Governments to blame for welfare dependency

This blog concentrates on benefit fraud. A commenter recently accused it of being fixated on one subject. Well, there's plenty of benefit fraud about - at least £3.5bn a year with much more under the surface.

Now Fraser Nelson summarises some wider problems of the benefits system, saying that

The biggest evil in Britain today is welfare dependency.

He points to welfare ghettoes, where crime is high and life expectancy low. We pay nearly half a million people under 35 to stay at home on incapacity benefit while we swell our population with immigrants to do the jobs they won't. He returns to the point powerfully made recently by Ian Duncan Smith that marginal rates of withdrawal can simply make going into work unattractive.

Consider a young bloke on the dole. Right now he gets £96 a week via Jobseekers, housing benefit and what have you.

Say he goes to work in a shop for five hours a week at six quid an hour. His income rises to just £101. Why? Because while he earns £30, he loses £25 of benefits. So he’s working five hours for just five quid.

Say he doubles his shift to TEN hours. Then his income stays at £101 because he loses the Jobseekers’ Allowance.

And if he TREBLES his hours to 15 hours a week, he loses even more benefits and takes home £106 a week.

Do we need to spell it out further? This means his “work pays” an effective rate of 66p an hour.

What idiot would do that? Not me. I’d stay at home with the JSA and Sky Plus. So, I suspect, would Yvette Cooper.

People making this rational decision aren't 'scroungers'. The failure's not with them, it's with government. It's their responsibility to get this right. No recent government - Labour or Conservative - has.

The UK welfare system has 51 different payments, explained by 14 manuals over 8,900 pages.

The complexity has created a net in which millions of British people are now trapped. Freeing them takes effort.

That's a huge failure of governments.