Desmond Swayne MP writes on welfare dependency

370,000 Foreign Born Welfare Claimants - 'Undeserving Poor'?

The figure of 370,000 foreign born claimants in receipt of out of out of work welfare benefits tells us something about the link between immigration and our welfare state we could never quantify before, because the data was never previously collected. It is only this government that for the first time has collected the key information about how many migrants are also benefit claimants. The release of this information may well reinforce a number of prejudices, but it does not tell us the one piece of information that we most want to know: how many of the 370,000 actually deserve the benefits they are getting. Of course, that is an entirely subjective judgement and even if we all knew the facts about any one of the 370,000 –how long and hard they had been working before they became unemployed, were they the victim of misfortune or did they contribute in some way to their loss of employment, how diligently are they looking for work now –we still might well not agree about the extent to which they are deserving or undeserving.

In this respect these 370,000 foreign born claimants do not differ from remainder of the 5 million or so claimants of out of work benefits: we have little idea of their individual stories on which to base any judgement of whether they have been genuinely unfortunate or just idle.

This is the dilemma that has been at the heart of our historic attempts to alleviate poverty: how to you assist the ‘deserving poor’ without at the same time rewarding -and encouraging- the ‘undeserving poor’. In the eighteen thirties this problem was resolved by the implementation principle of “less eligibility” which was the product of Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian philosophy summed up in the motto “the greater good for the greater number”. Basically, in order to discourage undeserving welfare claimants, life in receipt of welfare had to be ‘less eligible’, i.e. harsher, than the meanest form of independent existence. In practice this meant removal to the workhouse –a prospect that brought dread to generations of working class families and which is seared into our collective folk memory by the novels of Charles Dickens.

We are still grappling with the same policy dilemma. There may be huge practical differences in our modern welfare policy but is the principle so very different?

The cornerstone of this government’s attempt to get a grip on our ballooning welfare bill and growing culture of dependency is to impose a ‘benefit cap’ on households. This is the key feature of the bill which is causing such controversy in the House of Lords and which will return to the Commons next week with their amendments. The argument that we make is that it is simply unfair and wrong that a household on benefits can be better off and afford to live in better housing than a working household. Is that so different from the principle of ‘less eligibility’? I don’t think so. The difference is purely practical: instead of taking them to the workhouse we are capping their benefits at £25,000 (if you were working you would have to earn £36,000 to have the same disposable income as a household on benefits of £25,000). If anything, I think that this policy errs on the side of generosity.

My prejudice however, is this: we are not being overwhelmed by a tide of immigrants and welfare tourists drawn here to exploit our generous benefits, rather that hard working foreigners are keen to come here to take up jobs that so many of our own welfare-cushioned people won’t do. You will not get rich living on welfare, but you can just about get by comfortably enough. So why would you want to go out to work for 40 hours a week with all the aggravation and expense of commuting, only to be a couple of quid or so worse off than you would have been if you had stayed at home and had a lie-in every morning.

Of course even the thought of such behaviour is to insult those unemployed people who would do absolutely anything to get a job, but then we are back to the problem of how the state can distinguish between them and the undeserving. The truth is that it can’t.