The second Iraq war dossier was, conveniently, lost in the endless rows and inquiries about the first. This February 2003 paper, handed to journalists by Alastair Campbell, drew heavily on a PhD thesis ripped off the internet. It related to the time of the First Gulf War—since when the large majority of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction had not only been destroyed, but documented by the UN as destroyed.
This saga came to mind before this week’s government announcement of reforms and cuts to disability and incapacity benefits. A recent rise of something like 41 per cent in the number of claims is—unlike Saddam’s WMDs—a genuine issue. But a sense that the discussion was becoming unmoored from reality set in with two government press releases that hyped up the scale of the problem.
The first, on 6th March, stated that post-pandemic claims of incapacity-type benefits were up 319 per cent, a number quietly edited out a few days later. A second soon followed which led instead on the number of claimants having “almost quadrupled”, with a terrifying rise of 383 per cent. This number—not yet deleted—captures a purely technical truth: the growing number of claimants whose payments are badged as Universal Credit rather than as the old benefits it has gradually replaced. Overwhelmingly, it simply reflects bureaucrats moving people from one system to another. There are lies and damn lies—and then there are statistics.
The air of unreality continued with the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP)’s reform package. There were many welcome elements, including extra resources for employment support, enhanced contributory unemployment insurance, and a new right to try out a job without fear of benefit consequences if things don’t work out, which may bring some advances for the incomes of poorer Britain. But they will be overwhelmed by a proposed battery of £5bn in benefit cuts.
In the Commons, there was a sense of nebulous phrases clouding hard-edged realities as Liz Kendall, the work and pensions secretary, announced the plans. Those with the, unspecified, “most severe” disabilities were promised a lighter touch. But the proposed increase in the number of “points” needed to secure daily living Personal Independence Payments (PIP) pointed towards a future in which an inability to wash the lower half of your body, which currently helps you qualify for the money, will sometimes cease to do so. A heartening-sounding “£775 cash rise” in basic Universal Credit turned out to be—a still-welcome but tiny—£3 a week bump in real terms.
As someone who worked in the DWP 20-odd years ago when it produced incapacity benefit reforms called Pathways to Work, things got particularly dream-like when it transpired that this was also the name of the new reform paper. Many of the buzz-phrases were the same too: about transcending a “binary divide” between those who can and can’t work; about switching focus from what people can’t to what they can do. And yet Alf Collins, a doctor who’d worked on the 2005 programme, remarked that he doubted anyone in today’s department had read the original.
You would have no idea, listening to the Commons this week, that today’s Work Capability Assessment, the bastardised child of that reform wave of the 2000s, is expressly not binary: it identifies a middle group, too sick to punish for turning down any job who can nonetheless be asked to “engage” with jobcentres.
Focusing on what people can do is, of course, exactly what employment support should aim for, and what successive governments have promised, if not delivered. But with benefit entitlements awarded by dint of disability, a “can-do” test becomes oxymoronic. This problem is, if anything, even clearer with this week’s proposals, in which the only criteria for passporting onto any health-related payments will become PIP “points”. These are, inevitably, awarded for not being able to walk or cook, rather than being lucky enough to do these things unaided.
The thickest fog of all clouded the question of what all these changes will ultimately do to sick and disabled people’s economic position. The headline benefit cuts for some, at least, will be vast: the basic arithmetic suggests that clawing back £5bn a year from the PIP budget by restricting entitlement might require denying something like £5,000 a year from something like a million people.
In practice, I find it hard to see how entitlements will not shrink by more than this for a significant minority. The bar for claiming PIP daily living is being raised at the same time as it becomes the exclusive passport for entitlement to the Universal Credit health premium. In combination, that means some who would currently qualify for both payments—respectively worth £312 and £416 a month—would in future qualify for neither. Compared to someone claiming today, they would be missing out on £728 a month, or £8,736 a year. If you’re single and in this position, that’s likely to represent more than half your disposable income.
The great hope, is of course, that some people will escape such ghastly arithmetic for an altogether better future in work. But how many? In forecasting the effects of the last government’s mooted cuts and reforms, the Office for Budget Responsibility estimated that 15,000 extra people might move into work, something like 3.6 per cent of the caseload facing harsher benefit terms. Labour thinks it can do considerably better. I would agree, even if I feel nervous about bullish claims of 10 percentage-point effects that ministers have made based on exceptionally successful schemes. But let’s imagine they’re right. The question remains: how do things look for the other 90 per cent? It is hard to imagine an answer other than deepening poverty.
When Helen Whately, the shadow work and pensions secretary, rose to interrogate the government’s proposals, such hard realities only slipped further from view: “The fact is £5bn just doesn’t cut it,” she said. And when the “debate” moved out of the Commons and into the media things got worse again: most of the talking heads can go about their comfortable lives without the realities of contemporary penury intruding on their clichés about the “bloated welfare budget”. You could have listened to hours of radio and TV on Tuesday without anyone telling you that the overall weight of working-age social security spending in the economy is stable, with the surge in health-based payments broadly offset by ongoing reductions in the relative cost of other benefits, such as those for the unemployed.
Unlike the pundits, many individual politicians are dealing with the reality of Britain’s poverty crisis in their surgeries, and the conscientious among them are instinctively alert to the dangers of rushed welfare cuts making things worse. Of course, they worry too, and rightly, about the growing numbers of people with various conditions being deemed unfit for work, and the pressures on the Exchequer that flow from that.
These are realities that need to be faced. But there are other—perhaps harder—truths that must be confronted too. For example, single disabled people are already four times more likely to be falling behind on their bills, six times more likely to go cold and nine times more likely to skip meals—numbers arrived at by crunching official data. While the government’s welcome investment in employment support will alleviate these problems for the disabled minority that will hopefully move into work, pretty rapid and very deep cuts to payments can only aggravate them for the remaining majority.
It is surely worth at least pausing to ask whether this is a less harmful way to balance the books than, say, raising taxes in the way that the left would support, or reducing the formula for pension rises in a way that technocratic thinktankers might prefer. Everyone can mull these undoubtedly difficult choices and come to their own conclusion.
But as they do so, I would urge them to read the testimony of “Sandra” in High Wycombe, a woman whose bones have been hollowed out by heavy steroids for asthma so serious that on one occasion it caused her heart to stop. Her (lower-rate) PIP has sometimes been the only income she and her partner have had to live on. When Frances Ryan interviewed her a couple of years ago, Sandra confessed she was now showering less. Why? “The cost is just too much.”
