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The price of money for nothing

By Peter Saunders - posted Monday, 22 December 2008


In May last year, four-year-old Madeleine McCann went missing from an apartment in Portugal where her family was on holiday. Her disappearance dominated the news in Britain and across the world. Despite a reward of £2.5 million being offered for her safe return, nothing has been seen of her.

But one mother's anguish proved another's opportunity.

Back in England, watching daytime television in her council house in Dewsbury, Yorkshire, 32-year-old Karen Matthews got to thinking about that reward. She contacted Michael Donovan, her present partner's uncle, with a plan to abduct her own nine-year-old daughter, Shannon, and hide her at Donovan's house. After a few weeks, when a reward was offered, Donovan would claim to have found Shannon and the two conspirators would then split the money.

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In February this year, Matthews put the plan into action and reported Shannon missing. With 300 police officers searching for her daughter, she appeared before television cameras with tears in her eyes, appealing for Shannon's safe return.

About three weeks later, police discovered Shannon at Donovan's house. She had been drugged and tethered. This week, Matthews and Donovan were found guilty of kidnapping her.

Most people in Britain are appalled that a mother could subject her daughter to an ordeal such as this in the hope of making money. But this case is about more than just one woman's heartless indifference towards her child.

As details have emerged of this family's lifestyle, middle England has been confronted with stark evidence of how the country's welfare state has enabled a destructive underclass culture to take root and thrive. The only good news is that, at last, the Government seems ready to tackle the problem by radically reforming the way the welfare system works.

Matthews has never done a day's work. She has relied on the Government to house her and to give her an income of £287 ($644) every week. Nor has she ever married. She has had seven children, sired by five or six different fathers (she isn't sure exactly how many). Three of these children live with their fathers. The other four were living with Matthews and her latest partner, who is 22 and awaiting trial on child pornography charges. He thought he was the father of Matthews's youngest child, but DNA tests showed he wasn't. The four children who lived with them were badly neglected and beaten. The state fed the older children breakfast at school. Dinner may have consisted of a bag of lollies.

Much of the cash stumped up by taxpayers to look after these children was spent on cigarettes (60 a day) and alcohol. Shannon was regularly drugged with anti-depressants, painkillers and travel sickness pills to keep her quiet, especially during school holidays.

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The British public is gradually waking up to the realisation that this Hogarthian scene of debauchery, selfish irresponsibility and gross neglect is not exceptional.

The Conservative Opposition has taken to describing Britain as a “broken society”, although the core of the problem is concentrated at the bottom end of the social structure, where the middle classes rarely go. This is where the collapse of the family has had its most devastating impact and the corrupting influence of unconditional welfare is most keenly felt.

Almost one-fifth of British households live in public rental housing (four times as many as in Australia). Some of the biggest council estates in the country have become welfare ghettoes where almost nobody works.

They are spiritless, depressing places where people lead aimless lives of quiet (and sometimes not so quiet) desperation. Crime, violence and drugs are commonplace.

Many of the residents of these estates are single parents who, like Matthews, qualified for a house and an income by having children. Others are unemployed or claim to be incapable of working.

As in Australia, the number of single parents claiming welfare in Britain has mushroomed over the past 40 years. Fewer than one-quarter of single parents (and less than 10per cent of those with children under five) have full-time jobs. The rest rely on government payments for all or most of their income, for without at least one full-time worker, no household can be self-reliant.

Also like Australia, there has been a steady increase in the number of Britons of working age claiming they are sick or disabled. A staggering five million working-age people in Britain live on welfare, and half of them are claiming incapacity benefit.

This week the Government published a white paper that promises a welfare revolution. Some of the proposals echo what John Howard achieved in Australia, but some go much further. Until now, single parents in Britain have been entitled to stay at home and draw welfare until their youngest child reaches school-leaving age. The same was true in Australia until Howard changed the rules in 2006. Now the British Government is following Australia's lead by requiring single parents to look for work once their child reaches seven. Those who don't find jobs will be switched to unemployment benefits.

But the white paper takes two further steps that Howard never attempted.

First, it proposes that single parents on welfare should progress to work after their youngest child's first birthday.

It is unclear what exactly progressing to work means. It could involve training or work experience programs. It could just mean tweaking their CV.

But whatever it means, those who refuse to do anything risk having their benefits docked. Only single parents with children under one will be unaffected by new requirements.

Second, the white paper also aims to reduce the growing number of disability claimants. This has been a problem for all Western countries during the past 20 years and few have made much progress with it.

But Britain will reassess all claimants with the aim of reducing their numbers by 40per cent. As with single parents, all but the most disabled claimants will be reclassified as progressing to work. This could mean having to do training or complete work placements in order to keep receiving benefits.

Will these reforms work?

One reason for scepticism is that we have been here before.

When New Labour came to power in 1997, Tony Blair promised to reform welfare, but with his backbenchers revolting and people in wheelchairs demonstrating outside the House of Commons, it all proved too difficult and very little got done.

The same could happen again. Many Labour MPs feel uneasy about these proposals, and the welfare lobby could again cause trouble. It is probably easier for a Labour government to introduce reforms such as these than for the Tories to attempt it, but the dynamic young Work and Pensions Minister, James Purnell, will have his work cut out getting these proposals through.

Even if he succeeds, there is the obvious danger that progressing to work could get interpreted very loosely, in which case the reforms will achieve little. There is also the problem of how to apply financial sanctions to single parents who refuse to comply with the new activity conditions.

The Government says it will withhold payments from them, but when children are involved, this is easier said than done.

Australia's experience here is instructive. When Howard decided to penalise inactive parents by reducing their benefits, he ended up having to compensate them to ensure their children did not suffer. Money withdrawn with one hand was given back with the other.

Finally, there is the question of what jobs people expelled from welfare might do.

One reason why disability numbers have increased in all Western countries is because demand for unskilled labour has fallen as a result of technological progress and globalisation. Rather than swelling the dole numbers, many unskilled, jobless people got redefined as disabled.

What jobs will these unskilled, “incapacitated” people do if they must now leave welfare? Reskilling might help some get jobs, but training is rarely effective for those with few qualifications who have been on benefits for a long time.

It seems likely that many will be pushed through useless training schemes to prepare them for jobs that don't exist, or for which they are unsuited.

The time to reform welfare was during the past 10 years, when the economy was strong. With a severe recession looming, it will be much harder to move people off benefits and into work, and welfare numbers are likely to trend upwards, not down.

This week's welfare reform proposals may therefore prove to be too little too late.

Yet it has to be worth trying, for something urgently needs to be done to halt the growth of the welfare underclass. If these latest reforms fail, Brits can expect to see many more dulled, hardened faces like that of Matthews staring out from the front pages of their newspapers in the years to come.

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First published in The Weekend Australian on December 13-14, 2008.



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About the Author

Peter Saunders is a distinguished fellow of the Centre for Independent Studies, now living in England. After nine years living and working in Australia, Peter Saunders returned to the UK in June 2008 to work as a freelance researcher and independent writer of fiction and non-fiction.He is author of Poverty in Australia: Beyond the Rhetoric and Australia's Welfare Habit, and how to kick it. Peter Saunder's website is here.

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