Conservatives are winning hands down on welfare. The bishops in the House of Lords led a successful rebellion against the totemic £26,000 benefits cap—their aim was to prevent child benefit from being limited along with other welfare payments. But the government may force the cap through the Lords anyway. Labour and the Lib Dems are quiescent. Jobless, and poor people more generally, rarely vote, making them politically, as well as economically, marginal. The recession has not made people in work feel more generous to those out of work.
The sense that people should “pull their socks up” has a long history. The Tudor Poor Law put the able-bodied poor to work. Those able but unwilling to work could be sent to a House of Correction or prison. The Christian concept of “stewardship,” a responsibility to work productively as best we can, meant that idleness and begging were seen as worthy
JOHN_MUNFORD
The role of housing costs, and the benefits awarded to help meet them, complicate this picture. Where rents are low, jobs are scarce – and vice versa. It’s hard to get a room in a flat in London for less than £140 a week, and if you add £30 for average travel to work costs, £10 towards council tax, and another £15 for lunch money, there’s not much left from £200. A minimum wage job at 40 hours a week pays around £250, minus NI and income tax, plus tax credits (soon to be reduced). This all adds up to about £260 a week – compared with about £210 on JSA and HB. An overall gain of fifty quid is not much to motivate anyone out of unemployment is it?