THE UNITED Kingdom has been “sleepwalking” its way to an “unsustainable, unstable, unfair and, frankly, uninspiring” economy, which has left millions on welfare payments, British prime minister David Cameron will say today.
His speech will follow quickly on foot of proposals from work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan-Smith to take millions of people off invalidity benefits and pressure them back into work.
“For many years we have been heading in the wrong direction. Our economy has become more and more unbalanced, with our fortunes hitched to a few industries in one corner of the country, while we let other sectors like manufacturing slide,” Mr Cameron will say, in a speech in Yorkshire.
“It has become over-reliant on welfare, with mass worklessness accepted as a fact of life and around five million people now on out-of-work benefits. It has become increasingly hostile to enterprise, with business investment in the past decade growing at around 1 per cent each year – only a quarter of what it was the decade before.”
Criticising the growth of the public sector under Labour, the prime minister will say: “It has become far too dependent on the public sector, with over half of all jobs created in the last 10 years associated in some way with public spending. And, of course, as a country we have become indebted on an unprecedented scale. Our huge public debt is the clearest manifestation of our economic mistakes – the glaring warning sign overhead telling us we have taken the wrong route.
“We have been sleepwalking our way to an economy that is unsustainable, unstable, unfair and, frankly, uninspiring,” he will say, adding that the British public is now “waking up” to the threat posed by excessive debt.
Announcing his welfare proposals, Mr Duncan-Smith said 2.5 million people now on incapacity benefits would be subjected to tougher medical tests from the autumn and moved on to other less-generous benefits if it is found that they can work.
Mr Duncan Smith said it was a “tragedy” that people claiming incapacity benefits (worth £91 per week, compared with the £65-a-week paid to those on unemployment benefits) for more than two years were more likely to stay on welfare for the rest of their lives rather than get back into work.
“We must be here to help people improve their lives, not just to park them on long-term benefits.”
The new medical tests, which had been planned by the Labour Party before it left power, will decide whether claimants are fit for office or part-time work, even if they could not do either manual, or full-time work – though past efforts by the department of work and pensions to reduce invalidity benefits, which cost over £5 billion annually, have met with relatively little success.
People genuinely unfit for work will be kept on invalidity benefits, while those who could work, but not immediately, will be moved on to a different payment at the same rate and given extra help to train them for work.
Those assessed as immediately capable of work will be moved on to jobseeker’s allowance – a payment that will be cut in time if they refuse job offers, said Mr Duncan Smith.
Labour’s former work and pensions secretary Yvette Cooper rejected the Conservative minister’s charges that her party had not reformed welfare rules during its time in office: “So far all that they have actually announced are policies that are actually the same as ours or policies that will hurt the unemployed and make things worse,” she said.