What’s your problem with the benefits system?

Or did they? 

For the first time in years, public perceptions of welfare are hardening – rapidly. According to the British Social Attitudes Survey, support for increased spending on benefits for the poorest citizens has fallen to 27%, matching the lowest level ever recorded. More than a third (36%) say that the government should increase taxes and spend more on health, education and welfare, but that figure is also at its lowest level since 2013. 

While there is still support for spending on children in poverty, the wider welfare budget is under attack. Back in 2006, 61% of the public said state pensions should be the highest priority for additional benefits spending, but by 2025 this had dropped to just 34%.

Most political analysts put this shift down to the tenor of the Westminster debate over benefits. When a right-wing government is in power, the opposition argument for a stronger safety net tends to be louder, leading to a softening of attitudes. But when the governing party supports a more accessible benefits system, that amplifies the argument in favour of a crackdown.

But there now seems to be a convergence of political opinion over benefits. Reform is pushing Labour towards a harder rhetoric, so that the governing party now uses language once considered as Tory-only territory.

We can already see the effect. According to YouGov, welfare is now the second most popular answer to the question “what sector is the UK government spending too much on?”, lagging only behind overseas aid. Almost 40% of people now think that too much of the public purse goes to support others through welfare. 

Our attitude to welfare is rather odd: we like the idea of the safety net, but constantly pick holes in its webbing and mock those who fall into its embrace.

This is ironic as the UK economy is now more reliant on a strong welfare state than ever. The boss of Tesco, Ashwin Prasad, claims we’re heading into an era of “worklessness and benefit dependency”. But the opposite is true: benefit dependency has increased because it is directly linked to low paid work – of the type Prasad supplies. 

More than a third of working age adults who claim universal credit are actually in work. In the course of my reporting on the housing crisis I have met households with two adults in full time work who are nevertheless still entitled to large universal credit payments, and who would collapse into deep poverty without them. Some people fall into poverty, even with those payments.

According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF), there are more than 4.2 million people living below the minimum income standard. That’s largely because benefit levels are historically low when compared to the true cost of living. Even alongside work, they are insufficient. Poverty is entrenched in our current economic model. 

Iain Porter, senior policy advisor at the JRF, says that three decades ago, half of adults in poverty were in a working household. Now the figure is two thirds. “That’s the longer term trend right there,” Porter says. “For families with children it’s even higher, and for single parent households in poverty it’s over 60%.”

This problem isn’t going away. We’re heading into a febrile moment where the AI revolution is having a ripple effect across every sector, bringing with it the threat of job losses. The increase of the minimum wage has not offset the effect of the government’s foolhardy increase in employers’ national insurance contributions, which means they are creating new jobs at a slower rate than expected. 

We have more than one million young people who are not in education, employment or training (NEET) and there’s a frighteningly small window to support young people in the economy. Today, almost half of 24-year-old NEETs have never had a job; statistically, if that doesn’t change before their late twenties, they are unlikely to ever have stable work. 

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We need to reckon with the facts: our feelings about benefits and welfare claimants are simply false. An analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies looked at lifetime income distribution and how it related to the chances of requiring social security support. Brace yourself, because you won’t like what you’re about to read.

The study found that people in the middle income distribution only spend about 15 percentage points less of their lifetime eligible for means-tested benefits than those at the bottom. Even people in the richest decile spend an average of almost 20% of their lifetime eligible for means-tested benefits. 

The confidence of a skilled middle-class professional that they will never be out of paid work might turn out to be fairly placed. But they are as likely as anyone to become disabled, incapacitated by illness or take on full-time caring responsibilities for a loved one. 

An economy is a living thing, and in the UK it is being sustained by the social security arrangement we have in place. Given its crucial place in our homes and communities, it should be loved and cherished, just like the NHS. Instead it is the subject of scorn and scepticism. 

The modern welfare state emerged almost nine decades ago from a wartime inquiry into social security. The 1942 Beveridge report captured a national mood. Its author, William Beveridge, argued that Britain had to tackle five “giant evils”: want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. The state, he wrote, should guarantee security while preserving individual initiative and responsibility. 

After Clement Attlee’s Labour government was elected in 1945, a system of public services and financial support for the unemployed, ill and disabled was created. The ambition was striking at the time, but now that settlement is under immense strain. 

During the austerity years there were some high profile cases of outright neglect by a broken system. Take the death of Colin Traynor. In 2012, he passed away less than four months after he had been found fit for work under the then newly-introduced Work Capability Assessment procedure, a coalition government reform. 

He claimed incapacity benefit for severe epilepsy, but under the new system his benefits were cut by £70 a week. He was told he was expected to work, which he was physically unable to do. His condition rapidly deteriorated. He died, aged 29, following a seizure. If such a failure had occurred inside the NHS there would have been an outcry. 

One former senior DWP staffer, who had implemented huge changes in how the department dealt with people, told me the only way to get politicians and policymakers to actually listen on welfare was to talk about it in exactly the same terms as the health service. 

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“There’s a fear in humans: it could happen to you, but if you pretend it can’t and look away, or blame the person for what they’re facing, then you don’t have to face it and you don’t have to worry about it happening to you,” they explained. 

“I found that the most powerful thing I could do in a room of politicians was to talk about the welfare state as if it was the NHS – how we all needed, how we all valued it – to get the same buy-in.” 

That person no longer works in the welfare system but, remarkably, left the role positive about its future. They say there has been “real change” in the service offered to benefit claimants in the last decade. 

Others are less optimistic. Helen Barnard, director of policy, research and impact at the foodbank charity The Trussell Trust, believes the fact that disability and incapacity benefits now make up a growing proportion of welfare spending explains hardening attitudes. “We have a very nasty underbelly of attitudes towards disability,” she says. “We, as a society, seem to feel the need to police person-by-person whether someone is really as disabled as they seem, and that is now feeding into social security benefits.”

Attitudes like these create other problems for the future and block innovation in the welfare system. There are, for example, trials underway at Kings College London over non-means tested direct payment and basic income schemes for care leavers and those emerging from homelessness. 

The trials showed that young people leaving care who were given a £2,000 lump sum with no strings attached were more likely to be in stable housing, and less likely to be “sofa surfing” than their peers. They also reported higher wellbeing and were less likely to be involved in the criminal justice system.

But it’s much harder to try experimental ways of handling benefits when anything on the subject is met with such overwhelming scepticism. 

Barnard and others in her sector want a political effort to “shift those really deep-seated opinions” and to get people to trust in investing in the social security system. She wants a “seismic change in public opinion”. It has been done before – with attitudes to drink driving and, more recently, to mental health.

I too believe there is hope for a reset of the relationship between the people and the welfare state, but it’s going to have to start with a rebranding exercise. Benefits have become a signifier or totem. When we talk about welfare we’re no longer describing people’s lives, or needs, but a bunch of loaded political ideas. Starting over, a new department with a new focus, a new ministerial leadership and a new, experimental approach to welfare policy is the only way to meet reality head on. 

The National Solace Service. How about that?