less Eligibility

I spent the best part of 5 years in the last Parliament serving on the Work & Pensions Select Committee. The experience reinforced my prejudice that the principal problem that we face is a culture of welfare dependency.
Our out-of-work benefits are not particularly generous by European standards and those who are dependent upon them are not, by any stretch, enjoying a ‘cushy’ lifestyle. Nevertheless, recipients grow accustomed to the life and learn to ‘get by’, particularly so, when they are relieved of the inconvenience of going out to work for a living.
The trends are particularly worrying amongst the young
More women are now out of the workforce due to sickness than those who don’t work because they are raising children. Whilst the number of young men off work due to sickness has trebled in the last decade and three quarters of them indicate that they have no interest in finding a job.
The economically inactive population of working age now stands at a record 10 million.
The bill for sickness benefits is currently running at £65 billion annually, and is predicted to rise to £100 billion by 2030.
This has to be set against a background of several years with vacancies at record, or near-record, levels and enormous pressure from employers on government to ease immigration control in order to enable them to recruit from overseas.
Some 40% of those claiming sickness benefits state that mental health issues are their reason for doing so. Yet nothing could be better for mental health than the stimulation of work, with a consequent improvement in self-esteem.
Ministers have undertaken to bring forward reforms to the welfare system this year with the intention of encouraging recipients back into the workforce. We will have to wait and see what they propose. I did however, try and steer the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions in the direction of the work of Jeremy Bentham and his utilitarian principle of ‘the greater good for the greatest number’. I do not believe that society can, or should, carry a growing cost of an increasing proportion of its members who are not working.
The most effective way to achieve this would be a return to Bentham’s policy of ‘less eligibility’:  that life on benefits must be less eligible than the meanest form of independent existence, so as to discourage anyone from choosing to live on benefits.
How could we implement such a policy without cruelty and a return to the Victorian workhouse?
I think we need to ensure that, as far a possible, welfare rights have to be balanced with responsibilities. We need a system of ‘workfare’ where benefits are paid in return for socially useful work. This would be good for the self-esteem of many claimants with mental health problems and encourage them to take a further step towards paid employment.