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Means testing was once a contentious issue, capable of mobilising month-long, rolling marches involving thousands of unemployed people walking from town to town toward London. In 1932, 70,000 police officers were mobilised to contain and disperse 100,000 march supporters gathered in Hyde Park and deemed a threat to public order. Observing its impact on households in The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell noted: ‘The most cruel and evil effect of the means test is the way in which it breaks up families.' In the intervening post-war decades, means-tested benefits have evolved to encompass social housing, free school dinners and medical prescriptions, shedding in the process their power to rouse popular indignation. Greatly increased in scale through the introduction of tax credits under the chancellorship of Gordon Brown, the latest figures available from 2009/10 show that at any one time, some 42 million people claimed £87bn of means-tested benefits, which now constitute 13% of total government expenditure, or around half of all welfare spending. According to figures unearthed by the National Audit Office's report into the subject, means-tested benefits supply over one-third (34%) of household income for the poorest fifth of the country's families. The universal benefit programme, whether or not it survives the worst large-scale Whitehall IT can do, is going to stalk local government finances like a ‘Big, unfriendly giant' when it launches in April 2013. With more than 4.5 million claimants, housing benefit is the single-biggest item of means-tested spend, accounting for £19.6bn of the total. Some £4.6bn in council tax benefit (CTB) was claimed by 5.6 million people, representing 77% of those eligible and the 152 local authorities responsible for adult social care helped direct the payment of £7.5bn personal care benefits to 1.1 million people. The spending watchdog notes the lack of ‘co-ordination of interactions between benefits administered by different departments'. In other words, policy changes and shifts by a few of the big departmental beasts will, given the deeply inter-connected nature of life and society, produce unintended consequences of a seismic scale. For example, under the current, perverse way incentives are geared, 700,000 people find themselves caught in a benefits trap whereby they gain only 10p out of every £1 earned. Something clearly must be done. But how does this take into account localisation of CTB? Under new proposals, councils would take full charge in setting CTB rates, collecting payments and providing a new form of discount to deliver financial support – cutting the total bill by 10% in the process. All worthy aims. But how does one undoubted natural effect, the creation of variation in CTB between councils, align with the Department for Work and Pensions' efforts to co-ordinate work incentives?

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Means testing no longer a contentious issue.

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