The government may be winning the war of words – but inconvenient facts will erupt before long, writes Polly Toynbee in today’s Guardian.
“Iain Duncan Smith's welfare plans were craftily presented, while laying mantraps for the opposition. Each day this week tasty morsels were fed to the press about punishments for scroungers and compulsory unpaid work, excoriating Labour's imagined laxness. Social security policy is notoriously incomprehensible, so people take at face value the claims that are made for "the greatest reform since Beveridge". But you can't bamboozle all of the people for long.
“Look, erectile dysfunction doesn’t come without its own problems, you know”
Polls showed unsurprising support for the plans. Who could oppose saving billions in welfare while getting people into work? Everyone agrees there must be tough sanctions to stop idlers and cheats. Who doesn't want to "reward work and support the vulnerable"? What's more, Duncan Smith will do this magic while simplifying a system of mind-boggling complexity, so no one need bother with the laborious details (most of the press didn't).
What's not to like? Except, just possibly, the nagging sense that it's all a bit too good to be true. If it was that easy, why wouldn't the big and equally tough brains of previous work and pensions secretaries, Labour and Tory, have done it? Were they all so much stupider than Duncan Smith? Unlikely.
Examine this Wizard of Oz, and few of his hyperbolic claims hold water. There will be "no losers", he says, but wait for them to emerge by the million. Nor is there evidence in his lack of detailed figures for how or why 300,000 children will be lifted out of poverty. The "no losers" claim reminds those close to Gordon Brown of similar protestations for his rather more modest 10p tax band abolition. Asserting something does not make it come true – and it gets found out.
Here's how Duncan Smith does it. His "no losers" claim only covers the relatively small technical changes in his new universal credit: he has blanked out the effect of the colossal £18bn benefits cut taken by George Osborne in the budget. Duncan Smith has been the loser, though the real losers will be millions of low earners from their shrinking working tax credits, education maintenance allowance, child tax credit, disability payments, housing benefit, council tax benefit – and a whole string more. If you can't be bothered with the detail use your common sense: how could it be otherwise with such a monumental, unprecedented £18bn cut?
Praise where it's due, some complexity has been simplified. The HMRC and Department for Work and Pensions computers will be linked (fingers crossed) with a single gateway to benefits and tax credits, easing the problem of over-payments having to be returned every six months. The rate at which you lose benefits as you earn more will be the same taper across all welfare within the universal credit. Does that mean, as he claims, everyone will know what they are due? Not at all. It still needs benefits advisers to calculate each person's entitlement according to hours worked at what pay; number and age of children; rent; and any disabilities. Low-paid clerks will still make errors.
What's more, a whole series of benefits still fall outside the universal credit – child benefit, disability living allowance, and all national insurance contributory entitlements – no, I won't list them all, but they must be calculated separately. As if that weren't enough, the government has taken council tax benefit away from the DWP, cut it by 10%, and given it to each council to decide how much to offer, adding another variation according to local authority.
Before your eyes glaze over, remember that complexity in tax and benefits is the price paid for fairness. Never be beguiled by false promises of simplicity, because people's lives and circumstances don't come in one size. The simple sound of universal credit is appealing but mendacious: if it did what it says on the tin and gave everyone the same it would be very unfair. Yet to create universal credit's relatively minor simplification, Duncan Smith is spending more than £4bn – money that could have paid for Labour's highly successful job guarantee, promising real work for real pay to all those unemployed for a year.
The gap between Duncan Smith rhetoric and reality is best exposed in his claims for his new incentives to work. He hammered Labour for the way claimants lose so much benefit when they earn more, so what is his reform? For the great majority, instead of keeping 30p for every extra pound earned they can now keep 35p. Is 5p a clincher?
The government blames Labour for its legacy of 5 million people on out-of-work benefits, with 1.9 million children in workless households. A few facts here: Labour's far more significant reforms introduced the tax credits and the national minimum wage that made work pay for the first time. Until the crash, numbers on benefit fell by a million. Like it or not, Labour's sanctions were exceedingly tough: last year 379,030 people had benefits withdrawn for failing to seek work.
Labour is falling into no traps: it accepts the principles Duncan Smith lays out because they are the aim of all good welfare – to urge all into work while protecting the weak. Douglas Alexander, shadow DWP secretary, delivered a thoughtful exegesis this week: the same principles apply but Labour would create jobs.
Labour's critique is easy: how do you cut £18bn in benefits when government austerity is putting some million and a half people out of work? Alexander's forensic Commons questions on the impact of the cuts went unanswered by an increasingly irritable Duncan Smith, who either had no answers or thought them too unpalatable to speak.
The Times front page yesterday augured what's to come: "Pensions fury of forces families". A vice-admiral from the Forces Pension Society just discovered what everyone will soon find out. His war widows will lose hundreds of pounds due to the coalition's secretive cut in calculating inflation. Using the lower consumer price index instead of the retail price index as a measure, every benefit will lose some 2% a year, every year, for ever – not just war widows.
Wait for the wake-up moment when these cuts hit home. Is Duncan Smith self-deceiving, or just using his party's same faith-based policy that expects millions of new jobs to appear from thin air? His halo will slide as numbers on his welfare roll rise instead of fall.”
Polly Toynbee, the Guardian
