Welfare reforms to start in UK on Monday the biggest in 60 years

In February 2002, Iain Duncan-Smith was then leader of the Conservatives when he visited Easterhouse in Glasgow, one of the city’s most run-down estates where poverty and deprivation are rife.

“I walked around part of the estate with a local Baptist minister. The grey, wet day matched the bleakness of nearly everything that I saw.

“He showed me abandoned, boarded-up houses surrounded by litter and disfigured by graffiti.

“We stopped in a sheltered walkway where heroin addicts inject the drug into their bodies. I looked into one building, in a stairwell I saw a place where a child had been playing. A discarded teddy bear lay in the corner. A perfectly ordinary sight.

"Except that next to it lay the paraphernalia of a crack cocaine addict: what hope does that child have?" recalled Duncan-Smith weeks later, still clearly upset by the sights in Easterhouse, which lies west of the city.

The poor
In the years since, Duncan-Smith was replaced at the helm of the Conservatives, before finding new life in the Centre for Social Justice – displaying an interest in the trials faced by the poor that was unusual for Conservatives.

On Monday, some of the ideas in gestation since Easterhouse come into force, but critics, who once lauded Duncan-Smith’s intentions if not his politics, believe the most radical reforms of 60 years have become corrupted.

Benefits of all types will be capped at £500 per week for couples with or without children, or £350 for singles without children, to ensure that no one receives more in benefits than is earned by the average working family, once income tax is deducted.

For supporters, the change is necessary and fair, since many now live on sums significantly above average workers, particularly in housing benefit, living in districts that could not be afforded by those paying for their own home.

However, such benefits are received not just by the unemployed, but also by those on low wages, leading critics to argue that the UK, including Northern Ireland, is about to embark on an era of "social cleansing", where the poor are driven even more into the shadows.

Meanwhile, there is the so-called "bedroom tax" – a description hated by prime minister David Cameron, where local authority tenants will lose part of their housing benefits if they have spare bedrooms.

From April 1st, tenants with one spare room will lose 14 per cent of their housing benefit, while those with two will see it cut by a quarter, leading one Labour MP, Frank Field, to encourage tenants to knock down walls or block up doors.

In theory, the move is logical: the stock of local authority properties should be used in the most efficient fashion possible. In practice, it is set to prove a political nightmare since many tenants cannot move.

Exemptions have been made: for pensioners, or families with sons or daughters in the military. But since council-owned one-bedroom flats are a rarity many of those prepared to move will struggle to do so.

Given colder public attitudes to welfare, sympathy from workers struggling to pay their way may be meagre but, equally, there will be cases of obvious unfairness that will touch chords in wider public opinion.

Meanwhile, changes to disability benefits come into force on Monday in Merseyside, northwest England, Cumbria, Cheshire and the northeast of England, with the rest of the country following in June.

The changes are tied to medical assessments: a practice that has already seen terminally ill cancer patients being told by work and pensions officials that they are fit to work, only for them to die weeks later.

Meanwhile, the biggest change, universal credit, is due in October,though a plan to begin four pilots next month has been reduced to just one as the department for work and pensions struggles to get its IT system to work.

For Duncan-Smith, Easterhouse was an epiphany. However, April 1st, in the eyes of his critics, could yet prove to be the Conservatives’ Gethsemane in battleground constituencies that could yet decide election 2015.