I was reminded of this very human weakness as I listened to Dominic Cummings exhaustively describe the “complicated, tricky situation” that had led him to drive his family to Durham at the end of March. He seemed to think that “complicated” and “tricky” were evidence that his circumstances were exceptional. Because, like my school friends, he was blind to the complexity of others’ lives — the thousands upon thousands of other parents who also had little children, sick spouses and important jobs.

The government wrote a lockdown policy that was radically different to the norm in our common law system. Under common law, everything is legal unless prohibited by law. During the lockdown the default was the opposite: it was illegal to leave your home unless you had a good excuse. That shift puts an impossible burden on those who draft the law, to think of every single good reason that could arise, in the infinite variety of human experience.

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They missed a few. Of course they did. They deluded themselves that a short list of legal exemptions would be enough. They deluded themselves that tricky and complicated were rare.

This is an affliction that runs right through the heart of policymaking. We build models and spreadsheets to establish what the impact of a policy might be. To fit into those spreadsheets, the people have to be grouped into categories of similar people, and then all the inconvenient and incompatible details of their lives have to be stripped away. And that’s when we’re doing things properly. Half the time, we simply make an assumption that everyone in the population is very much like us.

In the 2005 General Election, my job was to research and advocate for the Liberal Democrat plan to replace Council Tax with a local income tax. I spent weeks poring over data about household composition: who lives in what family groups. I remember being astonished by how few families met the model I had in my head for normal — in other words the model I had grown up with — two full-time working parents with children. At the time, less than one in 10 households had two parents working full time, and children at home.

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It didn’t stop the media writing up reports about the terrible impact of the Lib Dems’ proposals that were almost always based on the calculation of two full time workers on the average income. I counted it a victory for common sense on the rare occasions they bothered to put the mother on the average female income, as it brought the total down by several thousand pounds. But even then single parents, retired people, disabled people, students, working people who lived on their own: the impact on them was obliterated by the urgent yearning for simplicity among the people who designed infographics.

That yearning for simplicity is at the root of countless policy failures. Take Universal Credit. It was designed to radically simplify the welfare system, which everyone agreed was far too complicated. Wouldn’t it be easier, we asked ourselves, if people got a single, simple payment to meet all of their needs? If all the benefits were rolled into one, and you could apply via a single online portal?

I fell for this delusion myself. I watched experts draw graphs on whiteboards in meetings, and say things like “smooth taper” and I found myself seduced. This would be so much better than what I’d described in speeches as the “rollercoaster of tax credit overpayments”. I failed to fully understand that tax credits had become chaotic for claimants primarily because their lives were chaotic. Their incomes were unstable. They could get more hours one week, and lose them the next. Their childcare could fall through. They could be booted out of their home. They could be victims of fraud.

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Of course, I knew these things were possible. But I didn’t recognise that they were normal — more likely to happen than not, for the people who would use UC. The welfare system shouldn’t be built for the average person. It has to be built for the extreme cases — or at least for the average claimant. And the average claimant is more likely to have a mental health problem than not, so making the system accessible for people with mental illness isn’t a luxury. It has to be your starting point.

The sad truth is that not even treatment pathways for people with mental health problems have been designed to suit the needs of the people they serve. They send appointment letters to people’s homes, not recognising that half of people with a mental health problem report they struggle with opening the post. I’ve heard stories of people blacklisted from treatment because they didn’t turn up for appointments they didn’t know they had.

Take sentencing policy. It is almost always written by people who’ve never committed a crime, and assume they understand the way to deter people who have from doing it again. They imagine that a long sentence will be a better deterrent, because they themselves would hate to go to prison. They rarely stop to think about the complex interplay of forces that drives kids to carry knives or join a gang: fear, status, opportunity.

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Eight ways to unite the nation

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A benefits adviser I met a couple of years ago told me about a single mum who’d got into debt to buy a 52-inch flat screen TV. No matter how bad things got, she wouldn’t get rid of the TV. It was the biggest on the estate. Plenty of people would be quick to judge her. But she kept the TV because it was status for her teenage son: he and his friends would stay indoors and play video games. It kept him out of a gang.

No one is going to suggest a national programme to buy large TVs for teenagers at risk, and I wouldn’t want them to. Only a parent could possibly know that this was the one thing that would make a difference for their child.

But we have to stop with the cookie cutter policies, imposed on everyone as if we were all identical. This is about so much more than lockdown. Complicated and tricky is everywhere you look. One-size fits all policies designed in Whitehall can’t possibly accommodate the infinite diversity of human experience. Central policy makers need to develop the humility to understand that other people’s lives are just as multi-coloured as their own. We must stop blurring out the background, and give people who can see the problem for what it is, the power to fix it. That means more flexibility — whether for benefits advisers, youth workers, therapists, community groups or local councils. One size fits no one.

Not social security, though. That remains very firmly under central government control. But that wasn’t always the case. Before the modern welfare state, social security systems, as well as being rudimentary, were highly localised.

For instance, the Poor Law system of Victorian England varied a lot from place to place – with some areas being much harder on the poor than others. But what explains this variation?

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The Economist reports on a new paper by Jonathan Chapman of NYU Abu Dhabi, which looks into the question:

“He compared the generosity and harshness of the conditions of poor-law relief in different areas with the gap between rich and poor, as measured by income from wages, and inequality within the rich, as measured by families’ number of live-in servants.”

The gap between the rich and the poor is of obvious relevance, but why also look at the gap between “within the rich” i.e. between the very rich and the merely middle-class?

Well, it turns out that the size of both kinds of income gap had an effect on local Poor Law policies – albeit in opposite directions:

“He found that areas of high wage inequality had less harsh rules for claiming poor relief—as conventional theory would suggest. More surprisingly, however, he also found that areas with a larger gap between the wealthiest and the simply well-off were much less generous and had much harsher rules for welfare handouts than those where the elites were more uniform.”

In other words, the further they are behind the rich, the less generous that the merely comfortable are inclined to be to the poor.

Might this factor still be in effect today? Obviously, a huge amount has changed since Victorian times – not least the size of the middle class, which like the welfare state is massively bigger than it used to be.

And yet it might explain a seemingly paradoxical feature of our contemporary politics. This is an era of widening inequality – of real anger towards the rich and powerful. And yet as The Economist notes, there’s been no groundswell in support for redistribution through the tax and benefit system.

It’s telling that the radical parties of the Left talk about more spending through borrowing or by resort to exotic measures such as Modern Monetary Theory. If higher taxation is mentioned at all, it is very clearly targeted at the super-wealthy and corporations. As for spending priorities, the emphasis is on free stuff for everyone – e.g. the abolition of student fees, socialised healthcare, universal basic income etc – as opposed to support targeted at the poor.

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As I’ve argued before, you don’t get Scandinavian-style welfare states without Scandinavian levels of taxation on middle-class incomes – but that appears to be an unsaleable proposition in politics these days.

And no wonder. Writing for the BBC, Sean Coughlan looks at a new report from the OECD that shows how the middle class is falling further and further behind the rich:

“Across OECD countries, which include most of the big economies in Western Europe and North America, the 10% of highest earners have increased their income by a third more than middle earners. In the UK, more than a third of middle-income households ‘report having difficulty making ends meet’, says the OECD. In the United States over the past three decades, the top 1% of earners have increased their slice of total annual income from 11% to 20%.”

The fragility of middle-class household finances isn’t just about income:

“The report, Under Pressure: The Squeezed Middle Class, says that totems of middle class family life, such as access to housing and higher education, have become increasingly expensive.

“The rising cost of property, in particular, has outstripped the growth in income, with parents worrying about the housing prospects for their children.”

Given the ease with which rich avoid tax, the squeezed middle fear that they will be squeezed even harder to pay for a tax-funded redistribution of wealth to the poor.

And whether they pay for it or not, I suspect that people on middling incomes (i.e. the majority of the working population) resent redistribution to the poor when it pays for lifestyles not dissimilar to their own. This isn’t snobbery so much as the sense of unfairness that people feel when the things they have to work for are given to others for free.

I wonder if trends like the expansion of higher education, competition for affordable housing in expensive cities and the erosion of some mid-level occupations is having the effect of pushing the classes closer together – both physically and in terms of socio-economic status. One might have thought this would encourage solidarity, but it could be having the opposite effect – undermining popular support for focusing government assistance on the poorest people.

It is usually assumed that a weaker, less optimistic middle class is bad news for the established parties of the centre-Right. On the one hand, angry older supporters defect to the populist Right; and, on the other, the conveyor belt of prosperity that would otherwise turn young radicals into middle-aged conservatives grinds to a halt.

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And yet the Left needs to watch out too. Right now, their ranks may be swelling with the disaffected children of the middle-class. Indeed, by holding out the prospect of change to Generation Rent, the likes of Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders might just find themselves in power. However, what this new Left would be expected to deliver in government wouldn’t just be a bigger welfare state, but a middle class welfare state. That won’t be cheap and they’ll be expected to pay for it without middle-class tax rises.

Yet with the wealth of the rich never more mobile (and alternatives like Modern Monetary Theory being, let us say, unproven) a Left-wing government would have to rely on borrowing and thus the confidence and goodwill of the money markets.

A corrupted capitalist system is close to putting the radical Left into power – and yet it is on that system that the Left in power would have to depend.

In 2017 more than one and a half million people were destitute in the UK, 365,000 of them children.[1. ‘Destitution in the UK 2018’, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 7 June 2018; People are destitute if they have experienced at least two of the following in the last month: no meals or just one meal a day for two or more days, slept rough, been unable to heat or to light their home for five or more days, or been without basic toiletries or suitable clothes or footwear. They’re also classed as destitute if their income is so extremely low that they couldn’t afford these things (less than £10 a day for a single person).] That’s the equivalent of the populations of Birmingham and Liverpool combined.

Destitution is the most severe form of poverty. By and large it is the culmination of living on very little for a sustained period of time – it’s what forces a mother to choose between feeding herself and providing the basics for her son.

Perhaps surprisingly, the likelihood of destitution is actually greatest for men under the age of 35 – a group also greatly at risk from poor mental health, self-harm and suicide. One young man interviewed for the research told us: “Mentally it was a real strain. If it wasn’t for friends and family I don’t know if I’d still be here to be honest”.

Less surprising is the fact that destitution is most common in the cities of Northern England, the Midlands and Scotland which still bear the scars of deindustrialisation, as well as a few London boroughs. Although Oxford also features in the 10% of places with the highest rates of destitution, showing more prosperous areas are not immune.

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That destitution exists on this scale should be shocking enough, but even more troubling is the fact that many people are being made destitute ‘by design’. Not because of peculiarly dire circumstances that are unpredictable or exceptional, but because of policy choices made which have left growing gaps within the social security system.

An ever-eroding safety net helps explain why single men are so vulnerable – they are most likely to be dependent on the minimum support the benefits system has to offer, and at a time when rents are rocketing and living costs rising. The inadequacies of the welfare system leaves people backed into a corner so that when their circumstances change, they have no alternative support to turn to.

There are three specific actions that the UK government could take now to protect those at risk of destitution and relieve the burden it is placing on the thousands of families already suffering.

Firstly, they should end the current freeze on working-age benefits. Most benefits for working age people have now been frozen since 2016, which means as inflation pushes up the cost of living, benefit recipients have been getting poorer.

Secondly, the use of sanctions within Universal Credit must be reformed so that people are not left destitute ‘by design’. Sanctions are an essential part of a conditional welfare system – without them there’s no backstop for when people aren’t playing by the rules. But sanctions should be proportionate, and applied fairly. The current regime means someone could receive a 3-year ban on receiving benefits, leaving them with little by way of financial support.

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And thirdly, they should review the total amount of debt that can be clawed back from people receiving benefits, so people can keep their heads above water. At the moment, the system that is supposed to protect families from harm is actually making them more vulnerable. Many people in poverty are in debt to central government and their local council, and the methods used to collect funds for council tax arrears, benefit advances and utility bills are leading to destitution.

This is not about making the welfare system overly generous, or removing the expectation that where people can work, they should be actively looking to do so. It is about ensuring that individuals and families, facing often dire circumstances, can afford the basics – rent, electricity, food, shampoo, shoes. That’s surely the minimum a compassionate society should provide for those most in need.

When in 1899 a report by Seebohm Rowntree into poverty in York was read by then Liberal MP Winston Churchill, the future Prime Minister responded that the findings ‘made my hair stand on end’.

Last week’s report should be no less shocking for today’s politicians.

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