For a compelling insight into the shambolic disaster that is the benefit cap, it’s worth reading last week’s landmark court judgment. It explains not only why the £500-a-week cap unlawfully discriminates against disabled people in the way it treats full-time carers of disabled adult relatives, but also why it is such an abysmal piece of policy.
Mr Justice Collins’s judgment finds – with thinly disguised contempt – that the work and pensions secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, was wrong to insist this cohort of carers should be covered by the cap (unlike full-time carers of a disabled dependent child or partner, who are exempt). Not merely wrong, he adds, but unreasonably and unjustifiably so.
What is striking is Collins’s scorn for the assumption behind the government’s position on these carers: that the minimum of 35 hours a week they spend looking after adult relatives is not really work, and that therefore that they must be subjected to the full persuasive force of the cap to change their workshy attitudes. This, he concluded, was “offensive”.
He points out that caring is difficult and burdensome work and that “those who are prepared to make the sacrifice involved in undertaking such care would not be those who would normally be regarded as workshy and content to rely on benefits.”
You have to wonder that it falls to a high court judge to instruct policy-makers in such basic common sense, but there we are – Collins also thought it necessary to remind Duncan Smith that if you are penniless to begin with it is impossible to cut household costs; that a homeless single mother of four decanted to Birmingham from London as a result of the cap would find it hard to care for her elderly Croydon-based mother; and that anyone caring at least 35 hours a week for a disabled adult (on top of caring for her own children) would find it difficult to find and maintain the 16 hours of paid work needed to avoid the cap.
All these points the judge felt obliged to make in response to the secretary of state’s defence of the cap, which displayed an embarrassing, if not entirely unexpected, detachment from reality. He was also baffled by how Duncan Smith’s defence of the benefit cap clearly contradicted other aspects of government policy. Why, if your aim was to save on public expenditure, he suggested, would you persist with a benefit cap that, by making carers homeless and those they care for reliant on social care services, piled huge extra net costs onto the taxpayer?
The judgment fell in a week when the government announced that it would allow councils to raise council tax in order to plug a billion pound gap in social care funding. Perhaps ministers can explain to taxpayers that some of that money is needed to pay for the care of those adults who have been pointlessly deprived of their full-time family carer (and, to their distress, made dependent on the state) by the benefit cap?
Only a few months ago, the health secretary Jeremy Hunt wrote that we “need a wholesale repairing of the social contract so that children see their parents giving wonderful care to grandparents”. Hunt talks of the “national shame” of elderly parents plonked into care by their family, and his reverence for other cultures’ supposed devotion to the familial care of elders. Perhaps Hunt can explain how the inclusion of these carers within the benefit cap fits in to this vision?
The judge urged the government to exempt this relatively small (1,400) group of carers from the cap: not doing so produces individual hardship, and provides no benefit to the state, he said. As the cap is lowered (to £440 a week in London, lower elsewhere), presumably many more will fall within it. But the immediate response of the government was to insist that these carers were still covered by the cap.
Why? Ministers may yet exempt this group, but they have much political capital invested in protecting this pitiful, nasty policy. It fails to achieve its policy aims, breaches international children’s rights, discriminates against disabled people, shunts extra costs on to the taxpayer and generates misery and poverty. Yet they may still decide all this is a price worth paying.
Patrick Butler is the Guardian’s social policy editor
