Dan Finn

The Queen’s Speech placed welfare reform at the heart of the new Government’s strategy for getting ‘five million plus people languishing on benefits into work and out of poverty’.  Subsequently, in his first major speech Iain Duncan Smith, the new Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, argued that the failures of the existing system were ‘trapping’ people in dependency.  The New Deal employment programmes were deemed to have failed and the existing welfare system has become too complex and expensive, with large numbers of people ‘parked’ on disability benefits. Read more...