Archive for the ‘Government’ Category
The Budget and Claimants.
The Budget was yesterday.
How does it affect claimants?
Here is the Official View:
Here is the Resolution Foundation’s view.
“The reduction in the taper rate in Universal Credit will bring an additional 400,000 families into the benefits system next year. Around 75 per cent of the 4.4 million households on Universal Credit will be worse off as a result of decisions to take away the £20 per week uplift despite the Chancellor’s new Universal Credit measures in the Budget.”
The Boris Budget (from the Summary)
Resolution Foundation analysis of Autumn Budget and Spending Review 2021
From the full report: The Boris Budget
For some, this change will be significant: a family with two adults in work (one working full-time with earnings at the 25th wage percentile and one working part-time on the National Living Wage for 20 hours a week), who have two children, will gain £42 a week from these Budget day changes, more than offsetting the £20 per week reduction made to the benefit earlier this month. But, overall, these changes will be overshadowed by last month’s £6 billion cut to entitlement: three-quarters of families on UC will lose more from he £20 cut than they gain from the Budget changes. Even if we also take into account the impact of the faster-than-average-earnings increase to the National Living Wage, the fifth of households will still be an average of £280 a year worse off overall.
Here is the real Tory view of claimants:
Then there is this:
It seems equally obvious to mention that if gas and other prices are going up what about increasing benefit levels from their present misery rates?
Next year we will begin paying Council Tax, which even at the reduced rate of Council Tax Relief can be an extra burden, and far from minimal in many areas.
Our contributors remain concerned about the way ‘schemes’ for the unemployed, outlined in ‘Plan for Jobs’ operate. Here is one Restart. Plan for Jobs: skills, employment and support programmes for jobseekers
At the 2020 Spending Review, the chancellor allocated £2.9 billion for the new Restart Scheme, which will give Universal Credit claimants who have been out of work for between 12 to 18 months enhanced support to find jobs. The Restart Scheme will break down employment barriers that could be holding them back from finding work. Providers will work with employers, local government and other partners to deliver tailored support for individuals.
Referrals will be made over a 3-year period and the Restart Scheme will benefit more than 1 million Universal Credit claimants who are expected to look for and be available for work but have no sustained earnings. The scheme will provide up to 12 months of tailored support for each participant. Early access can be considered on a case by case basis where conversations with a work coach suggest this is the most appropriate route for the individual.
It has been quite some time since the media was interested in what is happening on these ‘schemes’ but our contributors are already reporting serious difficulties with them.
Food Banks and Benefits.
Up till the new millenium it was rare – I had never even heard of them – to see Foodbanks in the UK. There were a few night-time soup kitchens in London, famously one run by the Salvation Army near the Embankment Tube station. They were for the homeless, a small number of people, often called “tramps” and “down and outs”.
These were times when you could still get a bath (left over from the time that not everybody had proper washing facilities at home) in a municipal facility (there was one in Ipswich round the corner, still here not that long ago). When the heating on our flat in Kentish Town broke down and working not far away, I used one, near to a hostel for the homeless in Holborn. In the same place, development on what is the Oasis Swimming Pool there, 1983 “Skeletons were found in the workhouse earth basements of the former workhouse inmates, which stopped work for a while”.
There is still a soup kitchen in the area by the Thames, Soup Runs.” St James’s Spanish Place: Operates Tuesday and Friday evenings at Lincoln Inn Fields and Embankment, Central London.”
So how have we got used to Food Banks?
Food banks developed in America where there is no real social security system, and those at the end of their tether are forced to rely on he good will and grace of others – Charity. Instead of rights you get dependence on the minimum needed to survive.
It is not accident that it was during the Regan years, when those who claim to believe that “god helps those who help themselves” grew, “According to a comprehensive government survey completed in 2002, over 90% of food banks were established in the US after 1981.” After initial criticism, “in the decades that followed, food banks have become an accepted part of America’s response to hunger.”
Something similar has happened here with those who would do away with social security and replace it with private insurance if they good in charge of the government since the 1980s, and New Labour unwilling to put benefit payments at a decent level, or to reform the punitive sanction system.
Foodbanks were rarely seen in the UK in the second half of the twentieth century, their use has started to grow, especially in the 2000s, and have since dramatically expanded. The increase in the dependency on food banks has been blamed on the 2008 recession and the Conservative government’s austerity policies. These policies included cuts to the welfare state and caps on the total amount of welfare support that a family can claim. The OECD found that people answering yes to the question ‘Have there been times in the past 12 months when you did not have enough money to buy food that you or your family needed?’ decreased from 9.8% in 2007 to 8.1% in 2012, leading some to say that the rise was due to both more awareness of food banks, and Jobcentres referring people to food banks when they were hungry.
Now, with Boris Johnson is charge, a man generously described as a “fabricator and a cheat” whose office as Prime Minister is a “triumph of political lying” (The Assault on Truth. Peter Osborne. 2021), Foodbanks are treated as essential institutuons.
Which they are. As the Trussell Trust has pointed out,
“The rapid growth in the number of charitable food banks had particularly captured public attention, as had the quantity of emergency food parcels they were distributing. Food banks in the Trussell Trust’s network distributed 61,000 emergency food parcels in2010/11, rising to 2.5 million in 2020/21.”
“Rather than acting as a service to ensure people do not face destitution, the evidence suggests that for people on the very lowest incomes … the poor functioning of universal credit can actually push people into a tide of bills, debts and, ultimately, lead them to a food bank. People are falling through the cracks in a system not made to hold them. What little support available is primarily offered by the third sector, whose work is laudable, but cannot be a substitute for a real, nationwide safety net.”
“According to an all-party parliamentary report released in December 2014, key reasons for the increased demand for UK foodbanks are delays in paying benefits, welfare sanctions, and the recent reversal of the post-WWII trend for poor people’s incomes to rise above or in line with increased costs for housing, utility bills and food.”
Just to underline the point and bring it up to date.,
The Trust also says,
It’s time for change – and that will only be possible as we raise our voices together to call for an end to the need for food banks.
We need your help. We’re calling on government at all levels to commit to ending the need for food banks and developing a plan to do so, and we need you to get involved.
Here is what is happening.
A couple of days ago the BBC ran this story.
Food banks struggle for donations as demand rises
A food bank said it is running low on donations as demand is rising due to the pandemic and people’s financial worries.
Worcester food bank said it gave food parcels to 987 people in September, a rise of 46% on the same month in 2020.
Goff O’Dowd, from the charity, said they were running short on 40 items including pasta and tinned fruit.
He said some people were desperate for help with not enough money to pay their energy bills.
The charity estimates they need 50 tonnes of food to get through until Christmas and are currently receiving about eight tonnes a month.
Calls for new Beveridge Report: building a decent welfare system
This was on Channel Four last night:
These serious calls have been made in the last few days.
What British politicians won’t admit – we need to transform the welfare state
A conversation about a fundamentally different welfare state ought to fall two ways: between immediate answers to the cruelties of our current systems, and longer-term ideas about how to completely reinvent it. The former might include an end to universal credit’s built-in five-week wait, the abolition of the cruel and arbitrary benefit cap, and no more sanctioning. It should extend to a recalibration of housing benefit so that people – including key workers – can afford to live in even high-cost areas, a watershed rise in our miserable rates of statutory sick pay, and the upgrading of the minimum wage and national living wage to the so-called real living wage (£9.50 across the UK and £10.85 in London), with an ongoing link to inflation.
Louise Casey: ‘Are we ever going to create a Britain for everyone?’
The former homelessness tsar thinks we need big, radical reform to tackle hunger, rough sleeping and poverty. And she has a plan
by Rachel Cooke“We need to move into Royal Commission territory,” she says. “A new Beveridge Report [drafted by the economist William Beveridge in 1942, this was the document that led to the founding of the welfare state]. That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about.” Crikey. Is this a job she would like to take on herself? I look at her steadily, wondering if she’s going to indulge in a bout of it’s-not-for-me-to-say. But, no. She doesn’t much go in for let’s pretend. “Yes, I’d love to be part of that,” she says. “Government can, if it wants to, do something on a different scale now. The nation has been torn apart, and there’s no point being defensive about that. We’ve got to gift each other some proper space to think. We’ve got to work out how not to leave the badly wounded behind.”
….
We can get there quite quickly,” she says. “By March, there will be 6 million people on universal credit [in October, there were 5.7m]. Almost 4 million people are furloughed, and those still working are on less income [in a survey by the Resolution Foundation, 26% of adults reported suppressed wages during the first lockdown]. Unemployment has doubled [it stood at 1.72 million in November 2020], and will keep rising. Two million people are still on legacy benefits – which means they didn’t get the £20 uplift that came with universal credit. Then you add in the 5 million people who are in debt [42% of adults report using at least one form of borrowing to cover everyday living costs].
….
Pre-pandemic, there were 280,000 homeless in England and Wales. Earlier this month, the government announced that the ban on bailiff-enforced evictions, which protects private renters, would be extended to the end of March. But it will end eventually. “At which point, family homelessness will rise,” says Casey. “If 25% of your population is affected, then you can’t just tweak old policies, working out the least expensive, least challenging thing that can be done. You need big new policies.”
Most of us will have views on this!
A Million Covid-19 Universal Credit Claimants Have Deductions From Benefits.
Child Poverty Action Group. 7th of January Press Release.
New Year call for an end to clawback of UC advances
More than one million households forced to claim universal credit (UC) when coronavirus struck are entering the New Year having debt deductions taken from their UC, and almost all include repayments of an advance taken out to get them through the five-week wait for a first UC payment, new analysis for the Covid Realities research project shows.
Nearly two thirds (63%) of those who claimed UC between March and June (‘Covid-claimants’) are having deductions taken from their monthly UC payments, compared with 41% of all UC claimants, the analysis by Child Poverty Action Group for the Covid Realities research project shows. That means a million new UC claimants living on less than their assessed need.
The Government suspended some deductions for three months from April 2020 as part of its emergency response to the pandemic. However, deductions for the repayment of UC advances were not part of the suspension and continue to be made as another lockdown begins in England and Scotland and more job losses and UC claims look likely.
Deductions can be taken from benefits for a range of reasons including repayment of a UC advance, legacy benefit overpayments, budgeting loans, rent arrears, utilities bills and mortgage interest. For UC claimants, deductions are limited to 30% of the UC monthly standard allowance but this still means that £179 (for couples) can be deducted each month.
For claimants already living below the poverty line, deductions can deepen their poverty significantly. Ignoring deductions, CPAG analysis shows that, the average household in poverty is 23% below the poverty line; in pounds and pence, for a couple with two children, that means they are £400 per month below the after housing costs poverty line.* However, if this family has to repay an advance, this will push them to £500 per month below the poverty line.** And if they have additional deductions on top of repayments of a UC advance, they could drop to £579 per month under the poverty line.***
1,060,000 ‘Covid claimants’ have a deduction of some kind from their UC. Of those, 810,000 are repaying an advance only, 50,000 have a deduction for another reason and 200,000 have deductions to repay a UC advance and another debt.
More news:
More news:
Regulator investigates DWP over universal credit ‘cover-up’
The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is claiming not to possess documents that show estimates for the eventual impact of universal credit on disabled people, despite telling both the statistics regulator and MPs that they exist.
In the latest stage of an apparent attempt to hide estimates of how many disabled people will lose out financially through the introduction of universal credit, DWP has told Disability News Service (DNS) that no such written equality impact assessments (EIAs) exist from 2012 onwards.
The freedom of information response contradicts a statement made to MPs by the minister for disabled people, Justin Tomlinson.
It also contradicts information passed by DWP to the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR).
This week, OSR promised DNS that it would investigate the apparent discrepancy.
The existence of any fresh EIAs is important because ministers, including work and pensions secretary Therese Coffey and Tomlinson, have stated on several occasions that around one million disabled households will receive a higher entitlement under UC than they would have received under the previous “legacy” benefits system.
Thousands of new Work Coach vacancies open across the UK…
Are you “so
People may have missed this announcement. (though Trev has not……).
Here it is again!
The number of Work Coaches is to be doubled to 27,000 nationally.
- Employment Minister calls for those who want to make a difference in their communities to apply now.
- Thousands of new expert Work Coaches to boost support for jobseekers and build back an even stronger economy.
From today (Thursday 10 September 2020), jobseekers across the country will be able to apply for one of thousands of new jobcentre Work Coach vacancies being offered by the Department for Work and Pensions, as part of its pledge to double the number of Work Coaches to 27,000 by March 2021.
Getting Britain back to work as quickly as possible is vital, as the UK strives to build back an even stronger and more resilient economy. Thousands of new Work Coaches will be at the forefront of this recovery, and will be deployed in communities across the country.
These expert Work Coaches will be trained in how to get the best out of people and make sure they have the support they need to get back into work.
Through a rapid recruitment plan, the department will have 4,500 Work Coaches in place by October 2020, with a further 9,000 by March next year.
Minister for Employment, Mims Davies said:
Getting Britain back into work is key to our national recovery and our DWP Work Coaches are on the frontline of this effort – boosting their numbers means we can build back stronger.
Our Work Coaches not only deliver financial support to millions of claimants across the country, but take time to listen, encourage, advise, and ensure everyone has access to the best support available – helping those facing a tough time get back on their feet sooner.
If you are someone who cares about your community and are keen to take on a fresh role helping others, then you can make a real difference by becoming a Work Coach and I want you to join our team today.
Work Coaches will deliver:
- New flagship programmes, such as the £2 billion Kickstart scheme, a key part of the Government’s Plan for Jobs, which puts young people receiving benefits first in line for new, high quality, six-month roles provided by employers from all sectors. The placements give them a wage for the duration and the chance to build their experience and professional networks.
- Increased support for 40,000 jobseekers of all ages will also be available through DWP’s Sector-based Work Academy Placements, which received a £17 million funding boost this summer and will help people learn new skills through a mixture of work experience and training.
- Work Coaches will also offer vital retraining opportunities to people looking to start a new career, as well as support for those who need to update their skills and CV, or simply prepare for an interview.
For more information on applications and deadlines in your region, please visit the Work Coach recruitment site.
Today’s announcement to boost the frontline comes as jobcentres across the country continue to offer more support for jobseekers in Coronavirus-secure offices, as part of the Government’s Plan for Jobs. While many appointments will still be conducted virtually, jobcentres are now open for customers to meet safely with their Work Coaches face-to-face when necessary.
AFfer this good news Thérèse Coffey is on yet another roll!
Ipswich Unemployed Action. 
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