'No booze' smart cards for benefit claimants who spend their handouts on drugs and alcoholFeckless welfare claimants will be given Oyster-style cards which only work in certain shops to buy household and food essentials
Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith will target 120,000 problem families with new scheme
By Tim Shipman
PUBLISHE
02:18, 13 October 2012 | UPDATE
15:42, 13 October 2012
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Action: Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith
Feckless welfare claimants who spend their benefits on drugs and alcohol will be handed smart cards so they can only spend state handouts on food and essentials.
Plans being drawn up by Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith will see the 120,000 problem families targeted with Oyster-style cards which can only be used in certain shops.
That will mean those who waste their welfare money would only get the cash if it is used for certain items in chosen shops.
Items that could be bought include food, clothes and household essentials.
Mr Duncan Smith has ordered civil servants to draw up a scheme modelled on welfare reforms in Australia, where welfare credit cards have already been used with success.
The first welfare recipients to get the cards are expected to be drug addicts and alcoholics, or those who are problem gamblers, in order to ensure that taxpayers’ money is not used to fuel addiction and dependency.
That could pave the way for payment cards to be used more widely.
Mr Duncan Smith’s aides say he is also keen to use the restricted payouts to help turn around the problem families who are blamed for the epidemic of antisocial behaviour in Britain today.
A report published by Louise Casey, the tsar for troubled families, found that the families who cause the most problems are distinguished by drug and alcohol problems.
The plans would require a change in the law since it is currently illegal for ministers to decree what benefits cash is spent on.
Getting tough: Benefit claimants who spend their handouts on alcohol and drugs face a crackdown. (Posed by models)
‘I am looking at the moment at ways in which we could ensure that money we give [benefit claimants] to support their lives is not used to support a certain lifestyle,’ he said.
Asked about Australian use of smart cards, he added: ‘I am certainly looking at it - I am going through that in some detail. With the use of cards, we are looking at that to see if we can do something.
There would be some legislative issues that we would have to go through about allowing us to say “you cannot spend your money exactly where you like it”.’
Prevention: The cards should stop claimants spending their benefits on alcohol
The plans will be controversial since defenders of maintaining handouts will accuse the government of attempting social engineering.
But civil servants are now studying papers on the experience in Australia, where the scheme has just been rolled out nationwide after being pioneered in Queensland and the Northern Territories.
The Basics cards, as they are called, can only be used to purchase 'priority' items such as food, housing, clothing, education and health care.
The government puts the money electronically on the card once a fortnight, when people receive their benefit payments.
Between 50 per cent and 70 per cent of income is 'quarantined' for essential needs depending on the individual’s circumstances. The rest is available as cash.
Mr Duncan Smith believes the scheme is better than food stamps, which are issued in some American states since those can be swapped for drugs.
A senior official at the Department of Work and Pensions said: ‘Food tokens don’t work because they can be traded on the black market.
Credit cards would not be for everyone claiming benefits but they could be used for extreme cases where people are not good at managing their lives like drug users or those with children living in poverty where money needs to be spent on food and clothes not drugs and alcohol.
‘Iain has asked the civil servants to look into this quickly.’
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the liberals are against it, why? because this is their core support voter base and the majority who have a lifetime on benefits yet have no disability are against it simply because it endangers their lazy scrounger lifestyle and free handouts for booze cigarettes and mobile phones.....this at least ensures more of th ebenefits go directly to the children and to their welfare, their nutrition, clothes and heaitng etc etc
It is working successfully in australia and I applaud the government for attemtping this