

The Moral Tyrannies of Therapy

We were surprised and saddened to see The Observer endorse, even with qualifications, the government's draconian welfare reforms (Leader, last week).

These reforms are not about compassion. They are more about cutting benefit budgets to aid the Treasury and creating revised demarcations of the 'deserving and undeserving poor'.

Even in good economic times, they are invasive and unnecessary; now, in a time of crisis, they have the smell of the workhouse about them.

The Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) asserts: 'Some groups will actually be worse off under the new Employment Support Allowance [ESA] by as much as £400 a year.'

Many disabled people on benefits are feeling frightened, demonised and unwanted with the emphasis on work as the only option. Most disabled people do want to work. What is required is genuine welfare reform that puts the individual claimant at the centre, not just as a profit vehicle for private companies.

John Rogers
Sheffield Welfare Action Network

Observer 30 November 2008

Parents with young children, carers, sick, disabled, people with mental health problems and other vulnerable groups face tougher tests to qualify for benefits. If they fail, they could be cut off with no support.

We are opposed to the abolition of income support which ends the principle that those in need deserve help. We are opposed to compulsory work for benefits. People should be paid the rate for the job or at the very least be paid the national minimum wage.

The government wants more of the welfare state to be handed over to the private sector. It is wrong to profit from the sick and unemployed. There is also the intention to share information with the police which raises real concerns about civil liberties.

The government should introduce measures to challenge discriminatory attitudes held by employers, encourage flexible working practices and expand the provision of affordable childcare.

We want the government to rethink its plans. Support our campaign to help create a better welfare state and society.

Neal Lawson, chair, Compass
Mark Serwotka, general secretary, Public and Commercial Services Union
Paul Kenny, general secretary, GMB
Sally Hunt, general secretary of the University and College Union (UCU)
Colin Hampton, National Unemployed Centres Combine
Eileen Devaney, national co-ordinator, UK Coalition Against Poverty
Iman Achara, director, British Black Anti-Poverty Network
Peter Kelly, director, The Poverty Alliance, Scotland
and 24 others

Observer 30 November 2008

The government is to scrap the sick note that GPs have used for 60 years to sign people off work.

Alan Johnson, the health secretary, and James Purnell, the work and pensions secretary, said yesterday sick notes will be replaced in England by electronic "fit notes", allowing doctors to say what work their patients can do as well as what they cannot.

Sick leave costs the economy £100bn a year, including the loss of about 172 million working days.

Johnson said sick notes were introduced in 1948 to protect vulnerable people, but they had become a mechanism for consigning thousands of workers to long-term unemployment.

People who left the workplace due to poor mental health, for example, often found it hard to return and were denied the stimulus of work that could have improved their condition.

Purnell said the government wanted to encourage "a fundamental culture change" to help people stay in work ...

Guardian 26 November 2008   

There are very high rates of incapacity benefit claims in a number of Britain’s classical post-industrial regions: areas dominated in the past by coal, steel, dock work, ship-building and various manufacturing industries. South Wales, the north east of England and the Glasgow conurbation have particularly high rates.

There are a number of reasons why incapacity is a problem for public policy. First, the number of people on incapacity benefits has more than trebled since 1979. Whilst what is known as the inflow onto incapacity benefit has stabilised over the last ten years or so, 7.6 per cent of the population of working age are in receipt of incapacity benefits. Moreover, the duration of time on incapacity benefit has increased, and there is evidence that duration is strongly linked to the likelihood of a return to work.

Secondly, rates of incapacity claims are unequally distributed across social classes and regions. Although this may seem to be common sense, the discussion of what is to be done tends to be undertaken without any clear sociological analysis of either the cause or meaning of this inequality.

Thirdly, incapacity is a ‘wicked issue’. Therefore, although incapacity benefit has traditionally been the responsibility of the Department of Work and Pensions, it relates in complex ways, to patterns of ill-health and wider issues of economic development, poverty and social exclusion that are the responsibilities of other departments of government. ...

The interesting feature of incapacity, as understood in this way, is that it is both a health indicator and an economic indicator. Indeed, we could say that incapacity and its distribution tell us something important about the functional relationship between chronic ill-health, the labour market and forms of social and economic life in different groups and localities.

Enduring political anxiety about the growth of a population of working age unable to work because of ill-health or impairment lies at the heart of the way in which States screen and process populations. Most of the discussion of incapacity benefit at the present time examines it in the context of what are referred to as New Labour’s ‘activation policies’ (Walker and Wiseman 2003), their strategy to modernise the welfare state by encouraging movement from welfare benefits into work, and by making that movement worthwhile in financial terms: work for those who can, security for those who cannot ...

Inequalities in limiting-long term illness

... The proportion of adults aged 45-64 who have a limiting long-standing illness in Wales, the north-east region of England and Northern Ireland is almost double that in south-east England.

When we examine the different regions those with the lowest rates are uniformly in south-east England. Of the worst ten, five are in south Wales, two are in northern Ireland, one is in the west of Scotland (the city of Glasgow, of course), one in north-west England, and one – the worst of all – is in north-east England. Indeed, in most tabular representations of this issue, Easington, Merthyr Tydfil and Blaenau Gwent (which includes a number of former coal and steel towns like Ebbw Vale) appear to jostle for a position at the top.

In reality of course, people living and working in these areas are often profoundly depressed by such public representations of what is increasingly discussed judgmentally as a matter of personal, professional and municipal failure ...

Localities with high rates of LLTI are the same areas with the highest rates of incapacity benefit claimants.

Loss and Change

You would of course expect economic inactivity to be higher following redundancy in areas in which there are fewer appropriate opportunities for work. However, Robert Cornwall [] is also conveying something else: that the relationship of these men to their work and the manner in which the work was taken away from them are also partly responsible for subsequent long-term economic inactivity.

The sense of loss of meaning and respect, and impending hardship are palpable.

Let me give you another example of this sense of loss, and the way in which it affects more than the immediate workforce. Following a major strategic review in February 2001, Corus the steel makers announced that they were going to restructure their enterprise and activities in Wales. The company had 64,900 employees at the end of 2000, with approximately 33,000 of those employed in the UK, and almost 11,000 of them working in Wales.

The main element of the restructuring was the announcement of the closure of the well-known Ebbw Vale steelworks. Most of the Corus jobs were those of full-time, relatively well-paid men (£26,000 per annum on average, at 2001 prices), occupying posts that encompass a wide range of skills.

Contrary to popular impression, many – possibly most – of the job losses occurred amongst men aged between 30 and 50, with long-term domestic responsibilities and financial commitments. Most of these ex-steel workers would have found it very difficult to transfer to similar jobs with comparable levels of remuneration. Moreover, the loss of the wages of the steel workers was sharply felt throughout the local economy.

As part of a rapid analysis of the impact of the announcement of steelwork closure, during 2001 we interviewed a small number of people working in the towns and villages within the local authority area of Blaenau Gwent close to the Ebbw Vale steelworks. They comprised health professionals, church ministers, welfare officers, and other ‘key informants’, and were asked about what they thought was going to happen to the area. Here are two community psychiatric nurses:

The deterioration in Blaenau Gwent has been on-going for many years… [But] this has been a big blow for the community because this has been a steel working community for years. This is just the final nail in the coffin…

[Closure] has always been a threat. My father-in-law worked there in the 1930s. He said they always said that it was going to shut and it never has. And so they automatically think that it is never going to happen…it’s always been said but it’s never happened. [Now] I think the community is a bit shocked.

... The impact of the loss of employment in coal and steel, and the manner in which it was handled by both national governments and local agencies had a huge impact on the people who lost their jobs and on the wider networks, communities, societies and economies in which they lived. In research undertaken by Huw Beynon and his colleagues, comparing the impact of colliery closure in different coalfields, they make a number of important points, nicely encapsulated in the following Durkheimian proposition:

[In South Wales] this was not just a case of localised economic decline but rather one of cultural crisis. The collapse of coalmining undermined a range of mechanisms of social regulation that were grounded in the politics of the workplace and the trades unions, but spread more widely into local society and politics. There was an acute sense of loss in places in which coalmines closed after decades of existence. This was typically accompanied by a period of grieving as people in these places tried to come to terms with the manifold implications of the precipitate ending of the economic raison d'être of their place. ...

It is interesting how quickly the massive contribution of these now stigmatised communities to Welsh, British and global capitalism can be forgotten, and how any attempt to understand their contemporary predicament in historical terms is pushed to one side by the false positivism of evidence-based policy.

It seems to me that there are opportunities here for an historically-informed sociology of work and non-work related ill-health. The complex patterns of long-term illness and incapacity in localities of the kind I have described are the product of the interaction of a number of processes: a long-term legacy of working class hardship, the political destruction of the economic base in which those working class lives had been rooted, the impact of this on what is nowadays referred to as the ‘resilience’ of once robust communities and ways of life, the growth of poverty in those communities and inequality in relation to other communities nearby, and the modernisation of the welfare state into one which seeks to place people in work of any kind, however time-limited, insecure, low paid, disrespectful and purposeless it may be.

Medical Sociology September 2007

Clegg warns of 'Prozac nation' Britain as pill-taking soars

Nick Clegg, new leader of the Lib-Dems, has homed in on the "Prozac Nation" problem:

Britain has become a "Prozac nation", with the use of antidepressants spiralling out of control amid a crisis in mental health care, the Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg, will warn today. In a speech to the Guardian public services summit, Clegg will commit his party to a maximum 13-week wait for NHS treatment for mental health problems. If the NHS misses the target, the patient will be entitled to go private and make the health service pick up the bill, he will say.

The government is committed to an 18-week deadline for consultant-led care only, from March.

Clegg will highlight figures showing one in four Britons suffering from mental health problems at some point in their lives, with one in six at any one time. The cost of mental ill-health is estimated at £77bn a year.

He will also point to an "explosion" in antidepressant use, with 31m prescriptions issued in 2006, including 631,000 for children.

"Britain has become the true Prozac nation. I believe this trend has gone too far," Clegg will say. "That is not to say that medication has no role to play in tackling mental health problems; of course it does. But [it] should not be the default option, prescribed by doctors because of a lack of access to psychological therapies ... pills must not be a crutch for the wider issues in our society which cause mental health problems." ...

Guardian 08 February 2008

The Depression Report

In June 2006, the LSE "Depression Report" claimed that:

• There are more mentally ill people on incapacity benefits than the total number of unemployed people on benefit. ..
• One in six of all people suffer from depression or chronic anxiety, which affects one in three of all families.
• Only a quarter of those who are ill are receiving any treatment – in most cases medication.
• Modern evidence-based psychological therapy is as effective as medication and is preferred by the majority of patients.
• In most areas, waiting lists are over nine months, if therapy is available at all.
• A course of therapy costs £750 and pays for itself in money saved on incapacity benefits and lost tax receipts.
• We can therefore provide a service in every area at no net cost. This would require 10,000 therapists and 250 local services, with 40 new services opened each year till 2013.With proper leadership from the centre and protected funding, this is totally feasible.

Nick Clegg's problem is two-fold: where's the money coming from; and where are the trained staff?

'I was walking the streets screaming' - 08.02.08

Elderly mental health care 'poor' - 13.08.07

'No services' for depressed elderly - 12.08.07

Elderly mental health 'neglected' - 09.10.05

Long-term mentally ill 'ignored' - 14.04.04

Young mental health care slammed - 11.04.04

Younger pupils' mental health risk - 23.08.03

It is in the countries most committed to what British-based criminologists Michael Cavadino and David Dignan describe as "minimal and residual, mainly means-tested benefits with stigmatised entitlement" that prison populations are highest. Research by the men confirms there is "an almost watertight divide between the different types of political economy as regards imprisonment rates" in a study of 12 contemporary capitalist countries.

... a new publication from think-tank the Crime and Society Foundation makes matters more explicit. Examining research across US states, then replicating it across 18 OECD countries including the UK, the foundation has found an intimate link between the amount of welfare spending and the level of imprisonment. The seven countries with the highest imprisonment have the lowest rates of welfare spending, while the eight with the highest welfare have the lowest imprisonment rates. ...

Deborah Orr - The Independent 22 November 2006

We will take over the leadership of a country that doesn’t just face an economic crisis – worse than the one that greeted Margaret Thatcher in 1979 – but also a breakdown of British society.

Across a range of indicators – depth of recession, scale of government borrowing, breakdown of the family, and the level of crime – Britain is in worryingly bad shape.

I established the Centre for Social Justice five years ago. It works with all political parties. It has won credibility by pursuing the very opposite of cosmetic change.

We’ve brought together Britain’s most effective poverty-fighting charities in a national alliance. Within this alliance every kind of social challenge is being addressed.

Drug addiction. Family breakdown. Homelessness. Long-term unemployment. Indebtedness.

We’ve awarded these poverty-fighters with privately raised cash. We’ve befriended them. We’ve fought for them when they have become entangled with government bureaucracy.

The best policy conclusions we have recommended to the Conservative Party – and to Britain’s other mainstream parties – have emerged from what we have learnt from them.

Three years ago we published a report that documented the scale of social collapse in Britain. It was called Breakdown Britain.

A year later we produced Breakthrough Britain. Breakthough Britain contained 188 policy recommendations.

They were based on the idea that a strong family, a completed education, good employment opportunities and freedom from drugs and other addictions were the basis of a life free of poverty ...

For David Cameron – for me – and for modern British Conservatism – social policy is central. What I have argued for some time is that this is not an add on but integral to conservatism and for four good reasons.

First, unless Britain starts to mend its broken society the cost of fractured families, of poorly educated workers and dysfunctional adults will make Britain’s economy uncompetitive.

The recent report ‘Bankrupt Britain’ demonstrates that as the economy turns down this becomes more critical, not less.

In the last ten years alone the cost of welfare spending in Britain has spiralled upwards by close to £100bn. The single biggest component of government spending is the permanently unemployed… the permanently ill… broken families… people with addictions.

Then there are the costs associated with crime. Most of the criminal justice budgets have grown by nearly 50% in real terms. This money hasn’t reduced crime but contained the problem. Although a lot more people are in prison we have seen large increases in violent crime and anti-social behaviour. If you look at the prison population you find young men – mainly from broken homes – addicted to drugs – and with a reading age of 11.

Reforming society is not a soft option but without it big government becomes inevitable.

Second, in emphasising social policy we are rediscovering the conservatism of Edmund Burke.

We are not just against big government but ALL forces that crush the social institutions that lie between the individual and the state. These institutions could not matter more for our future and could hardly have been more neglected in recent times.

There will be no sustainable reduction in the size of the state if civil society doesn’t become stronger – nurturing more self-sufficient and vigorous citizens. There’ll be no possibility of light touch regulation if certain moral values are absent from our culture. There’ll be no competitive economy if families don’t encourage their children to learn and excel.

Third, the cohesive society.

Currently 47% of voters see Republicans as out-of-touch. Only 15% see the party as “in touch with ordinary people”.

The groups the Republicans were seen as closest to are big business, rich, well off people, Christians and the armed forces.

You cannot lecture people about freedom if parents think the life chances of their children are set at birth and that they are set for failure.

Talk of liberty is at risk of being seen as a self-serving arrogance from those who already have everything.

This, surely, is at the heart of the American dream. A cohesive society where every parent really believes that their kids have a chance of a better life than them.

The fourth factor is a by-product of the other three.

In emphasising society conservatism isn’t just seen as the party of the wealthy and the strong – a party that is good for me. It will also become a broadly-based party; meeting that natural sense of decent people that their government should be good for them AND good for their neighbour.

Centre for Social Justice 09 March 2009

Cheap Labour

Depression and anxiety - June 18, 2006

Oliver James

Rethink

SANE

Unicef Report

Vulnerability and Violence, Peadar Kirby, Pluto Books 2006

Martin Buber

The “Relating Cure”