Welfare Reforms

Cameron sometimes overreaches himself at PMQs but there was no such danger of him doing so today when he announced the Welfare Reform Bill in what was a confident and well thought through presentation. The Bill includes the well trailed replacement of various benefits by the Universal Credit and help for the long term unemployed to get jobs and introduces measures to ensure work always pays. The Bill according to Cameron is not an accounting exercise but about changing our culture. Never again, he said, will work be the wrong financial choice. At long last it appears a government is getting to grips with our broken welfare system. That dinosaur TUC is not pleased however and is blaming the cuts for the high levels of unemployment and not increases in scroungers. It is quite extraordinary that there is little acknowledgement that the cuts are only cuts to future rises in government expenditure. The TUC also complain that  low income families will be worse off through the welfare cuts until all the changes come through in 2013, which the government denies saying that no one will be worse off as a result of the changes. It can only be hoped that the Government will stick to its guns and that the proposals will not, unlike the proposed sensible Forestry sell off, prove to be a paper tiger.