found this on the bbc:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8180799.stm

irrespective of where the idea comes from, i wonder if there is something in it?

Sounds a bit like 'one stop' or 'gateway' or whatever the initiative was called....wasn't that supposed to ultimately result in everything being dealt with from one fixed point?

dunno ... but all information in one place would solve a lot of issues in terms of people not having to repeat themselves all the time!

Forgive the cynicism, but right wing think tanks almost invariably have a anti Welfare State agenda, and are keen to separate its functions from the State.

I suspect their enthusiasm for a 'one stop' has more to do with making it easier to separate Welfare from the state and contract/privatise it etc etc etc, not out of altruism. Amongst other reasons.

that may well be so (not being enamoured of anything right wing myself) but having said that one can see that asking people to repeat the same information several times to different bodies isn't efficient and results in the many cock ups we all see and deal with.

Hi Claire,

I actually like the idea and i agree with you and i'm not being a dog in the manger (honest). But...................

Such is my disdain for the blah blahs, i felt compelled to grump my observation albeit implicit that i thought in the current climate the less the powers that be meddle with the Welfare State the safer it will be.

I just do not believe right wing think tanks or the party in Govt (their pally think tanks) or the one in waiting actually believe in the Welfare State, i think it goes against the very grain of their entrenched thinking/opportunism, ideologies and policies.

So i see any proposals from any them however their cosily couched/spun as part of that process of dismantling it. Once we had a Keynesian consensus amongst the two parties vying for power, and now for 30 years we have had a neo-liberal consensus that shows no signs of running out of steam or grabbing any opportunity to undermine it..

andy

My paper today says 25% of the whole of the country's budget is (or will next year) be spent on benefits. I've no idea whether that's true, but it is clearly a hell of a lot of money. Do you really believe Government (of whatever persuasion) spends on that scale without having some belief that what they are doing is the right thing?

Errrrrrrrrrrr no Derek i don't, Welfare is and has been an an inherent part of capitalism from the time of feudalism on to proto capitalism on to full blown capitalism whether its the current set up or for example in the not distant past poor houses. I think we live in a political cycle in which neo-liberalism holds sway and the politicians are stuck in a rut that the market will solve everything regardless, and don't have any vision of society other than we are individuals/consumers.

As for the 25% of the country's budget i haven't got a clue (although i'm very dubious). The bulk i suspect would be older people who have paid their contributions and tax credits subsidising low wages.

But it says a lot for us as a society we wring our hands over paying benefits as if they are beyond the pale, but when it comes to tax evasion, tax avoidance, pumping money into the banks, failed PFI's for example the politicians and the wider society feel no revulsion or prejudice (albeit justified). Gramsci would call it all part of hegemony, i.e. the truth/reality is in the hands of those who hold sway be it politicians, media moguls and mulitnationals etc . What about the wealth divides corrosive effect on societies?

Anyway, i wished i'd kept my mouth shut for reasons of time, but just to say i'm not actually a doctranaire Socialist, but i do believe in fair distribution of wealth, resources, justice, public ownership and sustainability etc etc something our middling piddling politicians evidently don't and i make no apology for that (its no cyncism or scorn its a reflection of how i see our current society).

Whoops i meant to say work houses, but i'd also mused about the poor laws before etc etc.

Long live Speenhamland!!

Speenham land Mmmmm is that the one where labourer's wages were supposed to be pegged to the cheapest bread (white sliced motherswotsit) i.e. an aspirational idea that employers (farmers) would embrace (erm self regulation), but employers ignored because they considered to expensive.

Oh gawd they say the truth hurts, and the disparity in wealth and resources, access to social justice for all, private ownership of the former public utilities, railways, lack of sustainability, individualism over society, and enviromental degradation etc etc (certainly twigs my arial) is not just morally wrong, but socially destructive.

The marketisation of our society is not about choice or competition its about monopolies and entrenched venal interests.

Anyway, current confessional over.

Can we bring back feudalism? Pretty please?

"but just to say i'm not actually a doctranaire Socialist"

really? LOL

more @ http://www.epolitix.com/latestnews/article-detail/newsarticle/benefit-report-needs-re-think/

This is just the latest idea for raiding social security given the inability of the two main parties to address wider inequalities, under-taxation of the wealthier (including the lax terms attached to the bank bailouts).

It becomes easier to promote the idea that welfare is wasted (and thus a fair target for a raid) when there has been continual negative coverage of benefit claimants and benefit/poverty issues, in no small part encouraged by government ministers and the language they use("languishing", "dependency", "play by the rules" etc).

However, what is a more immediate and serious threat is the Green Paper on Social Care and the proposed transfer of AA/DLA. Given the importance of these to claimants' incomes and also to the work of welfare rights advisers, people should be hopping mad. But so far there seem to be few signs of opposition.

Before everyone gets over-excited about the CPS report you have to realise that anyone who has spent a lifetime in the odd world of tax advice (the author of the report and myself) comes at any problem from a strange direction.

However, having said that, after a bad day of dealing with HMRC and the organs of the DWP on behalf of destitute citizens there does seem to be merit in a system of universal self-assessment where every citizen plugs in their total circumstances into the Government Knowitall Computer and then receives either a tax demand or a benefit.

I'm old enough to remember the 'single multi-purpose claim form' designs of the late 1970s / early 1980s.

Imagine a sheet of paper, about the size of a cinema poster, printed small (on both sides) and containing instructions such as "Complete box 273d unless you answered yes to Q 16, no to Q 29b and (C) to Q 78(4). If you answered (T) to box 221 go to Q 306 unless you also answered (T) to box 222."

A sensible single representation of the individual is 'a good thing' but these people must remember that the benefits system is designed to provide different help for different needs and the assessment of those needs will require different information.

Speenhamland actually ended up more about relief from the parishes topping up wages rather than living wages from employers. Some of the features would be recognisable to all of us. Set amounts deemed the minimum needed to live on, a scale of rates with a couple receiving less than 2 single people, extra amounts for children. It was criticised as discouraging hard work because it meant you could work less without loss of income, encouraging the poor to have more children in order the get higher rates and encouraging employers to pay less than a living wage (knowing the parish would top it up). All of which makes it feel like we haven’t moved on much!

(at least in them days the computers never went down)