Reform welfare policy: more of the same

Blogging wise I’m on light duty this week since I’m on holiday in deepest Somerset and baking in the August heat. It’s too hot to think this week - which is just as well because no serious thinking is required to dismantle Reform welfare policy, published today. As far as it goes, Doctor Johnson's dog springs to mind. Regardless of what's in it, that they've attempted it at all is something of a small wonder. My breath is not entirely wasted.

Before I go further, I must confess that welfare is a difficult area of policy and I’m a long way from satisfied with my own work on the Manifesto Project. If you looked at that chapter and thought it was rubbish, you’re not wrong. What I will say is that Reform and others are quite right to say that current levels of welfare spending is unsustainable. I’ve just not yet happened upon the right answer as to what to do about it. Reform’s foray, though, is less than compelling.

First off the bat, Reform is saying this is a comprehensive policy at fifty pages long, but as with Restore Britain’s efforts, much of it is padding, and if we’re being generous, only thirty pages of this document are actually of substance. It will be later in the week before I can do a more comprehensive review but there are two certainties this policy. It will not save as much as they think it will, and it will not be as easy as they think it is. It will also cost them more political capital than they'll have.

Their Welfare for Work policy, meanwhile, in which welfare claimants will be expected to perform duties such as litter picking and leaf/grate clearing, will not survive first contact with reality - and will likely cost more to administer than it saves. They're essentially talking about welfare chain gangs, which is Restore level slopulism.

The optics, for starters, don’t sit well. Around London, work squads will be predominantly unwilling black participants (often from rival gangs/ethnic origins) who will require additional training, security and supervision. You can also expect union protests because it should be paid work. If it's a job, make it a job. If not, it's just punishing young people for being out of work.

With any attempt at policy you have to assume that nothing you come up with is especially original, and that it has probably been tried or considered before, and if we're not doing it there's a often good reason. That is certainly the case with Welfare for Work schemes - as this blog has touched on before when Rupert Lowe mooted the same concept. In politics especially it is unwise to assume that you can make things work where others have failed.

The point for me is that a Reform government is not likely to have an absolute majority, and should not attempt reforms that will prevent them from being re-elected. Fix the foundations of the labour market first. Save the controversial stuff for when you have more power to play with. Policy that assumes absolute power and an absolute mandate is fantasising.

Their PIP reform, meanwhile, will create endless bad press. There will be massive assessment backlogs - because there always is, and it will be worse in poor areas. We will see endless edge case front page stores in The Mirror - just like the Bedroom Tax. It’s political suicide. Reforms have to be longer term and much more subtle. Ultimately, if you want to do something about the welfare bill, you have to increase the availability of work and make it pay. Tackle that first. One thing Reform would do well to keep in mind is that many of their disability benefit reforms will have major implications for their own voters base.

As to the proposal to ban all foreign nationals from receiving benefits, this is something I support in principle, and in fact, this is the key part of the entire policy. It certainly puts the writing on the wall. Under the proposals, foreign nationals will no longer qualify for Universal Credit, Housing Benefit, Pension Credit, Jobseeker's Allowance, Child Benefit, free childcare, or disability benefits. This, they say, will save an eye-catching, save £21bn per year.

The devil, of course, is in the detail. No doubt this will mobilise every activist lawyer, charity and NGO in the land, and will be subject to endless legal challenges. A lot of it is contingent on being able to pass primary legislation. While Reform believes leaving the ECHR will remove the main obstacles, the main pushback will come from settled EU citizens, and the EU will do doubt have something to say about it. Nigel Farage has tweeted “Those with EU settled status account for 58% of foreign welfare claimants. Reform will ban them from Britain's welfare state”.

Veterans of the Article 50 era will recall how the rights of EU citizens was a key pillar in Brexit negotiations, and this move runs the risk of collapsing the entire TCA, or incurring trade penalties. While I think this is an inadvisable course of action, not least because EU migrants are the least of our problems, there is a principled case for doing so, but the implications are huge. We need to see what Reform’s contingency plan is. I doubt their thinking has evolved much beyond the "WTO rules” shtick of 2019. That there is such a gaping omission is not a trivial oversight.

What troubles me about this policy is that it’s the work of Robert Jenrick, and it falls far sort of the standard I would expect from him having read some of his prior works. It suggests he was only as good as the researchers he had working for him in the Tory party, and suggests that Neil O’Brien was the real brains behind Jenrick’s slick presentation.

I will no doubt have more thoughts on this, especially as I further develop policy on the Manifesto Project, but for now I’m just going to enjoy the last few days of my holiday in Somerset. The main take-home point today is that Reform is finally putting meat on the bones of their tropes and slogans. While that is good news, the results are not promising. What we’re looking at is extruded verbal material that hasn’t been stress tested, and has little chance of succeeding. As such, loathsome though they might be, it still looks like the Tory party is the only party of the right capable of forming a halfway functioning government. This policy does little to change the perception that Reform is an unserious party.