The Government's benefit cap plans were defeated in the House of Lords this week, in part by a group of Anglican bishops, on moral grounds. But the former archbishop of Canterbury has come out against their stance. Is the benefits cap a moral problem? Who's right, asks John Humphrys, as he explores the issues
The Government was defeated in the House of Lords this week over its plans to cap welfare benefits to families. Its defeat was brought about in part by a group of Anglican bishops who objected to the measure on moral grounds. But their stance has since been attacked by their old boss, Lord Carey, the former archbishop of Canterbury. So who’s right?
Central to the Government’s whole economic and political strategy is its determination to reduce the state’s debts. In a week when the size of that debt has topped one trillion pounds for the first time in our history, everyone seems to agree that we should stop it growing so fast. That means reining in the Government’s annual deficit by raising taxes and cutting spending. The biggest item of spending is welfare.
The Government will spend £192 billion this year on welfare payments of one sort or another so it was always inevitable that the welfare budget would be a prime candidate for cuts. Among the measures it is proposing is that there should, for the first time, be a cap on the amount any household can receive in welfare benefits. The Government wants to put that cap at £350 a week for single adults without children and £500 a week for working-age families. That means no family could receive more than £26,000 a year in benefits.
In fact this proposal would not save an awful lot of money. The Government estimates it would affect only about 67,000 families when it is due to come into force in 2013: that’s only 1% of benefit claimants. The saving would be around £300 million a year which, in relation to the total welfare budget, is very small beer indeed.
But the Government says that saving money is only part of its motivation. Iain Duncan Smith, the Work and Pensions Secretary, has long argued that the benefit system creates a dependency culture which is harmful to those in its clutches because it destroys any incentive they might have to take responsibility and improve their own lives. In this respect, he argues, the current system is immoral.
For example, under the present system of potentially unlimited benefits, some out-of-work families living in expensive rented accommodation paid for through housing benefit risk losing some of that benefit and the ability to stay in their expensive homes if one of them tries to get a job. So they don’t. But how can it be good for them, Mr Duncan Smith asks, just to stay at home all day doing nothing? And is it morally right that hard-working families on tight budgets should have to pay taxes to make it possible for them to do so? The Government’s case, then, is as much moral as financial.
But that’s not how the bishops saw it. Their chief concern was how the Government was proposing to add up the benefits that would then be subject to the cap. Their leading spokesman, the Bishop of Ripon and Leeds, the Rt. Rev. John Packer, objected to the Government’s plan to include child benefit in the calculation.
His argument is that because child benefit is a universal benefit, paid to all families with children irrespective of their incomes, it should be excluded from the assessment of the benefit cap. He said of child benefit: “It’s a benefit which is there for all children, for the bringing up of all children, and to say that the only people who cannot have child benefit are those whose welfare benefits have been capped seems to me to be a quite extraordinary argument.”
Enver Solomon, the policy director of The Children’s Society, spelt this point out by arguing that it would be wrong for unemployed people with large families to be deprived of child benefit once their other benefits exceeded £26,000 while working parents of small families earning together, say, £80,000 or so would be able to go on receiving the benefit.
The Bishop of Leeds persuaded his fellow peers, including some leading Liberal Democrats, to exclude child benefit and his amendment was passed by fifteen votes. Labour, which says that it is in favour of a cap in principle, voted against the Government, arguing that it was doing so in order to allow further discussion of the matter to take place in the Commons.
There, the Government says it is determined to reverse its defeat. Excluding child benefit from the calculation would render the whole exercise 'pointless', Mr Duncan Smith said, as it would allow some families to earn up to £50,000 a year in benefits alone.
In sticking to its guns, the Government finds itself helped, perhaps surprisingly, by another prelate, the former archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey, who has written an article in the Daily Mail sharply critical of his episcopal colleagues. Lord Carey disputes any idea that the bishops who backed the amendment can 'lay claim to the moral high ground'. He argues that the 'greatest moral scandal' facing the country is the scale of the Government’s debt because it is mortgaging the future of our children and grandchildren.
But his main argument is that the current welfare system is 'fuelling those very vices' it is supposed to be curing, in that it 'rewards fecklessness and irresponsibility'. And he accuses the bishops of being out of touch with the moral attitudes of many people in the country. He wrote: 'Considering that the system they are defending can mean some families are able to claim a total of £50,000 a year in welfare benefits, the bishops must have known that popular opinion was against them including that of many hard-working, hard-pressed churchgoers.' Allowing present arrangements to persist risked 'stoking social division', he said.
So the battle over the welfare budget has reached a most intriguing position. It is not now simply a matter of whether money should be saved or not. It’s also about two conflicting views of morality, each espoused by leading figures in the Church of England. Who’s right?
What’s your view?
- Is the Government right or not in principle to want to cap the amount that families can receive in benefits?
- Should child benefit, a universal benefit paid irrespective of income, be included in the calculation of the cap, or not?
- What do you make of the argument that, if it were (as the Government proposes), child benefit would go on being paid to families with high-earning breadwinners but would be stopped for large families whose breadwinners are out of work and that this is wrong?
- Do you think it is right that child benefit should be a universal benefit?
- What do you make of the argument that it is simply wrong for ‘hard-working, hard-pressed’ families to be paying taxes to finance benefits paid to families who might end up earning far more than them?
- Do you think the welfare budget should be cut substantially, or not?
- And do you think the current system does ‘reward fecklessness and irresponsibility’, or not?
Let us know what you think in the comment box below.
