Nigel Hastilow: Benefits system unfair to workers

What I didn't know until he'd finished his work – 60 quid for half an hour, cash thanks mate, no cheques – is that until very recently he'd been receiving disability benefits.

According to my friend, his window cleaner had been claiming money off the state for 15 years because he was supposedly unfit for work thanks to a gammy knee.

That didn't deter him from building up quite a lucrative window-cleaning business. He even employs an assistant these days.

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He has now given up claiming benefits. Not because his conscience finally got the better of him or he realised he was abusing the system.

He's not on disability benefits any more for the simple reason that the Government has cracked down on the thousands cheating the system.

Since May 2010, when Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith took on the mammoth task of reforming benefits, there has been a fall of 160,000 in the number of people claiming sickness payments.

More than 2.6 million people were out of work because of illness in 2010, with 900,000 jobless for more than a decade. This has now dropped to 2.46 million. That's quite an achievement but it's still a long, slow process to bring some sense of fairness to our benefits system.

We have 2.3 million people unemployed and on benefits. Yet we have something like 500,000 people a year coming into this country. Why? Because there are thousands of jobs available which the locals refuse to do. Care assistants, waitresses, coffee shop baristas, fruit-and-veg pickers – if it's a minimum-wage job, there's every chance it's being done by a foreigner.

Why is this? Because our welfare system is so kind to the locals they have no incentive to get up from in front of their tellies and do a decent day's work.

The pictures of White Dee, made infamous by Channel 4's Benefits Street programme, living it large in Magaluf must surely have offended anyone struggling to get by on the national minimum wage. While the perverse 'celebrity status' of Deirdre Kelly apparently encourages the punters into the bars, it outrages everyone else.

But as she says: "If people have a problem with how much I am getting, they should speak to David Cameron."

The Prime Minister now thinks it's about time her benefits were cut.

Ms Kelly is apparently 'too depressed' to work.

As a result, we give her benefits of £214 a week and we pay £500 a month for her home in James Turner Street, Birmingham. Taken together, this represents an income of £17,128 a year. To earn that much money, Ms Kelly would have to find a job which paid – before tax – a wage of £20,844 a year.

That's a great deal more than you get on the minimum wage of £6.31 an hour or £13,124 a year for a 40-hour week.

Staying on the dole rather than looking for low-paid employment is a perfectly reasonable decision to take for Ms Kelly and thousands like her.

A benefits system which makes you much better off staying at home than seeking work is the real culprit in this scandal. Ms Kelly is merely the embodiment of something which has been going on, unchecked, for years.

And every time Mr Duncan Smith tries to do something about it, he is vilified by all those who believe the State should provide people not with a financial safety net but with a feather bed.

His critics forget that the real victims are what our leaders like to call 'hard-working families' – that is to say, people who get up in the morning, slog away at tough jobs, pay their taxes and do their best to make their own way in the world.

They would, no doubt, love to be treated as celebrities.

Many would, doubtless, appreciate being whisked off to Majorca, and given all the booze they can drink, at somebody else's expense.

But they're too busy trying to earn a living and make ends meet.

It is their taxes which are being abused.

It is their taxes which allow the thousands like White Dee to sit around all day waiting to be discovered by some passing camera crew which happens to be roaming Birmingham's inner city, like wildlife presenter David Attenborough, in search of curious creatures to film in their natural habitat.

Our Prime Minister is right to say people should not stay 'parked on benefits' for ever.

But getting them to move on isn't easy.

Every time his Government tries to give them a shove in the right direction, it is accused of penalising the poor.

But Ms Kelly is not poor – nor is she being penalised.