Welfare

Encouraging a culture of work

Government endeavours to relieve the poor in our society have all too often undermined the creation of a free and independent-minded citizenry. Individual hope, opportunity and responsibility have been replaced with the Welfare mindset - a dependency on the State, a poverty of ambition, and a general resentfulness against the so-called 'haves'.

Milton Friedman, the late American economist, set out some radical solutions to our collective welfare problems in his book, Capitalism and Freedom. The ideas advocated could be applied across the welfare system, and included the replacement of Public Housing with individual cash subsidies, a system of school vouchers in Public Schooling, and the abolition of the minimum wage. Whilst far removed from what is currently political possible, they provide, at the very least, some potentially great ideas to draw inspiration from in the future.

But how can we begin to shift our welfare system onto the right footing? How can we help to replace spiritual poverty with a sense of hope, dependence with contribution, and resentment with aspiration? One method would be to focus in on Britain's Work and Benefits culture.

It is no secret that the current regime, on the whole, inadvertently discourages work. Get a job, and you will rapidly lose your Housing Benefit entitlement. Get a job, and your jobseekers allowance entitlement will similarly vanish. There may seem nothing wrong with these mechanisms in theory, but in practice they act as a disincentive for people to choose part or full-time work over welfare.

A much better system would be a genuine partnership between citizen and State. Such an arrangement would allow for people to gradually move away from Benefits and into full-time, stable work. In short, it would help to encourage work, over dependency. There would be a number of tools the State could utilise to advance this cause - tax incentives, for instance, to allow the newly-employed to retain more of their initial earnings, phasing out such breaks over time as the individual increased their general net income. Working tax credits, in the form of payments to the low-incomed and their families, are already in existence, could perhaps be made more of - State maladministration aside.

The other side of creating such a culture of work would be to encourage the private sector, rather than the State, to recruit the unemployed, invest in them, and receive State money after a job recruiting-training-establishment operation had been carried out successfully. Such a shift of emphasis was tried and tested in America, when President Clinton's welfare reforms returned responsibility for welfare back to individual States who then experimented with different ways of adminstering entitlements and getting people into work.

The effects of these and other reforms will not been seen overnight. This is the case for much of the reform agenda, and conservatives should be concerned with the long-term effects of policy, rather than their sound-bite quality or ability to appease the tabloid press. We should expect, however, to see the benefits of such reforms within a relatively short space of time - and with the forward march of a free and independent citizenry, a longer-term retirement plan for the Welfare State Leviathan.