Mixed Messages from Tories on Benefits

3.37.00pm BST (GMT +0100) Tue 20th Oct 2009

Amid new found concern for the poor and proclamations that "we are all in this together" at the Tory party conference in Manchester, there appeared a divergence of thought on welfare policy that has the potential to create confusion and anxiety for the millions who are obliged to rely on benefits.

Whereas Iain Duncan Smith, the anointed social justice Czar should the Tories gain office, proposes that incapacity benefit and job seekers allowances should not be withdrawn immediately on a return to work, so as not to disincentivise recipients from taking up employment, Tory leader David Cameron says that all benefits should be withdrawn after a certain period so that people are forced to return to work. The criteria for establishing whether people now categorised as incapacitated are indeed able to work and the resources for making the assessment have not been addressed. Moreover, neither explains where new jobs will come from during a recessionary period in which their party wants to see major cuts in public spending - those with their benefits withdrawn will go from poor to poorer.

Dr Geoff Seeff, the Liberal Democrat Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for Chingford and Woodford Green, calls this gesture politics of the worst kind. "There are two inconsistent policies supposedly addressing the same problem - the one promises something that cannot be delivered and the other threatens something quite nasty that can most definitely be delivered but which cannot be sure of offering anything in return. Tories just don't understand welfare - the only reason for withdrawing benefits is if someone is guilty of defrauding the system, everything else should be taken care of in the tax system".

Letters from Geoff on the proposals were published in the Waltham Forest Guardian and the Woodford Recorder, the full text of which follows:-

"Following a report on the benefits system published in September by his "think tank", the Centre for Social Justice, Iain Duncan Smith states the obvious point that people receiving benefits will not work in low paid jobs if those benefits are then withdrawn. He has recommended that, up to a certain level, benefits should be retained on a return to work. This week at the Tory party conference his leader, David Cameron, has called for the withdrawal of benefits unless the recipients are prepared to return to work.

Inconsistency aside, neither explains how the jobs that they think will incentivise the "workshy" will materialise. In the context of a private sector still in recession and their party urging cuts in public sector spending programmes, this is something of a glaring omission.

Heaven help the single parents, larger families, the incapacitated and the genuine job seekers if, after the forthcoming General Election, these two are ever allowed to interfere with the welfare system".