The administration of the harshest of all benefit cuts is descending into shambles. The right is starting to lose its argument
'Iain Duncan Smith prospered politically
by embodying this moralising mood.' Photograph: Dave Thompson/PA
Until now, the argument
about social security in this country has been a moral debate – and, those of us
on the left have to be honest about this, it is a debate that the right has been
winning. Despite frightening reportage about penury, and irrespective of
whatever the poverty statistic might say, when welfare has been talked about
down the Dog and Duck, it has chiefly been in terms of the 9am cans of lager,
the layabouts and "jobs on the side" highlighted
on Channel 4's Benefit Street. As a man who projects great personal zeal,
Iain Duncan Smith prospered politically by embodying this moralising mood.
Finally, however, the
welfare debate is beginning to switch from a discourse of ethics, to a more
run-of-the-mill question of government incompetence. Some of us warned a long
time ago that the universal credit was no panacea, but a mere rationalisation
which promised real but modest theoretical advantages in return for serious
practical risks. We
warned, too, that officials made a "nervous sucking sound" when asked about
just how easy it was going to be to move clients from a whole host of different
benefits on to a single system. But the rhetoric of simplifying
things by replacing six benefits with one was irresistible for pundits who
know little about social security, beyond a vague (and justified) sense that it
creaks with complexity. Unfortunately, the complexity reflects the messiness of
the real world, which is exactly where it is now running aground.
To recap, last month
Duncan Smith used the cover of George Osborne's autumn statement to bury
bad news about the universal credit timetable for delivery slipping. Then
this week, my colleague Shiv
Malik reported that Francis Maude's crack team of IT experts were stepping
back from the reform not, according to official minutes, because the technical
problems were fixed nor because these taxpayer-funded officials were needed to
go and serve the public interest elsewhere, but simply because the Cabinet
Office felt it was time for the Department for Work and Pensions to "take
ownership" of its own shambles. Now, the Guardian reveals one of the harshest of
all the £25bn in benefit cuts thus far announced – the bedroom tax – has
been applied with complete incompetence. By failing to rewrite old regulation
before driving through the new legislation, the Department for Work and Pensions
has failed to create the legal licence that was needed to enforce this housing
benefit reduction on thousands of tenants who have been enduring it since last
year. The upshot will be more administrative chaos, compensation claims and –
very likely – in some cases the eviction of tenants who had legal right to
remain where they were.
The bedroom tax, which
requires poor council tenants to pay £14-£22 for "spare rooms", is already one
of the most controversial of the welfare cuts, losing
popularity over the year, as it has become plain that its effects can
include the uprooting of disabled people from adapted homes, and the reality
that it imposes an expectation that tenants should move even when there is
nowhere else for them to go. Now, however, it is emerging that the coalition is
not only cutting with cruelty, but also cutting without competence. That is the
sort of combination that might, just might, start to reset a debate in which the
right has made all the running.
