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It’s the good this government does that can make you hold your head in your hands and sigh. Ask people what they think of Labour policy on benefits and they will probably talk of seizing the winter fuel allowance from freezing pensioners. Or that £5bn snatched from disabled people, until Labour’s own MPs prevented it. These were the signifiers that set the wrong tone early on. Late, far too late, abolishing the two-child limit has not made the same impression on public perceptions, despite the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) this week reporting it as being behind what could be the greatest ever fall in child poverty in a parliament.
The government fails to herald its progress in reversing the worst the Tories did to benefits. Why? I’m not sure if it is ineptitude or a political decision not to trumpet its many progressive policies.
At the Fabian thinktank conference last week, I had an “in conversation” session with Stephen Timms, the minister who probably knows more and cares more about social security than any other MP. As financial secretary to the Treasury, he took the Child Poverty Act through parliament in 2010. In opposition, he chaired the work and pensions committee scrutinising the Tory years. Now as minister for social security and disability, he chairs two crucial reviews, one on personal independence payments (Pip) for disability and one on universal credit.
The basic benefit for adults has never risen in real terms since the 1970s, he said. Now for the first time since then, universal credit’s standard allowance will rise above inflation every year for each of the next four years. It always was, and still is, a pathetically low sum to live on, at £98 a week from this April for a single person, but that 2.3% real rise will slowly make a positive difference.
“Reducing child poverty is what Labour governments do,” Timms says: any child poverty graph reveals which party was in power when. His universal credit (removal of two-child limit) bill that he takes through parliament in a few weeks will lift about 450,000 children out of poverty, and will benefit another 100,000 taken above the line because they now qualify for free school meals. Increasing child poverty is what Conservatives always do. They pretended to support the 2010 Child Poverty Act in David Cameron’s wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing pre-election phase, but scrapped all those targets once in power. Timms watched them cut benefits to their lowest real terms for 40 years, propelling the number of children living in poverty to 4.5 million.
Labour has changed direction since the shock of that attempted £5bn disability heist: Timms makes it crystal-clear Labour will not be doing that again. His Pip review will not make disability cuts, news that will come as a great relief to those who lost trust. Timms says Pip will rise with inflation up to the next election. Although numbers of new claimants are starting to fall, the Office for Budget Responsibility predicts the Pip bill will go on rising, but Labour has accounted for that in its envelope of benefit spending. No more cuts, except by getting more people into work. He reminds us why panic about the “rising” benefit bill is bogus: the proportion of GDP spent on working-age benefits has not changed for 40 years; it’s still at 4-5%.
On his universal credit review, more good news. One of UC’s worst features was imposing a five-week wait on new claimants: it projects many with nothing to live on into instant and permanent debt repayment and rent arrears, sending food bank use soaring. Expect that to end. He talks emotionally of a conversation with the late Frank Field, benefits guru, protesting at the five-week delay. Field asked why, when he was minister and forms were filled in by hand, manually processed, driven by van to a centre and assessment managed without computers, it took only seven days to pay out? Yes, absurd, Timms agreed.
But the point of that wicked five weeks was political, a deliberate policy, designed to “mirror the world of work” by paying monthly to many used to being paid weekly, with erratic hours, with no leeway to wait. To “mirror” work, they had to prove they spent 30 hours every week applying for jobs on pain of severe “sanctions” (benefit cuts), driving employers to protest at mountains of utterly unsuitable applications. Don’t forget those punitive policies where local jobcentre managers were threatened into “sanctioning” as many claimants as possible, tripping them up with unreachable appointments.
Instead, Labour sets out to reprise its highly successful “new deal for young people” from 1998, when it brought down an inherited high youth unemployment rate with personal attention from jobcentre staff well trained to support, not punish: it worked. Of course, there was always a backstop of “conditionality”. Similarly, the future jobs fund for the young, responding to the 2008 crash, was a proven success, though instantly abolished in 2010.
Now with the number of Neets – young people neither in work nor education – at nearly a million, Labour’s youth guarantee currently being piloted is about to do it again, with work coaches trained to give that same support.
All of this is good news. Good enough? It never is, but it is reversing the poison of the George Osborne, Iain Duncan Smith years. Last time they returned to government, the Tories obliterated most of Labour’s advances, so how can Labour nail down progress irrevocably this time? Only by changing underlying public attitudes, defying the right’s “scrounger”, “skiver” epithets. That will take a Labour cabinet talking up the good a well-designed benefit system does, never more than in rescuing the young fallers in a Covid-damaged generation. Lack of a guiding story about the best it does has been this government’s failure.
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Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
