The impact of more welfare cuts

Reducing the welfare bill by a further £10bn is going to have a massive impact on children, families and communities. Bear in mind that existing cuts in welfare are only now starting to felt.

One target is apparently going to be feckless parents who have more than one child. This is not far from the Chinese population reduction strategy, but applied in a more targeted way.

The truth is that there are really not that many workless large families – so the savings will not be huge. And the losers will, as so often, be the children. It is entirely unfair for a child to be penalised because a) it has the temerity to be born into a workless family and b) has the further audacity to have two older siblings. And, on policy terms, will it work? Will it dissuade feckless potential fathers and mothers from having children?

Almost certainly not – feckless people are not those most likely to use contraception effectively, and they have (almost by definition) both time on their hands and not much else to do. I’m not arguing that there is nothing that can be done in terms of public policy to dissuade potential parents from having children, just that penalising families after the fact is not the way to do it.

We should also consider the broader economy.  In the borough where I live, Dudley, which is average on almost all measures, we might expect the welfare bill to reduce by perhaps 0.75% of the national total, that is around £70m. This is money that will be lost to those in poverty but also lost to the local economy, not being spent in local shops and so on. Now, in Dudley, which is average, or Westminster, which has great wealth alongside poverty, that won’t matter too much. But in communities that have very high unemployment, the loss to the local economy will have a severe impact. If you have not read Neville Shute’s Ruined City, try to; he is an unfashionable author but this novel documents brilliantly the lives of people in a former ship-building town during the 1930s before the welfare state.