Leading article:Welfare needs more than curtain-twitching

The net curtains of the nation are twitching. Those bad boys on benefit who spend half the week cleaning windows should take a second look at the faces staring out at them. Peter Lilley is encouraging us to shop our neighbours who are fraudulently claiming benefit from the state. If local pilot schemes are anything to go by, the public response should be immense.

This latest "Beat a Cheat" campaign is the tip of the iceberg. Alongside growing hostility towards fraudsters, there is a widespread anxiety about genuine benefit recipients too. As the benefit lists get longer, the taxpayer's bill gets higher, and voters, politicians and policy-makers are starting to wonder: is it enough just to enforce existing rules, or should those very rules be changed?

The crux of the debate is well expressed by a Tony Blair soundbite: "Rights and responsibilities". From every side of the political spectrum people are revising their ideas about the kinds of entitlements the poor and the unemployed should have, and about what it is fair to demand in return.

But while these are proper questions to ask, we should beware seeking fashionable answers across the Atlantic. The new US welfare bill, which right-wing politicians and commentators suggest we emulate, has the balance between rights and responsibilities completely wrong. While it is legitimate to place new obligations on those who accept state support, they have to be practicable, and they have to be matched by extra state help as well.

A consensus is certainly emerging that the present system needs change. The welfare state was designed 50 years ago for a very different society and a very different labour market. Men worked, women, by and large, did not. More marriages lasted longer (however happily). Even men with no skills or qualifications at all could find work. None of this is any longer so. Men and women can find themselves unemployed for years at a time. Jobs for the unskilled are hard to find, except at rates of pay which leave people worse off than on benefits. And absent fathers are hitched up with expensive second families.

It should be no shock to discover that the state's obligations to the poor and unemployed need to be revised for the turn of the century. After all, the idea that the state should take responsibility for insuring people against unemployment, and protecting families against poverty, is a historical aberration in the grand scheme of things. For thousands of years, families that could not support themselves relied on the church, charity or the patronising compassion of their local community to stop them starving.

In Britain, most of us agree that the state should continue to help those who lose their jobs and ameliorate poverty, especially among children. And the minimum we expect from benefit recipients in return is that they play fair. The net-curtain brigade is as good a way to ensure that as any other. Most people agree too that the state should not just rest at handing out cash, and should encourage people into jobs as well. The "welfare- to-work" proposals embodied in the pilot schemes in Kenneth Clarke's 1994 budget, and the more ambitious Labour plans to guarantee jobs and training for the long-term unemployed and the under-25s are all steps in the right direction.

But how much should we expect from the poor and unemployed in return? As far as the Republicans in the US are concerned, an awful lot. Their new bill, cheerily described by the President as a way to "end welfare as we know it, by getting people off welfare and into work", limits benefit entitlement for families to only two years, before the head of the family must find work. In other words, in exchange for those two years of taxpayers' support, parents have to accept their own responsibility to get a job, and finance their families in the longer term. Tough it is. But Clinton himself would presumably prefer to describe it as "tough love".

Right-wing politicians and commentators, including John Redwood, have welcomed the US approach. But the balance of rights and responsibilities it sets out is unrealistic and unfair. For a start, it is immoral to set people responsibilities that they cannot possibly fulfill. When the benefits run out after two years, some parents will still find it hard to get work that pays enough to keep the family. Moreover single parents, who make up most of the people the US bill will affect, will have even more problems finding work that pays well enough to cover their child-care costs as well.

It is all very well setting realistic incentives and responsibilities for those who can work and support themselves, but punishing those who can't - including single mothers and the children they are trying to bring up - is cruel.

The problem with the US version of new responsibilities is that they are not accompanied by enough new rights. If the state ensures that people have real opportunities to work, including child care where necessary, then it has far more justification for cutting entitlement when people turn them down.

Labour's proposals for the young unemployed are a better model than the US welfare bill. Anyone under 25 out of work more than six months would be offered training, wage subsidies for private sector jobs, voluntary or public sector employment. If they turn down reasonable offers, then their benefits will be reduced.

No one is pretending it will be easy to create a fair, effective and affordable welfare system for the 21st century. But, while we catch the fraudsters by whatever legitimate means, we should also remember that most of the poor and unemployed need and deserve active state help to stand on their own two feet.