I VISITED a friend in Fordingbridge Hospital last weekend.

Ford Ward really is excellent now and the staff could not be more considerate or helpful.

When you come out, however, you cannot avoid passing the old workhouse buildings. In this week in which so many of the changes to welfare benefits begin to bite, I could not help but reflect on the fact that this workhouse in Fordingbridge, now a listed building, was the solution identified by an earlier generation in their attempt to wrestle with exactly the same problem that we are trying to solve now.

The cost of welfare was rising unsustainably then, as it is now.

They knew that some basic provision had to be made: that you couldn’t – in a civilised society – simply turn people out on the street; but they knew that if they provided a level of support that was comfortable enough then it would simply encourage the idle to sponge off it.

Their solution was the discipline, segregation and privation of workhouse. Life in the workhouse had to be less comfortable than the meanest form of independent existence, so that only the genuinely destitute would accept its terms.

Are the problems of our welfare state, and the arguments that surround them, so very different today?

Last week there was a furore over the case of Mick Philpott who killed six of his children and whether or not he was a product of our welfare system. I do not believe that his wickedness was created by welfare benefits, but he certainly sought to exploit them.

Every additional child added more benefits with which he could support his lifestyle.

He committed arson in order to be seen to rescue the children, in order to blame his former girlfriend and regain custody of their children, restoring the income in benefits that would accrue from having them once more under his roof.

The purpose of the benefit cap that is being implemented this week is to remove the perverse incentive that drove Philpott to seek an ever higher level of benefit.

The fact that Philpott is quite untypical of benefit claimants in general does not diminish the widespread damage they do.

The effect of the relatively high level of benefits that can be achieved is to induce hundreds of thousands of households to remain on benefits because they would be worse off if they took a job for a wage, than they would be by continuing to stay at home and claiming benefit.

With the overblown rhetoric of some politicians, and indeed the complaints that have been brought to my advice surgeries by constituents, you would think that we were about to reopen the Fordingbridge workhouse when, in reality, we are simply saying that it should always pay to take a job rather that stay on benefits, and that no family on welfare should get more from their benefits than the average wage.

There is in my opinion nothing compassionate about a welfare system that has trapped generations of children in workless households.