Reframing the debate requires a different, more accurate account of welfare
Declan Gaffney looks at ‘the people Labour forgot about’, and discusses disability, benefits and reframing the debate on welfare cuts.
Declan Gaffney
Grayling’s “ticking time bomb” – more misdirection from IDS’s DWP?
New DWP figures throw little light on household worklessness in Britain, and none whatsoever on youth unemployment, the purported subject of today’s stories.
IDS is doubly wrong on housing benefit and rent inflation
Declan Gaffney shows how IDS has used figures on Local Housing Allowance deceptively argue the burden of the cuts would fall on landlords
Housing benefit cuts: Just how desperate is the secretive DWP?
When government ministers resort to briefing what purports to be new statistical evidence on important policy issues to selected lobby journalists rather than making it available to the public, it is clear indication that they are unsure of their ground. The Department for Work and Pensions has been a hotbed of this sort of quasi-official briefing for several months, as has been pointed out here and by FullFact.
Who will be affected by the housing benefit cuts?
Welfare systems need to address two different types of situation faced by working age households. They need to provide short-to-medium term support for living costs in response to labour market fluctuations and frictional unemployment; and longer term support for those who are without a market income for extended periods (in practice many households are located on a continuum between these two poles).
Getting worklessness wrong, again
‘Worklessness’ is one of those terms which means one thing in specialist usage and something quite different in political discourse and media commentary.
Big words, small numbers: Jeremy Hunt talks tough
Tory ministers’ world view seems to consist of two types of people: ‘people on benefits’ and ‘working people who have to pay the taxes to pay those benefits’.
Not so tough, not so fair: The coalition cannot be trusted on welfare reform
Mr Osborne’s attack today on out-of-work benefits and his rhetoric on ‘fair play’ lack credibility, and mean the coalition cannot be trusted on welfare reform.
The myth of the intergenerational workless household
References to the pattern of intergenerational worklessness in households are rarely accompanied by any relevant statistics on the no. of households involved.
The paradoxical stability of welfare expenditure (and why we should be spending more)
Whether they express their views in the élite language of economic or fiscal ‘unsustainability’ or the demotic of ‘welfare scoungers’, everyone apart from a handful of unreconstructed egalitarians seems to agree that welfare spending is too high.