The latest British Social Attitudes findings, which show that growing numbers of people have swallowed the fiction that benefits levels in the UK are too high, perhaps explain why the government this week feels able to float plans for another round of devastating benefit cuts.
The latest proposal, picking up the argument the chancellor lost last year to his coalition partners, is that the government should not increase benefits to compensate for increased living costs. This time the government is considering not just decoupling benefits from inflation but freezing benefit levels for two years.
Such a move is just one in a long line of recent uprating adjustments that have eroded the value of benefits. In the 2010 spending review the government announced it would start using the consumer price index (CPI) measure to uprate benefits instead of the historically more generous retail price index (RPI). According to the IFS, this technical adjustment will do more than any other government tax or benefit decision to drive up child poverty by 800,000 by 2020.
The furore last year about the fairness of uprating benefits even with the lower CPI measure when average earnings were lagging behind prices was a further piece of political insincerity. What was conveniently obscured in the debate was the fact that for many years, benefits have risen at a significantly lower level than wages. As earnings have raced ahead, this has resulted in a stark disconnect between wages and benefits: the value of unemployment benefit has fallen, for example, from 21% of average earnings in 1970 to under 11% by 2010.
If we look at trends over time we can see that manipulating the levels at which benefits are uprated is a tried and tested method of trimming the social security spending both in good times and in bad.
The government is presenting the idea of a benefits freeze as a necessary step in order to save an additional £10bn in 2015/16 from a social security budget that is already decimated by £18bn of cuts. And such assaults on the incomes of the poorest are justified by reference to the very social attitudes that this and previous governments have done so much to foment.
At the risk of stating the obvious, benefits are already inadequate for basic needs. If an out-of-work family with one child claims their full benefit entitlement, the income they receive provides only 65% of the funds required to live above the poverty line. For those in work and receiving tax credits life is a little better. However, a family with two children and both parents working at the national minimum wage will still only receive an income that constitutes 94% of the amount needed to live a life free of poverty if they take up all the benefits available to them.
At a time when the price of essentials such as food, fuel and clothes continue to rise sharply, another cut to the real value of benefits can only further intensify their inadequacy. The chancellor and his cabinet colleagues must reject this disgraceful proposal, which is just another assault on those living in poverty, shamefully dressed up as a necessary aspect of fiscal austerity. It would cut the poorest families adrift from the rest of society and further batter the coalition's poverty record.
Breaking the link between benefits and living standards would be no less than breaking the link with decency. In hard times the values of a civilised society must ensure the most vulnerable families are protected.
