In 2012, this country spent £207 billion on welfare. That is £207,000,000,000. To put this in context, imagine every hospital, every GP surgery, every operation, every appointment and every patient. Add to this our armed forces, the soldiers, the tanks, the aircraft carriers. Now imagine every police officer working hard every day to keep our streets safe. If you add all this together, you are still short of what we spend on welfare. Imagine every school, university, college and teacher, double it. You are still short of what we spend on welfare. To put it simply, the welfare system costs every working family in this country £12,276 a year.
Welfare has a deserving place in society and it is right that those who find that they cannot support themselves, be it through unemployment, illness or disability, receive the help they need. What the welfare system should never be is a lifestyle choice. This is what it increasingly became under Labour and this is what we are trying to reverse. Under the last Labour Government, welfare spending spiralled out of control. The bill rose by a staggering 60% to eclipse what we get from income tax and corporation tax put together. It is simply unaffordable. Action must be taken.
Firstly, we are tackling the fraud and error that cost each working family as much as £2,300 a year. The introduction of the Universal Benefit is long overdue, combining six separate work-related benefits and vastly simplifying the system. This will help reduce both the scope for administrative error and for fraud. It will be simpler for people to understand what they are entitled to and get the support they need. We are also overhauling the old incapacity benefit that was widely open to abuse, to ensure that the money goes to those in genuine need.
Secondly, we are ending the disgraceful situation whereby Labour saw fit to increase benefits rapidly, with workless households seeing a 20% rise in their income in just five years. In contrast, those in work - the people funding the welfare system - saw their earnings go up by just 12%. This injustice must end.
That is why this week the Government voted to cap benefit rises at 1% for the next three years. At a time when wages are frozen and family budgets are tight, it is not fair that taxpayers should have to dig deep to fund benefit rises whilst they themselves are seeing their incomes fall. Labour voted against this cap, voting once again to reward those who won’t work at the expense of those who do.
