No benefit in change

But certainty is a regular visitor to the Iain Duncan Smith mind, and the vocal views of a disabled citizen further crippled by a cut in his allowances was not going to put the great reformer off his stride. Not much does, though the news that his much-trumpeted universal benefit pilot has been scaled back with full-scale implementation postponed might, you think, have planted the odd doubt.

Even before the scale and damage of these reforms become wholly apparent, we are gaining a greater understanding of the sickening house style being imposed by his department on the agencies charged with putting his draconian measures into daily practice.

The activities of ATOS, the private sector firm hired to determine fitness for work, have been well documented, as have the colossal taxpayer-funded sums deployed winning appeals against manifestly unjust assessments.

Oxfam, better known for its work addressing poverty in the developing world, has found no shortage of need on its own doorstep in recent times. In Scotland it partners a variety of community groups helping them build skills. One of them, the Clydebank Independent Resource Centre, has had an 80% success rate appealing against flawed ATOS testing.

But like so many community groups, it is run by a handful of part-time staff and volunteers on a budget of under £200,000. Oxfam believes this is the type of organisation which should be supported by the Scottish Government as it tries to combat the effect of cuts which will take an estimated £2-3 billion out of the Scottish economy.

They suggest it might be done through a financial security change fund of the kind recommended by Jim McCormick in a report he wrote for the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations. "It would bring together energy companies and banks operating in Scotland to assist those who may be affected by welfare changes."

There will be no shortage of those. Last week some discomfited whistleblowers went public, describing how Jobcentre workers had been pressurised into finding ever-more ingenious ways of throwing people off benefits for six months as a sanction for breaking their agreement.

These so-called breaches have been as trivial as turning up late for a Jobcentre interview or not chasing up possible vacancies in areas where they had no skills and experience. According to some Jobcentre workers they had to be ever more inventive about finding ways to meet new "targets" of people to sanction or face threats to their own employment. Hassling claimants has even coined a new word in assessing who might be thrown off the books: "botherability".

These casualties of the Iain Duncan Smith revolution rose to 75,000 sanctioned in the last month for which figures were available, and will be joined before long by the victims of an attempt to roll up benefits into one computerised single adjustable payment.

The DWP initially blustered that no such targeting or inter-Jobcentre league tables existed but, faced with ever more leaked memos proving the opposite, they then suggested it was all a question of misinterpretation of the new rules.

To someone thrown off Jobseeker's Allowance, itself a meagre shelter against hunger and poverty, and on to a £30-a-week hardship payment, the source of their personal financial disaster is less relevant than the stark fact of having to exist on a sum which, self evidently, cannot cover living costs.

As Judith Robertson, head of Oxfam in Scotland, puts it: "Our system does a bad job of caring for people. It is one of the meanest in the developed world, providing incomes far below what people need to live a decent life."

For many people the whole basis on which these so-called reforms have been mounted is itself deeply flawed, based as it is on the holy grail of finding paid work in a society where five people chasing every job is a daily reality.

But more than that, people such as economics professor Ailsa Mackay at Glasgow Caledonian University are convinced that not only has the Secretary of State found the wrong answers, he is asking the wrong questions.

In her recent paper for the David Hume Institute she suggests: "We have to move beyond the work versus leisure dichotomy and start to question how, what and whom we value."

She argues that the economist's traditional model of what is valuable and productive takes no note of the huge amount of valuable work done in the "invisible" sectors like caring. And she says that by focusing on welfare schemes which have an overarching purpose to promote paid work exclusively, "we fail to account for the experience of that work for many vulnerable individuals, including, most significantly, women".

Her alternative proposition is a citizen's basic income, irrespective of employment status, to replace all existing income maintenance benefits that would effectively integrate the tax and benefit system. Whether or not any government would be prepared to think that radically is a moot point, but in talking to her you sense her anger and despair at the current direction of travel.

"When I started work it was with something called the Department of Health and Society Security, which by definition offered protection. That become the Department of Social Security and now the Department of Work and Pensions. That tells you a lot about how we view its contemporary purpose. We also used to talk about a welfare state, but now we just talk about welfare in the kind of terms used in America.

"I am fearful for the future of our children, which I believe looks really bleak. In the 1980s we used to talk about the long-term effects of poverty, but the situation is worse now. We have households hit by a double whammy of reduced benefits at the same time as cuts in public services."

Prof Mackay thinks some communities are so battered and bruised that issues such as human rights and dignity are not things people have the time or energy for any more. "They're just too busy trying to survive and put food on the table."

She also thinks there is a job to be done by her fellow academics undertaking serious research in the next six months on the impact of the cuts and the DWP culture on individual households.

"We know about lots of things anecdotally, and we can presume lots of things. But what we need is to assemble the hard evidence so that we can use it to try and address some of the awful damage in the future."