So there is something here for everyone, except those who are paying the bill. The DWP has won the Whitehall contract of the decade to set up the Universal Credit, which will take up to 2017 to phase in, and it has poached the child and working tax credits from HM Revenue and Customs. As for the claimants, there will be conditions but no cuts unless they default. Those who find a job will be allowed to keep more benefit, 65 pence for each pound, up to a set limit. The Treasury has been promised savings from the new streamlined system, but over time. The only people who will suffer are those who have worked and earned and their families, as some universal or NIC benefits will go.

The sad truth is that neither fine tuning nor a makeover will transform the fortunes of either taxpayer or jobless in a system which has no brakes. The evidence is that the ritual of sticks and carrots meted out by the DWP to "make work pay" has failed to check the explosion of costs and numbers of dependents. 

Yes, the determined Employment Minister, Chris Grayling, may succeed in moving more of the jobless into work by applying intelligence and determination to the plans to use private and voluntary companies to move people into a job on the "Work Programme". But restoring the jobless to the labour market is only part of what is a far bigger picture. If welfare is to be affordable now and in the future as an ageing population and new work patterns bring fresh costs, Britain's welfare state must change fundamentally. What is needed, as Beveridge explained, is an insurance system where benefit for lost income is paid from contributions or premiums and builds up in its own social fund. Beveridge's scheme was published in 1942 and rapidly became a bestseller with no mystery about its appeal: it gave people entitlement to benefit in return for contribution. It ruled out a means test, provided conditions were met. It avoided penalising those who did well or saved and it kept the state small and official interference to the minimum. The worker, the employer and the state each paid into a social fund. In return, the insured had entitlement to benefit if earnings ceased for reasons such as sickness, unemployment or bereavement of the breadwinner.

And for those who did not pay their way or earn? A subsistence sum from general tax would be given with help to find work. As the state had the duty to see that earning people were better off than those on benefit, subsistence or "national assistance" was calculated to be adequate, but was not set above the level of earned income and was means tested.

As governments over time abandoned the insurance principle and treated National Insurance as just another tax, costs and dependency spiralled. First, politicians raided the social fund for the favoured beneficiaries of the day. In the 1940s and 1950s, these included the old-age pensioners; from the 1960s and '70s came the growing proportion of non-earning households, such as those with lone parents and then those where the breadwinner had moved from the labour market to incapacity benefit. As a result, NI, instead of being self-funding and regulating, became a patchwork of handouts and rules, with the contributors increasingly penalised in favour of non-contributors, some of whom did better on benefit than earning families.