Numbers reliant on it have more than doubled since 1979

Numbers reliant on it have more than doubled since 1979.Housing benefit: Provides rent rebates for 2.98 million council tenants and rent allowances for 1.8 million private tenants Cost pounds 10.25bn Weekly rate depends on rent and income.Means tested Paid to people both in and out of work. Bill has doubled in five years as the Government has cut subsidies for council housing and to housing associations and pushed up rents Withdrawn as earnings rise. Weekly rate: complex, depends on age and family circumstances. Rates range from single person under 24, pounds 36.80 a week to pounds 73 for a couple aged over 18. Additions for children vary by age - pounds 15.95 for a child under 11 to pounds 36.80 for an 18- year-old.

Unlike Income Support, allows spouse to go on working while recipient is job hunting. To be merged with income support into a new Jobseekers' Allowance in October next year which will provide non-means- tested benefit for only six months. Change will increase numbers unemployed but save an estimated pounds 300m over three years.Income support: 5,899,000 recipients Cost pounds 16bn. Rate: pounds 46.45 a week for singles, pounds 75.10 for couples.Non-means tested and paid for up to a year, but depends on national insurance contributions. If increased in line with prices would be worth more than pounds 70 today. All politicians judge it would be political suicide to kill it off.War pensions: 312,000 recipients Cost pounds 1.2bn.Unemployment benefit: 445,000 recipients Cost pounds 1.26bn. About 1.4 million recipients who have no other income have to be "topped up" with means-tested income support, while a further 167,000 pensioners rely entirely on income support.Christmas bonus: 13 million recipients, chiefly pensioners Cost pounds 133m.

Rate pounds 10.Arguably the silliest part of the social security system Introduced in 1972 when weekly pension was only pounds 6.75. Non-means tested but dependent on having paid national insurance contributions. Numbers and costs rising but more slowly than in the recent past. Paid for by employees' national insurance contributions (19 per cent), employers' contributions (23 per cent) and general taxation (57 per cent).Main benefitsBasic retirement pension: 10.1 million recipients Cost: pounds 29bn. Weekly rate: single person pounds 58.85; couple pounds 94.10.The biggest single item in the benefit bill. The question now is how the system can adapt to these new conditions.What follows looks at the welfare state today: who gets what and how it is paid for in the four key areas.Social SecurityTotal budget: pounds 85bn Share of government spending: 31 per cent.

The figures are a little ambiguous, but it seems in crude terms that it is those on the lower end of the class scale who have benefited most. Since 1945 class distinctions have blurred and the country has become much wealthier. The middle class, still benefiting from the welfare state, has expanded vastly. Yet change has not all been for the good: the spread of incomes from high to low is at its widest for at least 50 years and middle-class earners face job insecurity as never before. The price for all this was a significant transfer of resources, through taxes of all kinds, from the better off to the less well off. Everyone who paid their compulsory contributions became entitled to a basic state pension, unemployment benefit and other non-means-tested payments. In addition, like everyone else, they received "cradle-to-grave" social security protection. And while the working class gained, too, it was, certainly initially, overwhelmingly the middle classes who came to benefit from wider university education.

The better off will do better, but at the price of more inequality It is really that simple a choice.". BRITAIN'S welfare state has never been just a safety net for the poor. When it was created in its modern form in the 1940s, the middle classes and above were brought firmly into its embrace They no longer had to meet hospital and doctors' fees. They no longer had to pay school fees if their children were not bright enough to win grammar school scholarships. If we do it communally, through taxation, then we redistribute from the affluent to the less affluent If we do it individually, then people get what they pay for. What is at stake is a political decision about whether to pay for them communally or individually.