Labour Manifesto: Scrap Universal Credit and “end poverty by guaranteeing a minimum standard of living.”

Labour’s Manifesto is out today.

Here is the section our Contributors will focus on.

Social Security.

While Labour wants a society in which people care for one another, the Tories are trying to pitch us against each other.

Under the Tories, the social security system has lost sight of its purpose. Poverty has become endemic, the glue that binds our society together has come unstuck and, in the words of the United Nations, the UK’s social safety net ‘has been deliberately removed and replaced with a harsh and uncaring ethos’. The cruelty and heartlessess of the Tories has made the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) a symbol of fear. When people feel the DWP is more about harassment than a helping hand, something has gone seriously wrong.

Labour will completely change this culture, replacing the DWP on day one with a Department for Social Security, which will be there to help and support people, not punish and police them.

Universal Credit

The Tories’ flagship social security programme, Universal Credit (UC), has been a catastrophe. It has pushed thousands of people into poverty, caused families to lose their homes and forced parents to visit food banks in order to feed their children.

Labour will scrap UC.

We will immediately stop moving people onto it and design an alternative system that treats people with dignity and respect.

Our ambition in designing this system will be to end poverty by guaranteeing a minimum standard of living.

We will start developing this system immediately. But we have learned the lessons from Tory failure: major policy change can’t be delivered overnight, especially when people’s lives depend
on it.

So we will also implement an emergency package of reforms to mitigate some of the worst features of UC while we develop our replacement system.

• We will end the five-week wait by introducing an interim payment based on half an estimated monthly entitlement.
• We will immediately suspend the Tories’ vicious sanction regime and ensure that employment support is positive not punitive.
• We will stop 300,000 children from being in poverty by scrapping the benefit cap and the two child limit, so ending the immoral and outrageous ‘rape clause’.
• We will pay childcare costs up front so that parents aren’t forced to turn down work or get into debt to pay for childcare.
• Labour will protect women in abusive relationships by splitting payments and paying the child element to the primary carer.
• We will make it easier for people to manage their living costs by introducing fortnightly payments and paying the housing element directly to landlords.
•  The Conservative’s ‘digital only’ approach is excluding vulnerable people. Labour will end the digital barrier and offer telephone, face-to-face and outreach support.
• We will recruit 5,000 additional advisors to deliver this.
• Tory cuts are pushing people into rent arrears and leaving them at risk of homelessness. We will stop housing costs running away from benefits by scrapping the bedroom tax and increasing the Local Housing Allowance.

In the meantime:

Priti Patel says poverty “isn’t the government’s fault” while stood in a food bank

“Everybody just says it’s the Government as if it’s this sort of like bland blob that you know, you can just go and blame.”

Priti Patel has been criticised for arrogantly dismissing the government’s role in poverty while stood in a food bank in Barrow.

The Home Secretary attempted to push blame onto local authorities during an interview, even though local government has suffered “enormously from vicious Tory cuts”, Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell said.

When told that four in 10 children in parts of Barrow, Cumbria, are born into poverty, she told BBC North West Tonight: “Well it’s appalling.

“But of course everybody, and it’s not just people in Westminster, it’s not just at a national level it’s at a local level.”

“You can’t blame the Government for poverty.” The Home Secretary has been in #Barrow today where Labour has a margin of just 209. Will she win enough voters over? More with @Ninawarhurst tonight. pic.twitter.com/PXYijxCOmW

— BBC North West (@BBCNWT) November 20, 2019