Rivers in Trouble

Yesterday was the sixth annual World Rivers Day, with events scheduled all around the world to clean up rivers and highlight threats to them. The Straits Times looks at the top 10 endangered rivers.

Target: Welfare

British minister's plan to revamp system running into fierce opposition

By Jonathan Eyal, Europe Correspondent

LONDON: Mr Iain Duncan Smith, the minister in charge of Britain's pensions and social security payments, is a man in a hurry.

Although he got his job only a few months ago, he has already threatened to resign twice, angered by opposition from colleagues to plans for a radical overhaul of Britain's welfare system.

Mr Duncan Smith appears to have won this skirmish: His reform proposals will be unveiled next month, and they will affect all British government handouts, from allowances to the disabled to child welfare and pension payments.

But the bigger battle with the millions of ordinary Britons who rely on welfare support and the armies of bureaucrats who run the schemes is only beginning. And it's guaranteed to be bloody.

The size and complexity of Britain's welfare structure remains mind-boggling. Overall, it spends around &pound192 billion (S$397 billion) a year on welfare.

The Department for Work and Pensions - Mr Duncan Smith's empire - administers 27 different types of benefits; other British ministries and local authorities operate a similar number of schemes yet again.

One of the reasons the system is so complex is that, although most of Britain's welfare and social security benefits were introduced between the 1940s and 1960s, some have their roots well in the Depression years after World War I.

Politicians did not help either. Since inventing new welfare benefits is a vote-winner, successive governments added fresh layers of entitlements.

There is also the familiar problem of every welfare state: regardless of how fast a country's economy grows, some people will always be poor, because poverty is ultimately a relative concept.

So, a welfare system meant to 'eradicate the scourge of poverty' - as its inventors claimed - keeps growing despite the fact that, by definition, it can never achieve this objective.

What is more, the system is wasteful and open to fraud, stifles any sense of personal responsibility and creates a national culture of dependency on the state.

Most examples of waste stem from the curious British obsession with distributing some payments to all citizens, regardless of actual needs.

This is the case with benefits paid to any family with children under the age of 16, assistance with paying winter fuel bills, or the provision of free public transport for anyone aged over 60. Since the number of individual payments is huge, the amounts tend to be small. So, perversely, those who need the money most don't get the right assistance, while those who don't need often forget that they are being paid.

Fraud is also inevitable in a welfare structure which regularly distributes payments to no less than 15 per cent of the working population, in addition to those retired or disabled. False claimants run little risk of being caught, partly because this requires serious investigations, but also because of the sheer volume of work: 19 million payments are processed by the Department of Work and Pensions each year. According to current estimates, &pound5.2 billion worth of these claims are fraudulent.

And then, there is the so-called 'benefits trap', which is probably the biggest failure of the concept. Because many of those who draw jobless benefits are badly educated, their only hope of employment is in poorly paid jobs. But the salaries on offer in such positions can be lower than the social security benefits. Unsurprisingly, most of these people choose to stay at home, watching daytime television.

Either way, a system which was designed to help those who are temporarily without work ends up creating a class of permanently unemployed.

Yet reform is easier said than done.

One option is to withdraw unemployment support only gradually; this could encourage people to accept low-paid positions, in the knowledge that they would still be entitled to some government money. But that's very expensive, and a nightmare to administer.

A second approach would be to introduce 'means tests' for universal benefits; only those who are too poor or needy would get government support. The snag here is that the introduction of tests is political dynamite.

And then, there is always the option of reducing welfare payments altogether. The Conservative-led government has already tightened housing benefit payments, and told lone parents that they must seek work once their youngest child starts school.

Faced with the biggest crisis in government finances in decades, Mr Duncan Smith has opted for streamlining the entire welfare structure into just a number of major schemes, while waging 'war' against fraudsters.

But the Treasury, which holds all the purse strings, is opposing the plans. The reason for this curious twist: paradoxically, because the system is dysfunctional, it's also so complicated that it deters some from claiming what they are due.

Non-governmental organisations estimate that up to &pound16 billion of benefits which could be disbursed never leave the state coffers. So, a newly streamlined welfare project which makes entitlements easier to understand could leave taxpayers with a heftier bill because more people may be encouraged to claim.

For the moment, there is a compromise: Mr Duncan Smith was given &pound2.5 billion in extra funds, on the condition that his department will start producing &pound10 billion worth of savings by 2014.

It will be a tall order. And Mr Duncan Smith is still careful to skirt around one fundamental issue: whether the welfare system should be a social enabler by helping people to help themselves, or whether it should continue with just administering pain-killers to the country's social ills.

That, as always, remains a matter left to future generations to decide.

jonathan.eyal@gmail.com

The size and complexity of Britain's welfare structure remains mind-boggling. Overall, it spends around &pound192 billion (S$397 billion) a year on welfare.

'Disabled' man showed off fancy dance moves

Sep 11, 2010

LONDON: Terence Read is the sort of person who should inspire admiration. The 61-year-old is a picture of perfect health: At a recent dance competition in Manchester, he twirled his partner on the dance floor in a routine that included the Charleston and jitterbug.

Unfortunately for him, a secret agent from Britain's Department for Work and Pensions was also present.

And for good reason: According to government records, Read can barely walk and has claimed about &pound20,000 (S$41,400) in disability benefits over the past decade.

So the dance contest ended up badly: Read was arrested and sentenced to 12 months of unpaid community service.

According to official government figures, welfare fraud costs the British taxpayer about &pound5.2 billion a year.

The biggest obstacle to fighting fraud is the fact that Britons do not have to carry identity cards; verifying their claims or even their names and residences can be difficult.

But British commercial organisations can collect plenty of personal data about people.

The country's credit agencies - used by banks and credit card companies to assess the standing and honesty of potential borrowers - hold every detail about a person's spending patterns, as well as the property he owns or rents.

So the government has now tied up with these agencies, which will be paid a percentage of any fraudulent claim they manage to uncover.

The government has also resorted to more original methods to detect fraud.

Kim Stokes, who claimed &pound15,000 in social security benefits as a single mother of two young children, forgot this tiny detail when she posted on Facebook pictures of herself with her 'hubby', with whom she claimed to be 'very much in love'.

Unfortunately for her, government inspectors also have Facebook accounts and noted her profile.

Nobody pretends that such measures will eliminate fraud, although the government hopes the amount of publicity given to these cases will deter future transgressors.

But the public remains furious about a different problem with welfare abuse: that of public housing.

Under Britain's laws, the local authorities are obliged to provide a roof for anyone who is homeless in their area, even if the person is a foreigner applying for asylum. Hundreds of thousands of such claims are made each year and the local authorities often end up housing them in hotels or expensive commercially rented properties.

The claimants carry no responsibility: The more children they have, the greater the property they are entitled to.

And, to make matters worse, some of those who get public housing subsequently sublet their property to others, and make a profit.

A National Fraud Initiative - a data-matching operation run by the government - is now designed to catch such cheats.

But the results remain insignificant: only 75 fraudsters were caught in the last three years.

JONATHAN EYAL

Spending cuts around Europe

A protester's sign reads: 'Grandpa, grandma at work, young people unemployed, no thanks'. -- PHOTO: AGENCE FRANCE- PRESSE

BRITONS are not the only ones feeling the pain in Europe. In Dublin, Athens, Madrid and Paris, it is the era of smaller government, with public sectors being pruned and welfare spending reduced. Here is a brief look at the experience of four other European countries.

IRELAND

The first to take the bitter medicine. The Emerald Isle has been called the poster boy for deficit cutting, as it has pruned spending, benefits and salaries with remarkably little resistance from its unions or people.

Its budget deficit has come down from 14.3 per cent last year to 11 per cent this year, but at a huge cost. Public sector salaries have fallen by 13 per cent. The economy has contracted.

Unemployment is now at 13.7 per cent, prices and rents are falling, and the country is experiencing brutal deflation.

GREECE

The government has been much more rigorous in slashing spending than many had thought possible. Officials from the International Monetary Fund and the European Union have been full of praise.

Civil servants have seen salaries fall and perks disappear, but unemployment is rising sharply. Households and businesses remain deeply pessimistic. Few believe that, despite all the hardship, the country can avoid defaulting down the road. Others believe the cuts have gone too far.

SPAIN

Public sector wages have been cut and infrastructure projects postponed or abandoned. The country is cutting spending when unemployment among young people is at 41.5 per cent.

Some say that reducing demand, with so many out of work, flies in the face of conventional wisdom. There are signs that the Spanish government is wobbling over the extent of its austerity package. It recently announced an extra €500 million (S$852 million) for infrastructure projects next year.

FRANCE

This week, its reforms faced a stiff test on the streets, with unions protesting against the plan to raise the retirement age to 62. President Nicolas Sarkozy has said the changes are non-negotiable.

But governments have buckled before in the country, in the face of street protests. The problem this time round is that investors will be watching for weak nerves.

A concession on pension reform could indicate that the government lacks the will to enforce the €40 billion austerity package.

BBC NEWS SERVICE

Reflection on movie 'Hotel Rwanda'

I think it was an excellent movie as it touched my heart deeply. This movie describes the killings and genocides that happened in Rwanda very well. I could not believe that it actually happened in Rwanda. I think what moves some of the Hutus to do the mass killings was the media that kept on “brainwashing” them to wipe out the Tutsis. The media was cunning to drive the Hutus mad and enraged by broadcasting the message through radios. The media’s target was mostly to the uneducated people who could be easily enraged by their emotions. If they were educated enough (like the hotel manager, Paul, who saved a lot of Hutus and Tutsis), they would not go around in a killing spree and let their emotions control them. That is why it is important for us to understand the cause of this horrible event and to acknowledge it.

Nadia.L.Soh, 3EA

Because of the film that has been shown to me, I had a further understanding of the effects of internal conflict in countries. The effects were dreadful and innocent people were killed, wounded and psychologically tramatised because of the violence. I also learnt that even if we have sound thinking, we would still turn violent and resort to mass killings. We only need something or someone to trigger it and in the case of Rwanda, it only took one man, the media (radio broadcast) to trigger the Hutus to go on a killing spree.

It was really sad that innocent people were involved and even children were horrendously killed. I hope that whatever happened to Rwanda will not happen ever again, be it on Rwanda on other parts of the world.

To avoid this kind of conflicts, I think we should learn to be tolerant towards others and try to understand each other without letting our emotions take over our sound minds.

Rayzelyn N.Zamora, 3EA

After watching this movie ‘Hotel Rwanda’, I realized it is really important to promote harmony among different races. Misunderstanding between people may lead to very big unhappiness and even deep hatred. The hatred overwhelmed certain people and they will start to use violence. Many innocent people will be involved.

Soo Jie Yi, 3EA

I think civil war is mainly influenced by media. The media gives such information to create huge misunderstanding between two parties. As people are brainwashed by the media, they resort to violence to express their feelings of anger, envy and hatred towards another group of people.

Jhenesis Ann E. Serrano, 3EA