The Benefits System Perpetuates Misery

Intelligence Squared

Arts, News, Society & Culture, News Commentary

4.2 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 11 June 2016

⏱️ 60 minutes

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Summary

Beveridge would be turning in his grave. The benefits system that his 1942 report introduced has become a travesty. Right now there are some 4.5m people in the UK living in households where nobody has a job. Behind that figure lies a subsection of society mired in multi-generational unemployment. What was meant to be a safety net has become a poverty trap. Far from being the short-term stopgap that Beveridge envisaged, benefits have created a culture of long-term welfare dependency. And that leads to misery. A 2012 survey showed that the unemployed in Britain are 3.6 times more likely than those with jobs to say they are seriously unhappy. If you want to help the poor, don’t just throw money at them. Incentivise and help them into work, and reform the system in which many people are actually better off not working at all than taking a job. Such an environment of worklessness simply makes it harder for the next generation to break out of the cycle. That’s the argument that was made by journalist James... Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/intelligencesquared. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:40.0	Well, good evening. So it's a great delight to be here at the Royal Institution. This, as you know, is one of the first spaces in Britain in the world where science was debated but actually from the office was a place
0:53.8	where politics arts and philosophy were brought to bear upon the public and so we
1:01.1	are in a noble tradition so the motion that we'll be debating this evening is that the benefit system
1:06.9	perpetuates misery and I'm going to give you a few statistics now I'm a
1:11.4	neuroscientist by training and I've actually
1:13.4	lectured here on neuroscience and I'm much more nervous talking about politics
1:16.5	and benefits than I am talking about neuroscience but let me give you some facts
1:19.0	and those of you in the back there if I've got it wrong don't hiss until it's your
1:21.9	term to speak but but his until it's your turn to speak.
1:23.0	But it's since 1942 that the benefit system was instituted on the recommendations of William Beveridge.
1:30.5	And it's not clear that it's worked out exactly as he proposed.
1:34.0	We hear a lot of outcry about long-term dependency,
	...

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