Tim Jones: Who really benefits if the vulnerable are forced to get by on £53 a week?

IAIN Duncan Smith, the Work and Pensions Secretary, has said that he could survive on £53 per week. Already there are petitions raised, demanding that he prove it. He might even give it a try; it would certainly make for an interesting television documentary. He is, by all accounts, a caring and thoughtful man – and let’s not forget that he has lived on benefits before. In the early 1980s, after leaving the Army, he spent a couple of brief spells on the dole.
Iain Duncan SmithIain Duncan Smith
Iain Duncan Smith

But could he live on the most basic benefits for week after week, for, say, 15 months? I’m sure he could. He is by nature a resourceful and resilient man, intelligent and enterprising, an erstwhile Guards officer, who for a couple of decades now has bounced around the higher echelons of British politics.

Could he do it while getting rejection letter after rejection letter, with countless applications just ignored in between? Yes, almost certainly. Could he do it while the newspapers and airwaves are filled with a constant snide tirade about the integrity and worth of people on benefits? Yes. But then, every so often, if the benefits did not show up, and it took a couple of weeks – or a couple of months – to sort out the hiccup, would he cope then?

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Of course, Iain Duncan Smith, with his fairly robust personal support network, would cope. His family and friends would rally round, and it is fairly unlikely that he would ever need to be one of the burgeoning numbers who turn to local churches for emergency assistance in the form of food parcels.

Would he eventually, though rarely, in moments of weakness, succumb to temptation and buy something he really couldn’t afford? Well, he is human, so probably yes, even though sometimes that occasional bad decision would cause huge problems. Financially, he is fairly astute, and probably wouldn’t 
be sucked into the sinkhole world of payday-lender legal loan sharks.

Would his close relationships – his marriage, for instance – endure? Hopefully. Would his integrity, honesty, and moral framework be pushed to their limits? Almost certainly. Would he struggle with his faith (whether in God or himself), finding it tested, and either lose it or find it stronger? Probably. Would he struggle to keep all his old friends and acquaintances, and start to slide towards depression? Maybe.

He would cope, though. I’m convinced he would. People like IDS tend to get by in adversity, but not all of us can be like him.

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In his favour is the fact that he must already know how difficult and grim life on a such a low income would be. That is, after all, his whole argument – the very thrust and purpose of his policy – to make unemployment practically intolerable. By accepting the challenge to live on £53 a week he would at least have actual experience of it all.

In the extremely unlikely event that he wasn’t already motivated to find a way to earn a better income, the experience of constant poverty would provide a serious incentive. Work, he argues, just doesn’t pay 
when benefits have been too generous.

The point though is that while work sometimes doesn’t pay, it is really not because benefits have been too high. Work hasn’t paid because the minimum wage is artificially low: employers are allowed to pay a crushingly low wage which the Government (taxpayers) have to top up in benefits. If employers had to pay a decent living wage, then benefits would only be for the unemployed, and work would pay. Even the lowest-paid would then have a decent income which they could be proud of, and not need all the extra benefits with a generous side order of official contempt.

Last autumn, the economists at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation – Britain’s most influential and respected independent think-tank, based right here in Yorkshire – raised the level of the Living Wage to £7.45 per hour. That’s what workers need to earn to keep themselves and their families self sufficient and able to participate in normal British community life at a minimum respectable level. It compares to the current national minimum wage of £6.19 per hour. About a fifth of all those who are employed in the UK earn less than the Living Wage.

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It should therefore be no surprise that the benefits bill
is so high, and that the largest group of recipients are not the unemployed but those who are at work. Their pay is rubbish.

In effect, taxpayers top up ridiculously low levels of pay. IDS has had a real problem to solve – why should someone on 
benefits strive to find work which does so little to relieve their poverty?

The answer has been to make the experience of unemployment truly horrible. Reducing benefits to as low as £53 per week simply exploits the most vulnerable, making them pay the highest personal price for the greedy fecklessness of others. In a civilised society, we shouldn’t make bad pay for workers
more attractive by making benefits for the unemployed punitive and demeaning. It’s just wrong.

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