The battle for welfare reform

AS men who like to position themselves as enemies of poverty, the Church of England’s bishops have said remarkably little over the past few years as more and more people have found themselves caught in a benefits trap from which it has become increasingly difficult to escape into the world of work.

Now that Iain Duncan Smith has come forward with proposals aimed at springing this trap, however, it seems that senior Anglican clergy have found their voice and are using it not to encourage the Work and Pensions Secretary in his mission, but to stymie the reforms by spearheading opposition to the Welfare Reform Bill in the House of Lords.

Yet, far from plunging children into poverty and seeing families abandoned on the street, as the bishops seem to envisage, this Bill will begin the long-needed task of ending the state-sponsored poverty which the welfare system has effectively engendered over the past decade or more.

The decision to limit a household’s benefit income to £500-a-week, a figure which many working families would envy, came about because the system has created a range of perverse incentives, encouraging young women to boost their income by having children and making unemployment a more lucrative option than work.

As a result, welfare ghettoes have been created across the country with the enterprising dissuaded from seeking work by the size of their benefit cheque and the incapacitated effectively written off as unfit for work because of the refusal to countenance any reassessment of claimants’ conditions.

Mr Duncan Smith’s reforms may not be perfect and it is the function of the Lords to scrutinise them carefully. But, unless it is understood that the system as it stands has entrenched poverty rather than alleviated it, the bishops’ entire analysis of the problem is based on a woefully wrong premise.