Â鶹Éç

Later today James Purnell, the Work and Pensions Secretary, will unveil the UK government's plans to reform the welfare system.

The language is one of sanctions and penalties, more stick than carrot.

The aim is to get a million people off benefits and back into some form of work. If you turn down a reasonable job offer, turn down or fail to turn up for interview, then you'll face losing some of the benefits you were due or be asked to do some sort of mandatory community service.

If you're on incapacity benefit then you'll be expected to show that you're preparing to get back into work. In other words, as Mr Purnell has put it, he wants to make sure - particularly now that economic times are tough - that "there aren't people in a boat not rowing".

Yesterday the First Minister told me that he'd sat down with James Purnell and talked him through the Assembly Government's objections to his plans - objections that almost spill out of the latest Welsh Assembly Government cabinet papers published. He started out talking about rhetoric, about the implication that people who don't have jobs, who take home sickness or incapacity benefit are "tagged or stigmatised as scroungers".
Some of the policies themselves being suggested were, he said, very sensible and perfectly reasonable but they way they'd been talked about - now there he differed from Mr Purnell.

But the objections spelled out in the cabinet papers run deeper than rhetoric. Welsh Ministers are worried that families who are already vulnerable and in debt will get deeper into debt. They're worried that will have an impact on crime. They're worried about the impact of the rule changes on those with mental health conditions.

They're worried about cost: that the Assembly Government could end up footing the bill for many of the new skills development programmes and careers advice from within its own budget. That could "stretch Assembly Government resources".

And all of this the First MInister had conveyed to the Work and Pensions Secretary. The telling line - the one that took Welsh ministerial objections way beyond rhetoric - was this one: "Clearly, whether you are going to actively participate in the labour market to some extent is determined by your perception of whether there are lots of jobs available, and that's going to be very different if you live in Mountain Ash than if you live on the outskirts of London".

In other words if you live near London you'll know that there'll be job opportunities there somewhere if you go looking. If you live in Mountain Ash, then you don't. After ten years of a Labour government in Wales, whose fault is that the Conservatives might ask? In fact Chris Grayling, the Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary, has already asked the UK government why it is that young people are finding it ever tougher to "do better than their parents ... For ten years the government has been telling us it has the policies to solve the problem. But it hasn't worked".

The changes to the benefit system will of course apply equally across the UK - the benefit system isn't devolved - but one size, Rhodri Morgan had argued, does not fit all.

And there, in the cabinet papers, Welsh Ministers suggest doing something about it. Why not, they propose, pilot a different system in Wales, one that perhaps involves incentivising work? Where the rhetoric at least is more carrot than stick, where the "intervention regime" is most appropriate to Wales?

That sounds to me like a proposal for a very different benefit system in Wales to the one James Purnell will be unveiling this afternoon - the kind of proposal that will have the proverbial eyebrows in Westminster well and truly raised.

• Bookmark with:
• |
• |
• |
• |
• - What's this?