No Benefit in Change

Unsurprisingly the Work and Pensions Secretary chose not to reprise his endlessly promoted state visit to Easterhouse in 2002.  Instead, when he came to a seminar in Edinburgh last week he had to dodge the verbal bullets of some of the people most affected by his wholesale reinvention of the welfare state. Economics professor Ailsa Mackay at Glasgow Caledonian University is convinced that not only has the Secretary of State found the wrong answers, he is asking the wrong questions.

In her recent paper for the David Hume Institute she suggests: “We have to move beyond the work versus leisure dichotomy and start to question how, what and whom we value.”

She argues that the economist’s traditional model of what is valuable and productive takes no note of the huge amount of valuable work done in the “invisible” sectors like caring. And she says that by focusing on welfare schemes which have an overarching purpose to promote paid work exclusively, “we fail to account for the experience of that work for many vulnerable individuals, including, most significantly, women”.

Her alternative proposition is a citizen’s basic income, irrespective of employment status, to replace all existing income maintenance benefits that would effectively integrate the tax and benefit system. Whether or not any government would be prepared to think that radically is a moot point, but in talking to her you sense her anger and despair at the current direction of travel.

“When I started work it was with something called the Department of Health and Society Security, which by definition offered protection. That become the Department of Social Security and now the Department of Work and Pensions. That tells you a lot about how we view its contemporary purpose. We also used to talk about a welfare state, but now we just talk about welfare in the kind of terms used in America.

“I am fearful for the future of our children, which I believe looks really bleak. In the 1980s we used to talk about the long-term effects of poverty, but the situation is worse now. We have households hit by a double whammy of reduced benefits at the same time as cuts in public services.”

Prof Mackay thinks some communities are so battered and bruised that issues such as human rights and dignity are not things people have the time or energy for any more. “They’re just too busy trying to survive and put food on the table.”

She also thinks there is a job to be done by her fellow academics undertaking serious research in the next six months on the impact of the cuts and the DWP culture on individual households.

“We know about lots of things anecdotally, and we can presume lots of things. But what we need is to assemble the hard evidence so that we can use it to try and address some of the awful damage in the future.”

Extract from “No Benefit in Change”, Ruth Wishart, The Herald, Tuesday 2 April 2013.

Read the full article http://www.heraldscotland.com/comment/columnists/no-benefit-in-change.20655070