Welfare slavery reprise

It seems some on the left are actually catching-on. Back in September 2012 I wrote

By reserving to itself the duty of care of our less fortunate fellows, the State also creates a barrier to the fulfilment of our own obligations to our neighbour and community; Welfare measures intended with best intention to end the human indignity of the Poor Law and the stigma of poverty have themselves at the start of the 21st century created a Welfare slavery that condemns entire generations of families to a culture of idleness and ill health, deprived of the dignity of work and belonging, alienated from the mutual rewards of citizenship, barred from fulfilment and deprived of that human solidarity "of the poor among themselves, between rich and poor, of workers among themselves, between employers and employees in a business, solidarity among nations and peoples ". Surely to God it's time to end their captivity.

Now Simon Danczuk writing in the Telegraph today;

Anyone who has lived with or spent time with people capable of working that have been parked on benefits for a decade or more will know the tragedy I’m talking about. We should all experience the feeling of satisfaction after a hard day’s work, the pride at getting a promotion, the sense of achievement from making a difference in the workplace. But for those trapped in welfare dependency these experiences will never happen. This is a criminal loss of human potential and something everyone interested in progressive politics should rail against.

IDS reforms are not the answer - but they're a start. 

Beyond Welfarism, toward Dignity

An excellent piece in the Telegraph this morning from Philip Johnston on ways in which a post-Welfare society could work, based on Friendly Societies and Mutuals. At a time when IDS' State behemoth is collapsing in on itself before it's got one foot off the ground, and more particularly the most recent Social Attitudes survey has shown the lowest support for Welfare since the surveys began. The survey also revealed that some 22% of the employed workforce have taken a pay cut, and 45% are 'struggling'. Well, I haven't given Ralph Harris an outing for a while and this is a good opportunity.

Arthur Seldon, who founded the IEA with Ralph Harris, was born Abraham Margolis in the East End of London to Russian-Jewish refugee parents. They both died in the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918. He was adopted by a cobbler, Pinchas Slaberdain, and his wife Eva. He grew up with the great depression in the East End, and knew the harsh reality of poverty at first hand. He recalls when he was nine or ten his foster father died to leave him and his foster mother provided for by an insurance policy. He says he learned that even the poor, if left alone, were doing things for themselves. He said:

I was appalled by the insensitivity of governments to the efforts of the working classes to help themselves - the belief that they could not do all the necessary things. They were most anxious to ensure that they used all the opportunities of insurance to safeguard their families in times of sickness and loss of work. I began to sense a sort of anti-working class sentiment in all political parties. They wanted the State to do these things. They didn't like people to do things for themselves. They thought that ordinary people weren't capable. They forgot all the history of the working classes.

Ralph Harris, too, came from a working class background. He recalled when his mother died finding four policies in a shoebox - a funeral benefit policy for each of her children. "The working class feared they wouldn't have the money to bury their dead, so you could take out for a penny halfpenny a week an insurance policy to pay five pounds; four children, four policies, sixpence a week altogether and five pounds on it." Harris believed in something that was about human dignity;

Liberty carries with it individual responsibilities. Responsibility for yourself, and hopefully your family and as far as possible your neighbours. But it does throw responsibility onto our own shoulders. Well, that's what living means; it doesn't mean shrugging off responsibility and taking soft options.

In the years before the 1911 National Insurance Act, the working classes were served by a network of friendly societies, savings and loans clubs, mutuals and insurers that provided an alternative to the old Poor Law provision; their growth and popularity reflected a striving for that human dignity that is at the heart of a congruent society and nation.

By reserving to itself the duty of care of our less fortunate fellows, the State also creates a barrier to the fulfilment of our own obligations to our neighbour and community; Welfare measures intended with best intention to end the human indignity of the Poor Law and the stigma of poverty have themselves at the start of the 21st century created a Welfare slavery that condemns entire generations of families to a culture of idleness and ill health, deprived of the dignity of work and belonging, alienated from the mutual rewards of citizenship, barred from fulfilment and deprived of that human solidarity "of the poor among themselves, between rich and poor, of workers among themselves, between employers and employees in a business, solidarity among nations and peoples ". Surely to God it's time to end their captivity.

Labour peers disconnected

Labour peers (including Paddy Ashdown) are demonstrating just how disconnected from reality they are in opposing Welfare caps as the government's proposals pass through the Lords. Even if IDS' welfare reforms have missed the opportunity for real and fundamental reform, they are at least dealing with an aspect of welfare that aggravates the majority of voters - benefits claimants living in grand homes at the taxpayers' expense. As the Indie points out, this is just as much an irritation to the 'squeezed middle' as the equally scandalous fat-cat rewards at the other end of the scale. 


The British people have, as a whole, a pretty good idea of fairness. It's fine for Richard Branson and Alan Sugar to be wealthy, but not fine for some unknown thieving muppet to equal their wealth by skimming all the profits from your pension fund. It's understandable that a 20-something soccer player or pop tart behaves stupidly with unaccustomed cash wealth, but inconceivable that a 20-something derivatives trader is entitled to do so. Labour peers should realise they're backing the wrong horse; Cameron's vulnerability is his closeness to the obscene earnings at the top end, not the benefits piss-takers at the bottom. 

Welfare must be local

Following on from the post below, I think this issue is the crux of the debate on where the whole right-of-centre is headed. Nick Drew is a wise old bird with much high-level real life experience in politics and local government, and I take his points below. Wherever local governance entities just distribute largesse from on high, there will be unfairness and corruption; the people attracted to such duties will include many seeking to gain from graft, peculation, sleaze and fraud. However, the same doesn't hold where Welfare costs are levied and borne locally. As James Bartholomew wrote in the Speccie;

So what happens if you are, say, a young mother in Switzerland with a little baby but no husband or similar on the scene and nowhere to live? There is no countrywide answer to this question because it is not dealt with on a national basis. It is not even dealt with by one of the 26 cantons. It is dealt with by your local commune. There are 2,900 of these and their population can be anything from 30 to 10,000 or more. 

Officials from this ultra-small local government will come and investigate your individual circumstances. The father will be expected to pay. The mother’s family, if it is in a position to, will be expected to house and pay for her. As a last resort, the young mother will be given assistance by the commune. But the people who pay the local commune taxes will be paying part of the cost. You can imagine that they will not be thrilled at paying for a birth or separation that need never have taken place. Putting yourself in the position of the mother — and perhaps the father — you can imagine that you will be embarrassed as you pass people in the street who are paying for your baby. Instead of feeling you have impersonal legal rights, as in Britain, you are taking money from people you might meet at your local café. No wonder unmarried parenting is less common. 

A similar system applies if you need means-tested benefits. Those made redundant receive, for a while, generous unemployment insurance payments from the cantonal governments. But once these payments run out, people depend again on their local commune. You would be cautious of claiming fraudulently because, if you worked in the black economy, your chances of being spotted would be high. And so it is that Switzerland has the second highest rate of male employment in the OECD. Britain’s rate is about 50 per cent worse.

I simply don't believe the Swissies are any more moral, fair, equitable and uncorrupt than Brits, or that the fairness and probity exercised by the Swiss communes are beyond the capacity of local Welfare panels in the UK. 


IDS' great behemoth of a Welfare State is as doomed to failure as its predecessor. 

IDS reforms start to show cracks

IDS' much vaunted Welfare reforms have always been regarded with huge disappointment by this blog. With all the best intentions, he has merely replaced a centralist, bureaucratically moribund, top heavy, expensive and inefficient system with an alternative centralist, bureaucratically moribund, top heavy, expensive and inefficient system. Like a Great War general, Duncan-Smith has sacrificed billions for an advance of a few inches. 


Toynbee almost tells the truth this morning when she states "Voters think two sensible things about benefits: citizens needing help should be well cared-for and the healthy should be deterred from malingering". You just need to modify the word 'well' to 'adequately'. The cracks appearing in IDS' reforms result from a sensible assessment that they will achieve neither aim. 


You simply cannot design a universal Welfare system from the top, as IDS has tried to do. You can't do it. 


Welfare, above all things, must be local. IDS would have done better to throw the 10,000 page benefits manuals out of the window and simply allocate the entire benefits budgets to local offices with total discretion to distribute it as they thought fit. Seriously. Welfare recipients also need to be more 'visible'. Currently, the person who gives them money is a vague 'they' completely unconnected with their neighbours, their local traders or the driver of the bus that takes them to the Post Office. Administering Welfare payments and benefits at the most local level would target resources to those truly in need, be flexible enough to vary with changing circumstances and above all eliminate free riders. A fraudulent IB claimant may fool the benefits assessors but they can't kid their neighbours for very long. 


IDS had his chance and he blew it. 

Benefits reform: Too central, too Statist

Iain Duncan-Smith, a genuinely good and well-meaning man, assiduous and diligent, has just unveiled his new Five Year Welfare Plan. It's actually remarkably like the old, failed Five Year Welfare Plan, except they've swapped some of the coloured knobs around on the Great Levers of State, fitted leatherette gaiters and updated the old electro-mechanical tell-tales on the vast Whitehall control board with LEDs. Here will sit the Secretary of State in a James T Kirk type command-chair skilfully piloting the State Ship 'Welfare'; a tweak on the Employment Support Allowance lever, half a turn on the Universal Credit dial and cross-feeding the Earnings Cap through the Lithium Drive and IDS will smile as the Leviathan settles on a new course. Staff across the country will soon be coming to terms with the new 4,000 page instruction manual, digging for the Politburo's procedure in the case of crediting Class I NI Contributions to a Share Fisherman undertaking 12 hours of voluntary work a week. 


What a wasted opportunity. 


In preserving 'the State' as the provider of Welfare support, rather than you and I, taxpayers, IDS preserves the anonymity and sense of entitlement that such distance creates. If your welfare payments, your rent and your Council Tax come from the wallets and purses of the people you meet in the local Co-op, if assistance and assessment comes from learned and skilled local benefit officers with wide powers of discretion, and if the 'little platoons' can play their part in recycling toys and clothes, providing IT and other training, keeping the community's eyes out for job opportunities, and policing and correcting free-riding, then those in need of support will be infinitely better served than by this distant, vertical relationship between the individual and the State.  


IDS, decent chap though he is, has blown the chance of a generation in truly reforming Welfare for the better.  

Boris talking out of his arse

Boris has a propensity to be led astray by his trouser region, through either marital infidelities from the one end or fatuous pronouncements from the other. This latest odorous flatus signals that this week it's his arse's turn to take charge. This is the house in Kensington that costs taxpayers £8,000 a month in Housing Benefits to house Somalian asylum seeker Abdi Nur and his workless family. It's worth £2.1m. 

Ho, you say, Mr Nur could well have long family connections with the area, come from a long line of Kensington Somalis, needs regular Somali comestibles from Harrods or the like. Not a bit of it. He lived in a perfectly decent house in Brent at our expense prior to this, but didn't like living in a 'poor area'. 


Well, Mr Nur can now skedaddle back to Brent and lump it. If this is ethnic cleansing, then I'm Boris' anal wart. 

Benefits cap is for the long-term

Whilst the national media concentrate their output on the child benefit cuts - there being no shortage of articulate middle class parents willing to provide vox pops for the media channels - the boldness of Osborne's move in capping benefits is almost sneaking under the wire.


The way he's doing it - reducing housing benefits by the amount that total benefits exceed £500 per week - is clever indeed. Families on benefits with large numbers of children, requiring larger homes, will gradually be pushed out of the more expensive to the cheaper areas of the country in which to live; Bangladeshis and Pakistanis, with high unemployment rates and large families, will be disproportionally affected, and those living in London particularly so. And a good thing too. No one is too pious to work, and Asian families are more likely to have both a mother and father who can both work to support their large families. As a result, the ghetto mentality will gradually be lessened, Muslim women will no longer be trapped in the home not speaking English but will be forced to take their place on the factory floor and chat with the other girls. They will start to limit the size of their families. Integration will be accelerated. 


Most importantly of all - and worth the real pain this measure will cause some in the short-term - it will prevent a much more painful welfare slavery in the future. 


However, the stupid, the improvident and silly Island girls who can't keep their legs closed are set to suffer; the example below, a single woman with 13 dependent kids by different fathers, was used by the Standard's 'Dispossessed' campaign. Nothing will persuade some people towards prudence and continence. Our charity must move them to a remote Scots island, preferably one sans men, but with large homes at low rent, I think. 

Time to privatise unemployment insurance?

The rate of unemployment when the nation is at full employment level is often debated; estimates range up to 5%, with a cluster of estimates around the 3% mark. This so-termed Frictional Unemployment recognises that at any time people will genuinely be between jobs for anywhere between a few days and a few months. The vacancy is there, the worker is there, but it takes a little time for the two to meet.

Our system of unemployment benefit used to recognise that a different kind of support was needed for this short-term joblessness. A higher basic rate of benefit was paid dependent on the applicant's NI contribution record - if you spent more time in work than out of it you probably qualified - and on top of this an earnings-related supplement, based on recent previous income, damped the shock of temporary adjustment. This higher-rate provision lasted, I think, for six months before benefits reduced to the long-term one size fits all never-worked rate. And it was not means-tested - which meant in many cases that the combination of benefit, redundancy payment and savings allowed workers to move between jobs without having to endure the horrors of penury.

As the long-term benefit rates became more generous and millions of citizens found a life on the dole to be a rational economic choice, this special treatment for those genuinely between jobs was abolished to pay the bigger bills. This not only places a grossly unfair burden upon those involuntarily unemployed with a high probability of finding work within a few weeks or months but acts as a disincentive for firms to shed staff and hinders a full transition from the 'job for life' culture to one of flexible labour markets.

We should therefore think about splitting the unemployment benefits system. The private insurance sector, or mutuals and friendly societies, could easily provide a system similar to the old unemployment benefit system for those opting-out of a proportion of NI contributions. This would cover maybe somewhere between a fifth and a third of the jobless at any one time.

For the rest - those who have never worked, those voluntarily unemployed and the small proportion of those who whilst not disabled are so lacking in physical or mental ability so as to make them virtually unemployable (council parks departments used to employ such people in some numbers, tasks such as collecting litter and leaves and sweeping being within their capacities) - Welfare needs to be ultra-local, with means-tested benefits administered and paid almost at the neighbourhood, parish or ward level, overseen by a panel of local citizens. The choice of an anonymous 'entitlement' from the State must end. The closer the relationship of the wallets and purses of taxpayers and the pockets of tax recipients the better.

Jobs will be found for unemployed school and college leavers. The indolent, once in the local spotlight, will find that idleness is not a comfortable lifestyle choice, and perhaps we will even find local suitable employment for those with limited abilities. Above all, local transparency and the community's will to get all their number into work will extend the dignity of work, the benefits of 'belonging' and social self-respect to those who now endure the painful slavery of Welfare dependence. It's got to be a better way.

IDS please note

I have a lot of time for Ian Duncan Smith, but less so for his slightly hissy threat to the Treasury that unless he gets £3bn for welfare reforms he'll walk. Is he just another central Statist, or does he really have what it will take to reform Welfare? Read this from Anthony Hilton in the Standard;

The long-term challenge this country faces is not the deficit, because with common sense and political will it can be managed almost as comfortably as a similar deficit was in 1993. Rather the danger is that we will get back on an even keel without ever having to confront the fact that we have a dysfunctional benefits system, which has created a hugely corrosive dependency culture in a significant slice of the population and now serves as a huge drag on our ability to compete.

Above all it has destroyed the work ethic. By some estimates 70% of the million or so jobs created in this country between 1997 and 2007 went to immigrants, including even the lower-end services jobs in construction, retail and restaurants, because native British workers either did not have the skills or did not want to do the work.

Too much of our economic resource is ill educated, unskilled and unproductive, but if we are ever going to compete with Asia a way has to be found to motivate, mobilise and utilise it. This is where insurance comes in. Roughly a quarter of government expenditure goes on benefits of some form or another —unemployment, sickness, housing, residential care, pensions, top-up payments — and we can self evidently no longer afford it, neither in terms of the direct costs, nor in the way it distorts human behaviour.

Benefits are in fact the state's way of providing the population with risk management against life's uncertainties, but this is exactly the business of insurance.

So when Breedon talks of insurance as being part of the solution he opens the door to a world where much of this provision of benefit is transferred back from the state to the individual.

Payments would come not from people paying taxes and collecting benefits from the government, but from people paying premiums and collecting benefits from the insurance industry.

In the past the idea has been too radical for politicians to contemplate it but if this crisis does nothing else it provides political cover for contemplating such a move. What is needed is an open-minded examination of how best to provide and pay for basic levels of social protection and then do what is rational, not what is dictated by outdated political dogma.

Thatcher's one time advisor and one of my heroes, Ralph Harris of the IEA, was adamant that insurance enabled Britain's working class to be independent and maintain a strong identity, a pervasive work ethic and enormous self-reliance. The last word I think must go to Arthur Seldon of the IEA;

I was appalled by the insensitivity of governments to the efforts of the working classes to help themselves - the belief that they could not do all the necessary things. I began to sense a sort of anti working class sentiment in all parties. They wanted the State to do these things. They didn't like people to do things for themselves. They thought that ordinary people weren't capable. They forgot all the history of the working classes. The records are that the working classes were sending their children to schools by the 1860s. They were insuring for health cover and so on by 1910 - 11 when all parties in England, the main ones Tory and Liberal, with people like Lloyd George and Churchill and Beveridge at the centre, passed the infamous act of 1911 which forced the working class to insure with the State despite the fact that nine tenths of them were already covered by private systems. Politicians seemed to me to be saying you are not capable, you need us to ensure you take care of your families, which was nonsense.

Finally, I'd like to push you in Guthram's direction for details of a forthcoming series of events coordinated by the Cobden Centre; exactly the sort of thing we need to be talking about.

Five steps to welfare reform

Lady Toynbee disparaged Cameron's chances of effective welfare reform in Saturday's Guardian; presuming that Labour's lunatic social engineering experiments were the only way to improve the lives of the poor, the feckless, the idle and the untalented, and that only 'more of the same' could work, she concluded;

There is no sign that Cameron or his team understand what it takes to make social progress. They should look harder at just how heavy the lifting has been for Labour. He sets himself a dangerously high benchmark if he wants to be judged on how much faster he can improve the lives of the poor. With this week's rhetoric, the Conservatives suggest they will do more – but that's a tall order, since Labour has still made better social progress than they can hope to match.

The difficulty for Lady Toynbee is that she rarely encounters those for whom she writes so bravely; they are unlikely neighbours to her either here or to her Tuscan villa, and they rarely venture into Waitrose. She therefore tends to see them as statistics, as percentages of median income, of numbers of at-risk children, as lower life expectancies and as higher prison risks. What she's campaigning for is not the poor but against the idea of poverty.

Frank Field, in contrast, actually knows what he's talking about. He actually understands that we've moved from the age of Beveridge, when the dole was a shameful but necessary safety-net, to an age of entitlement in which Welfare is a lifestyle choice. Field's is the first of five steps to welfare reform. Oh yes, Polly, it can be done - and it can be done differently to Labour's abject failure. There is an alternative.

1. Localise welfare
The first stage is to re-personalise welfare, that it's not 'The State' but 'my working neighbours' who are paying the bills. Benefits office staff know their clients better than anyone, and are the best placed to make accurate and fair benefit determinations. Welfare administration should be localised down to Parish level, with local benefits officers given a budget and allowed wide discretion in making benefit determinations. Claimants would have a right of local appeal to a Parish lay-tribunal. The result would not only be better, quicker and fairer decision making but taxpayers at the local level would know exactly how many (but not who) of their neighbours they were supporting, and at what cost.

2. Capping
A cap of two consecutive years claim for all benefits including HB and CTB except those for the profoundly physically or mentally disabled; at the discretion of local benefit officers, benefits to be up to 70% of the previous two years average earnings for the first year for the newly unemployed, or for those shifted from higher rate disability / invalidity benefits onto workless benefits. Those already on workless benefits would have two years more from the date of enactment. A lifetime cap of six years.

3. Transitional support
Unemployment is a stock concept. Even at full employment levels, at any time there will be those between jobs. An inflexible benefits system means frictional costs are high; many won't claim for a few weeks of unemployment because of the huge bureaucratic barriers and inefficiencies in doing so, and the same inefficiencies often mean it's easier to stay on benefits than accept a job offer. Removing the frictions in moving into and out of jobless benefits, and local discretion over transitional support grants and loans (where, for instance, accepting the next job may involve moving home, or putting the dog into kennels whilst working away) will remove the 'stickyness' of unemployment

4. Housing
Subsidised welfare housing is one of the nation's most expensive luxuries. We're past the days when a Council house was for life; welfare housing at taxpayer expense should be short-term and transitional, either for the temporarily unemployed or those undergoing life crises such as family breakup. Again, the stocks of welfare housing should be managed and allocated at local level by local benefits officers. Allocation priorities should include keeping two-parent families with children together, and short-term buffer accommodation for single persons with or without children who have excellent prospects of moving into work and getting their own place.

5. Community Settlements
We all know that however successful the above measures are, there will always be a hard core of the idle, the feckless and the sociopathic underclass who will exhaust their benefit or bear fatherless children with no intention of ever working or providing for themselves. We cannot abandon them. Even these must receive our Christian charity.

We need to build community settlements to house them, in supervised dormitories for the men, in wards with separate cubicles for single mothers. Such settlements would needs be 'closed' to restrict access to drugs and alcohol, but not prisons; clients could leave whenever they wished, but with no return within fourteen days. Useful work during the day for both men and women, and teachers and health workers for the children, would aim at rehabilitating even these and allowing their return to the world of self-responsibility. There would be no restriction on how long they stay once in - for this would be the final provision, and nothing more but the street and starvation beyond it.

Do I think Cameron would be brave enough to enact the above? No. I fear he's determined to prove Lady Toynbee right.

Welfare reform will take two generations

I'll read James Purnell's White Paper on benefit reform carefully before I comment, but any thought that reform will happen rapidly is entirely misplaced.

Just visit Catford during the working week as I did yesterday. Fat young white women with infants in buggies, but inarticulate to the point we used to term 'educationally sub normal', physically uncoordinated, swearing and screeching at their infants. What place in what office could they ever fill? West African village girls likewise all carrying or dragging infants, semi-socialised, shouting Yoruba at eachother on their mobiles. Sulky Afro-Caribbean young men resentful of any authority, alive to any hint of disrespec', forming a barrier of threat and belligerence around themselves. Who would want to employ them? Thin chested men in their thirties looking and smelling dirty, a decade or more on sickness or disability benefits having robbed even the light of aspiration from their eyes and in contrast to Obama's message they just exude 'No, I can't'. Some are the third generation of their dysfunctional families on benefits. They breed, they drink, they fight, they demand of the council and of the State but the one thing they don't do is to work.

After more than a decade of wasted socialist redistributive policy - tax the working classes and throw the money at the feckless and unsocialised - our society has become far worse. Labour's spin suggests that they might finally have realised that welfare causes poverty, but how true a Damascene conversion is this? Sure, it will play well with 'Mail' readers whose sympathies are reserved for the deserving poor, but do they mean it? I'll wait to read what Frank Field thinks, for a start.

One thing's for sure, though. There's no quick fix. It will take two generations to undo this harm.

Time to rethink Welfare Housing

Good to see that Newmania has found time in a busy breeding cycle to start blogging again, and no surprise that his last couple of posts see him on brilliant form. Including this post on council housing. Now, whenever I post about council estates being modern rookeries, secure retreats for the criminal underclass, I usually get at least one comment or email along the lines of "I grew up on a council estate in the 1960s ..." or "Mum still lives on a council estate". So I need to make clear that I'm not condemning anyone on the basis of personal association with council housing, that small blocks of council houses in the country don't count as estates in this sense, and that, yes, many better people than me have made their way in the past from council estate to grammar school to Oxbridge in a realisation of personal potential and demonstration of social mobility of a kind I wholeheartedly support.

Council housing used to be allocated on a waiting list basis; anyone could go on the list. Council estates were therefore socially mixed places, and in many cases teachers lived next to welders and civil servants across the road from train drivers. All that changed when council house allocations became needs-based; overnight those most adept at playing the Welfare system went to the front of the queue and large metropolitan council estates rapidly became Stews of Hogarthian squalor, idleness, ignorance, disease and want. The Hills Report, commissioned by government from the LSE and quietly buried thereafter, catalogues a litany of failure in Welfare Housing;

• The economic cost to the country of subsidised welfare rents is £6.6bn a year
• We (the taxpayer) own £400bn in capital value of welfare housing, but our return on capital after management and maintenance is barely 1% per annum
• It's a myth that council tenants all want to be owner occupiers; given the choice, 39% would prefer to stay as subsidised tenants
• Barely a third of heads of welfare housing households are in full time work
• One in eight private house moves are work related, but just a very few thousand moves a year amongst 4m welfare tenants are for employment reasons
• Welfare tenants stay put in the same house for a very long time. Over twenty years, they will enjoy the benefit of subsidised rent worth £65,000 at Net Present Value.
• Despite subsidised rents meaning that in theory it's much easier for a welfare tenant to move from benefits to work than for a private tenant, very few do so.

Amongst those of working age on welfare estates, around half are without paid work. Two groups predominate amongst these; those on incapacity benefit, and single parents. The higher-rate disability benefit is the holy grail of the long-term claimant.

The system itself, including welfare housing, actually creates the disadvantage and deprivation it is meant to tackle. The LSE report finds that if you have no qualifications, you will be 43% likely to be workless if you live in non-welfare housing, but 70% likely to be workless if you live in welfare housing. 35% of single parents outside of welfare housing are without work, but 64% of those in welfare housing are out of work.

Moving from benefits to paid work should be very much easier if your rent is only £35 a week; common sense suggests that those in private rented accommodation paying 3 times this at market rates should be the ones 'trapped' on benefits. Yet it is those in welfare housing that show a minimal propensity to make this move.

And these new rookeries command a disproportionate part of our taxes; they suck in police, criminal justice, health, social services, education, public health, regeneration and social care resources, yet unless the populations are broken up and dispersed there is never any real improvement.

Yet welfare housing is still the shibboleth of the socialist central State, the elephant in the room. And as Newmania comments "Any reform of the Coucil house citadels brings New Labour into direct conflict with Old where they have been dug in for generations. Picking fights its a delicate business and this poisonous turf war allows scandalous waste to go on unreformed"

Cameron must grasp the nettle of Welfare Reform

The carefully planted pre-release of Cameron's family-friendly tax proposals in today's Mail is a welcome fillip to those who wondered if this policy area was on his agenda at all. Despite Labour's oh-so-weaselly-worded claims last week, the reality is as explained by Frank Field:

"The economy has continued to deliver a record number of new jobs and has, in fact, been growing strongly since late 1992. Britain’s longest ever economic boom added an additional million jobs up to the 1997 election, and a further two million since. On top of an annual benefit bill of £70bn and the cost of running the Department of Work and Pensions, which comes in at £2bn a year, the Chancellor has spent an historic additional £60bn to make work the gateway to freedom. And yet, ten years on, the numbers of working age claimants has fallen by a mere quarter of a million, from 5.65 to 5.4 million. The most dramatic of policy shake-ups is required."

Brown's welfare shambles is costing the nation some £80bn a year in total - £80bn of wasted investment. The New Deal is a failure. 1.2m young people aged 16 - 24 are languishing at home. The numbers of Britain's disabled people has soared under Labour to 2.7m people, claiming over £12bn in incapacity benefit. (And creating 1m additional disabled persons was not a claim Labour was proud enough to make last week).

The welfare system, by which I mean the welfare system supported in this nation, is a safety net. Clinton's reforms that time-limited benefits to 5 years in the US should be adopted here. A safety net. Not a DFS recliner and a 42" plasma TV.