Andy Burnham has been celebrating his first 100 days in power by talking up the scale of change that his Government has already managed. Much of that change has in fact been promised, rather than realised, but the true scale of what Burnham has pledged is really quite something. There are a number of major and difficult reforms that he really has ended up staking his premiership on which he now cannot dodge.
One of them is welfare reform, which he has spent so many months talking about, it will be the mother of all U-turns if he isn’t able to show by the next election that he has at least materially changed the benefits system to move people back into work. He hasn’t given us the details of how he will do that, yet, and neither has he provided the measure of success he wants to use, which means his opponents are doing a pretty good job of framing both questions for him.
The matter came up again at Prime Minister’s Questions this week, with Louise Haigh standing in for Burnham while he is abroad with the King. The First Secretary of State insisted repeatedly that the Government had been “clear the benefit bill will come down” and that “we cannot afford to pay for failure and must invest in success”. Her Tory opponent Alex Burghart argued that Labour didn’t want to cut the benefits bill and would end up putting up taxes to pay for that failure to reform welfare.
The Conservatives want to push Labour into agreeing that it will cut the bill by the next election, when all the signs from those working on the detail of welfare reforms are that the savings will have to come later, after significant upfront investment. What the Tories then want to argue is that Burnham claims he is cutting the welfare bill while he is in fact spending more money on it, largely because he wants to appease his own backbenchers, rather than because it’s the right thing to do.
It’s an unfair argument: spending more on proper training programmes and support back into work is a much more mature approach to welfare than just slashing the bill to punish everyone for merely claiming benefits, even if they have little hope of getting a job. And it’s an argument that Labour needs to get better at countering.
Alan Milburn, the author of the key report on young people who are not in employment, education or training (NEETS), has been trying his best to make the Labour argument of spend now to save later. In repeated briefings and interviews about his much-delayed proposals for reform, the former New Labour minister has made very clear that the government will need to spend more money now. A lot more money, in fact. The latest briefings put that figure at “billions”, and the report is expected to point to higher spending by countries like Denmark and Germany with much lower NEET rates: they spend 0.4 per cent of GDP and 0.3 per cent respectively on youth employment programmes.
John Healey is understood to be sympathetic to this argument, which is just as well given he and Burnham have staked a lot on the Milburn report giving them all the solutions they need. And yet Labour ministers, including the Chancellor himself, repeatedly give into the premise of the measure of success being a cut in the bill by the next election. People know what a difficult problem this is, and how desperately it needs solving. Burnham often argues that he wants to approach it in a “different way” in which rather than giving into a “kind of cuts agenda”, he focuses on how many people the Government can help (which in turn and in time does save money). But he rarely talks about the amount of time it is going to take, even though he presumably agrees that this is not a quick fix with a simple design.
That design of the system is as important as the amount of money spent on it. Previous governments have invested a lot of money in programmes which have allowed ministers to say more young people are in “training” when they are in fact not paying any attention at the back of a poorly-delivered CV-writing class, or are on a very low quality vocational course that doesn’t even equip them with the skills that employers desperately want them to have. Even with a lot of money and political attention, Burnham will know that his plans could end up being an expensive mess. But he doesn’t seem to be giving the public nearly enough of a sense of how hard and how long this will be. He can’t back out now, though.
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