Owen Polley: ​Stormont makes no serious contribution to the debate about welfare​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

This was a welcome change in tone, but it all felt rather familiar from the period when David Cameron was prime minister.

This time, the secretary of state for work and pensions, Liz Kendall, attributed the country’s problems to “14 years of Tory failure”. In a similar vein, from 2010 until at least 2016, the Conservatives blamed 13 years of Labour government for their difficulties.

Under Mr Cameron and his chancellor, George Osborne, the Tories promised to stop benefits from becoming a ‘lifestyle choice’ and said they would stage a ‘bonfire of the quangoes’. Now, Starmer says he intends to get rid of NHS England, which he describes as the biggest quango of them all, while also persuading people out of welfare and back into work.

The ideas and instincts behind these initiatives are all beyond reproach. However, the sense of deja vu shows how unsuccessful the government has actually been in getting benefits under control, or cutting back wasteful public spending, over the past 15 years.

Will the results be any different this time? As the News Letter reported, the proposals are at an early stage, and may yet be trimmed back or changed. Don’t be surprised if there is also a strong sense that history is repeating itself on these issues in Northern Ireland.

You may remember that in 2015 Stormont collapsed, because, according to the police, the IRA had killed a former member, Kevin McGuigan, during a feud. As a consequence, the DUP understandably refused to work with Sinn Fein for a while.

Predictably, though, it was the Shinners who made the loudest demands, including special treatment for NI to mitigate Tory welfare reforms, when negotiations to restore the executive began.

This bare-faced audacity should have caused unionist anger, but the DUP liked the idea of extra funding too. For that reason, Sinn Fein got much of what it asked for in the Fresh Start Agreement, without any meaningful challenge.

To bring us back to the present day, most of the local parties, both at Stormont and Westminster, reacted to Kendall’s announcements with alarmism. The DUP leader, Gavin Robinson, and Sinn Fein’s Michelle O’Neill both accused the government of potentially endangering the ‘sick and the vulnerable’. The SDLP’s MP, Colum Eastwood, frothed at Labour’s ‘immoral and unethical’ plans.

This kind of response is almost instinctive for many politicians here, irrespective of the changes that are proposed.

Northern Ireland’s welfare system is devolved but the Treasury pays the bills directly. If our benefits were to become substantially more generous than those in Great Britain, Stormont would have to pay the difference.

However, local representatives, even those from unionist parties, are inclined to treat welfare as if it were a free injection of cash into NI’s economy, rather than tax-payer’s money that should be spent with care.

To add to this sense of entitlement, devolution encourages ministers to blame Westminster whenever they need to make difficult or potentially unpopular decisions. And Irish nationalists always have an incentive to allege bad treatment by the government and create another grievance to attack our place in the UK.

That is not to claim that Labour has come up with the perfect plan, or to argue that its reforms will work well.

Liz Kendall says that people are better off mentally and physically when they are in work and the current system does not provide a sufficient incentive to get them off benefits and into a job. The result is that too many of the population are effectively ‘parked’ on welfare. This means they are less likely to live fulfilling lives and impose a financial burden on society that it increasingly cannot afford.

Many of these arguments were used 15 years ago by Iain Duncan Smith, the former Conservative work and pensions secretary. He believed strongly that the government was letting people down by allowing them to become trapped on welfare. He even started a think-tank to explore these issues.

They were both right. And the situation has, if anything, become more serious, thanks to unprecedented levels of immigration.

Unfortunately, one of the biggest problems with Labour’s proposals is that, although the government wants to move people from welfare into work, it has also introduced policies that are dissuading businesses from taking on new employees.

At the last budget, the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, announced an increase in employers’ national insurance, which is about to take effect next month. Many companies have already stopped recruiting staff, due to the extra costs this will impose.

The government’s proposals last week included tightening the criteria for some benefits, raising the minimum age for claiming Universal Credit and putting time limits on allowances for job seekers. These changes may be fair, if there were jobs for people to go to and a safety net for those who genuinely could not work.

There absolutely should be a debate about those points and the government’s plans should be scrutinised closely. Can we expect sensible contributions to that conversation from the parties at Stormont, though, or just a lot of overly-emotional language and special pleading?

From the evidence of the past week, most of our politicians have already decided to take the deeply unserious route.