A Citizen's Pension?

At the same time as the government is planning to focus working-age benefits on means-tested benefits – a “Universal Credit” – it is also making proposals to remove means-testing for pensioners. The principle of a universal pension was pioneered in the Citizen’s Pension of New Zeland, and that, more or less, is likely to be the model for future development. There are strong arguments for such a scheme: it will be simpler to manage, take-up will be better, and it avoids the perverse incentives associated with means-testing. It should go a long way towards avoiding poverty in old age, without penalising people for saving or having made alternative arrangements.

However, the government is suggesting that the new pension will not affect the position of existing pensioners; it will only apply to new claimants. The State Pensions scheme is not based on a fund: current contributions go to pay current benefits. The claim of those who are working to have decent pensions in the future depends on what they do for pensioners now. The arrangement the government is proposing suggests that pensions will be better when their generation retires, at the expense of those who are then working, but that they are not ready to protect the position of current pensioners. This is indefensible.

The government could just abolish National Insurance pensions instead. However, removing entitlements that people have paid for will raise a storm of protest from those who feel their contributions have gone for nought. (The same problem blights the transitional arrangements: when the scheme is introduced, the new claimants will also have paid contributions.) There is a way round the problem: start introducing the scheme, not for younger pensioners, but for older ones. If the scheme opens with a universal pension for everyone over 90, the problems with equity largely vanish. During the transition, younger pensioners can be told their benefits are time-limited, which is consistent with the principle of insurance. And the qualifying age can gradually be reduced to the level the government wants to support, avoiding the vexed problems of raising pension age.

The Universal Credit

The government’s plans for reforming social security benefits have been mis-sold. They have been presented as if the primary focus was getting unemployed people into work – along with people with serious physical and mental disabilities, who are most of the people identified as being long-term claimants of working age. The proposals for Universal Credit are about something different. They represent a unification of basic means-tested benefits – Jobseekers’s Allowance, Employment and Support Allowance and Income Support – with benefits in work, mainly Working Tax Credit, Child Tax Credit and Housing Benefit.

The crucial problem for any scheme that claims to simplify benefits is that they are liable to over-simplify. This scheme is no exception. Benefits cover a wide range of circumstances. They are not just about getting people into work: they are concerned with lots of other issues, including meeting needs, helping people whose incomes are interrupted, economic management. They are complicated because people’s lives are complicated.

This leads to the second key problem: the scheme is quite impractical. The government believes that a new computer programme will make it possible to respond to changes in “real time”, with implementation beginning in 2013. The computer programme does not yet exist – even on paper – but even if it did, it could not do want the government wants it to do. A computer programme, no matter how good it is, can only go as fast as the information that goes into it. People’s circumstances change with starting rapidity. They find it difficult to say what their situation is – whether they are now disabled, whether their partner has really left them, whether or not the prospect of employment means that they now have a job. Building a system on the hope of firm, confident answers cannot work.

There is no reason to believe that this scheme will increase incentives to work. There is no reason to suppose it will reduce fraud or error – quite the contrary. And there is no real basis for supposing it will make any difference in getting people to work instead. The government’s hopes for the new scheme look like wishful thinking.

The curious case of Child Benefit

6th October 2010

When the Chancellor announced, shortly before the Conservative party conference, that Child Benefit would be withdrawn to families with high earners, it was clear that no-one expected the storm of protest. Iain Duncan Smith had called the idea of paying benefits to richer people “bonkers”, and up to that point the newspapers had seemed to agree.

The government’s reasoning made some sense. Child Benefit is effective because it is simple, takeup is virtually universal and it has no discincentive implications. Means-testing Child Benefit would be self-defeating, and pointless – there is already a means-tested benefit for families with children, in the shape of Child Tax Credit. The government was looking, then, for a simple administrative trigger that could make a practical distinction, and they thought they had found it. The central argument for keeping Child Benefit, however, its its universality – a point the press have not, to this point, seemed to understand. We don’t means-test people using schools, hospitals or roads for many reasons, but the most obvious one is that it would be nightmarishly complicated if we tried to do it. Child Benefit is built on the same logic. Every alternative is more difficult, more complicated, and more burdensome.

Many of the complaints have focused on the unfairness of the proposal – the implication that two earners might retain the benefit when a single high earner cannot. There are two problems. One is that Child Benefit is still mainly received by women, and stopping benefits to women because of men’s earnings is not popular. The other is that every attempt to respond to changes in people’s circumstances comes with complications. People with fluctuating earnings will not know whether or not they are entitled; people who become unemployed will be entitled at some points and not at others. Some people will only know that they are in the higher tax bracket and the end of the tax year, and adjustments will have to be made. These issues have blighted the Tax Credits scheme and inevitably they will blight this change.

Welfare reform

The new Green Paper, No-one written off, looks depressingly familiar; nearly all the major measures have been announced already. There are three key elements. The first is the development of individualised labour market support for people who have been out of the labour market for a year or more. Most of the comment on this has focused on the private sector firms who are engaged in the process. The profit motive means they have a strong incentive to show themselves in the best light, but that apart, I do not have a problem with the principle. It is rather more important that the performance of such schemes to date has been exceptionally poor. Pathways to Work, the programme on which the current policy is based, was also based on private sector firms. It proved to be very expensive. The rate of engagement in the labour market was lower than might have been expected without the programme, and notably worse than the DWP’s own New Deal; there is some suggestion that the programme may actually have delayed people’s return to work, rather than speeding it. To evaluate whether a scheme is working or not, we need to ask what value it adds. The big problems of individualised support are deadweight – where people are included in the programme who were going to improve without it – and spillovers – where people receive support after they no longer need it. Most of the current arguments about effectiveness simply ignore these elements. It is hard to see why it is now being rolled out as a national programme – except for the lobbying by the firms who stand to gain by it.

The second element is the introduction of “conditionality”, mainly understood as the obligation to work or enter training as a condition of receiving benefits. The Freud review was delivered under the misapprehension that active labour market policies began in the 1980s. In fact, there is a long history of conditional rules and work requirements, and it’s not encouraging. Conditionality adds greatly to the complexity of benefit rules. It penalises people for the prevailing labour market conditions. And there is surprisingly little evidence to show that it has a positive effect on labour market participation, even if it has a clear effect on benefit receipt – cutting people off benefits is not the same thing as putting them into work. The figures for the US are heavily distorted by a prison population that is equivalent proportionately in size to Britain’s problem of long-term unemployment.

The third element is the revision of Incapacity Benefit, which is being changed into a new “Employment and Support Allowance”. I wrote about this reform last year in the Scotsman. Suffice it to say here that most of what you will have read or heard about IB through the news media is gibberish. IB is not given through sick-notes, and the numbers of claimants are falling not increasing. I do not think the reforms will work altogether, because the government is not addressing the use of IB as a route to early retirement through ill health.

Taken in all, this is a minor reform, not a major one. There ought to be a fine for politicians, like a swear-box, for claiming that the latest reform is the most important one since Beveridge. This is an incremental change based on a series of badly thought out measures which have been tried, tested and failed. There’ll be further reforms when the next minister comes along.

The assault on the public services

Several entries on this blog refer to cuts, austerity measures and pressure to transfer public services to the private sector. The rationale for doing this is very weak.

  • Reducing public spending during a recession is a certain way to turn it into a slump. Everyone – including the private sector – depends on demand generated by public subvention. The main effect of cutting services across Europe is to ensure that there will be no-one to sell things to.
  • Public expenditure in a slump is counter-cyclical. Keynes argued that wars or building pyramids would be better than parsimoniousness in such circumstances. Deficit financing is not intrinsically a problem – most countries in the OECD incurred debts during the second world war, and it took a long time to pay them off. Like Keynes, I tend to think that neither is the best use of public money. Now is the time to build roads, railways, water treatment plants, housing and energy production facilities. There will never be a better time.
  • Cuts will cost jobs. I do not understand the argument that projects not undertaken or “natural wastage” do not imply the loss of jobs; of course they do. Often the loss will be felt most keenly in the wider economy.
  • The main source of the current deficit is not the public sector; it is the private sector. That does not mean that the public sector does not have to pay, but it does raise questions as to how far the cuts can legitimately be represented as the management of a structural deficit.

Ultimately, the only way out of a slump is through growth, not through retrenchment.

Population and resources

Thomas Malthus, at the end of the eighteenth century, argued that increasing population must inevitably lead to disaster. We were going to run out of food. Malthus was wrong, but that has not stopped generations of neo-Malthusians from claiming that it was going to be true next time. In the 1970s, The limits to growth claimed that the world was going to run out of energy. It isn’t. What happens in an economic market is that as an item grows scarce, it becomes more expensive. As some sources of energy will become more expensive, we will be forced to switch to other sources. There is no point at which the last drop of petrol will ever be poured into the last car, while other drivers look on in fury. This is just not the way that the economy works.

The other side of the Malthusian argument is about population. Population does not grow exponentially: the birth rate falls as the economy develops. The reasons are complex. Part of the explanation is the changing role of women, who delay childbearing when they have options for education and employment. Some reduction may be attributed to contraception; some, perhaps, to the effect of urbanisation on the costs of raising a child. But a significant element must be the fall that most countries have seen in infant mortality over the course of the last forty years. The association is clear and strong (try this link, which opens a new window): once parents see that children have a realistic chance of surviving to adulthood, the number of children they have drops markedly. As an Indian minister once commented, “The best contraceptive is development”.

The age of austerity

Now that cuts in public spending are on the agenda, a parade of experts has been in evidence, arguing for a new kind of welfare regime. However, what they are arguing for looks a great deal like the policies the same people have been pushing for over twenty years – a programme of privatisation, individualised services, diversity and a withdrawal of the state from direct provision.(1)

Precisely because these arguments have been running for more than twenty years, we can form a pretty clear picture of what happens when services are based on these principles. The policies may seem in principle take expenditure off the books of the public services, but that is largely illusory: the most expensive services are nearly always paid for ultimately by government, and the costs are still largely held within the accounts. The central argument is that the private sector is supposed to be more efficient than the public sector. That efficiency is largely achieved, however, by refusing to do things that the public services are bound to do; and the main way that private services have reduced cost is simply by reducing labour costs. Partial provision by the private sector still leaves the public services to provide residual services. The appropriate comparison to make is not between public and private services, but between the total cost of services where there are different patterns of service provision and delivery. Taken in the round, the combined effect of expenditure in the private sector, the development of regulatory mechanisms in the public sector and the maintenance of residual public services has been generally more expensive than services were when services were planned, delivered and strictly rationed by a sole provider.

Personalisation, diversity and consumer choice are not cheap options. There are no good grounds for believing that such policies save money.

(1) e.g. R Hewit, Public service reform is the only way to avoid cuts, Scotsman 1.3.2010

Rationing and road pricing

The Times tells us: “there are only two ways to ration the space on the roads: by queue or by price” (Editorial, 31st October 2009). Rationing is about how resources are allocated. There are many other ways to ration besides queues or pricing. The standard approaches include service restriction, dilution, filtering and reallocation. This might mean e.g. restricting the class of vehicles or drivers able to use certain roads; redefining the use of the road space through line markings; reserving space for certain purposes (e.g. breakdown lanes, bus lanes, car sharing lanes); changing traffic flows (in the US they use gates to open or close road sections at different times for traffic moving in different directions); changing the rules of the road (should there be fast and slow lanes, instead of all outside lanes being for overtaking?); and redefining the use of existing roads (freight-only roads, motorways and ring roads are examples). I’m a specialist in social administration rather than transport, and I cannot tell which of the options is better; that needs evidence. Pricing may or may not be better than the alternatives, but we should never assume it is the only option.

Why cut?

All the main political parties in the UK seem to have reached a consensus, that the economic situation must mean cuts in public spending. This is alarming. Governments must understand that they cannot cut their way out of an economic depression; they have to grow out of it. The way to bring in higher revenues is for people to earn more, not less. If they cut, the reduction in demand will lead to lower tax revenues, and increasing costs through higher unemployment.

The government finances are certainly bad. It is not because of high spending on public services; it is because the government has bailed out the banks. The main way to recover that money is going to be from the banks, as they repay their loans. The idea that this has to be paid from tax or public spending cuts is a false choice. Either might be true in time, but this is not the time.

Financial socialism

There may not be much to chuckle about in the current financial crisis, but complaints in the US about “financial socialism” (e.g. in Forbes magazine) offer Europeans some wry amusement. The US has never really understood what socialism is about; it seems to be some kind of infection, where exposure to a mild but toxic measure, like a publicly funded library or a school, turns people into brainwashed automata. Socialism, in most of Europe, refers to forms of social organisation for collective benefit. Socialists like Robert Owen, R H Tawney or Richard Titmuss stood for principled, moral intervention in social and economic organisation. (I have been puzzled by the number of commentators – like Matthew Paris in the Times – who seem to think that this has something to do with Marxism. Marxism had no time for principled idealism, or for collective groups working together to improve things, or for the idea that governments should intervene to make economies work better. The socialist parties in most European countries had very little to do with Marx – marxist parties in Europe were “communist”, not “socialist”.) The Parti Socialiste Europeen, the largest bloc in the European Parliament, is committed to “principles of freedom, equality, solidarity, democracy, respect of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, and respect for the Rule of Law.” In respect of financial markets, equality, solidarity and social justice implies much more than regulation for greater stability. Whatever one makes of the Paulson plan, “socialist” is not a word that springs to mind.

There is a different word for pragmatic intervention intended to achieve order and stability: that word is “conservatism”. The standard view in conservative thought was powerfully expressed by Edmund Burke (incidentally, as much a supporter of the American revolution as he was a critic of the French one). “Government”, Burke wrote, “is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants.” The idea that government should take action as needed to regulate, balance and protect people is fundamentally conservative, and it has been a cornerstone of the “christian democracy” of central Europe for sixty years.