Welfare reform is popular - so popular that most people will support a policy described as ‘welfare reform’ without being sure what it contains.
This is why a growing list of problems, political objections and egregious mishandling of individual cases in Northern Ireland is failing to set the agenda. Not enough people care, nor will they care unless both welfare and reform are presented in a different manner. There may be widespread sympathy for claimants treated unjustly but this is clearly seen as the unfortunate price of a necessary ‘crackdown’. Changing that view means facing up to the fact that it contains an element of truth.
The UK’s current welfare reform policy, centred around the introduction of Universal Credit, has enjoyed the consistent support of three quarters of the population since the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition announced it in 2010.
This finding recurs across multiple surveys and opinion polls with no meaningful variation by income - people on the minimum wage are only one or two percentage points less keen on cutting benefits than people in the highest tax bracket.
Cutting rather than reforming is where the attraction lies.
Universal Credit was meant to end the benefit trap, ensuring nobody was penalised for returning to work. The government warned this would involve an up-front cost before savings were realised. Research showed around 75 per cent of the public endorsed this philosophy - a figure so high Labour was shocked into saying it would back the reforms if they were properly funded.
However, when chancellor George Osborne gutted the Universal Credit budget in 2015, ensuring it could not work, 75 per cent endorsed that as well.
There were signs of this public cynicism from the outset. The most supposedly controversial aspect of Universal Credit at its introduction was the benefit cap for individual households, yet this was the most popular policy of all, scoring up to 77 per cent.
Opinion in Northern Ireland has closely matched the UK figures, with one sadly hilarious exception. Welfare reform was the subject of a DUP-Sinn Féin stand-off between 2012 and 2015. As this crisis deepened, public opinion divided along tribal lines. By 2014 it had reached an almost perfect unionist/nationalist split.
Then the 2015 Fresh Start agreement officially resolved the argument and public support promptly snapped back to 72 per cent across the board, in a survey commissioned by Stormont nine months later. This included 72 per cent support for replacing disability benefits with Personal Independence Payments (PIP). A follow-up survey last year produced identical results. Yet both surveys revealed enormous confusion over the purpose of welfare reform, with the public largely clueless over how the benefits system works and what reform is meant to accomplish. For example, popular opinion massively over-estimates the share of unemployment benefits in the welfare budget. For most people, the vague sense of an axe being swung is apparently good enough.
This is unlikely to change now that significant issues are emerging with universal credit, both with its implementation and with the Fresh Start mitigation package. The bedroom tax will start to ramp up in just over a year with effectively no suitable properties having been built. There is a growing perception, supported by horrendous reported incidents, that PIP reassessments are a cynical exercise in targeting the vulnerable to see if they manage to appeal.
So where is the public outrage, or even notable disquiet? It is evident that many people view official cynicism as an apt response to the cynicism they feel about the benefits system - a case of fighting fire with fire.
This is obviously the worst possible approach to ‘reform’ and is a particularly tragic fate for Universal Credit, which started out with honourable intentions.
The task of tackling this cynicism, essential to developing a better benefits system, has gone beyond the usual complaints about tabloid monstering of ‘scroungers’ and claims of the social classes being played off against each other. There needs to be an honest assessment of why the public has developed compassion fatigue. We are bombarded in Northern Ireland with excessive claims of the level of need - that is one obvious culprit in driving doubt and weariness about the still very real levels of genuine hardship.
If you constantly tell people that one third of the population ‘lives in poverty’ or one in five ‘have a disability’, and insist every case is of unquestionably equal merit despite everyone’s lived experience, why would they believe you when things really start to go wrong?
newton@irishnews.com
