Does anyone have an alternative to Universal Credit?
There's a lot of talk, but not a lot of policy
It would be hard to argue that the British welfare system is hugely effective.
People fall into poverty despite being in work. Millions of people are forced to use food banks, and millions more regularly go hungry. Work doesn’t pay, and there is almost no real social safety net.
These disastrous outcomes sit in the context of recent changes to the welfare-state that have been incredibly wide-ranging. The most notable of these changes has been the advent of Universal Credit (UC) – a system that was legislated for in 2012, and is still, a decade on, not fully rolled out. UC has been contentious since its inception, and has been denounced by a huge range of opposition politicians.
Consequently… one might think that in 2022 the policy world would be alive with alternate systems and plans for major reforms.
But if you thought that… you’d be wrong.
Plans to make plans
In their 2019 manifesto, the Labour Party were scathing of UC. “The Tories’ flagship social security programme… has been a catastrophe”, they wrote. “It has pushed thousands of people into poverty, caused families to lose their homes and forced parents to visit food banks in order to feed their children”.
Needless to say, they pledged to abolish it. But they had no plan for a replacement. They said they would “design an alternative system”… but offered us no detail about what that system would look like. They hadn’t got round to doing the work yet.
Perhaps, if you were being unreasonably generous, you could say that, in the context of a snap general election, that was excusable. However, three years on, despite all the other changes that have happened in the Labour Party, we are still no closer to seeing a proposal for a new system. Labour remains committed to abolishing UC… and to coming up with some better ideas at an unspecified later date.
Some progressive think-tanks are trying to fill this policy vacuum. IPPR produced a report last year on “Britain’s Broken Social Settlement”, which made a number of recommendations for how welfare and economic policy could be reformed to reduce in work poverty and deliver on the government’s ‘levelling up’ mission.
Ideas laid out in that report -including things like amending the way child care support is provided the through UC, extending legacy benefits and increasing some of the base payments within UC’s structure - are all clearly sensible. They perhaps could be extrapolated to form the ethos of a new system that a new Labour Government might implement after a future election victory.
However -whilst definitely being more generous - that system new system, if constructed on those lines… would still look a lot like universal credit.
Is anyone questioning the fundamentals?
We’ve established then that people outside the Conservative Party do not like UC. They deplore the bad outcomes it generates and the increasingly visible poverty that it fails to prevent in this country.
But are those bad outcomes really the fault of UC as a system, or as a result of the way that it’s funded?
Because despite all the talk of abolition… the base assumptions of UC are not hugely controversial in mainstream left and liberal policy circles.
UC, whilst not technically a workfarist system, has the ideals of workfarism at its heart. It internalises the idea that the primary job of a welfare system is to stop people using it, and that employment should be the real goal for everyone. A lack of work is the cause of poverty, and getting work is the solution.
This view of welfare as a being a bad outcome in itself, has a complicated relationship with the idea that people who use welfare might be bad in themselves. UC is characterised by intense suspicion of those who use the service, with people constantly asked to justify themselves and their circumstances, and then demonstrate that they are trying as hard as they possibly can to remove themselves from state support.
Many of those who oppose UC are unwilling to argue publicly against this latter set of ideas. Can we imagine that any new Labour system will advertise itself as having fewer safeguards against benefit fraud? And on the first set of ideas, about employment representing salvation… despite all the evidence of work not paying anymore… these are things that UC opponents and proponents actually tend to agree on.
This feels like the nub of why we are seeing no real progress in designing an alternative system to UC. Because despite what people say, many actually share its ideals.
That doesn’t mean they are okay with the outcomes it produces or don’t want to do anything about them. They do. But they see doing that as being an exercise in increasing the flow from Treasury tap, not in redesigning the state’s plumbing.
Abolition is something that has been pledged, largely because it’s an effective slogan.
But are we really ready to talk about what a new system might actually look like? I see no evidence of that. Expect the new universal credit, if it ever comes, to look a lot like the old universal credit.