Who came up with the idea of a benefits cap?

Someone asked a question this morning to which I have previously tried and failed to find the answer. So it is time to take to the internet and use its power to solve this problem. Whose idea was it to set a cap on total state benefits at the level of average earnings?

It is one of those simple ideas that makes you wonder why it had not been adopted before. Labour today is in disarray before it. Its spokespeople have many detailed cavils, and there may indeed be some rough justice at the edges, but it is hopeless: provided the disabled are taken out of it, as they are, there can be no justification for state benefits at a level of £35,000 a year pre-tax earnings.

Even the pinko liberal BBC has a powerful piece of propaganda in the Government’s cause, analysing the finances (and embarrassing self-justifications) of a family on benefit.

I have traced the origin of the policy thus. George Osborne, in his first, June 2010, Budget, put limits on housing benefit:

We will for the first time introduce maximum limits on housing benefit – from £250 a week for a one-bedroom property to £400 a week for a four-bedroom or larger.

Four months later, in his Conservative party conference speech, 4 October 2010, he set out the principle that today carries all before it:

Unless they have disabilities to cope with, no family should get more from living on benefits than the average family gets from going out to work.

So who came up with it?

Photograph of George Osborne, 2010 Conservative conference: Reuters

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