Welfare Archives - Red Brick

John Humphrys evidently gets paid around £375,000 a year to be rude to people on the radio in the mornings, around £2,500 a show, and another £250,000 for presenting
Mastermind. Evidently he charges the equivalent of a year’s Jobseekers Allowance for an after dinner speech.
Radio 4 is intolerable in my view when he is on. I suspect the ancient Greeks invented the word hubris with Humphrys in mind. But for some reason he and the BBC feel that he is particularly well qualified to spend a year researching and then presenting a documentary on the welfare system and the ‘benefit dependency culture’. No doubt he has some insight because he is dependent for his enormous income for doing next-to-bugger-all on the licence fee; it takes many people on very low incomes to fund his grand lifestyle.
Humphrys trails his views in advance of the programme, which goes out tonight, in the
Daily Mail, well known for its balanced view of welfare recipients. With the kind of originality and sublety that Humphreys himself is noted for, they give the article prominence by including a large picture of the Gallagher family and the headline ‘Our Shameless society’.
His basic premise is that a ‘dependency culture has emerged’: ‘A sense of entitlement. A sense that the State owes us a living. A sense that not only is it possible to get something for nothing but that we have a right to do so.’ He travels the country searching out people who are happy not to work. And he visits Iain Duncan Smith’s Centre for Social Justice, no doubt to get a balanced view (why not Child Poverty Action Group?). And then he goes for single parents, with no context, no information, no acknowledgement that most single
parents exist because of failed relationships rather than ‘Shameless’ families.
Cutting benefits evidently works in Poland and in the USA – our hero visits the USA (at our expense) and talks to Larry Mead, the ‘godfather of workfare’, who tells him cutting benefits works. To give him credit, he does note that destitution and hunger are also rife in the USA.
Humphrys writes about the Ipsos Mori poll done for the programme which showed that 92% agreed that there should be a benefits safety net, but that ‘only’ two-thirds* think it is working effectively. Only? I’d like to see the questions and the figures, but evidently people were ‘particularly suspicious’ about sickness benefit and ‘pretty hawkish’ about housing benefit, with a lot of support for forcing people living in expensive areas to move to cheaper accommodation.
At least Humphrys offers more balance than is normal in the Mail, by saying: ‘The problem is, for every claimant who makes you want to scream in frustration because they’re perfectly happy to be living off the State, you meet another who makes you want
to weep because they are so desperate to find work. Any work.’
But he ends firmly in Mail territory: ‘Beveridge tried to slay the fifth evil giant (idleness) and, in the process, helped to create a different sort of monster in its place: the age of entitlement. The battle for his successors is to bring it to an end.’
For a genuine counterpoint, I strongly recommend Declan Gaffney’s retort to Humphrys on Left Foot Forward. Gaffney is a real expert and doesn’t need to spend a year and a lot of licence fee payers’ money to find out about the welfare system. He destroys Humphrys’ use of the statistics of modern worklessness, incapacity, and single parenthood, and demonstrates that ‘welfare dependency’ has not, in fact, grown. He demonstrates that areas with concentrations of benefit recipients, like Humphrys’ birthplace Splott, which he revisits, are ‘highly responsive to labour market conditions: the opposite of what is
suggested by the ‘welfare dependency’ theory’.
I have argued before that debate about welfare policy and housing policy has become dominated by right wing language and stereotypes of the Shameless type, talk of chavs and the rest. It is so pervasive that Labour often falls into the Tory trap: attacking the unemployed is so much easier than attacking unemployment.
But the welfare system is viewed differently from the rest of the welfare state. As Declan Gaffney argues: ‘When there is a major scandal in the NHS, this does not lead people to question the principle of healthcare free at the point of delivery; when schools send young people out into the world without qualifications, pundits don’t line up to argue it’s time to drop the idea of universal education. But any evidence, however anecdotal, of failure on the part of the social security system leads to calls for its very existence to be put into question.’
I hope Humphrys’ programme isn’t as prejudicial as his Mail article and that the presentation is more balanced. I guess I’ll have to force myself to watch it to find out. And I hope to hear Declan Gaffney on Newsnight and the Today programme putting him right.
*Update – some people might notice that the figure used in the documentary is different from the one I have quoted here (two thirds). That’s because I used the figure quoted by Humphrys in his Mail article. Either the Mail article or the film must have been wrong. Shoddy – like the rest of it.

Picking up Tony’s theme in our last post, our guest blogger seeks to answer the same question.
Monimbo
In housing circles there have been debates for years about the ‘role’ of council housing or more widely social housing, and of course these were given a further boost byJohnHills’ report in 2007. Before the election, as readers of red Brick are probably well aware, think tanks were falling over themselves to redefine – and usually narrow – social housing’s role.
But recently there have been even more worrying developments – typified by the media castigation of Bob Crowe for living in council housing which Steve covered in an earlier blog. Nothing could be more typical of the recent trend than the disgraceful article by Mary Dejevsky about fraudulent tenancies, which called for all council tenancies to be ended on 1st April 2013 at which point there would be a sort of moratorium and people (presumably by now waiting outside the front gates of their houses) would have to justify their entitlement to a continued tenancy.
As CIH’s Abi Davies has pointed out, while of course social housing is part of the welfare state, it is not ‘welfare’ in the sense that it’s only available when needed like a hospital emergency service. There has always been ambiguity about these issues in the media, most of whose commentators probably know and care little about social housing, but the recent trend is marked by a succession of coded comments about the sector by ministers, which are then regurgitated in the usual exaggerated ways by the media to produce a general picture of tenants who want to live in social housing long-term somehow being abusers of the system.
Steve has previously written about the misleading term ‘tenancies for life’, which is part of this slur campaign, when security of tenure is simply about proper consumer protection. CIH is about to publish a book, Housing and Inequality, which reminds readers that housing policy is about people’s homes and the home is a key ingredient of people’s happiness. This is something deliberately overlooked in current debate about security of tenure, the need for more ‘mobility’ and the issue of ‘underoccupation’. It is almost as if there are two housing systems, one in which owner-occupiers with adequate and secure incomes have an almost unthreatened dominion over their homes, while the more than one third of households who are not owners or who have only a tenuous grip on ownership have to live with much less security and less right to regard their house as their home at all.
The other slur is to describe council housing (in particular) as ‘subsidised housing’. There are several issues here. One is that all tenures are subsidised – the last government spent about £1bn in its last year subsidising owner-occupiers, for example. Of course social tenants pay sub-market rents, partly because of historic grants and subsidies and partly because social landlords are non-profit. However, if someone shops at the Co-op, we don’t describe his shopping as ‘subsidised’, do we?
Let me make a positive proposal to address this particular issue, at least as far as council housing is concerned. In a year’s time (April 2012) council housing becomes self-financing, and this presents a golden opportunity to kick the ‘subsidised’ tag. The Treasury is forcing councils to take on £6.5bn of extra debt, not currently in the system, to compensate the Exchequer for the profits (yes, profits) it would have made if council housing had still be on its books.
Let’s make a virtue of this necessity. Every Labour councillor, every council, the LGA, trade bodies like ARCH and the NFA, the CIH, trade unions, the four national tenants’ organisations – all should plan to publicly celebrate on 1^st April 2012 the fact that council housing will have paid off its historic debts to government. From April next year it will no longer be subsidised, and in fact it will be making a modest return to reinvest in the homes it provides. Non-profit, yes, but subsidised – no!