Fairness and honesty at work

"A Future Fair For All" is something we will be hearing a lot about over the next few months. Who can argue with that? Of course, the fact is that Gordon Brown is largely responsible for thirteen years of past in which social mobility has decreased, the income gap widened and the tax and benefits system become ever more bamboozling such that it is almost impossible for many people to know to what, exactly, they are entitled. That's not fair. It's not fair to tacitly encourage those on Jobseekers' Allowance (JSA) not to declare their earnings honestly (because of the crude way their enterprise is capped to £5-15 per week, depending on circumstances), while treating those who do declare additional income as suspicious characters who need to be investigated for fraud. It is not fair to reward dishonesty, especially when people are at their most vulnerable. Another irony is that those on Incapacity Benefit or its spawn, ESA (Employment and Support Allowance), are rightly free to earn up to £90 per week permitted earnings, and given other financial incentives to get back into the workplace and start an upward health spiral. However, the recent rise in those on JSA is probably due in part to recent huge, and expensive, efforts to force people off health-related benefits and into work. Surely we should be encouraging everyone to deal honestly with the State? Surely we should be encouraging everyone to be both enterprising and flexible?  In the real world, work/unemployment and fit/unfit are not binary states: we all have to deal with shades of grey, and many of us with varying and unpredictable hours, with fragmented and portfolio careers. It would be a lot fairer if the State would acknowledge that reality.


Simpler is not always fairer, but incomprehensible is never equitable. Leaving aside the seemingly random appearance and disappearance of tax bands, the complicated systems of benefits and tax credits which Gordon Brown has devised, modified and entrenched need a radical overhaul, in my personal opinion. It will require a certain amount of consensus, and a lot of impartial analysis, but it has to be done. This is not about thinking the unthinkable but about fixing the unfixable.