LONDON — Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith will on Thursday warn that the current welfare system reduces the incentive to work and promotes "destructive behaviour", the Daily Telegraph reported.
During a speech to Cambridge Public Policy, a think tank associated with the university, the minister will say that for some families "the notion of taking a job is a mug's game".
"All too often, government's response to social breakdown has been a classic case of 'patching' -- a case of handing money out, containing problems and limiting the damage but, in doing so, supporting -- even reinforcing -- dysfunctional behaviour," he will say, according to the report.
The Conservative minister will insist that the system return to the principles of William Beveridge, the economist whose vision for the modern welfare state was implemented by the post-war Labour government.
He will highlight warnings made by Beveridge 60 years ago that those on benefits cannot be sustained "from a bottomless pit".
"Especially so, when the economy isn't growing as we had hoped, the public finances remain under pressure and the social outcomes have been so poor.
"You have to ask which bits of the system are most important in changing lives. And you have to look at which parts of the system promote positive behaviours and which are actually promoting destructive ones," he will add.
The minister earlier this month agreed to find another £10 billion of benefits savings, on top of the £18 billion reduction already agreed for 2014.
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