INITIAL proposals from a groundbreaking initiative were launched for consultation on August 12. The focus of the project — to develop proposals for the future of social security — is a subject that has received no little attention as opponents to the government’s welfare reform agenda attempt to develop alternative ideas.

What stands out about the Experts by Experience Commission on Social Security is that it is led entirely by those with lived experience of the benefits system. There were no big-name speakers at the online launch for the consultation, only benefit claimants and grassroots campaigners against the current system.

The commission is notable for its rejection of traditional approaches to policy-development where high profile advocates are prioritised above those with lived experience. A case in point is the new disability commission set up by the Centre for Social Justice, a think tank founded by Iain Duncan Smith in 2004.

The chair of this commission is Lord Kevin Shinkwin with members including former Paralympian Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson as well as representatives from City firms such as Clifford Chance and Deloitte.

A user-led approach is neither gimmicky nor tokenistic. Insights formed through personal experience of benefits, work and disability are crucial to the kind of ambitious thinking that is needed to build a better social security system. Having claimants in positions of leadership directly challenges the deliberate denigration of people reliant on benefits used by successive governments to justify welfare cuts.

The rarity of claimant-led approaches to the thorny issue of social security policy reflects the many misperceptions and prejudices that surround the worlds of benefits and disability.

Myths concerning generations of worklessness and six figure benefit sums have been largely debunked since the early years of the coalition government when anti-benefit claimant rhetoric was deliberately enflamed by the Tory ministers and the right-wing press.

There is also now growing awareness of the growing rate of in-work poverty, with over half of those living in poverty belonging to in-work families.

Nevertheless, the idea that benefit claimants are capable of both understanding and developing complex policy proposals might come as a surprise to some, but one out of every 20 young college graduates is now unemployed. This is a higher rate than in 2000 when the figure was one in 25.

Furthermore, since 2010, many claimants politicised by their own experiences of welfare reform have educated themselves in the minutiae of social security technical details with the result that many are now more expert than the paid policy wonks.

Over the past two decades, social security policy has been created to serve the interests of neoliberal political economy without adequate research or testing. The consequence has been a terrible human cost as the needs and interests of those dependent on social security have been ignored and overlooked.

At the same time, there are many examples of how welfare reform has failed against the Tories’ own targets. One example of this is how the replacement of Disability Living Allowance (DLA) with Personal Independence Payment (PIP) was intended to save £2 billion and yet was found by the Office for Budget Responsibility in 2019 to have cost around the same amount more than if DLA had been retained.

The user-led approach taken by the commission represents a challenge to the core attitudes towards worklessness and disability that underpin Tory welfare reform. According to this view, worklessness is a mental health problem and claimants’ own ideas about what they can do cannot be trusted; the solution is to coerce claimants into employment.

Unemployment is blamed on the negative ideas and behaviours of benefit claimants while overlooking material conditions such as lack of jobs, workplace discrimination, illness or impairment. There is no credible evidence to support this view.

There is now fairly overwhelming evidence to prove that welfare reform policies not only harm people but can also be counter-productive to the aims of getting people into sustainable employment, particularly those who are already disadvantaged. And yet the Tories stick with them, even bringing back conditionality and sanctions before the Covid-19 outbreak is over.

Within neoliberal thinking, the social security system provides a tool for disciplining workers as well as the unemployed. Costs spent on those who have never and never will work for a living are borne to avoid civil unrest; they are something that capitalists would love to be rid of and will always do their utmost to minimise whenever they think they can get away with it.

This is why those groups represented on the commission are the last people the Conservative government would want round the table setting policy with them — and precisely why they need to be at the heart of any decisions about the future of social security.

To have your say on solutions for a better benefits system go to commissiononsocialsecurity.org.

Ellen Clifford is co-chair of the Experts by Experience Commission on Social on Security and author of ‘The war on disabled people: capitalism, welfare and the making of a human catastrophe’ published by Zed Books.