Why welfare reform is popular

Why does the government want to outflank the Tories on welfare reform with a proposal that unemployed people will be forced to take on placements or volunteer work once they have claimed benefits for more than a year?

It's partly stories like this from Southampton -

A benefits cheat, who ripped off the taxpayer for more than £40,000 over six years, has been jailed for 12 months.

It doesn't seem to have been difficult - he had three jobs. The defence lawyer said that "this was not a particularly sophisticated fraud." He just seems to have asked and have been given. For six years.

Or the story that down in Hounslow

A convent worker who used a string of false names to claim nearly £30,000 in benefits has narrowly avoided jail.

The council became suspicious when data-matching showed there was another person wth one of her surnames at the same address. The fraud lasted for four and a half, years, though. One reader comments there that

The sad fact is, pursuing benefit cheats is not cost effective.Recently released figures showed around £150 million spent to recover just £22 million.The quality of evidence required to secure a successful prosecution is a major stumbling block.

Bizarrely, the government has been accused of failing the North East over returning unemployed people to work, with the region having the country’s highest proportion of benefit claimants.

It's not up to government to find jobs for people. What happened to responsibility?

Maybe that's why the BBC (of all people!) invited a member of two conservative US think tanks to South Wales. His line is that welfare money should be cut and put into creating local jobs. He argues that the number of people claiming incapacity benefit in Wales could be reduced by two-thirds if American-style reforms were adopted.

In the US we cut people's cash benefits in the 1990s and told them they were going back to work.

They are some of the most successful policies we've ever introduced. In some states, money from benefit claimants was taken and used instead to create jobs in local companies, boosting employment opportunities.

As this blog has argued, we need the stick as well as the carrot.