2007

What: New Labour commission and publish the report ‘Reducing Dependency, Increasing Opportunity: options for the future of welfare to work’ by the former investment banker David Freud. The report advises outsourcing work programmes to the private and voluntary sectors; and reducing the number of people on Incapacity Benefits (from 2.68 million to 1.68 million) by pushing them into work –helping to set the tone of welfare reform for the next decade. The report would  later be discredited (Dorling, 2007).

Why significant: Freud was appointed as a Peer for the Conservative Party and spoke in the House of Lords for the opposition. Following the 2010 general election, Freud was appointed as a junior minister in the DWP for the Coalition government, with Iain Duncan Smith as the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. Freud had no past political experience and admitted he knew nothing about welfare, so he was unqualified for the post he was given. He designed Universal Credit with his ambition to create a single working-age benefit and recommended outsourcing work programmes to the private sector which came to pass, demonstrating his influence with future social policy legislation.