Deborah Orr: Radical welfare reform? I don't think so

Radical? We have forgotten the meaning of the word. The idea that the Government's proposed changes to the benefits system are "radical" is a joke. Radical changes are fundamental changes. All that is offered in the Green Paper of the Work and Pensions Secretary, James Purnell, is some more largely ineffectual stick, which will need more largely ineffectual bureaucratic monitoring in its wielding.

These incremental changes in emphasis will not change things because positive intervention in people's lives, via the benefit system, comes far too late for many of the people whose difficulties are most endemic, and does not offer holistic help to the communities most likely to harbour these problems.

Few people dissent from the idea that there are some people for whom state support is essential. It is heartbreaking that these people have to be so sparingly and so grudgingly protected by the state in order not to encourage the others. Each and every person who abuses the benefits system, by claiming when they shouldn't have to, abuses and demeans the people who are in real need, with every penny that they milk.

Benefit abuse, whether enacted with deliberate cynicism or because of misplaced, delusional, self-pity, is utterly horrible and cruel. Or course it is right to try to put pressure on to people to stop behaving in this way. Of course it will improve their lives if they manage to claim only responsibility for their own lives. But 10 years of stubborn adherence to benefit dependency, in a time of burgeoning job opportunities, ought to be enough to teach us that this rethink – backed by the Conservatives – is nothing like radical enough.

Only the terminally messed up believe that it is better to be on benefits than in work. The trouble is that the terminally messed up are already terminally messed up by the time they enter the ambit of this system. It is like waiting for a person's legs to fall off before wielding the stick, not as a support, but as a weapon. It is elaborate and expensive and even if it gets off the ground is likely to prove pointless.

A long-forgotten report from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, back in 2000, offered a portrait of youth growing up in the highly disadvantaged neighbourhood of Willowdene in Teesside north-east England. It found that most of the young people shared common aspirations, and saw "getting a proper job" as key to attaining adult status. Very few were keen to live a life on benefits, although only a few actually proved able to secure long-term or rewarding work.

Those among the young people who were involved in "criminal careers"– and criminals love benefits – tended to share typical markers. They had almost always disengaged from school at 12 or 13. They had indulged with their peers in street drinking, drug use and petty crime from early on, then had progressed to more serious crime and drug use. Most residents pinpointed the influx of heroin into the neighbourhood in the early 1990s as having a devastating impact on the local community.

Yet despite the wider stigma they faced – many felt they did not even get job interviews because their postal address showed them as coming from a notorious area – most had no desire to leave the neighbourhood. Their families and social networks were there, and they could not imagine surviving without that support.

The essential thing to remember when discussing benefit reform is that benefit dependency does not happen in a vacuum. It happens, usually, in places where there is high unemployment. Shared experience in such places is often negative. It is easy to persuade yourself that it is ok to take drugs when you have children, or to live on benefits and do bits of work you pick up, when plenty of others around you are doing it too. It's easy to be depressed when you live in a place that isn't convivial or safe.

When the Government talks of how the unemployed should be forced to do community work in return for benefits, I'm afraid it makes me laugh, even though I don't disagree with the principle. Why? Because one of the things that is missing from the sort of communities that are most defaced by graffiti or by litter – the two most cited forms of community work – are people who are actually employed at a very local level to keep them clean and ordered, and respected for doing so.

Such an infrastructure might provide this community work, and people might take part in it quite gladly. But it just isn't there, for the most part. Local councils are often as distant and bureaucratic as Whitehall. If they were not, there would be fewer social problems in the first place.

Imagine what it might be like actually to have the name and the telephone number of a team of named people responsible for maintaining just a few local streets or parks and amenities? Imagine what it might be like if such people were well paid, were provided with a vehicle and perhaps a home, had decent budgets, and understood that it was part of their job to liaise with the community, with the police, with the drug action team, with the schools, and so on?

The stark fact of benefit dependency is that it has gone on now, in some areas, for several generations. Politicians are fond of discussing ways of "empowering communities". But they shrink from being really radical and providing local public sector work to ordinary local people, instead of desk-bound civil servants carrying out policies that are doomed to fail.

So much policy keeps right on careening down the wrong route, gobbling money that really does have to be invested at the sharp end. It makes me quite ill, for example, when I imagine the wonks in Whitehall who are presently planning a bright new future without any indolent youth by raising the age at which children must receive compulsory education to 18.

The children who are really at risk of becoming professional system-milkers, on drugs, working in the black economy, causing local havoc, need to be helped while they are still at primary school. It is often easy to spot children who are likely to go off the rails very early on in their education. But the things that will help them – boarding schools, special schools geared to their needs – are invariably dismissed as too expensive or out of step with the idiocy of under-resourced, lip-service "inclusion".

Even the welfare reforms that have been proposed – which can only work if they are implemented as part of a wider change in direction that combines community intervention and targeted educational intervention – are being talked down as costing too much. The last 10 years are littered with good ideas that were "too expensive". Money has been squandered instead on cheaper "solutions" that just don't work. There are no cheap solutions. But there are real ones.

d.orr@independent.co.uk