From page 5 of the DWP's white paper on welfare reform (pdf):
... we know that work, and the improved incomes that flow from it, have beneficial effects in terms of people’s health and well-being, the educational achievements of children and improvements in communities, such as reduced crime and anti-social behaviour. It is difficult to quantify these effects precisely but their existence is not in doubt.
Broadly agreed, the figure for the social and economic cost of the welfare state, in its current form, is huge, but we don't know what it is. This document is proudly signed by Iain Duncan Smith, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions.
This is presumably the same Iain Duncan Smith whose signature appears under an article on the website of his own think tank, (this is just one of hundreds of articles and reports which referred to the £102 billion figure in 2008 and 2009) containing this particular hostage to fortune right at the end:
A stronger voluntary sector, enabled by government not usurped by it, builds a stronger society where people take more responsibility for their lives. In damaging economic times, with the annual cost of social breakdown well over £102 billion, this is more essential than it has ever been.
Had he just said £100 billion, then fine, that means "somewhere between £50 billion and £150 billion", but he added that extra £2 billion at the end and stuck to it through thick and thin.
Monday, 15 November 2010
More Fun With Iain Duncan Smith
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5 comments:
My good feeling towards what Duncan Smith claimed to be trying to do is disappearing fast. He has made a right bloody pigs ear of this reform. We need a DWP minister who will go on a mass sacking spree of civil servants and keep the ones who genuinely want to see a simpler system rather than those who want complexity as it keeps them in the job.
My missus has a bigger set of balls than IDS!!
SW: "He has made a right bloody pigs ear of this reform."
Agreed. But I don't think he's lacking in balls as much as he is lacking in brains, he doesn't seem to realise that it's civil servants who are the enemy, and they have duly hijacked the whole thing.
SW, I don't think balls have anything to do with it. He doesn't have the power to go on a mass sacking spree. "The Government" is made up of two parts, the Legislature, which is the MPs and the Lords, and the Executive, which is mainly the Civil Service. The Legislature makes laws, the Executive runs the country. Try watching "Yes Minister" again.
B, from where I'm sitting, we'd be better off with a dead simple Citizen's Income welfare system that can be run by a few thousand fraud investigators people and a robust computer (like Child Benefit).
If he really wants to employ 300,000 or so people at DWP and HMRC, we'd be better off if they sat round drinking tea and playing tiddly-winks, rather than making welfare deliberately complicated. Hopefully, over time, they'd get bored and get proper jobs instead.
we'd be better off if they sat round drinking tea and playing tiddly-winks
I am sure there are huge swathes of the public (and the subsidised private) sector for which that is true, however, we are not in the C18th now and the government has to con the electorate that these people are doing something useful, rather than simply handing out sinecures.
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