ON WELFARE reform, on which it promised to "think the unthinkable," the government has gone gingerly so far. It has had to because, whenever it has displayed a radical streak, back-bench dissent - as with the proposed cuts in benefits for lone parents and the disabled - has led it to proceed with caution.

But, to its credit, New Labour keeps coming back to grasp the nettle again.

And it needs to if the country's monumentally sapping welfare burden is to be cut and the something-for-nothing benefits culture that Tony Blair has denounced is to be dispelled.

Today the government launches a week of welfare reforms to show that it has not been blown off course, with pilot schemes making claimants attend interviews with job advisers, absent fathers facing losing their driving licences or even their liberty if they dodge child maintenance, and new proposals for making people more self-reliant in their old age.

But, in this, do we glimpse a move that could become as contentious for Labour as the poll tax was for the Tories?

For just as this week's agenda promised a slightly increased tempo for welfare reform, it was reported that Chancellor Gordon Brown is out to pull down one of the biggest pillars of the system by scrapping housing benefit.

This has long been a target demanding root and branch reform - not least because of the benefit's massive cost to taxpayers of £11.2 billion a year and the £840 million that, it is estimated, is stolen from them through fraud.

Also, it is a fundamental factor in the baleful something-for-nothing outlook, since claimants are encouraged to turn down jobs because they fear that losing their housing benefit will leave them worse off. Mr Brown's alternative, set out in a forthcoming Green Paper we are told, is for people on low pay to have their benefit replaced by tax credits and for the unemployed living on income support to no longer have their rent automatically paid by the council and being expected to make some contribution themselves in addition to the welfare help they receive.

There are shades of the poll tax, surely, in that virtuous expectation that all must contribute in some way for the help they get from the community - and all the portent, too, for a political backlash on the back benches and in the polling booths should this "unthinkable" thought become a policy.

But, stung as it may become in the process, the government has to grasp the nettle of welfare reform.

And it needs to grasp it hard before demographic change tilts the balance between contributions and entitlement to claims over the edge into collapse.

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