The document critiques the current rhetoric around welfare reform and argues that while the welfare state is fundamentally good, it has been designed wrongly and many beliefs about it are false. It makes six main points: 1) the welfare state benefits society but is designed incorrectly, 2) many common beliefs about its costs and effects are untrue, 3) it is paradoxically biased against the poor, 4) the current reform agenda risks further corrupting the system, 5) citizenship rather than charity should be the guiding principle, and 6) a better system is needed that supports communities and basic securities for all as a matter of rights.

1. Christian Welfare Reform
a critique of the welfare state and current rhetoric
Dr Simon Duffy ￭ The Centre for Welfare Reform ￭ October 2013 ￭
Notes based on presentations for Bishop of Wakefield’s Breakfast Seminars
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2. In summary
1. The welfare state is a good thing
2. But it’s designed wrong
3. Many of our beliefs about it are false
4. It is biased against the poor
5. The current crisis highlights deeper problems
6. Citizenship is the key to real reform
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3. 1
The welfare state is a good thing...
...and it is utterly essential.
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4. After meeting with community groups in the
North of England a Finnish researcher asked:
What’s the problem with ‘welfare’? In Finnish it
just translates as ‘well being’
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5. All societies create some system of welfare; but Christians have
often seen their role as advocates for the poorest. We seek to
build societies where welfare is not as a result of kindness, but of
justice:
True love is excess of justice, excess that goes farther than
justice, but never destruction of justice, which must be and must
remain the basic form of love. Benedict XVI
It is axiomatic that Love should be the predominant Christian
impulse, and that the primary form of love in social organisation is
Justice. William Temple
Christ does not call his benefactors loving or charitable. He
calls them just. The Gospel makes no distinction between the love of
our neighbour and justice. In the eyes of the Greeks also a respect for
Zeus the suppliant was the first duty of justice. We have invented the
distinction between justice and charity. It is easy to understand why.
Simone Weil
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6. The Christian call for justice is central to our faith and
our role in the world. But there are many other good
pragmatic reasons why we need the welfare state:
• Morality demands we create a fair society - to live
together as equals in justice.
• Happiness demands we ensure a balance of
security and freedom - to enable each of us to
flourish.
• Efficiency demands we use all our talents - to
ensure we can all contribute to the well-being of all.
• Prudence demands we avoid fear & crisis - to avoid
victimisation, blame and strife.
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7. Fear and insecurity breeds
scapegoating, terror, war and
revolution. Current rhetoric implies
we may now no longer need the
welfare state. But this false. Modern
society grows even more insecure it is more important than ever that
we secure our collective well-being.
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8. 2
The welfare state is a good thing...
it’s just designed wrong.
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9. Debates about the welfare state usually focus
on its size: spend more vs. spend less
But this is the wrong question.
The real question is how should the welfare
state be designed: How should it work?
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10. The dominant intellectual tradition which framed the design of the
welfare state was Fabianism:
We have little faith in the 'average sensual man', we do not believe
that he can do more than describe his grievances, we do not think he can
prescribe the remedies. Beatrice Webb
Competing traditions were defeated in the debates that preceded
World War II:
Collectivism has put all their eggs in one basket. I do not think
that Mr Shaw believes, or that anybody, believes, that 12,000,000 men,
say, carry the basket, or look after the basket, or have any real distributed
control over the eggs in the basket. I believe that it is controlled from the
centre by a few people. They may be quite right or quite necessary. A
certain limit to that sort of control any sane man will recognise as
necessary: it is not the same thing as the Commons controlling the
means of production. It is a few oligarchs or a few officials who do in fact
control all the means of production. G K Chesterton
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11. 1. The first principle is that any proposals for the future, while they should use
to the full the experience gathered in the past, should not be restricted by
consideration of sectional interests established in the obtaining of that
experience. Now, when the war is abolishing landmarks of every kind, is the
opportunity for using experience in a clear field. A revolutionary moment in the
world's history is a time for revolutions, not for patching.
2. The second principle is that organisation of social insurance should be
treated as one part only of a comprehensive policy of social progress. Social
insurance fully developed may provide income security; it is an attack upon
Want. But Want is one only of five giants on the road of reconstruction and in
some ways the easiest to attack. The others are Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and
Idleness.
3. The third principle is that social security must be achieved by co-operation
between the State and the individual. The State should offer security for service
and contribution. The State in organising security should not stifle incentive,
opportunity, responsibility; in establishing a national minimum, it should leave
room and encouragement for voluntary action by each individual to provide
more than that minimum for himself and his family. William Beveridge
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12. The underlying design assumptions of Fabianism are powerful,
but ultimately damaging:
• Meritocracy - most people lack the capacity to make good
decisions for themselves, only the ‘clever’ can be trusted with
power.
• Centralisation - power and control needs to be centralised in
order to make rational decisions on behalf of the whole of
society.
• Standardisation - equity is more about ensuring procedural
uniformity (we all go through the same processes) than about
equalising resources or opportunities.
• Individualisation - the relationship between the individual
and the state is central (civil society - firms, communities,
Churches, friends and family can all be taken for granted.)
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13. The price we pay for the success of the Fabian tradition is steep.
Costs include:
• Power and resources are centralised in London (the UK is the
2nd most centralised welfare state after New Zealand).
• Communities and families are undermined (e.g. the benefit
system penalises people for forming families).
• Inequality is growing - the UK is the third most unequal
developed country, yet has low levels of productivity.
• Our leaders blame the poor for poverty and encourage
stigma (e.g. growing hate crime for disabled people).
• We fund services, not people (e.g. £3 billion spent on 21,000
institutionalised in private ‘care services’).
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14. Beveridge set out to defeat five giants, but have we created five
new giants in their place?
1. Elitism - power and control is concentrated in the hands
of powerful private and public elites
2. Isolation - people are increasingly cut off from each other
and the means to rich and meaningful lives
3. Poverty - differences in income are growing, freedom for
leisure and personal development is diminishing
4. Stigma - some of us are increasingly marked out as less
worthy, less valuable or a threat to society
5. Despair - mental illness, hopelessness and a sense of
spiritual emptiness is growing
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15. At the same time we are increasingly
aware that none of this is sustainable.
The state is good and necessary - but
its competence is limited.
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16. Pruitt Igoe Urban Housing Project: 1952-1968
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17. 3
The welfare state is a good thing...
...but our beliefs about it are false.
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18. Much of what passes for common knowledge about
the welfare state turns out to be utterly false and
misleading. Here are 6 welfare myths:
1. The welfare state caused the current crisis
2. Benefits are expensive
3. Benefit fraud is significant
4. The poor are not tax payers
5. There are many people who just live on benefits
6. The South subsidises the North
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19. Over 40 years public expenditure has varied little. The recent
modest increase was the result - not the cause of the economic
crisis.
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20. Benefits are not strictly government expenditure - instead for
economists they are part of a system of income adjustment. When
we adjust for taxes real cost of benefits is very low.
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21. Benefit fraud is only 6% of tax fraud, yet it is covered by the news
600% more. Government fraud - a benefit system so complex
many do not get what they are entitled to - is even greater.
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22. The poorest 10% of families pay the highest share of their income
in taxes - about 45%.
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23. 23

24. The number of people who simply rely on benefits and who do
not make an efforts to find work is tiny.
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25. So called ‘deprived’ communities do not even get their fair share
of public spending, and what they do get they can’t control.
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26. These welfare myths are not random. They
flourish for a purpose...
to assure the powerful of their own superiority.
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27. Overheard at a public policy conference in London:
The welfare state exists for the benefit of the poor.
This statement was made, without irony, by a senior academic
and made to a room full of public servants, politicians, thinktankers and others; all of whom are utterly dependent on the
patronage of the welfare state.
What other people get is a ‘hand out’, while what I receive is an
entitlement. We are blind to the entitlements of others; but all
too eager to expand our own sense of entitlement.
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28. 4
The welfare state is a good thing...
...but it’s biased against the poor.
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29. Paradoxically the welfare state serves least well
those who are used to justify its existence...
the poorest families, disabled people, asylum
seekers - the victims of injustice.
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30. The welfare state is designed in ways which often
disadvantage the poorest:
• The poor not only pay the highest taxes, they pay
rates of marginal tax that can exceed 100%
• You must get poor and stay poor in order to get
means-tested services (e.g. social care).
• Only the better off can choose how they get
education, health or social care.
• The poor are very poor - e.g. the poorest 10% of
families live on £11.90 per day after tax.
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31. The system is a vast poverty net:
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32. 5
The welfare state is a good thing...
...but it can be corrupted.
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33. Today ‘welfare reform’ is a central political project.
The current government - building on the work of the previous
government - is pursuing policies that are justified in strong
moral terms and which seek to increase employment, personal
responsibility and stronger communities.
However, as these goals are converted into practical policies
and media soundbites they often seem to reinforce bigotry,
ignorance and injustice.
[NB. The “Benefit Thieves”
Campaign was developed by
New Labour.]
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34. 34

35. The terms ‘austerity’ and ‘fairness’ are used to
justify cuts in public spending and welfare
reforms.
but these cuts target the very people that a fair
society should protect.
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36. Most cuts are targeted in just two areas - benefits and local
government (60% of which is social care):
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37. Child Benefit freeze
Abolition of Sure Start Maternity for second
and subsequent children
Change to CPI indexation of benefits
Reductions in support for carers
Replacing DLA with PIP
Child Benefit clawback from higher rate
taxpayers
Time-limiting of contributory ESA
Transfer of Social Fund to local government
Council Tax Benefit – 10% reduction and
localisation
Extension of JSA lone parents with a youngest
child aged 5-6
Housing Benefit cuts
Household Benefit cap
Abolition of the Independent Living Fund
Continued use of ATOS or others
Universal Credit
Reductions in ‘Access to Work’ funding
Closure of Remploy services
Abolition of the Child Trust Fund
Tax credit changes
Abolition of the Health in Pregnancy Grant
Abolition of the Child Trust Fund
Abolition of the ESA youth rules
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38. The cuts in benefits and the cuts in social care
fall disproportionately on two overlapping
groups: people in poverty and disabled
people (including children and frail older
people).
They fall hardest of all on people with the most
severe disabilities, who rely on both benefits
and social care.
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39. 39

40. 40

41. 41

42. Harsh measures are justified in terms of the
current economic crisis.
But politicians try to avoid confronting the fact
that that this crisis was created by overborrowing by home owners & over-lending
by banks.
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43. The extreme growth in house prices is primarily the result of a
bubble - an artificial price increase that offers easy benefits:
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44. Current interest rates reflect a desperate effort by the government
to not let the bubble burst at great cost to home owners.
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45. This artificially low interest rate is a hidden subsidy to the better
off even greater in size than the cuts to benefits and care.
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46. ‘Welfare reform’ has become code for a redistribution of
resources away from the poorest and towards the better off.
In the competition for political power politicians are taking care
to ensure that they target benefits on swing voters: home
owners, families with two employed parents, middle-income
earners.
The median voter is far more important than any other. The
median voter determines who wins elections. We live in a
medianocracy.
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47. 6
The welfare state is a good thing...
...and it should support citizenship.
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48. The on-going corruption of the welfare system into
an increasingly unjust and damaging system was the
very opposite of what was intended by the thinkers
who inspired and designed it:
The aim of a Christian social order is the fullest
possible development of individual personality in the
widest and deepest possible fellowship. William Temple
The [new 1834] Poor Law treated the claims of the
poor, not as an integral part of the rights of the citizen,
but as an alternative to them - as claims which could be
met only if the claimants ceased to be citizens in any true
sense of the world. T H Marshall
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49. A better system would support and encourage citizenship for all.
It would respect the capacities of communities and citizens and
create a fundamental framework of basic securities.
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50. Services would be accountable to citizens, not gifts from the
government.
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51. Elements of a better system might include:
• Human rights at heart of
system
• Minimum universal securities
as rights
• A fair and integrated taxbenefit system
• Individual freedom for all
• Families and communities
respected and supported.
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52. It’s time to explore a new settlement for the welfare state and
ensure its underpinnings are strong, constitutional and less liable
to corruption by politics.
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53. The Church may not have all the
answers...
but it can ask the right questions.
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54. Further reading:
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55. For more information:
Web: www.centreforwelfarereform.org
Twitter: @CforWR and @simonjduffy
Blog: www.simonduffy.info
Facebook: centreforwelfarereform
Campaign: www.campaignforafairsociety.org
© Simon Duffy. Rights Reserved. Full copyright details at www.centreforwelfarereform.org
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