When Beveridge published his report in 1942, he declared war on five giants: Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness.
The welfare state was built to kill them. Eight decades on, and we can debate about whether the welfare state or capitalism can take credit for eliminating most of them. But it is undeniable that ‘idleness’ won the war against the system; people are now paid money to stay at home and fester, to the shame of us all.
Andy Burnham, it seems, wants to reopen the fight. The new Prime Minister plans to take sickness benefits off young people who refuse to train, study or volunteer, borrowing from the Dutch, who send claimants out to pick litter, mend playgrounds and visit the elderly. Good. The instinct is right and long overdue.
Given the welfare bill now sits at £333billion a year and more than 430,000 people aged 16–24 claim sickness benefits, there is clearly a huge problem.
Even the Government’s beloved Resolution Foundation found that 84 per cent of young people on the health element of Universal Credit are required to do precisely nothing to prepare for work.
Once signed off, a claimant can go a decade without a health check. This is not kindness. It is neglect of the most uncaring kind.
I doubt that Burnham will be able to do anything about it, however. Keir Starmer tried something milder last year and was torn apart by more than 120 of his own MPs, who accused him of the biggest attack on the welfare state since George Osborne and austerity (still the deadliest insult in the Labour lexicon) until he folded. Burnham owes his job in no small part to that revolt.
The idea that the same parliamentary party will now wave through a tougher version simply because a different leader proposes it requires a heroic level of faith.
Burnham needs huge savings to pay for an £18billion National Care Service, as well as the extra £4.7billion Wes Streeting has demanded for defence on pain of resignation.
Welfare reform, even done properly, yields its savings slowly and in small change. Burnham’s pledges are large and immediate.
The Conservatives have called it a £96billion tax bombshell, and teenagers collecting litter will not close the gap.
And Burnham has already hedged. He will not be “squeamish”, he says, but nor will he countenance “crude cuts”.
He can’t have both, and when the honeymoon period ends, I wonder which side he will call on.
Beveridge understood that idleness destroys the idle first. Andy Burnham has correctly understood this and finally deserves a scintilla of credit.
But getting any kind of meaningful welfare reform means fighting his own side, and on the evidence of Labour’s last attempt this Prime Minister will settle, as the system itself has for years, for bone idleness instead of action.
