The Government’s arguments over the proposed benefit cap appear, to me anyway, to be fundamentally flawed. The figure of £26k which is supposed to represent the average annual salary might well be the place to start, but the government is looking at this in the wrong way for several reasons.

Firstly, the 67000 households who claim more than the £26k do this because of their circumstances. A family of five are always going to claim more than a single person who shares a flat with friends or lives with his/her parents. Some folks have large families, and whilst there certainly are arguments against the state footing the bill for this, there are explanations for this. Religious freedom, something we prize and hold dear in this country, sometimes means that certain folks will have larger than average families. The orthodox Jewish communities are just one example of this. Widowed folks might also be in the same situation. Life has a sometimes cruel way of forcing people into unfortunate and unforeseen circumstances. Unemployment very often reduces the family income to a point where they rely on benefits to make sure that their children don’t suffer unnecessarily.

Secondly, most of this £26K does not find it’s way into the pockets of the claimants, but goes instead directly to their landlords. Our economic mismanagement; the boom and bust years; political control of interest rates…all of these have lead to artificially high and ultimately unsustainable property prices. This translates directly into artificially high rents, which claimants have no control over. Telling them to move to cheaper areas with lower property rents is a short term and artificial saving, as rents will rise in these areas as demand increases. But what about the children who will be forced to uproot, move school, and leave behind social and support networks? How will the demand for extra school places in the ‘lower rent’ areas be met? And what about the schools from which these children have been forced to exit? Surplus capacity also costs money to maintain. School closure battles will commence in some areas whilst over demand will lead to expensive short term accommodation solutions for other areas…and extra medical services will need to be established to cope with an influx of new patients…the list goes on. Moving these families (half of the 67,000 live in London) is a false economy in the long run, and do we really expect them to move large distances away, deconstructing and reconstructing their entire lives? Just to save what will in fact be a pittance? I am coming to the view that this proposal is based on populist scaremongering (a la Daily Mail) and social stigmatisation of a particular group of people. This kind of thing happened in Germany and Italy during the first half of the last century and we are in danger of heading down a similar road. Many of these claimants are disabled and have special needs. The government is in danger of being seen as picking upon this vulnerable group who very often lack the means to fight back. We need rent controls to deal with this, and ultimately, more social housing will force greedy landlords to lower their rents to more realistic and affordable levels, or sell up and get out. The landlords must be quite happy that the claimants are taking the flak for the high cost of housing rather than themselves!

Thirdly, if people are forced out of their homes because of this proposal, then their local councils have to pick up the pieces by rehousing them. Short term accommodation is probably going to be more expensive than the properties they have had to vacate…so where’s the saving there, Mr Duncan-Smith!

Fourthly, we don’t include child benefit when we calculate the ‘average’ wage. So why should benefit claimants loose this due to their high housing benefit claim? Are we really saying that a family with , say an income of £100K can claim child benefit, but a family on benefits ( maybe due to disability) can not?

Kate and Wills, if they’re blessed with a child could claim but a crippled single mother of three cannot?. This is just crazy.

Fifthly (!) The aim of these proposals is to ‘encourage’ the claimants back into employment. Well, it might do this to some, but the flaw in this argument is that a large proportion of the 67,000 will never be able to work due to disability of because they are carers ( who incidentally, save this country a small fortune in care costs ). Why should they be forced to move, their already stretched incomes cut further to satisfy this Tory populist blood-lust? Social services and the NHS will have to pick up the tab here with revised care assessments, adjustments to new homes, and increased levels of ill health.

Are the LibDems really supportive of these changes? I hope they force the government to have a rethink. Where are the real cost savings, if any, from these proposals taking into account the many indirect costs. Or is it that the Government wants to gain more control over local government spending by the back door of increasing need, which these proposals, if they become law, almost certainly will. Labour needs to step up to the plate and be an opposition. Here in Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon is already talking of not giving Scottish Government approval to the legislation. Good on her for standing up for the moral imperative to do what’s right in society, where the principle of taking care of those less fortunate should be a hallmark, not a cost limited cosh…

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