Two extracts from Reclaiming the Common Good (2017) edited by Virginia Moffatt.
I. From: ‘The Shrinking Safety Net’ by Bernadette Meaden
This extract describes the establishment of the welfare state after the Second World War to provide ‘cradle-to-grave security’, together with the National Health Service. Then ‘the broad consensus of support for the welfare state continued more or less unchallenged until the late 1970s’ to be replaced by neoliberal policies, which promoted the free market, and in which ‘income redistribution and measures such as progressive taxation were considered a threat to liberty; the state should play a minimal role in people’s lives.’ Adopted by both Conservative and New Labour governments, these policies culminated in the 2010 Coalition Government’s austerity programme, described as ‘the biggest shake-up of the welfare state in sixty years’. Changes included:
A much tougher benefit sanctions regime for unemployed, sick and disabled claimants. In 2014, after this system had been operating for two years and the effects were clear, the Joint Public Issues Team wrote: ‘The DWP guidance repeatedly acknowledges that the sanctions it administers are expected to cause deterioration in the health of normal healthy adults. This undermines a foundational principle of the welfare system. It is precisely because of the damage caused by poverty on human well-being that the welfare state exists. We would argue that any human society should be disturbed by a statutory system that deliberately causes harm to another human being. At the heart of our Christian understanding of social justice is that human society should make provision for the weakest and most vulnerable. It is alarming to discover a welfare system that deliberately sets out to exploit a person’s vulnerability in order to achieve control and compliance.’
The abolition of Disability Living Allowance, to be replaced by Personal Independence Payments, with the intention of reducing the number of entitled claimants and so reduce expenditure by 20 per cent. Up to December 2016, with the reassessment process ongoing, 230,000 disabled or ill people had their support reduced or completely withdrawn.
The so-called ‘bedroom tax’, whereby tenants in social housing who were deemed to have one or more spare bedrooms faced a reduction in Housing Benefit, leaving them with a shortfall on their rent if they could not move to a smaller property.
The flagship welfare reform policy, Universal Credit, aimed to simplify the benefits system and ‘make work pay’. Designed with an in-built delay of several weeks or even a couple of months before a claimant receives payment, it has become associated with increased hardship, particularly a sharper increase in rent arrears. Claimants transferring to Universal Credit can fall into debt which they may never get out of. In June 2016, social housing bodies said that 79 per cent of tenants on Universal Credit were in rent arrears compared to 31 per cent of other tenants. They also reported, ‘an increase in demand for money and debt advice services, foodbanks and hardship funds’ with ‘tenants increasingly using loan sharks and pay day loan companies’. Universal Credit has also introduced ‘in-work conditionality’, whereby people who are in low-paid work and receiving UC can have their benefits sanctioned if they do not comply with various conditions.
From April 2017, many people who become unfit to work due to illness or disability will receive the same benefit payment as a healthy non-disabled person claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance.
The overwhelming effect of these and other reforms has been negative, bringing increased stress and hardship for those on the lowest incomes, and for some of the most vulnerable people in society. Indeed, the impact on disabled people has been so serious that in 2016 the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities conducted an inquiry into the UK and found ‘reliable evidence that the threshold of grave or systematic violations of the rights of persons with disabilities has been met in the State party’.
Across the UK, foodbanks have proliferated. There has been a rise in the number of children living in absolute poverty, a rise in the number of disabled people living in absolute poverty, a rise in rough sleeping and homelessness, and a rise in ‘survival crime’ where people steal food because they are simply starving. Foodbanks even ask for donations of female sanitary products because of what has been labelled ‘period poverty’.
The situation is set to get worse, almost entirely due to political choices and policies. In its Living Standards 2017 report, the Resolution Foundation said:
‘Very significant cuts to working-age welfare of over £12 billion are a key component of what looks set to be falling living standards for almost the entire bottom half of the working-age income distribution between this year and 2020-21. The result is the biggest rise in inequality since the late 1980s.’
The Child Poverty Action Group is predicting a 50 per cent rise in child poverty over the same period.
2. From: ‘Rolling Back the Market’ by Virginia Moffatt
At the time of writing, public services are crumbling in every sector. Winter pressures, always a problem in the NHS, have led to deaths in A&E, with the British Red Cross declaring the situation to be a humanitarian crisis. After six years of cuts, social care services are in such disarray that three different select committees have called for a cross-party investigation. The closure of night shelters has led to city streets being full of homeless people, while affordable housing is a pipe dream for many. Cuts are predicted in education and in the prison system, riots are frequent. Libraries and leisure services are closing, highway services are unable to keep up with potholes, the infrastructure of our country is breaking down, and with it any sense of a society built on common good principles. Not only is this causing specific damage to individuals who need extra support to survive – homeless people, sick and disabled people, families – but it is also damaging society as a whole.
We didn’t get here by chance. This is the result of politicians from Thatcher and Reagan onwards attempting to provide public services according to principles of laissez-faire economics. Such policies claim roots in ideas from Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. These include the notion that a perfectly free market can sort out the best outcome, and the modern corollary that public spending can and should be reined in. But it is plain to see from the above, designing public policy based on market forces is resulting in the worst outcomes for everyone. Not only has such thinking been destructive to public services and local communities, we have yet to see the benefits. Though economic growth for 2016 was 2.2 per cent, a marked improvement on the 1.5 per cent growth in 2010, it was down from 2014. Furthermore, the same period has seen a rise in national debt and the promise that austerity would eliminate the deficit has not been realised.
Rather than pursuing policies to increase the wealth of the nation, which in fact creates inequalities and damages society, we should turn our attention instead to look at ways to increase the wealth of all our communities. And we should consider this not just in economic terms but in human ones. Community wealth isn’t just about the income flowing into an area – though that is important – it is also about how that income is spent and on whom, and the non-fiscal contributions each member can make, caring, volunteering, creating art and so on.
There is a strong moral imperative to build communities that consider the needs of others. As Pope Francis recently remarked: ‘You cannot be a Christian without practising the Beatitudes. You cannot be a Christian without doing what Jesus teaches us in Matthew 25:
‘For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you made welcome, lacking clothes and you clothed me, sick and you visited me, in prison and you came to see me.’ (Matthew 25:31-46)
A truly wealthy community can only exist when everyone feels they have a stake, and everyone has resources to survive. While most people look to their immediate family, friends and neighbours to flourish, the state has an important part in ensuring the local infrastructure works to make that happen. In particular, public services are necessary to ensure the health and well-being of those who need extra help – women fleeing domestic violence, disabled people, those who are ill, homeless, refugees.
However, it is not just those in need of extra support who benefit from public services. Everybody uses roads and footpaths, and will suffer when they are full of potholes. Even the very healthy require medical treatment from time to time. And we can all be enriched by museums; we can all enjoy parks or get fit at leisure centres. Those of us who are parents want good education for our children, and those who are not still reap the rewards of an educated workforce. When all of these elements of public service are working effectively, our communities can be places where people can work, learn, share art, play, talk and think together. Even if we never used a single public service, we are still affected when they are cut. Without decent health care, sickness levels will rise, resulting in lost productivity in the workforce, which in turn has a negative impact on the economy. Loss of preventative youth and community services, coupled with lack of decent educational opportunities, can lead to young people having fewer options open to them, which in turn can lead to an increase in crime. The effect of closing night shelters is that more people sleep on the streets, and there is a rise in begging and antisocial behaviour. It is not only morally right to protect public services – it is in all our interests to do so.
When austerity began, following the bankers’ crash in 2008, politicians on all sides of the House of Commons argued that it was politically necessary. And few disagreed with George Osborne’s first austerity budget in 2010. Now that the impacts are being experienced across the UK, this consensus, thankfully, has shifted. Labour, the SNP, Green Party and Plaid Cymru are all vehemently anti-austerity, while the Liberal Democrats, who helped make it a reality in office, have also shifted their views. UKIP has adopted some positive ideas for public services, and recently even Theresa May has suggested we need to have a ‘shared society’, although it remains to be seen whether this is anything more than a political soundbite.
However, if we are to stop public services deteriorating further, we need to encourage politicians to build a post-austerity consensus that ensures they work for the common good. We need to build on the voices that were finally being heard during the 2017 election: the sick and disabled people, teachers, health workers, police, carers, who all cried out for change. To do so we need to increase resources, reassess and roll back the market and re-imagine the role of the state in the provision of public service.
Bernadette Meaden is an Associate of the think tank Ekklesia and in recent years has written extensively for it on social justice issues.
Virginia Moffatt is a writer and community activist. She retired as Ekklesia’s Chief Operating Officer in 2016 and continues as an Associate. Her first novel Echo Hall is forthcoming from Unbound (London).
Reprinted by kind permission of the publisher, Darton, Longman and Todd.