Let's get the feckless to buy food - not fags and booze

By Simon Heffer for the Daily Mail

Published: 01:14 GMT, 5 April 2014 | Updated: 01:14 GMT, 5 April 2014

Although the Government has capped its welfare spending at £119.5 billion a year, the amount of taxpayers’ money directed to those who stubbornly refuse to work is still far too high.

What’s more, a shockingly large amount of that money is squandered by many recipients, rather than being used to provide essentials for their families.

If the Tories win the 2015 election, the economy will still be in such a precarious position that this burgeoning welfare budget will have to be cut further.

Iain Duncan Smith, the Work and Pensions Secretary, has achieved great things as a minister, not least by reducing the availability of benefits and encouraging people out of welfare dependency and into jobs.

Waste: Too many welfare recipients spend the money on idle pursuits, like Frank Gallagher from Shameless

However, the process of reform must go much further.

Last winter, Anglican bishops and the new Roman Catholic Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster cynically joined the Left to claim that a ‘national crisis’ had driven half a million people to use food banks.

Government ministers knew that was nonsense. The level of benefits is, they believe, sufficient to feed those who receive them.

Though Leftists cynically exploit the existence of food banks as proof that a Tory-led government has inflicted terrible hardship on the poor, there is a widespread belief that some people use them because they have chosen to spend their money, instead, on drink, tobacco, slot machines, tattoos or pornography. This leaves little cash to buy food.

Mr Duncan Smith has been searching for solutions to this problem and nearly 18 months ago asked officials to look for new ways that might ensure benefits are not wasted.

Meanwhile, Left-leaning think-tank Demos made its own revolutionary suggestion.

It advocated that prepaid cards, rather like debit cards, should be given to claimants for some benefits.

Such a system would involve cards being loaded with money whenever a benefit payment is due. They would work by being pre-programmed so claimants can only buy essential goods — and withdraw just a small amount of cash.

Demos called for a ‘frank debate’ on the issue and said that such cards might ‘remove temptation’ from people to waste welfare money, and would also help them with savings and budgeting.

A similar scheme was pioneered in America, where, in 1996, the Clinton administration successfully introduced the suitably named Personal Responsibility And Work Opportunity Act.

Welfare recipients were issued with prepaid cards programmed to be used to buy only food and household goods.

Several councils in this country have followed. For example, Kent County Council has piloted prepaid cards for some services.

As well as enabling social services to control how taxpayers’ money is spent, they allow a much more efficient administration of the hand-out system. Mr Duncan Smith is intrigued by the potential of all this.

He sees such cards as a possible way to give people who don’t have a bank account the so-called universal credit — his new form of benefits that will merge all existing ones.

Also, they could be the answer to the age-old problem of how to make sure that benefits are spent wisely by those Mr Duncan Smith calls ‘troubled’ families — an estimated 120,000 households in England with lifestyles marked by crime, drug abuse and bad parenting that are trapped in welfare dependency.

However, I am told that, predictably, the Lib Dems are blocking Mr Duncan Smith because they object to the idea of the state trying to police how taxpayers’ money is spent by benefit claimants.

What a bovine attitude! Harnessing technology to help ensure that welfare money is not spent on drink, drugs or slot machines is not only a brilliant idea but a potential vote-winner.

Introducing such a system would mean that welfare money is spent only on basics such as food, energy or rent.

Retailers would be invited to sign up as part of an approved merchant scheme and would  benefit by having guaranteed custom in return.

Now technology needs to be improved to guarantee that the cards can only be used for certain approved items.

In America, the system relies on cashiers refusing to accept the card for anything not covered by the scheme.

But it ought to be possible to devise a system whereby tills would reject items with barcodes that have not been programmed as acceptable.

In our increasingly electronically dominated world, surely this is the sensible way to go about dispensing welfare.

Such a system would continue to provide the poor with a safety net, but would also send out the important message to the unemployed that if they want money to pay for things other than essentials, they should earn the money by getting a job.

After all, this government, thanks to Iain Duncan Smith’s policies, has been successful in getting more people than ever before into work.

Some people, though, still need extra encouragement to get off welfare — and restricting how they spend their benefits might be just the incentive required.

The Farage/Clegg debates confirmed two important points.

The first is that Nick Clegg is out of touch with the vast majority of British people, who either ignore or despise him.

The second is the clever way that Nigel Farage is increasingly associating Ukip — a party until recently believed to constitute solely disgruntled Tory voters — with the white working class.

Vince's betrayal of the young

Ed Miliband wants tuition fees cut from £9,000 to £6,000 a year — which would leave universities with a £1.7 billion deficit. If that meant closing poor courses and even poor institutions, I’d agree it might be no bad thing. For the current system isn’t working.

Currently, 45 per cent of student loans are written off.

University funding — run for vanity purposes out of Vince Cable’s inept Business Department rather than by the Education Department — is in chaos, causing huge damage to students and the institutions they attend.

A huge concentration of Russian military power along its borders suggests that Vladimir Putin might be planning an invasion of the rest of Ukraine, Moldova or the Baltic states.

I fear our weak leaders are in denial about this very grave threat. They had better face facts urgently and be prepared for a rapid and severe response.

Private schools pay their way

The Left continues to snipe about private schools, and particularly the £100 million tax break they get by having charitable status.

This week, figures showed these schools pay £4.7 billion tax a year and provide 275,000 jobs.

That strikes me as a good return on the annual £100 million — not forgetting the fact that thousands of poor children are given free places every year.

Also, the already creaking state system would collapse if the 550,000 or so pupils in the private sector suddenly turned up to be taught at state schools.

Lord Warner, a former Labour health minister, outraged his comrades this week by calling for people to pay an annual £10 fee to the NHS before they can benefit from free treatment, and a £20-a-night hospital bed and breakfast charge.

Given that we pay taxes already, this is a controversial idea, but  I think he’s absolutely right about his second suggestion. People have to feed themselves at home, after all, so why not pay for food in hospital?

At last, a Labour supporter has admitted that we can’t afford an unreformed NHS for much longer. Can we now have the much-needed discussion about its future, and how to pay for our increasingly lavish expectations?

Don't give us PC PCs

Given that London is now such a multi-national city, it would benefit by having more police from ethnic minorities. Indeed, some could be appointed from cultures where dishonesty is still regarded as a grave moral offence!

But Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, the beleaguered Commissioner of the Met, is utterly misguided to think the law should be changed to allow positive discrimination and the recruitment of more ethnic minority officers.

The public will have even less respect for the police if they think some officers are only in the job because of a politically correct appointment system.