Hold the horses: the OBR covers us in manure

The Office for Budget Responsibility has produced an alarming new report about the state of the public finances. They offer projections over 50 years, mainly 2024 to 2074, which seem to suggest that the economy will be faced with insurmountable debt and a disastrous state of public finance. The main factors they consider are the impact of climate change, demographic change, the growing cost of health care and the cost of maintaining massive public debt.

Don’t panic.  These are projections, not predictions, and a projection simply takes a present trend and follows it outward.  Some of the startling figures projections, particularly those related to climate change, are based on wild guesses.   The projections assume no changes in policy of any kind, no changes in the pattern of economic production, the same social codes, the same consumer behaviour, and so on. This is the same process that led the Times in 1894 to write that “in 50 years, every street in London will be buried under nine feet of manure.”   As a prediction, it’s horse manure.

 

A cut in Winter Fuel Payment is a cut in the basic pension

The Winter Fuel Payment has always come over as a little odd.  It’s not a cold weather payment – the weather is irrelevant.  It’s not really a winter payment – it’s based on the situtation in September.  It’s not actually a payment for fuel – people are free to spend it on whatever they think appropriate, and while some people will use it to pay for a little more fuel, it’s unusual to use even most of it for that.

The proposal to abolish WFP is essentially, then, a proposal to cut the income of pensioners, currently by up to £300 a year.  That cut is not self-evidently justified, because it reveals a somewhat distorted view of priorities, but it’s not fundamental either.  If the government really wanted to rethink the distribution of income to pensioners, it would make far more sense to tax the state pension (that would only affect those pensioners who had combined income from state pension and other sources above the tax threshold).   They’re not doing that, because they came to office with an undertaking not to increase personal tax rates.  Taking the money directly from pensioners may be different from tax, but it ends up in the same place.

I’ve been more concerned by a set of ill-informed public comments about the WFP.  Taking them one by one: why should rich pensioners get anything? The immediate answer to that is really simple. Pensions aren’t income-related.  All pensions go to richer pensioners as well as poorer ones.  I’ve already explained that the Winter Fuel Payment is not really tied either to winter or to fuel. The cut in WFP is nothing more, and nothing less, than a cut in pensions. 

The second question: why can’t they just claim Pension Credit?  To which the answer is: Have you looked at Pension Credit? It’s not as complicated as Universal Credit, which is a blessing, but it’s still difficult to decipher. (For example, entitlement is still expressed in weekly amounts, but pension payments are often monthly.  It becomes more complicated if Savings Credit is included: at that point, it becomes difficult to work out when people become entitled, and when they cease to be.)  Like other income-tested benefits, PC has consistently failed to reach hundreds of thousands of people who are in principle entitled.   The last estimate (2022) was that PC was received by 63% of the people entitled, and not received by 37%.

That is also the answer to the third question: why don’t we just means-test WFP?  The basic reason is again obvious. Every means-test calls for more details and more complexity.  In their heyday, there were literally thousands  of separate means-tests. (Consider, for example, the awful mess we’ve got into with local authority means-tests for residential care – but that at least relates to very large financial payments.)  We already have one, comprehensive means-test for everyone with an income.  It’s the tax system. Why create yet another complex, burdensome process to do the same job?

Means tests all fail to some degree.   It’s far, far more difficult to work out who is entitled and who is not if the assessment relies on a test of income or other resources. That is not a reason never to have any means test, because considerable numbers of people depend on the payments – but we do need to decide whether it wouldn’t better to go for simpler, broader eligibility criteria for benefits with a mass role.  I’d be in favour, for example, for a guaranteed minimum state pension, so that everyone who received a partial pension and had no occupational pension got the state pension automatically made up to a set level.

This blog is not, however, here to offer you a vision of the shining city of the future.  If WFP is so feeble, why should we keep it?  Does it matter?  Here are three reasons.

First, the principle.  The cut in WFP is a cut in pensions.  Is that merited?  Pensions in the UK are markedly lower than pensions in many of the countries we’d use as comparators – which is why the ‘triple lock’ has been used, however slowly, to bump them up a wee bit.  WFP is another way.

Second, the value of having a distinct benefit.  Benefits don’t work too well when they cover multiple contingencies.  Technically, cash benefits are ‘fungible’ – they mix together in different ways for different people.  The best and most effective way to be able to respond to particular circumstances is to have a stand-alone benefit that can be added to other income.  That’s the mechanism that the government is set to destroy.  WFP is the only system that is available to distribute benefits to everyone.  If we wanted in the future to make a lump sum available to pensioners  (and why not – we did it for the banks), this is the administrative mechanism you’d need to use.  An old rule about tax: don’t burn your instruments. You never know when you’ll need them.

Third, the economics.  WFP (and pensions overall) are not ‘public spending’.  If they’re paid out of tax, the amount of money in the economy is just the same afterwards as it was before.  Pensions are ‘transfer payments’, which mainly affect who is going to spend the money. The state does not spend the money; pensioners do.   The abolition of WFP is, crudely put, a cut in the disposable income of pensioners. That is also a cut in the financing of economic activites that the money would otherwise have been spent on.   Far too many people in the UK are destitute.  Markets don’t work if people don’t have the money to spend in them. There is a powerful case for increasing benefits overall.

Preparing for another pandemic

The first Hallett report on the management of a pandemic is disappointing.  It’s wordy and over-blown, but that’s not the main problem.  Consider this central, first recommendation for action:

“Recommendation 1: A simplified structure for whole-system civil emergency preparedness and resilience

The governments of the UK, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland should each simplify and reduce the number of structures with responsibility for preparing for and building resilience to whole-system civil emergencies.
The core structures should be:
• a single Cabinet-level or equivalent ministerial committee (including the senior minister responsible for health and social care) responsible for whole-system civil emergency preparedness and resilience for each government, which meets regularly and is chaired by the leader or deputy leader of the relevant government; and
• a single cross-departmental group of senior officials in each government (which reports regularly to the Cabinet-level or equivalent ministerial committee) to oversee and implement policy on civil emergency preparedness and resilience.”

The idea behind this seems to be that the way to be effective is to give the responsibility squarely on the busiest, most senior figureheads possible. That is hopelessly naive – and it’s what led to the effective dereliction of duty when the Prime Minister couldn’t be bothered turning up to routine meetins of COBRA.  Picture the scene.  Nothing more happens for 25 years, and then we get hit again.  What will those high-level, cross-departmental groups have done in the meantime? They’ll take it seriously at first.  Then it will become more routine.  There’ll have been at least two, possibly three, new governments, and far more responsible ministers.  There’ll be changes at the level of supporting departments.  Senior staff will retire.  And someone, someone, won’t treat this as a priority any more.

The crucial test of any administrative structure is not what happens when everyone has good will, competence and commitment. It’s what happens when things go wrong.

The second complaint: Hallett thinks that our government isn’t centralised enough.

“It is therefore necessary to place in charge the only government department that has the power and authority necessary to take the lead – the Cabinet Office. It has the decision-making power of the Prime Minister and the oversight and ability to coordinate the activities of the whole government.”

This is absurd – and dangerous.  Hallet complains about ‘groupthink’, but her proposals are a recipe for more of it. In the pandemic, decisions were highly centralised.  That’s one of the principal factors which led to the single-track policy, assuming that this disease would be like flu.   People who knew how to identify the spread of disease, people who knew local areas and local systems for distribution, were sidelined.  And later, when new evidence emerged to say that the official advice (Hands-Face-Space) was off-beam – because the disease was airborne, not mainly spread by droplet – the ‘leaders’ couldn’t bring themselves to change the advice.

We’ll get on to issues about the conduct of the response in due course, but that’s for a later report.

An uninspiring election

I’ve said almost nothing about the election that’s currently taking place in the UK. The parties have not been sufficiently interested to want to engage in debate on any of the issues I happen to think, however eccentrically, are important: issues like primary care, social security, housing, access to law or schooling.

Two things are getting in the way.  The first is the contention that everything in a manifesto has to be fully costed.  I find it baffling that everything has to be costed: none of the parties seems ready to say directly, ‘these are our values’, giving a sense of purpose or direction for the period they propose to be in office. Specific costings may be good for two or three months, but then an incoming government will need to look at conflicting claims about priorities and their objectives will have to be revised, manged and reconsidered.  The convention on manifestos is mainly important because they lead to an effective veto on revision by the Lords, and the more limited the commitments, the less will be certain of passing.

The second problem is the obsession with personalities – the delusion that we are voting for a Prime Minister.  Wake up: this is not the way our system works.  If you voted for Cameron in 2015, you got May.  If you voted for May in 2017, you got Johnson. If you voted for Johnson in 2019, you got Truss and Sunak. There’s an obvious defence for Starmer against the criticism that he was campaigning  for Corbyn to be Prime Minister: no-one in our country should ever assume that they’re campaigning for a leader.  You vote for a party, and a party is a team.

I part company with most parties when it comes to  priorities.  The Labour Party has adopted a slogan long associated with the political right-wing, that security is “the first duty of any government.” That formula runs back to Thomas Hobbes and Adam Smith. It’s a common rhetorical ploy to claim that one thing is so essential that it comes before everything else – the Greens make equally strong claims about climate change, the Club of Rome used to do it about finite resources – and they’re just as invalid, for the same reason – no government in the world does just one thing.  There are lots of other preconditions for the continued existence of a society which could just as plausibly be claimed – health, education, family life, international cooperation, economic growth, action against poverty, and so on. Defence is only one duty of many. I don’t think there’s any government in the world that doesn’t think it is also responsible for economic policy, and nowadays the vast majority of governments around the world have social policies extending to health care, education and cash assistance. Are these really less important than defence? Let me offer an older principle, which is also to be found in Hobbes:  Salus populi suprema lex – the welfare of the people is the highest law.

I’m not going to try to write a manifesto here, but if you look at the previous entry on my blog, you’ll find a plausible substitute. Policies for health, education, housing and social security are all discussed in my book, How to fix the welfare state.

 

How to fix the welfare state – a short introduction

Two years ago, How to fix the welfare state was published. We have an election coming up, and many of the issues that I discuss in the book will come up during political debates.  I’d like to think that the book could offer some foundation for those arguments, but bitter experience says it probably won’t.

I was looking at other material online, via the University Press system, when I came across a description of my book, and discovered that it wasn’t the material I had sent to the publisher.  Someone had obviously decided not to use the abstracts I sent in, and replaced them with gobbledegook. For example, the abstract of the last chapter now reads: “This chapter focuses on the condition of the welfare state. It notes the claims of welfare wasting money and of being undermined by fraudulent claims. The arguments for personalisation are well-meaning as the option of choice becomes available in public policy. … ” This has no direct relation to anything I’ve written, and that third sentence there makes no sense to me at all.   I’ve raised this with the publisher, but in the meantime I’m going to post the abstracts I submitted here, in the hope that anyone who’s looking for the material would prefer to judge it by something that’s minimally coherent.  If you’d like to know what basis there is for the arguments that follow – they’re all in the book.

How to fix the welfare state: abstract

The book discusses a range of issues in the British ‘welfare state’. Chapters outline the structure of services, the impact of some false and misleading narratives, and the problems that need to be addressed. Many aspects of the dominant policy narratives, such as personalisation, marketisation, when to opt for private provision or the influence of individualism, have created further problems, and diverted attention from the main issues. The book points to a range of different issues, including questions of size, centralisation, co-ordination and complexity. It points to the ways that the services have gone wrong, and makes suggestions about what they need to do to get things right.

Chapter 1: Introduction

This introductory chapter covers:
* Arguments for welfare
* The criticisms made of the welfare state from the right wing
* A brief history of social services, considering the Poor Law and after, and
* The plan of the book.

Chapter 2: Social security

Key points 
Social security provides money, to be spent in a commercial market.
Money can be brought together from different sources. It doesn’t have to be done by one benefit.
Social security is provided for many reasons, but its main purpose is to provide some secure income.
Positive developments
Most of the cost of social security currently consists of benefits offering a secure but only partial contribution towards income. Earnings-related pensions, Child Benefit and benefits for disability were all developed after the welfare state’s foundation.
Where policy has gone wrong
Some degree of selectivity is necessary, but the process is liable to fail in some cases and to leave gaps in others.
Lumping benefits together doesn’t make them simpler.
Benefits don’t have much to do with work. Tying social security to employment services has been to the detriment of both.
What to do instead
A secure income can have many components. The benefits package can be made of smaller, more specific benefits.
Benefits need to be less conditional, and more predictable. More could be universal.

Chapter 3: The NHS

Key points
The NHS offers a form of insurance, providing medical care to anyone.
Despite the dominance of hospitals, general practice is at the heart of what the NHS does.
The need for public health has been highlighted by recent experience.
Positive developments
The NHS has moved away from long-stay institutions and focused on medical care.
General practice has been greatly improved.
Where policy has gone wrong
Private markets cannot fill the gaps. They depend on producers having choices, and that leads to exclusion.
Health is public as well as individual. Reducing everything to the personal level compromises the aims of health services.
What to do instead
The health service has to provide different levels of service: decentralised general services, more specialised work for larger areas, and highly specialised centralised provision.

Chapter 4: Social care

Key points
The shift from health care has left services that are fragmentary, insecure and often expensive.
Residential care has grown because it is an effective way of providing intensive services, but not all residents need that.
Domiciliary care has been based in a flawed model of ‘personalisation’ – and a catastrophic assumption that it won’t be sustainable.
Care in any setting depends on continuing personal relationships.
Positive developments
This service did not exist when the welfare state was founded.
It was created as part of the movement away from long-stay institutions. It has its failings, but at least it has made it possible for some people to continue to live in their own homes.
Where policy has gone wrong
Personalisation has never lived up to its promise; it only works for some.
Creating something like a market in social care is no guarantee of choice.
Markets offer commodities; people who need care need something different.
What to do instead
The clients of social care need people with time and skills, not a shopping list of the tasks that workers will fulfil. Both residential and domiciliary care will need teams of carers who can offer a personal service to clients.

Chapter 5: Education

Key points
Education depends on a process of development, not on any set quantity of knowledge.
Disadvantages can be cumulative.
Positive developments
The welfare state secured free secondary education. Later developments made this comprehensive, and greatly expanded higher education.
Where policy has gone wrong
Equal opportunity is not enough; in an unequal society, it becomes the opportunity to be unequal.
Students don’t necessarily ‘catch up’ by being taught faster.
The problem of low attainment is not about how schools are managed.
What to do instead
We need a stronger focus on human development. This would include a major emphasis on primary and elementary education, a review of the secondary curriculum, and reconsideration of the structure of assessment to allow for appropriate final stage qualifications.

Chapter 6: Child protection

Key points
Most families raise children well enough. Some don’t.
Child protection is a residual service, for children where family fails.
Some things can still be done for every child. The residue of children requiring protection can be reduced but not eliminated.
Positive developments
Preventative work scarcely existed when the welfare state was founded; services could only react after the event.
Where policy has gone wrong
Some families are poor, but that is not the same as saying they are not good families.
It is not true that dependency is passed on from generation to generation.
What to do instead
Children need protection. Part can be done universally, but unavoidably part must be done individually and personally.

Chapter 7: Housing

Key points
People have to live where they can. If there are not enough houses, some people will live in unfit housing, some will have no home of their own; and some will be physically homeless.
Positive developments
The legacy of post-war policies has been a greatly improved and expanded housing stock.
Social housing continues to provide essential, good quality housing to those who cannot afford adequate housing within a market-oriented system.
Where policy has gone wrong
The housing market does not work in the way that free-marketeers imagine.
The issues of tenure and affordability disguise the real issues: access and deprivation.
The problems of the housing system are structural, not the result of individual failings.
What to do instead
We need a substantial, continuing increase in the stock of housing, in order to ensure access and adequate standards.
A programme of regeneration is needed to save towns and regions that have been marginalised.

Chapter 8: Employment services

Key points
The level of employment is mainly dependent on the economy, not on individual effort.
At their best, employment services offer support and training to help people engage with the labour market; but they cannot create jobs or guarantee decent employment.
Positive developments
Where macroeconomic policies have been applied, they have greatly diminished the level of unemployment.
Where policy has gone wrong
‘Active’ labour market policy shifts the burden of unemployment to the people who experience it.
Incentives are not a simple matter of comparing benefit levels with wages.
The standard microeconomic analysis, presenting unemployment as a matter of personal choice, is an ideological prejudice, not social science.
Employment services have suffered by being muddled with benefits.
What to do instead
Unemployment is a waste of human resources. We need large numbers of people in a range of professions. Government can, and should, create jobs. It can do this through expanding public employment.

Chapter 9: Equalities and human rights

Key points
‘Equality’ is about the removal of disadvantage. ‘Equalities’ refer to specific disadvantages.
The disadvantages can be cumulative.
Positive developments
The services described here, and the principles on which they are founded, were hardly thought of at the time of the foundation of the welfare state.
Where policy has gone wrong
Human rights outline the bare minimum; citizens need more than that.
What to do instead
Legal redress is fundamental to justice, but it only goes so far. The law has to be clearly stated, and legal protection has to be accessible and affordable.

Chapter 10: Public services

Key points
Public services are guided by public policy. They work to different criteria from private services.
Universal services can be available to anyone; some are available to everyone.
Positive developments
At a time when public services have been eroded or privatised, some have gone against the trend: charges for prescriptions and eye tests have been removed in Scotland, charges for museums were introduced but then abolished, several areas have introduced bus passes for older people and those with disabilities, there are planned extensions of free school meals and transport for children.
Some private firms have recognised the case for free public access.
Where policy has gone wrong
Markets sometimes fail, and market provision is always incomplete. That is tolerable in some fields and not in others.
What to do instead
Some services are better taken out of the private market. The more this can be done, the greater the security the welfare state will offer.

Chapter 11:  Towards a stronger welfare state

The concluding chapter considers issues more generally, reviewing
* Misleading trends – choice and personalization, privatisation and marketisation, individualisation
* General problems: problems of size, centralization, coordination, practical capacity, and cost
* Approaches to reform.

A submission to the Green Paper on PIP

In line with my previous post, I’ve sent a short submission to the Green Paper.   I’ve found it impossible to relate the issues around PIP to the questions asked in the consultation.

The central points in the submission are these:

  • The primary aim of PIP is to raise persistently low income, not to meet extra costs.
  • There have been other benefits designed to meet extra costs.  PIP is not one of them.
  • Personal Independence Payment does not and cannot duplicate the work of the social care services.

I have argued that the Green Paper should be withdrawn and reconsidered. I’m fully aware that, given the way consultation responses are processed, this response will disappear into the ether and the points it makes will probably not even be acknowledged.  I felt regardless that this had to be said.

A copy of the submission is available here.

 

The DWP consultation on disability benefits: read it and despair

The DWP’s new Green Paper, Modernising support for independent living, could well be the most alarmingly  misconceived document on social security I have witnessed during the tenure of the Conservative government, which in the era of Universal Credit is saying something.  It displays a basic lack of understanding of how benefits for disability work and what they are there for.

Personal Independence Payment (PIP) was introduced in 2013 to provide non-means tested cash payments to disabled people and people with health conditions to help them live independent lives.

A brief history is in order.  PIP was not a fundamental replacement of the previous system.  It was a rebranding of Disability Living Allowance, or DLA, which itself brought together two existing benefits for people of working age: Attendance Allowance and Mobility Allowance.

None of those four  was designed to promote independent living.  That was the job of a completely different set of systems, initially pioneered by the Independent Living Fund,  subsequently incorporated into the Griffiths reform of community care, and currently taking the form of personalised or ‘self-directed support’.   There is a limited overlap, to the extent that people who are supported by community care may also get financial benefits, but most of the users of either system are not covered by the other.

PIP … is often described as an ‘extra costs benefit’. It is paid at various rates depending on the level of functional impact of a person’s disability or health condition.

Well, that was how both DLA and PIP were presented politically – but it’s not what they do, or what they were designed to do. The criteria for awards do not, and never have, depended on extra costs.  They focused on the severity of the disability, which is something quite different. (The tenuous link to costs is explained in the DWP’s  Equality Analysis on PIP, undertaken in 2017:

“PIP is a payment that is intended to be broadly proportionate to the overall need of a claimant. The greater someone’s need, all else being equal, the greater the cost they will face as they go about their daily lives.”)

If the benefits were not about costs, what were they supposed to be doing instead?  That was made  explicit at the time of the introduction of benefits for people with disabilities in the 1970s.  It had become clear that people with disabilities, regardless of their status in other respects, suffered disadvantage throughout their working lives – not necessarily because they had additional costs, but because they were disabled.   Alf Morris explained in Parliament:

“It is not only a question of finance we are discussing, but also the dignity of disabled people. … This is only one stage towards improving the financial status, and therefore the dignity, of every one of our severely disabled fellow citizens.”

The logic of not means-testing the benefits was that this disadvantage affected everyone with a disability.

Additional note, 23rd June  This graph, from a report by the Resolution Foundation, shows what PIP actually does. Its principal role as a benefit is to do just what the benefits it was based on were meant to do: not meeting extra costs, but offering additional support for persistent low income.

In the United Kingdom, we have had a predominantly cash transfer system for extra costs since the introduction of Attendance Allowance and Mobility Allowance in the 1970s.

These were not ‘extra costs’ benefits, and no assessment was made to relate them to costs.  (I should perhaps add that despite the name, Attendance Allowance was not given for attendance, but for severe  disability.)  In the past, there were two ‘extra costs’ benefits attached to Supplementary Benefit and Income Support: those took the form of “Exceptional Circumstances Additions” and “Exceptional Needs Payments” when they were part of Supplementary Benefit, and became ‘premiums’ when Income Support was introduced. Things have moved on since; the ‘legacy benefits’ are being eradicated, and these provisions are going with with them.

We know from research that people often use their PIP payments on core household expenditure (such as utility and housing costs). We also know that some disabled people view their PIP award as compensation for being disabled rather than as an award for extra costs.

This is one of the few statements in the review that recognises how social security actually works.  Benefits are delivered as cash so that people can choose how to use them, and cash is ‘fungible’ – it gets lumped together  with other cash.

We also know a certain amount  about what applicants think about the disability benefits.  One of the primary findings about DLA, shortly before it was renamed, was that applicants didn’t have much idea of what the criteria were, and if they were receiving other benefits were likely to think they ought to have  a crack at it.  The takeup of these benefits has been weak; people with disabilities do not necessarily think of themselves as ‘disabled’, and some say that they are disabled ‘sometimes’.  It has not  helped that the benefits have been lumped into a single, supposedly ‘working age’ benefit, and that assessments have often focused inappropriately on someone’s ability to work.  There is a good case for smaller, more clearly defined benefits that might actually make some sense to the people who receive them – and, given the level of incomprehension that this DWP paper reveals, to the people responsible for delivering them.

We would like to understand whether some people receiving PIP who have lower, or no extra costs, may have better outcomes from improved access to treatment and support than from a cash payment.

This is disingenuous.  If there is no cash payment, those people will be worse off financially, as the evidence mentioned in the previous quotation makes clear. That will be true regardless of whether their health care is enhanced.

We want to hear how the welfare system could be improved by exploring new approaches to providing support. These include:

  • Moving away from a fixed cash benefit system so people can receive more tailored support in line with their needs.
  • Moving towards a better join up of local services and a simpler way for individuals to access all forms of support and care, whilst reducing duplication, to better meet the needs of people with health conditions and disabilities.
  • Exploring alternative ways of supporting people to live independent and fulfilling lives. This could mean financial support being better targeted at people who have specific extra costs, but it could also involve improved support of other kinds, such as physical or mental health treatment, leading to better outcomes.

In every particular, this refers to the objectives of the system of social care, not benefits for disability.  The thorough-going replacement of the objectives of the existing benefit system by the system of community care could potentially imply an expansion of community care – but it also implies, no less, the virtual abolition of the system of social security benefits for people with disabilities.

 

The Resolution Foundation loses sight of what Universal Credit is really like

I listened on Monday to a discussion at the Resolution Foundation of a new report, In Credit.  The participants seemed on the whole convinced by the proposition that UC has simplified the system, that the process of digitisation has worked well (especially in the pandemic) and that the central issues now concerned the adequacy of the benefits rather than the design of the system.  At the same time, reports from other organisations  point to serious structural problems with the benefit.  An outstanding report from CPAG  goes methodically through the processes of claiming, decision making, official communications and failures in the management of disputes. And research from Bath University’s Institute for Policy Research  criticises the rigidity of the assessment system and the drastic volatility and unpredictability of the income that is being provided.  “Monthly fluctuations in UC were ubiquitous, frequent and sometimes very large. ”

Someone has to have got this wrong, and in my view, it’s the Resolution Foundation.  They acknowledge that there were ‘teething problems’ at the outset.  It’s much worse than that.  The early years were a complete disaster, which is why the programme had to be ‘reset’ and massively overspent, but the system failed then, and has failed ever since, to meet any of its declared objectives.   I’m not going to go through everything I’ve said about this on this blog, but here are a few salient points.

The declared aims of Universal Credit have shifted frequently over time, but in general they were claimed to be:

  • the simplification of the system
  • reducing fraud and error,
  • reducing worklessness, and
  • improving work incentives.

Other objectives have included:

  • reducing the cost of the welfare system
  • rewarding work and encouraging personal responsibility
  • reducing poverty
  • smoothing transitions in and out of work
  • improved efficiency through automation
  • personalising benefits through a tailored response.

Every one of those objectives has been a failure. I’ve previously presented evidence about each of them. There have been critical reports from the House of Commons, the House of Lords and the National Audit Office, and specific rebuttals of the positive spin put on them by the DWP.

The main thing to add since I made that argument  has been the question of how things changed with the pandemic.  According to the Resolution Foundation report, “the system garnered praise during the pandemic for its ability to cope with a huge increase in claimant numbers with minimal delays.”  I seem to remember something different.  The first thing  is that the social security system had  coped before with massive increases in claimant numbers.  The second point is that in the early stages of the pandemic, the system didn’t cope: it locked up. Here’s a reminder.

When UC eventually did catch up, it was at the cost of substantial delay, uncertainy, error and fraud.

So – how has UC fared?  It has failed to simplify. Its digitisation has been  clumsy and inappropriate to claimants’ circumstances.  As for ‘incentives’, the policy-makers have lost sight of the main purposes of the benefits system, which have little  do with work.  And, in the process, we have lost sight  of the need for a basic benefit that can at least ensure that people are not malnourished,  destitute or in despair.

Defining hate crimes

The Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021 has attracted a great deal of criticism, much of it missing the point.  The Act does three things.  It consolidates existing laws about hate crimes, while abolishing the ancient offence of blasphemy.  Second, it extends protection from “threatening or abusive” behaviour to a number of protected characteristics, including religion, gender identity, age and disability.  (Race and sexuality were already protected under previous legislation.) Third, it takes the idea of public order into the private sphere: in a world where people can send messages to thousands from the comfort of their living room sofa, the old definitions of public space don’t work any more.

The Act has some clear defects.  The most obvious, following  Joanne Rowling’s furious exchanges with online trolls, is its failure to protect women from abuse.  Only slightly less obvious is the question of reasonableness: the police have already been inundated with thousands of complaints that presumably seem reasonable to the complainers but not to people who don’t share their world view.  (There is some reason to believe, too, that many of those complaints are vexatious – aimed at making a political point, rather than offering evidence of threat.)  A third is that the offence of ‘stirring up’ hatred relates specifically to groups: threatening or abusing an individual person on the basis of their character or identity is left to previous legislation.

Another problem, which is regrettably intrinsic to the subject, is that threats are often delivered obliquely.  Holocaust denial has been a common route; the world ruled by shapeshifting lizards less common, but nevertheless a cause for concern.  The idea that it’s somehow acceptable to go to a random kosher delicatessen and ask about conduct of the Israeli  Defence Force comes close.  That’s not, however, a reason not to legislate – it’s proof that protection is needed.

Some of the criticisms, however, are illegitimate.  One is the idea that responding to threatening or abusive behaviour is beyond anyone’s competence.  Another is the argument that this is an infringement of ‘free speech’.  Freedom of speech is not a right to say whatever one pleases, and it never has been.  I’ve reviewed the arguments about this in a previous blog, so I won’t repeat it all here.  In UK law, common restraints on free speech have included laws about public order, libel, blasphemy, incitement and conspiracy. Whether speech is restricted or not depends on what is said, where and when.   Words can kill.

 

Trans: where both sides go wrong

As a social scientist, I’m approaching this topic with some trepidation.  There’s a lot of heat being generated on both sides and people are not just getting things wrong, they’re doing it at the top of their voices.

‘Gender’ and ‘sex’ are inter-related, but they’re not wholly equivalent.  We mainly use ‘sex’ to refer to biological males and females, while ‘gender’ refers, not just to physiology, but to a set of social facts.  It should be obvious enough what a ‘social fact’ is, but the debate has become muddied. We’re surrounded by social facts – things that are true because society is constructed to make them true.  Law, finance, morality and property ownership are all examples of social facts.  Gender is like that, too.  It’s based on a complex and extensive set of norms, developed through a well-established process of socialisation – education, upbringing, shared perceptions and socially defined norms.

The Scottish Goverment got itself in an awful muddle when it assumed that ‘gender’ is subjective and that ‘identity’ is something we choose.  Social facts aren’t subjective – they’re social.  You can present yourself however you please, but it won’t change the speed limit, the amount of money you have in your bank account  or your educational qualifications.  Nor will it change your gender.  That’s something that can only happen after a long, difficult process of re-socialisation, and some people are uncertain it can be done at all.

So, where do the protagonists go wrong?  On the gender-critical side, the protagonists have been driven to a point where they argue that it’s mainly about biology.  Kathleen Stock’s Material Girls is an example. Biology certainly plays a part, but Stock’s reductionism comes perilously close to a denial of gender roles.   I know there’s a school of thought in psychology that holds that everything we do is genetically determined – last week, for example, I came across a completely daft article that claimed that whether or not people have health insurance is down to their genes – but we need to understand that gender is highly socialised.  Take a simple example: in our society, men are more likely to interrupt women speaking than vice-versa.  This is not about biology. The point is that people raised as men have been socialised to behave in a different way to people raised as women.   And we might well note that some of the voices of trans women – people who’ve been raised as men – are still given to speaking over women.

On the other side of the argument, nominally pro-trans, there’s been a tendency to over-simplify in the opposite direction.  The most vocal advocates for trans  claim that ‘trans women are women’.  The underlying assumption seems to be that there are only two categories that matter, men and women.  That leads to the proposition that people who do not fit one binary category must be redefined in terms of its opposite – with the consequence that trans people are expected to perform gender-based roles that may be inconsistent with their circumstances or capacities.  There’s no space left along a wide spectrum, let alone an acceptance that quite a few people find themselves somewhere in the middle.

A valuable report for the Scottish Trans Alliance offers a different perspective.  It considers the experience of people who feel they fit neither category – people who are ‘non-binary’.   The respondents used a wide range of terms to describe their position, but more than 80% were concerned that their gender identity simply wasn’t valid.   The respondents expressed their discomfort about being pressed into the wrong categories: “I find that most services can just about cope with the idea that you are transgender … but being non-binary is still beyond a lot of people’s comprehension.”  Liberals should uphold the ‘dignity of difference’ – but the thing about being different is that people are different because  they’re not the same.   I suspect that, in time to come, the binary position that is being advocated by some activists will be seen as crude, reductionist and failing to represent diversity.

Note that I haven’t said anything about hate crime yet.  That’s for another blog.