Breakthrough or Breakdown?
The Welfare Secretary Iain Duncan Smith was in East Belfast today attending the launch of a report from his Centre for Social Justice think tank which contained some pretty gloomy statistics about poverty here. According to we have the highest rate of economic inactivity in the UK, 63,000 children living in poverty, a sharp increase in the divorce rate and drug related deaths, and 72% of men between 18 and 29 binge drinking at least once a week.
Mr Duncan Smith doesn't think you can chuck money at these problems. Instead he says you must tackle what he calls the five drivers of poverty "welfare dependency, family breakdown, educational failure, drug and alcohol addiction, and debt."
Local voluntary groups attenidng the launch appeared concerned over the Welfare Secretary's talk of "conditionality", under which people would lose their benefits if they weren't ready and available to take work. As this blog reported back in May claims here for incapacity benefit and income support are well above the UK average.
Mr Duncan Smith defended his approach as commonsense. Helping people back to work, he argued, provided more than just economic value, it also gave them a renewed purpose in their lives. He attacked the current system as "byzantine" promising a new unified appraoch tapering benefits away in order to ensure people had a clear incentive to work.
The SDLP leader Margaret Ritchie entered a note of caution. She argued that people in Northern Ireland had fewer opportunities to work and a lack of affordable child care. She appealed for local "areas of flexibility" should Mr Duncan Smith push ahead with his ideas.
It's hard to imagine the kind of changes the Welfare Secretary is talking about being implemented in a hurry. Introducing a Universal Welfare Credit to replace the multitude of different benefits would be a huge task. Many would approve of attempts to move society here away from welfare dependency. But those reliant on benefits will no doubt fear that, despite all Mr Duncan Smith's talk of improving their lives, they will end up as the targets of a cost cutting policy. One Stormont aide later suggested to me that what we might see is not a swift wholesale change, but a series of pilot schemes testing out the new approach in areas of the UK. This could be a slow burn, but the eventual implications for Northern Ireland should not be underestimated.
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