TIME-limited benefits will be introduced to Northern Ireland by the Fresh Start agreement’s panel on welfare reform.
We may assume this interpretation is unintended. The panel, known as the Evason working group after its chair Prof Eileen Evason, was tasked with chopping up a carrot, not waving a stick.
Its report, published this week, proposes phasing the impact of reforms in for most of those affected by offering them a year of supplementary payments, at a cost to Stormont over the next four years of £500m.
The main beneficiaries will be carers, people with health problems and low-income families.
But however this is dressed up and whatever it is called, these claimants face a drop in their benefits after a fixed period even if there is no change in their circumstances, which in practice is a time limit.
The concept of time-limited benefits is not entirely alien to the UK system.
Everyone has a national insurance account that entitles you to a range of contributions-based benefits, which last for six or 12 months before you have to fall back on an income-based safety net.
However, this is all an illusion. There is nothing in your national insurance account - it is just a notional insurance account - and the levels of both types of benefits are the same.
So when your ‘insurance’ ends, you switch automatically and without penalty from contributions-based to income-based payments, which can then continue until you are entitled to the state pension, which is itself becoming increasingly disconnected from personal contributions. So in effect, there are no time limits.
This is extremely unusual in international terms, certainly in the case of unemployment-related benefit.
Lose your job in most European countries and you will receive a proportion of your salary, which then slides or drops after a fixed period to a much lower basic rate.
This in turn may stop entirely after a number of years. In France, for example, contributions-based unemployment benefit is around 60 per cent of your salary for two years (or three years if you are over 50) after which it abruptly drops to the ‘revenue minimum d’insertion’ (minimum subsistence income.)
The main welfare system in the United States is even more focused on deadlines, as Bill Clinton emphasised in 1997 by changing its name to Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF).
Clinton also devolved the system, making it intriguingly relevant to Stormont’s position today.
Washington gives each state its share of TANF’s budget as a block grant to do with as it likes - but one of the few restrictions still mandated at federal level is a lifetime limit on all claimants of five years.
Most states have added separate limits on how long each claim can last, typically two years. Some have gone much further.
Arizona permits only 12 months of claims in a lifetime, although child benefits are excluded.
Federal unemployment insurance is separate to TANF but again it is dominated by deadlines, with a basic entitlement of six months followed by five emergency extensions taking the current limit up to 99 weeks, after which you are thrown onto the mercy of TANF - or charity, if you have no dependent children. People who have reached this limit are known as ‘99-ers’.
Nothing so drastic would ever be considered here but the philosophy behind benefit deadlines on both sides of the Atlantic - getting the long-term unemployed back into work - is entirely humane and demonstrably successful.
Until 1998, Denmark had the longest defined unemployment benefit deadline in Europe - 90 per cent of salary for five years.
A feature of this system was a 700 per cent spike in people re-entering the workforce in the period between three and six months before their entitlement ran out.
When Denmark cut the deadline to four years, joint-longest in the EU with the Netherlands, the spike simply moved back a year.
So in 2010, it cut the limit to two years - only a little longer than America’s 99 weeks - and saw the spike move back again, in the midst of a global recession. In short, welfare deadlines work.
The Evason group focused largely on sickness and family benefits, in accordance with its remit of addressing the most vulnerable, but it is still asking Stormont to commit half a billion pounds to the idea that even the most vulnerable will get more for 12 months than they can subsist on indefinitely.
Does anyone have the nerve to confront what that implies?
newton@irishnews.com
