Bishops and benefits

Benefit reform is a big issue. The Government is proposing a cap on the benefits a family should receive of £26,000 a year — equivalent to £35,000 a year in taxable earnings.

I believe this is a generous figure. Why should a family on benefits earn more than many hard working families struggling to get by on less?

Bishops in the Lords argue that this cap will create homeless children, although their definition of homelessness includes children who might have to share a room with another sibling — not the Dickensian image of children wandering the streets. And the disabled and people who have returned to work and were on tax credits will be excluded from the cap altogether.

My view is that one of the worst things Government can do is to discourage work and promote welfare dependency.

As the former Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, recently stated in a rebuke to the Bishops, 'The truth is that the welfare system has gone from the insurance-based safety-net that William Beveridge envisaged in 1942 (designed to tackle the 'Giant Evils' of 'Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness') to an industry of gargantuan proportions which is fuelling those very vices and impoverishing us all. In the worst-case scenario it traps people into dependency and rewards fecklessness and irresponsibility.'

I agree with much of what George Carey says. We spend over around £165-billion a year on welfare – that's around £5,000 per working person per year.

The country cannot afford these sky-high bills and those who are caught up in higher levels of benefit claims are often in a position where an encouragement to work would be to the benefit of society, the economy, their own wellbeing and yes critically the health and happiness of their own children.