Kenny declares war on welfare culture

JOHN HUMPHRYS: How our welfare system has created an age of entitlement

When Sir William Beveridge wrote his report 70 years ago arguing for the creation for the welfare state he wanted to give the poor a hand up from the grim life they faced. But a dependency culture has since emerged which provokes fury among politicians and public alike. So is the nation ready for change?
Are we on the brink of another welfare revolution? In this thought-provoking article BBC Radio 4 presenter JOHN HUMPHRYS talks to those affected and examines the solutions on offer
The writing is spidery, the occasional ink blob suggesting an old steel nib that had seen better days, and the grey unlined paper might have been ripped out of a cheap notepad. The title is uninspiring too: 'Social Insurance and Allied Services'. This could be the work of a rather sloppy civil servant, too junior to qualify for a secretary of his own, jotting down a few thoughts that might one day impress his boss.
But when I took it from its dog-eared folder I felt like a Shakespearean scholar might feel handling a rare first folio. Of all the documents stored away in the library of the London School of Economics, none has had a greater impact on the way we live our lives than this. There is scarcely a soul born in this country over the last 70 years whose life has not been affected, one way or another, by what resulted from this scruffy piece of paper.
When it was officially published a year after these original scribblings it had a slightly snappier title: The Beveridge Report. Its author, Sir William Beveridge, had said he wanted a revolution and that’s what he got: the creation of the welfare state. What, I wondered as I scanned the yellowing pages, would the great man have made of the way his revolution turned out.

His ambition was immense: to slay what he called the five evil giants of society. Want. Disease. Ignorance. Squalor. Idleness. The first four may not have been slain but, given how grim life had become in post-war Britain for all but the privileged few, their malign power has faded. It’s the fifth he’d have a problem with today and the great irony is that so many people believe that it was his own creation at least partly to blame.
Idleness takes two forms today, one enforced and the other voluntary. One is the result of unemployment made worse by recession, spending cutbacks, growing competition from abroad and a dozen other economic factors. The other is the predictable effect of a dependency culture that has grown steadily over the past years. A sense of entitlement. A sense that the State owes us a living. A sense that not only is it possible to get something for nothing but that we have a right to do so. This, seventy years on from the Beveridge Report, is the charge many people level against it.
I have spent the past year making a documentary for BBC2 in which I have tried to deal with that charge. In the process I have talked to people who are desperate for a job – any job - and to people for whom idleness is a lifestyle choice and are quite happy to admit to it. I have talked to assorted academics who have studied the subject for decades and arrived at entirely contradictory conclusions. I have been to the United States, where they had their own welfare revolution a few years ago, and have witnessed some of its outcomes in the soup kitchens of Manhattan. And we commissioned our own opinion poll to test the mood of the nation. Do we still want the benefits system that the welfare state has spawned and if not … why not?

Inevitably our opinions (our prejudices maybe) are influenced by our childhood. I was born in a working class district of Cardiff called Splott. My father was a self-employed French polisher and my mother had been a hairdresser and still managed to do the odd home perm in our kitchen for friends and neighbours in between bringing up five children. We were often broke but probably neither much better off nor worse off than most other families in the street. All the parents seemed to work just as hard as my own – with one exception. The father in question had lots of children and no job and nor did he seem to want one. He was happy living on the dole. Because of that he was treated with contempt.
That was more than half a century ago. When I went back to my old neighbourhood we found others like him. In the words of an old lady who lived opposite my house when I was born and who lives there still: 'If they can get money without working, they will.' Times have changed, she told me sadly, and the 'pride in working' has gone.
The statistics seem to suggest she may have a point: one in four people of working age in this area are now living on benefits. But maybe that’s because there are no jobs to be had. I went to the nearest job centre, a smart modern building where bright young staff smile a lot and there are plenty of computer terminals to display what’s on offer. Last month there were more than 1,600 jobs advertised in Cardiff.
The centre’s manager Rosemary Gehler agreed with the rather brutal verdict of my ex-neighbour: 'There is undoubtedly less of a stigma to being on benefits and I don’t think anyone would argue with that,' she told me. 'Benefits became fairly easy to access ... too easy probably in some cases… and people taking them didn’t see themselves getting back into work. That situation has built up over the years.'
Back in my old street I talked to Pat Dale, a single mother of seven children. She was most indignant about the 'people who’ve never worked in their life… they don’t even know what a job is'.
So when did she last work? Twenty years ago. The older children don’t have jobs either. The problem, she says, is that the jobs on offer don’t pay enough. 'If I worked for the minimum wage I’d get paid £5.50 right? That means I’d lose out on my rent benefits and I’d be working for nothing. I think it’s disgusting. Honestly it is really, really disgusting.'
Her figures were slightly inaccurate – the national minimum wage is now £6.08 an hour - but she’s right about losing some of her benefits, depending on how many hours she worked. And that’s the problem. I came across it again and again as I travelled around the country.
On a pleasant housing estate outside Middlesbrough I met Steve Brown, as calm and mild-mannered as Ms Dale was defiant and angry - but equally dependent on benefits and equally unapologetic about it. He and his partner live with their three children in a comfortable, rented semi. Their household income is about £20,000 a year without, of course, any deductions for tax. Mr Brown told me that before he could take a job he’d 'have to sit down with them and work it out whether it’s acceptable to go to work or not'.
I suggested that some people who work tor the minimum wage might do so because they reckon working is better than not working. Had he considered that?
'No, no, no… not at all. I just don’t want to be going out to work for forty hours and missing my kids if I’m only going to receive a few quid extra for it, d’you understand? I’d be missing my kids growing up.'
I’m not sure I did understand, but then again I’ve never had to try living on the minimum wage.
There are about 250,000 people in this country today who have been out of work for more than a year and are claiming Job Seekers’ Allowance (JSA). The total number of unemployed is now 2.57m. But that’s only the half of it. Literally. There are another 2.5m people who do not work and claim sickness benefits of one sort or another.
That figure was much smaller until governments in the Eighties set about hacking back the number of people on the dole by the simple expedient of transferring vast numbers of them onto sickness benefits. So the dole queues grew smaller and the number of people on the sick went through the roof. Now it works out at roughly one in eleven of the entire UK labour force.


His ambition was immense: to slay what he called the five evil giants of society. Want. Disease. Ignorance. Squalor. Idleness. The first four may not have been slain but, given how grim life had become in post-war Britain for all but the privileged few, their malign power has faded. It’s the fifth he’d have a problem with today and the great irony is that so many people believe that it was his own creation at least partly to blame.
Idleness takes two forms today, one enforced and the other voluntary. One is the result of unemployment made worse by recession, spending cutbacks, growing competition from abroad and a dozen other economic factors. The other is the predictable effect of a dependency culture that has grown steadily over the past years. A sense of entitlement. A sense that the State owes us a living. A sense that not only is it possible to get something for nothing but that we have a right to do so. This, seventy years on from the Beveridge Report, is the charge many people level against it.
I have spent the past year making a documentary for BBC2 in which I have tried to deal with that charge. In the process I have talked to people who are desperate for a job – any job - and to people for whom idleness is a lifestyle choice and are quite happy to admit to it. I have talked to assorted academics who have studied the subject for decades and arrived at entirely contradictory conclusions. I have been to the United States, where they had their own welfare revolution a few years ago, and have witnessed some of its outcomes in the soup kitchens of Manhattan. And we commissioned our own opinion poll to test the mood of the nation. Do we still want the benefits system that the welfare state has spawned and if not … why not?