Given the fate of Andrew Lansley's NHS plans, it would be foolish to assume the welfare reforms will proceed smoothly
He had sauntered towards Downing Street with Etonian nonchalance, but 100 days into his term a succession of ready-to-run ideas on health, education and welfare had emerged, and David Cameron was suddenly looking like ? in his own phrase ? "a man with a plan". The Economist plastered the PM on its cover with a mohican, and hailed him as the punk to smash up the old bastions of state power and put the users in charge of public services.
The road towards the coalition's promise of a smaller but smarter state, however, soon turned out to involve an inelegant segue through the forests and the yards of schools scheduled for a rebuild. Next came universities, where the big idea of harnessing a price mechanism to secure value for money went awry once institutions from Oxbridge to former polytechnics lined up to whack their students for the maximum allowable �9,000 fee. Meanwhile, the great Cameronian police reform, elected commissioners, ran into possibly terminal trouble in the House of Lords. Now, most extraordinarily of all, the conveyor belt in the law factory has been ratcheted into reverse with the health reforms. Announcing the Liberal Democrats' great triumph of obstruction last week, Nick Clegg explained his party's success in taming the Tory urge to privatise was so complete that the Commons would now consider afresh legislation which the chamber had previously all but passed.
For anyone worried about creeping commercialism in English medicine, Mr Clegg's announcement is warmly welcome, and an important reminder that this is a coalition of two parties, born of a hung parliament. This constellation of political forces is not one in which the Tories should ever have been allowed to assume that their controversial plans could be railroaded through. Andrew Lansley was able to work his NHS plans up from blueprint to bill within a few short months in government because he had been preparing them for six years in opposition. But their fate is a reminder that the best-laid schemes often go awry.
Consequently, no one should assume that battle will proceed smoothly in the one other field commanded by a minister who had a similarly long time to prepare his ground. Iain Duncan Smith has been poring over the intricacies of social security ever since he lost his party's leadership. The former face of the Tory's unbending right is evidently passionate about the myriad ways in which the system can ensnare those it is designed to help. But his moral certainty that he has the answers invites doubts about whether he has truly grasped the inherent dilemmas between encouraging work and protecting those destined to remain without it. With welfare in line for �18bn in cuts, the single largest portion of budgetary pain, these dilemmas are heightened mightily.
Nervous about public anger against real or imagined scroungers, Labour abstained at the second reading of the welfare reform bill. As ever more devilish details come to light, however, a more full-throated opposition is now being actively considered. Potentially dire knock-on effects on childcare, housing and local government finance are slowly emerging.
The biggest worry for Mr Duncan Smith is that Liberal Democrats are also getting decidedly jittery on one point in particular. The crude benefits cap which won George Osborne easy cheers at the Tory conference and in the Sun is now coming unstuck. It would plunge big families into penury, since they currently get larger cheques for the good reason that they have more bodies and souls to keep together. In London, where the cap will also restrict high housing benefit payments, poor parents could soon be asked to raise each child on just �3 a day. Mr Cameron should avoid another coalition bust-up that ends in forced retreat. Better to do away with the last vestiges of the head-banging mohican, by calmly removing this cap at once.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/may/30/editorial-coalition-nhs-welfare-reforms
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