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From Times Online

May 28, 2010

Useless, jobless men – the social blight of our

age
The benefits system has produced an emasculated generation who can find
neither work nor a wife
Camilla Cavendish

Of all the government adverts that have swamped our radio stations these past few years (must be a quick
saving there for the Treasury), one of the most irritating was the jolly woman asking us in a sing-song voice if we
had remembered to report changes in our circumstances. Like hell. Every time I heard the ad it conjured up a
vision of a lonely official waiting in vain at her desk for people to come in and sign away entitlements to which
they feel, well, entitled.

This pathetic advert seemed to me to epitomise the politicians’ total loss of control over the monster that is our
benefits system. The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) presides over a system so complex that it has
to issue 8,690 pages of guidance to help its staff to apply its 51 different benefits — the product of the ever
more precise targeting of benefits to particular groups.

In the years of plenty, it was easier to placate and complicate than to simplify. Every new benefit and its
separate computer system was just bolted on to the mainframe. But the result is that Britain has more than
twice the number of sick people as France. The potential for playing the system, defrauding the system and
falling foul of the system is enormous.

So in declaring war yesterday on both poverty and the benefits system, Iain Duncan Smith had it right. If the
Government is going to make real inroads into the deficit it will have to tackle the nearly £200 billion welfare
budget, which is a third of government spending. This week’s £6 billion of cuts was only Round 1: £6 billion is
only 1 per cent of government expenditure, so this was a warm-up. Round 2 will need to take on the DWP
leviathan.

But the argument for welfare reform is not just one of affordability. In too many cases, welfare has entrenched
poverty. Mr Duncan Smith is one of the few politicians who really understand the poverty trap. Gordon Brown
made life more bearable for many people on benefits, but he also made it harder to escape from them. Get a job
tomorrow earning between £10,000 and £30,000 a year and you’ll take home only 30p out of every extra pound
you earn after the first £10,000. Twenty pence will go in income tax, 11p in national insurance, and 39p in lost
tax credits. Add in the loss of other allowances (housing benefit, council tax benefit) and you may find it simply
doesn’t pay to work harder. Our poverty trap is deeper than that of most other European countries. That is a
strange legacy for a government that wanted to make work pay.

The fear of losing benefits — of not being able to scramble back on to the lifeboat if you fall off — is a huge
disincentive to change your circumstances, let alone report them. One in seven working-age households is
dependent on benefits for more than half its income. More than half of all lone parents depend on the State for
at least half their income. William Beveridge would be horrified to discover that the safety net he designed has
become a trap, creating generations of worklessness and dwindling self-esteem. It is also creating a glut of
unemployed, unwanted, unmarriageable men.

These men were overlooked during a decade of prosperity that did nothing to change their lives. At the
beginning of that decade, 5.4 million working-age adults were claiming out-of-work benefits. The same number
were still claiming just before the recession struck. Almost a fifth of 16 to 24-year-olds were not in education,
employment or training in 1997. The number was identical in 2006. These people stayed put in the Welsh
valleys, in Liverpool, in Glasgow, while Eastern Europeans travelled a thousand miles to pick up work on
construction sites in London. Immigration reduced the opportunities available to white British men whose poor
education made them less attractive candidates, while the benefits system undermined their motivation.

The problem affects the whole of society because of the striking correlation between male joblessness and
single motherhood, particularly in the old industrial cities. In Liverpool, male unemployment rose from 12 per
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cent in 1971 to 30 per cent in 2001. In 1971 11 per cent of families were headed by a single parent; by 2001, 45
per cent were. Similar patterns can be seen in Birmingham, Strathclyde and Newcastle. The epidemic of male
joblessness after the collapse of manufacturing industries coincided with an increase in female employment and
welfare support to mothers who found that they could manage alone.

Overlooked by society, irrelevant to employers, unwanted by women who can raise families on benefits without
their help, the man who has no work or a series of short-term jobs is a problem. Without steady work, he will
struggle to acquire a family: unemployed men are less likely to marry or cohabit than employed ones. Without
a stable relationship, he is less likely to grow into a good family man and raise good sons. The taxpayer has
become the father: one in four mothers is single and more than half live on welfare. A lot of these women
describe the real fathers of their children as “useless” or worse. The men have no role.

In the worst cases, the State has helped to create a class of jobless serial boyfriends who prey on single
mothers on benefits. When two of these men moved into the flat that Haringey Council had generously provided
for Tracey Connelly, Baby P’s mother, the little boy’s fate was sealed. They killed him. Other such men appear
in bit parts in tragedies such as that of Shannon Matthews, abducted and drugged by her own “family”. The
welfare system has helped to deprive these children of the most effective check on abuse — the family.

Robert Rowthorn, Professor of Economics at Cambridge, has shown that female and male worklessness have
been going in opposite directions for 30 years, well before this latest “mancession”. His research suggests that
half the rise in lone parenthood in the past 30 years may be due to male unemployment. He believes that
governments must start to focus on these men, and question the feminisation of education and the workplace. It
is no solution, he says, to say that women don’t need men or that men should become more female. Nor is it
any good waiting for economic growth to dig them out of poverty. Those men need a chance, not a benefits
system that undermines them.

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