The Benefit Culture

Listening to a heated debate on the axing of Concentrix from the business of chasing Welfare claimants revealed not only the complex system of benefits that people can claim, housing, tax, child benefits the list goes on but also the complexity of people's lives, single mothers, disabled children, people who have hit the buffers in life and in there own individual way, desperate. A bureaucratic nightmare which is further complicated by the closure of the offices where in the past face to face discussion between claimant and the authority used to take place. Now the whole business is done over the phone with the inevitable frustration that the call takes ages to connect and then the person in the Welfare Office simply bats them off with a plethora of rules. 

When you drill down, behind it all, is the austerity of the financial settlement between Government and its citizens, which it is argued has to be made for the nation to become solvent again and a private company were engaged (Concentrix) to root out the people who were not what they were appeared.
Part of the problem is the complexity of claims and the opportunity for some to "play the game" by putting in bogus claims.
The complexity and the opportunity are not the fault of the claimant or even the bogus claimant and the need to address the hugely complex human plethora of changed and changing circumstance is a situation brought about by the changing state of the nation as it closed down avenues for work whilst still trying to fulfil the founding ideals of the Welfare State set up in 1947.
Can we, should we provide a Welfare blanket in the way we used to. The Welfare claimant in the 1950s kept their situation to themselves to avoid the claim by neighbours that they were scrounges. Today claimants ware their Welfare status on their chest happy to be seen as being "on benefit". The psycology, 'to get off benefits' is missing and a lifestyle is created to accommodate the payments as they come in. No wonder the terror of a delay when the relative comfort associated with regular payments is thrown up in the air.
The skill of a woman in the 1930s, 40s and 50s to make the rations fit the needs of the family, "to make ends meet" as the saying goes, was the guile she employed.
No 40" TVs, no mobile phones, no motor car, probably no washing machine and certainly no dish washer. No overseas holidays, no credit/debit cards, Clothing that was mended not thrown away it was a different world and one which largely people accepted and were certainly proud of their ability to manage their affairs within the financial constrains imposed.
Today it's entitlement, it's a right of passage that a certain standard is yours irrespective of where the actual money comes from. My mother and father would run a mile from credit arrangements on the basis that they could "not afford" the things Hire Purchase offered. Affordability was the touchstone of the working class household and their pride in their own self sufficiency was the cement which bound them together as a society