Peace will come to earth when the people
have more to do with each other
and governments less.

Via 21st Century Welfare, the Coalition seeks views on proposals for welfare reform. Since I gave time to work for the Centre for Social Justice, these reforms are close to my heart: we must take people out of the present intergenerational cycles of broad spectrum poverty.

Iain Duncan Smith’s statement in the main paper is encouraging, particularly the central section:

Too often governments have tried to tackle poverty but ended up managing its symptoms. The changes outlined here are based on a recognition that poverty cannot be tackled through treating the symptoms alone.

The benefits system has shaped the decisions of the poorest in a way that has trapped generation after generation in a spiral of dependency and poverty. This has cost the country billions of pounds every year in cash payments and billions more in meeting the social costs of this failure.

The only way to make a sustainable difference is by tackling the root causes of poverty: family breakdown; educational failure; drug and alcohol addiction; severe personal indebtedness; and economic dependency.

Through the Centre for Social Justice, Iain Duncan Smith has set the trajectory of this government’s poverty-fighting programme, a programme which aims to build a healthy society.

The paper sets out “a fair system that protects those in greatest need”, with proposals which:

• establish a fairer relationship between the people who receive benefits and the people who pay for them and, as crucially, between the people on out-of-work benefits and the people who work in low-paid jobs;

• target support more efficiently, supporting and protecting those in vulnerable circumstances;

• help to divert people away from the pathways that lead to poverty and give people living in poverty a route out; and

• support our wider goal of strengthening families, supporting carers and enabling disabled people to have an equal role in society.

The other aims of reform are affordability, rewarding work and personal responsibility, reduced worklessness, simplification and a reduction in delays, error and fraud. The paper sets out several ways in which these aims could be realised before inviting comment.

You can provide feedback by following the instructions in the annex to the main paper, which may be found here.

See also

• 21st Century Welfare, DWP
• Breakthrough Britain and other publications by the Centre for Social Justice
• Benefit Simplification by David Martin for the Centre for Policy Studies

If anyone still doubts whether British society is broken, they should read the reports of the Centre for Social Justice. When we consider family breakdown, educational failure, economic dependence, indebtedness and addictions, the human and financial cost of decades of top-down bureaucratic control becomes heart-breaking. And let’s not forget that, these days, the poor pay tax to support the very services which fail them.

The sheer scale and quality of the work of the Centre shines through their reports and there can be no doubt that those on the centre right have the best interests of the poorest in our country close to their hearts. As Iain Duncan Smith writes:

Our interim report Breakdown Britain charted the extent of the problem in extensive detail. Britain tops the ‘league tables’ when it comes to spiraling levels of drug addiction, single parenting, poor education and debt. Many people told us that the quality of their communities had deteriorated, maintaining that the crime levels were much higher than those reported to the police. The recent rise in gang warfare, which resulted in a spate of teenage stabbings and shootings in our cities, is a savage illustration of the deep fractures in so many of our inner city communities. A recent UNICEF Report concluded that we have the lowest levels of child well being in Europe. A further report has shown how young people in Britain are more likely to be unemployed and out of education than in almost any other country in Europe.

IDS names some of the inspirational people who have personally set out to serve their fellows, and goes on:

These inspirational people showed me that things could be much better if politicians learnt from them ‘what worked’ and ‘what didn’t work’. Government action, though filled with good intentions, can often exacerbate existing problems or create new ones. I was reminded that communities need strong families to bind them together and that families were vulnerable to a society that no longer valued the institution of marriage. I was shown by them what happens when family life breaks down and when the only male role model for a boy is the drug dealer or the gang leader. I saw first hand how drug addiction is destroying families and how parental addiction is too often repeated by their children. Too many of our children are growing up in sad communities where failed education is hereditary and worklessness is a way of life.

And so the Centre sets out to provide practical policies to mend our broken society. Thankfully, the Conservatives are heading in this direction together. As David Cameron has said:

We know we have a shared responsibility; that we’re all in this together; that there is such a thing as society – it’s just not the same as the State.