Does the government have a secret plan to cut the benefits bill? Fans of The West Wing will remember the episode where an aide, standing in for his colleague at the White House briefing, accidentally suggests to the press pack that there is a “secret plan to fight inflation”. Panic ensues, because President Bartlett neither has a plan to fight inflation, nor is keeping it secret.
It’s a quite similar panic to the way the Treasury has been trying to contain reporting that Andy Burnham and John Healey have a plan to cut the benefits bill before the next election. The Chancellor inadvertently suggested in interviews this week that there would be a cut in the £353bn bill before the next election.
Asked by the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 if there would be a cut in the bill before polling day, he said: “There will be – there will be a reduction in the benefits bill, we’ll do that in a Labour way.” He wasn’t explicitly saying that the bill would be cut by the next election: he was just saying that there would be a cut.
The Treasury line is that Healey was actually trying very carefully not to say that there will be a cut in the bill before the next election. He did say that he wanted to “map out the way that we need to change the system for the long run”. All of which rather suggests that Labour will have to go to the polls telling voters that its plans, secret or otherwise, really will work “soon” – but just not yet. Not a very encouraging message for an electorate that is already seriously disillusioned by how this party has performed in government.
Burnham and Healey have accepted the premise that welfare needs to be cut, while also knowing that Labour MPs don’t really want it to be. Any falls in the bill before the next election would involve the sort of benefits cuts that the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition introduced in the 2010 parliament, and no Labour MP wants to have to defend those, not least because many of the newer members were developing their political foundations at precisely this time, and see themselves as being opponents to the austerity unleashed on the country. Indeed, the line parroted by ministers this week has been that there will be “no return to the Tory austerity”. Ergo, no actual cuts. But at the same time, according to the secret plan, some mysteriously powerful savings.
Ministers privately know they cannot cut the benefits bill merely through the sort of long-term up-front investment in back-to-work programmes that Alan Milburn will suggest in his report on young people not in education, employment or training. This report is often held up as evidence of a secret plan that is going to work, and it will doubtless be detailed and impressive. But there is no UK government that has tried this kind of intensive work on supporting people to move from benefits to the workplace in the past 50 years that has managed to get upfront savings. It is absolutely the right policy to do, but it’s a long-term rewiring of the system, rather than something as simple as saving a bit of money.
There is no secret plan to cut the benefits bill. It is as solid as the secret plan to fight inflation that President Bartlett did not have in his desk drawer. At least Bartlett never intended to suggest that there was a plan, whereas Burnham has, from day one, claimed that there is. When there is no real plan, ministers and aides can end up making all kinds of slips about what they are allegedly going to do for the simple reason that they just do not know what they are going to do, but keep being asked about it.
Bartlett and his aide only had a couple of days of excitement about their mythical inflation plan. Burnham has kept Westminster agog for months about his. Both situations have the same cause: a problem that a government hasn’t worked out how to fix. And at some point, someone is going to have to admit that the solution to that problem wasn’t secret for the simple reason that it didn’t exist.
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