Bishops speak out too late

For years the bishops have stayed silent as welfare has created workless households that encompass entire generations. Yet no sooner has the Welfare Reform Bill – aimed at ending the culture of benefit dependency – made its way to the House of Lords than John Packer, the Bishop of Ripon and Leeds, has wasted no time in whipping up a frenzy of concern among his fellow clergy, resulting in a letter to the Press backed by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York.

According to the bishops, the plans to limit the amount of benefits claimed by a single household to £500-a-week will have the unintended effect of forcing more and more children into poverty. Fair enough. No one disputes the bishops’ right to raise this point and it is only correct that major reforms to welfare are subjected to the closest possible parliamentary scrutiny.

Why, however, did the Church fail to make any sort of a stand over the reasons that this particular reform is part of the Bill? For the decision to limit benefit income in this way (to a figure that will be envied by many working households) was made because the system, as it stands, has created a perverse incentive for young women to boost their income by having children and, for many, made joblessness a more lucrative option than work.

That this system was allowed to grow and fester for years until it became a cancer which choked the life out of housing estates in towns and cities across the country was nothing short of a national disgrace. Yet, other than a few individual clerics, the Church as a whole chose largely to ignore this scandal.

Ever quick to lambast governments that they believe are creating unemployment, the bishops stayed silent as jobs were created under the last Labour government but were taken largely by enterprising, hard-working EU migrants while Britain’s jobless continued to languish in their welfare ghettoes.

Iain Duncan Smith, the Work and Pensions Secretary, has made it his political mission to end this dire state of affairs. His reforms may not be perfect, but they are at least the result of years of intense study into the ways in which Britain’s welfare system stopped working – years which the Church of England opted to waste by looking the other way.