Andy Burnham is setting out his stall on welfare in more detail. Spend more taxpayer cash…
He said on last night’s 15-minute Andrew Marr softball interview:
“I’m not going to go with the crude cuts to benefit levels that then just put people who are struggling in even worse poverty, and that often creates the backlash, and understandably so. There’s a different approach, which is looking at two things that can be done differently to get the overall benefits bill down.
One of those is how we support young people. I will not defend an education system that is overly focused on the university route and does not lay out paths to technical qualifications for our young people…
What I’ve done in Greater Manchester is something that might be looked at more broadly: free bus travel for 16- to 18-year-olds, so that they can access those opportunities.
If you build more council homes, you can bring down the housing benefit bill. You do it over a longer term, in a more sustainable way.”
The ex-minister running Burnham’s policy spreadsheet, Miatta Fahnbulleh, told Sky News this last night:
“I do think [the bill] is too high. I don’t think it is sustainable. I think there are actually three ways in which you reduce the bill. You can cut the amount that people are given. You can reduce who is eligible for it or you can get people into work. And I’d say that the answer is the third. You get people into work…
If you just cut the support people have, it pushes them into destitution and precarity. It makes it very hard for them to engage in the labour market. If you basically narrow the number of people that get support, that often tends to be quite arbitrary and you get those edge examples where someone desperately needs it and then they’re just left to languish.”
The current proposals from Team Burnham include 1) spending billions on council houses, 2) subsidising travel for specific groups, 3) refusing to cut the amount given in benefits or the number of people eligible. Spending will obviously rise massively under these proposals. The welfare party never stops…
Badenoch said at her speech on Monday morning: “We are absolutely ready to fight a general election. We saw the results in Aberdeen South: 50% of the vote. Because we can unite the country… It’s about uniting the country, for God’s sake, behind a centre-right agenda.”