Social Security: Winter is coming and the Government appears content to leave the ramparts unguarded

A homeless encampment in Manchester last year, one of the signs of the growing strain on Britain's social security safety net. People are falling through the system into poverty.

The first signs are appearing of the hard times ahead, forecast by the Autumn Statement. It has been less than a week since the Government announced its budget priorities and already it is under pressure over the gaps in social security created by the lower funding brought by six years of austerity.

People are falling through the cracks because, from social care to free school meals, the safety net is becoming porous. In some areas, people don't know they have a right to support and in others there simply aren't places for them in programmes.

At the root of these issues is funding. In their quixotic crusade to tackle public spending, that they sees as an unnecessary waste, the Conservatives have chipped, slashed and removed whole sections of Britain's social security safety net.

As Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn has pointed out, the Conservatives have slashed spending even where spending would ultimately save far more money in the long run than cuts will. The onward rumbling housing crisis has proven particularly expensive for the Government.

As a result of a failure to build new social housing, and the determined sell-off of present stock, far more is spent on Housing Benefit to keep people in more expensive, and often less satisfactory, private rented accommodation.

Investing funds in social housing could, in fact, drastically reduce the housing benefit bill, by perhaps billions, all while tackling one of Britain's a major infrastructural problem. The key that the Conservative seem to be missing is the vital role to be played by smart spending.

The Conservatives have certainly tried to portray themselves as embracing the idea of smart spending. When it comes to funds, the Government has been keen to say that it has extended certain tax raising powers to local government to cover the increased cost of social care. And the Prime Minister continues to repeat the '£10bn for the NHS' figure.

Yet their claims are belied by reality. The £10bn figure has been debunked and its continued use criticised. The extra funding for social care, the Social Care Precept - that lets local government keep a 2% greater share council tax receipts - has been dismissed as wholly inadequate. The Chancellor pledge in invest in infrastructure resulted in just 40,000 new homes being promised.

There is even talk today of the pension age being pushed back again. Even as the living standards of all workers, especially the most vulnerable, continue to fall, the Government still whittles away at the public sector and turns to the market.

Winter is coming and the Government appears content to leave the ramparts unguarded - believing perhaps that people should secure their own fences in a market for social security. That is a plan that progressives should comprehensively reject.

Prioritising opportunities for the affluent and thrusting over security for the vulnerable isn't just unethical and economically unsound, its also a social disaster waiting to happen.

It is the very thing that feeds the desperation, that in turn feeds the far right. The neoliberalism of the Centre-Right is laying the shaky foundations of its own collapse.

So what does that leave for progressives to do? Yanis Varoufakis has put it the simplest: first, stabilise and save what we can of value in the present system, and second, develop a real, working and unifying alternative. The costs of letting the house of cards fall - personally, socially, economically - are just far too high to do otherwise.

References

'Autumn Statement: 'Mistake' not to invest in social care, ex-minister says'; on the BBC; 27 November 2016.

Judith Burns' 'Free school meals plan will help more pupils, heads say'; on the BBC; 28 November 2016.

Hilary Osborne's 'Private landlords gain £26.7bn from UK taxpayer, says campaign group: Generation Rent says private landlords benefit from subsidies worth the equivalent of £1,000 for every household in the country'; in The Guardian; 9 February 2015.

'Is the government’s £10bn NHS funding commitment more than NHS leaders asked for?'; from Full Fact; 5 October 2016.

Paul Burstow's 'Will the autumn statement offer any hope for social care? This week’s NCAS conference is likely to be a glum affair – chronic underfunding has further hollowed out an already fragile sector'; in The Guardian; 31 October 2016.

Richard Johnson's 'Social care precept to net councils £382m'; on Public Finance; 30 June 2016.

Rachel Younger's 'No lifeline for social care in the Chancellor's Autumn Statement'; on ITV News; 23 November 2016.

Rupert Jones' 'Pension age may be about to rise again, says former minister: Steve Webb says government considering faster timetable for higher state pension age of 70, affecting millions of workers'; in The Guardian; 28 November 2016.

Hannah Summers' 'UK in for cold snap as temperatures forecast to be as low as -8C: Monday night expected to be the coldest of week while bookies predict 2/1 chance of white Christmas in Scotland'; in The Guardian; 27 November 2016.

Yanis Varoufakis' 'Yanis Varoufakis: How I became an erratic Marxist - Before he entered politics, Yanis Varoufakis, the iconoclastic Greek finance minister at the centre of the latest eurozone standoff, wrote this searing account of European capitalism and how the left can learn from Marx’s mistakes'; originally from the Subversive Festival in Zagreb in 2013; in The Guardian; 18 February 2015.