Welfare

The Guardian last week put an apocalyptic spin on the recent welfare changes. 'The Day Britain Changed' — the headline intoned above a roll call of Tory and Lib Dem savagery.

So what has occurred and what are the implications? The main changes are:-

1, The Government has set a cap on the total benefits a household can claim, at £500 per week

2, There will be a cap on housing benefit of £400 a week

3, Benefits will be increased this year by 1%

4, The benefit subsidy currently provided for social housing tenants with spare bedrooms will be withdrawn, meaning that many of these rooms will be freed up for the two million people on the housing waiting list.

These changes are partly driven by our economic challenges and the need to control expenditure. At a time when 70% of our taxes go on just meeting the interest on the national debt it is difficult to justify rocketing welfare bills. But financial cost is not the only issue.

Benefits, as envisaged by Sir William Beveridge who, after the last war, laid out the basic building blocks of the Welfare State were there as a safety net to ensure that a basic level of support was provided by the State when people fell on hard times.

Quite what Sir William would make of the current situation is impossible to know for certain but it would not be unreasonable to assume that a man who cautioned firmly against allowing benefits to discourage self-reliance and work might feel just as uncomfortable as the Guardian about the current state of affairs, though for rather different reasons. That he might recognise that the quest to slay the evils of want has perversely brought in its wake something of an age of entitlement.