200,000 face housing benefit cuts

The TUC said some of the most vulnerable people in the country will be hit by proposals for a 10% reduction in the benefit of adults who have been claiming jobseeker's allowance for more than a year.

Disabled workers, lone parents and the recent homeless were among the groups most likely to be affected, said the TUC.

General Secretary Brendan Barber said: "This cut in housing benefit will make a real difference to some of the poorest and most vulnerable adults and families, who will find themselves out of pocket to the tune of nearly £500 a year.

"Long-term unemployment is not a lifestyle choice, it is a debilitating and stressful experience which puts unemployed people and their families at higher risk of poverty, poor health and relationship breakdown.

"The long-term unemployed need help and support to get them back into the labour market. They should not to be blamed for their predicament by having vital benefits cut. This is another example of the Government making struggling families bear the cost of the recession, while the rich have been let off."

uk.news.yahoo.com  06 Sept 2010    'Reserve Army'

Benefits sanction proposed for addicts

I've been labouring - wrongly it seems - under the delusion that it was bankers who got us up 5h1t creek, not people on benefits.

Drug addicts who refuse treatment could have their welfare benefits withdrawn, it was reported today.

It comes amid government plans for wider shake-up of the welfare system to help save billions of pounds.

The Labour government planned a series of pilot schemes this year to help drug users kick their habits and return to work.

They included applying sanctions to addicts who failed to attend treatment awareness programmes, and increased powers for the criminal justice system to help identify problem drug users not in treatment ...

Martin Barnes, chief executive of charity DrugScope, said there is no evidence to suggest the idea would work as he raised concerns it could breach medical principles.

"The benefit system can and indeed does have a very important role in terms of advice and support to encourage people both to access treatment and employment," he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

"But we seriously question both the fairness and the effectiveness of actually using the stick of compulsion - benefit sanctions - to link a requirement to undergo medical treatment with a condition of receipt of benefit."

Mr Barnes said there is "absolutely no evidence" that would work for a "vulnerable and often marginalised group".

He added: "Also, we have to bear in mind that under the principles that are enshrined in the NHS Constitution, medical intervention should be therapeutic, consensual, confidential - and I just don't see that's compatible with using the benefits system to require people to undergo a complex form of drug treatment intervention."

Independent  20 Aug 2010    We are all in together

Drug addict benefit withdrawal considered

Treasury plans 'will cut off 400,000 of society's most vulnerable'

Fund that provides accommodation for pensioners, victims of domestic violence, and the homeless, threatened with 40% cuts ...

More than 400,000 vulnerable people, including pensioners and victims of domestic violence, could lose their homes and see care entitlement scrapped if the Treasury carries out its threat to lop 40% from a £1.6bn government support programme, campaigners warned today.

The National Housing Federation (NHF), which represents England's housing associations, said that the "Supporting People" budget, which aims to allow the disadvantaged to lead independent lives and is paid through local authorities, is likely to face substantial cuts in the upcoming spending review.

The cash, which had previously been ringfenced, could see a range of the country's poorest groups affected by shelters closing and caring support services shutdown.

The federation says this would be ultimately self-defeating as some of the most needy people in society – those with learning difficulties and ex-offenders with a range of social issues – would simply be thrust into the NHS, social services and the criminal justice system ...

Guardian  20 Aug 2010    'We are all in together'

N.H.F.

28BN TAXPAYER BILL FOR WORKSHY SCROUNGERS

You don't want to claim benefits; if you do you could appear on our front page!

MORE than half a million people have falsely claimed sickness benefits for the last 10 years – at a cost to taxpayers of a massive £28billion.

Two-thirds of Incapacity Benefits claimants unemployed for the whole decade were in fact fit to work, new official figures reveal.

Ministers claimed the figures show that a huge number of people have been allowed to abuse the state payouts system under Labour ...

Fiona McEvoy, of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said:

“These figures are astonishing. It really goes to show how the welfare system has been failing both taxpayers and the benefit claimants who have been marooned on state hand-outs for a decade.

“The Government’s review of Incapacity Benefit is long overdue. It is vital for the economy that these people are helped back into employment.”

The figures show almost 900,000 people have spent a decade living on sickness benefits at a total cost of £42billion ... two-thirds of the 889,000 should have been engaged in some kind of employment, according to new Government tests to root out those fit to work ...

Daily Express  16 Aug 2010    Corporate Media: Manufacturing Consent

Dozen it just make you sick

Work Capability Assessment

Work capability assessment: is it working?

David Blunkett set to join Tory war on dole cheats

Former Labour Cabinet Minister David Blunkett is poised to give the Coalition a major boost by helping it tackle poverty, benefits abuse and the pensions crisis ...

Known for his no-nonsense views on scroungers, hooligans and the feckless unemployed, Mr Blunkett is considering working for Mr Duncan Smith’s Centre for Social Justice ...

Like fellow Labour Right-wingers Mr Field and Mr Hutton, Mr Blunkett had frequent clashes with Gordon Brown over state benefits and other issues.

While his socially conservative views upset Mr Brown, they won him many Tory admirers ...

In 2005, Mr Blair wanted to give Mr Blunkett special responsibility for dealing with anti-social behaviour by young thugs but the move was blocked by John Prescott ...

Mail on Sunday  15 Aug 2010    'Broken Britain'

DNA Bioscience

Nanny Visa

SHOCKING figures reveal almost one third of children in Blackpool are growing up in a house where no-one works.

Whether this is because jobs are not available, or people are happy to live off the welfare state, is not set out in the report compiled by the Princes Trust.

But the charity is warning this cycle of unmemployment is leaving young people without role models to inspire them to take up a more fulfilling and useful role in life.

Community leader Maureen Horn says the key is early intervention in order to raise the aspirations of youngsters and break the cycle of gloom.

But when benefits are so easily available, for many it is all to easy to turn to the state instead of trying to stand on your own two feet.

Blackpool Gazette 11 August 2010

The Blackpool Gazette comes from the stable as the Daily Mail, so the nasty - and ill-informed - final sentence is typical.

The current ONS stats state that unemployment is 2.46m, but vacancies - as of the end of July - are only 481,000.

Unless the coalition is to undertake an astonishing u-turn and start a job creation scheme - in defiance of articles 2, 7 & 8 of the Washington Consensus - then pillorying people on benefits seems a bit pointless.

However, it is fully in accord with the current trend to divert attention away from the real causes of the current recession onto the poorest and weakest.

Bonuses are up – so the economy must be doing well, right?        Corporate Media Manufacturing Consent

PM offers reassurance over benefit cheat plans

"We're all in it together"

He added:

"In the end, government can only do so much. We also need parents bringing up their children properly, we need citizens behaving responsibly and we need people taking responsibility for themselves for a sense that it is morally wrong to claim money you are not entitled to.

"We need that sense back in our national life as we grapple with this deficit and try to build a more responsible society."

Independent  10 Aug 2010

Welfare reform: will IDS walk?

... the main event being played out between DWP, the Treasury and No10.

Iain Duncan Smith is bidding for money – lots of it – to fund the up-front costs of his welfare reform plans ...

Across the upper reaches of Government there is near universal agreement that what he proposes is right in principle ...

What is clearer is that IDS has left his colleagues in no doubt that he will resign if he doesn’t get what he’s asked for ...

FullSteamAhead
Today 08:52

It's fairly simple what needs to be done.

The Joseph Rowntree Trust have calculated you need £15k/year to live an ok life.

So, benifits need to be about 2/3rd this, say £10k, that's including housing and council tax etc, that should enough to see you through until you get another job.

The tax allowance needs to be £15k so you only pay tax after you have enough for your minimum needs.

The minimum wage has to be set at £15k, to ensure work provides the basics.

Get rid of the working time directive, so people with low earning potential can improve their lot by working extra hours.

The state pension needs to be 2/3rd of £15k.

All the above are per individual, so an unemployed or retired couple, married or not, get a combined income of £20k.

A working couple have a combined tax allowance of £30k, as do a retired couple with a private pension.

The tax allowance is transferable between married couples only to encourage stabillity.

A small tax allowance is allowed to the first two children, and child benifit is scrapped.

Telegraph  10 Aug 2010

David Cameron promises tough action against benefit fraud

'Uncompromising' clampdown to increase penalties and claw back some of the £5.2bn [thought to be] lost to fraud and error ...

Writing today in the Manchester Evening News ahead of his latest Cameron Direct roadshows in the city, the prime minister outlines plans to claw back some of the £5.2bn thought to be lost through fraud and system error, some of which may discomfit groups concerned at the power of credit ratings agencies.

He also estimates that three-quarters of those caught defrauding the system are not currently prosecuted.

"We are looking urgently at different options for reform," he writes. "Tougher penalties for fraud, more prosecutions, encouraging those who know fraud is taking place to come forwards [sic] and making greater efforts to reclaim money that's wrongly paid.

"We will look at all these things and more. Including, for example, using more information from third parties such as credit referencing agencies to identify circumstances which are incompatible with the benefit claim."

ArseneKnows
10 Aug 2010, 1:11AM

Now let's just stand back a second and look at what is happening.

Long term unemployed curently stands at around 800,000.
Current job vacancies around 480,000
Total number claiming jobless benefits according to the government 5.2 million

Added to the job market by government policies:

Single mothers who will be expected to return to work earlier
Young people who haven't got a place in education due to cuts
Pensioners who no longer have to retire
600,000 public sector workers laid off
700,000 private sector workers laid off
People being moved off invalidity benefits on to JSA
1.2 million working part time or short time who will take up any slack long before any jobs become available in their companies

Government cutting housing benefit by linking it to CPI, moving the maximum payable from the 50% to 30% of local rents The long term unemployed, at the highest lever for nearly 15 years and growing rapidly, will be expected to find 10% of their rent out of the £65/week JSA even if they have done everything possible to find a job.

Now it seems to me that government policies are going to have at least two fairly predictable effects.

1/ Those who follow the rules risk ending up on the street destitute because the benefits cuts are so savage as to make it almost impossible for anyone to survive on them. Already there are estimates that 750,000 could be added to the homeless figures, so Cameron will emulate Thatcher again in that we can pretty soon expect the cardboard boxes to reappear on our streets.

2/ More will break the rules becoming 'benefit cheats' and risk destitution and criminal sanctions.

3/ 22 miilionaires around the cabinet table will continue to suffer minimally as capital still attracts lower taxes than income

Guardian  10 Aug 2010

Chris Grayling defends plan to use credit rating agencies ...

... Grayling also defended the decision to pay what have been described as "bounties" to agencies that help the government cut the cost of welfare fraud.

One company, Experian, already has a contract to scrutinise new housing benefit claims and it has said that it is in talks with ministers about extending its work, which involves checking whether people's household spending is consistent with the information they are providing to justify their benefit claims.

WaitForPete 10 Aug 2010, 11:43AM

It is all very well persecuting poor people but until the poverty traps are removed from the system, people will continue to have an incentive to cheat.

For the last 25 years if a person on Benefits accepts some temporary work then they lose all benefits and it can take weeks after the work is over to restore them. In the meantime what do they survive on?

The fact that the poverty traps still exist is one of Labour's larger failures.

Android1 10 Aug 2010, 11:45AM

Presumably they will be paid for successfully identifying benefit cheats. Its not like they can just send a photocopy of all of the UK's telephone directories to the government and say "look, all the cheats are in here".

True, but they could make the lives of some people very uncomfortable indeed, because not everything is black or white. Suspects who may later turn out not to have been fiddling could be hounded because of an overzealous operative at Experian or Equifax trying to up his bonus because he wants the extra four weeks' holiday in the Seychelles this summer and little Tarquin has to have his school fees paid.

And some people, hounded by the DWP and trying to get benefits that they are entitled to (I have a friend going through this at the moment – yeah, a genuine friend, not me, folks!) can sometimes just give up, buckle under, say, "What the hell!" and let the powers-that-be do as they will, because they've got nothing else to lose.

The DWP make it very difficult for a claimant wrongly deprived of a benefit to get that benefit back.

If Experian report a suspect as a result of little Tarquin's dad's enthusiasm, that claimant's benefit is going to be suspended pending enquiries, appeals and what have you, while the DWP drags its feet and doesn't answer letters and the claimant (or former claimant) has to live on "crisis loans" that are as hard to squeeze out of the DWP people as the proverbial blood is from a stone.

I'm unlikely to be in that position, but have had cause to feel some vicarious rage over the past few weeks.

And does what people are actually fiddling really amount to £1.5 billion? It seems awfully high. Then we note that critics of this latest Tory nastiness say only 1 per cent of of all benefits claimed are received as a result of fraud.

Then Cameron tells us how many hospitals and nurses could be paid for with the money saved – the way the last government told us when it handed out billions and billions to the banks. Yeah, right!

socialistMike
10 Aug 2010, 11:57AM

'Benefit fraud is such an easy target for the tories because for some reason it seems to anger the general public, or at least is more visible to them than non-doms and dodgers.'

It helps the tories that they own the media so they can make a big noise about minimal benefit fraud, while completely ignoring their own crimes of tax avoidance and false accounting, which are, of course, far more damaging to society as a whole.

That's what this is all about - distraction while the big boys get on with grabbing as much as possible.

We have a media that lies to us so that we can be better robbed by the real fraudsters.

Guardian  10 Aug 2010    Welfare to Workfare

Information Commissioner to discuss plans to use bounty hunters against benefit cheats

Would you trust bounty hunters to enforce the law?

Tax Research UK

Green Party: Citizen's Income

Every church should consider a foodbank

This week Steve Chalke, a UN special advisor and founder of Oasis, Stop the Traffik and Faithworks, told Trussell Trust Director Chris Mould that every church should consider having a foodbank.

With a challenging economic climate and government cuts already starting to bite, the need for foodbanks across the UK is greater than ever.

Whilst 69 foodbanks are currently launched nationwide, people are still going hungry in towns without a foodbank.

Trust Director Chris Mould says:

'I spoke to a couple with a young baby at a foodbank about what they would do if there was no foodbank, they said that they would have had to steal something to feed their daughter.

'13 million people live below the poverty line in the UK. It is so easy for people on the breadline to be pushed over the edge meaning that they cannot afford to eat.'

Last summer we helped Chris, April and William after Chris was made redundant and suffered 12 weeks benefit delay.

They were selling their possessions just to put food on the table. April says that the foodbank helped get them through this tough time.

Now, a year later, Chris has a job and they are expecting their second baby.

As more people hit crisis, we want to help more families like Chris and April to get through hard times. This is where UK churches need to help.

The Trussell Trust   06 August 2010

Britons on the breadline

Cameron pledges to protect vulnerable

Cameron: 'We're in this together'

Cameron's cuts: We're not all in this together

Council homes for life could go, says Cameron

On a visit to the West Midlands, he was questioned by a mother of two teenagers, who said she had slept on a blow-up bed for two years because her council could not find her more space.

Mr Cameron said the government was investing in social housing, but added there was "a bigger question here", which was how to make sure people were able to move through the housing chain ...

BBC NEWS  03 Aug 2010    Ponzi Housing Market

Councils offered new homes bonus

Nadine Dorries attacks David Cameron council home plan

London affordable homes 'at risk'

Spending cuts 'are threatening construction jobs'

Landlord regulation proposals scrapped

We want to work – but government would rather cut costs than help us

Rather than helping disability claimants into work, it is cheaper to cut benefits and set them up to fail in a tough labour market ...

Finding work is difficult enough for the fit and healthy, but if you are one of the 11 million people – from cabinet office estimates – in Britain who is disabled, injured, or suffers from ill-health, then your condition may make it harder to move beyond the interview stage. Enabling most claimants to work means that jobs would have to be tailored to their needs.

This means taking account for weeks and months off work, short days, regular shifts in working hours, work days and deadlines, the distraction of severe pain, post-medication sleepiness or sickness, susceptibility to colds, flu and bugs, and the need for home-working.

At least a couples of these issues will affect most claimants, no matter what their level of mobility.

This fact makes a poor joke of the idea that most disabled people, even if capable of some work-related task, would be able to cope with employment not adjusted to their symptoms.

Employers already complain about statutory maternity leave, so how would they cope with making adjustments to complex and long-term needs, affecting their profitability? And how can people be declared "fit" to work if employers won't give them jobs because of their illness? ...

Andrew
3 Aug 2010, 8:26AM

Another good article ...

The central issue with incapacity benefit and disability is not that that vast majority of people can work and choose not to, or indeed that they just need a bit of tough love to push them into the jobs market - even though this is the consistent bang of the drums from Whitehall.

The central problem is that employers try to avoid taking on people with disabilities - or are unwilling to provide sufficiently flexible working practises to make the job possible.

This is the elephant in the room - employers are concerned about the bottom line, productivity per worker. The tories are more than happy to embrace this - but you can't embrace this and at the same time hector those with disabilities for not fitting into the jobs market.

peterpuffin
3 Aug 2010, 8:39AM

The Tories are also planning to cut housing benefit but the significant cost for all poor people and low income people is RENT; a significant cost to the huge housing benefit bill.

The left must start a debate about how to CUT RENTS/housing costs which remain outside the area of TORY and tabloid interest; cut housing benefit and rents in tandem and you create an incentive to work.

There are millions of young and poor people paying off the gambling speculation of the propertied class and particularly tenants in BUY TO LET whose nos must equal those of the Council houses sold off by Thatcher.

Lets hear Labour running a campaign to cut rent; and return to a society based on mutuality where housing for First Time Buyers is 3x Median income ie 60,000 pounds for a starter house; this over a generation.

This requires a significant redrawing of the Green Belt; houses for working class based on the 1930's Garden Movement; allotments for flats , green spaces on the urban fringes ....

Also release land at agricultural rates 10000 pound a plot with services put in so people can buy kit homes off the internet and lets drive down housing costs for he next generation and stop the poor paying off BUY TO LET gambling debts.

In other words a housing strategy to answer the needs of a generation PRICED OUT.

Guardian     'Reserve Army'    

Remploy

GMB_Remploy

Disabled to lose their factories

Welfare reforms are 'onslaught on the vulnerable'

The National Housing Federation (NHF) claimed the plan to impose a cap on housing benefit payments amounted to an "onslaught on the vulnerable", which would cost more than 900,000 low-paid people an average of £624 a year – forcing them into debt or homelessness ...

The NHF analysis revealed hundreds of thousands of the unemployed and low-paid single parents would be hit by the changes.

It found that 18,870 people would lose out in Birmingham, 15,610 in Leeds, 12,620 in Liverpool and 10,210 in Manchester ...

Independent  01 Aug 2010    'Reserve Army'

Duncan Smith shakes up benefits in bid to cut costs and increase job incentives

Work and pensions secretary, under pressure to cut budget, sets out three reform options ...

Duncan Smith is expected to advance three options:

• Combining elements of current income-related benefits, such as income support and housing benefit, with the tax credit system.

• Bringing all out-of-work and in-work support together in a single system for working age adults, so integrating tax credits.

• Supplementing monthly household earnings through credit payments reflecting current circumstances, including children, housing and disability.

The final option would reduce the massive levels of fraud and error in tax credits caused by families receiving credits that no longer reflect their incomes ...

Guardian  29 July 2010

IDS welfare reform deserves support

Iain Duncan Smith issues stark benefits system warning

Single benefit payment among 'radical' welfare plans

Tory benefit reforms 'will make work pay'

Come off benefits and we'll make work pay

750,000 risk losing homes in south-east

IDS

Welfare

New benefits system forces three-quarters of claimants back to work

Nearly four out of 10 (39 per cent) of the 686,500 applicants for Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) have been judged able to work since the replacement for Incapacity Benefit was introduced in October 2008.

A further 37 per cent stopped their claims before their assessments had been completed.

Only six per cent of ESA claims (or 40,100 cases) from October 2008 to November 2009 were judged to have such severe disabilities that they were eligible for payments of at least £96.85 a week and exempted from work programmes.

A further 14 per cent (or 96,700 cases) were judged unable to hold down a full-time job and received at least £91.40 a week, but were forced to take part in work schemes.

One in three of those judged fit for work appealed against the decision and four in 10 appeals (21,200 cases) resulted in victory for claimants ...

There are 2.2 million people on incapacity benefit and 136,800 now on the new ESA, costing a total of £14bn in 2009-10.

However, campaigners believe the new system is flawed.

Laura Weir, of the Multiple Sclerosis Society, said: "Under this assessment system, more and more people are being found 'fit to work' when in fact they are living with severe health symptoms and disabilities.

"The assessment needs to be independently reviewed to take into consideration long-term, fluctuating conditions with 'hidden' symptoms that are being overlooked, such as fatigue and pain.

We need better-trained staff carrying out these assessments, who are aware of the complex nature of conditions like MS, and more exemptions for people with the most severe symptoms."

A spokeswoman for Citizens Advice Bureau said:

"We have grave concerns about how the work capability assessment for the ESA is working. We have seen cases where medical evidence has not been taken into account. Seriously ill and disabled people are being found fit for work." ...

Independent  28 July 2010    

Threat to outsourced workers’ benefits

Britons on the breadline

Thousands of people could be forced to rely on food parcels because of benefit delays, as the Government's plan to slash the country's welfare bill is put into effect.

Charities that run foodbanks warned this weekend that the prospect of people having to rely on Third World-style food aid – despite Britain being among the richest nations in the world – is a real possibility for 1.5 million people who will be moved off incapacity benefit (IB).

The number of people who are turning to foodbanks as they can't afford to feed their families has soared, rising from 26,000 in 2008-09 to 41,000 in 2009-10 – 37 per cent of whom were referred to foodbanks because of delays with their benefits ...

Chris Mould, director of the Trussell Trust, said: "What worries us is the amount of people who come to us because their benefits status is being reassessed and they've had their benefits stopped; if hundreds of thousands of people are being reassessed, we fear there will be huge problems."

The Government recently announced that everyone on incapacity benefit will have to go through tests known as Work Capability Assessments to see if they are fit for work. The Department for Work and Pensions estimates that, of the 1.5 million people currently on IB, 750,000 will move on to jobseeker's allowance, 300,000 will move on to other benefits, and 450,000 will come off benefits entirely ...

Independent  04 July 2010

Food Stamps USA

Trussell Trust

Ministers consider scheme to hand out food vouchers to unemployed

The line of travel is probably to replace benefits with food stamps.

The government is considering plans to distribute food vouchers to people on the dole as part of a wider drive to empower charities to supplement the support provided by the welfare state.

Iain Duncan Smith, the work and pensions secretary, has given his provisional backing to JobCentre Plus staff handing out vouchers that can be exchanged for food parcels.

The parcels, which contain enough donated items to keep a family fed for six days, are administered from 65 food banks across the country run by the Trussell Trust, a Christian charity ...

The Trussell Trust, which fed 41,000 people last year, already relies upon front-line professionals such as a teachers, social worker and doctors to give the vouchers to people they encounter who do not have enough money to feed themselves.

Until two years ago, a few Jobcentre Plus offices also let their staff distribute vouchers on an ad hoc basis.

That practice, negotiated locally, was stopped by the Labour government in 2008, after a ruling that Jobcentre Plus advisers "must not act as an agent for handing out any form of support, such as food vouchers" on behalf of charities.

Labour ministers were thought to have been concerned that the Trussell Trust parcels would give the impression welfare payments were insufficient ...

Chris Mould, director of the Trussell Trust, said a growing proportion of the charity's clients were "on the edge" because they had been refused a crisis loan or had their benefits halted as officials reassessed their entitlements ...

Figures released by the DWP revealed that 37,000 people waited 17 days or more for their jobseeker's allowance last year, while 20,000 had to wait more than 22 days ...

Guardian  02 July 2010

Food Stamps USA

Trussell Trust

It's 'negflation' that Britain really needs to worry about

There were two ... important stories from the weekend press to digest ...

One was a warning from John Bason, finance director of Associated British Foods, the owner of the discount clothing chain, Primark, that the cost of clothing in the UK could rise by as much as 5pc over the next year because of increased transport costs, the weakness of sterling, and the increase in VAT.

According to Mr Bason, this will be more than just a temporary blip.

Strongly rising wage pressures in formerly low-cost manufacturing countries such as China, mean that the era of ultra-cheap clothing – prices have been falling pretty much uninterrupted for nearly twenty years now – is well and truly over.

The other was the warning from Philip Hammond, the Transport Secretary, that swingeing public spending cuts are likely to cause steep increases in rail fares next year.

Conventional wisdom, echoed by the Bank of England in its last Inflation Report, is that recession induced excess capacity in the economy will push down on inflation for some time to come.

These two warnings may suggest otherwise.

Inflationary pressures have remained surprisingly strong right through the downturn, and there is as yet little sign of a let-up ...

[These pressures] ... come either from external sources, or as in the case of rail fares, as a result of the removal of state subsidy from public services.

This is "cost push inflation", rather than "demand pull", but no less damaging to disposable incomes and business confidence for it ...

Rising domestic demand from the big developing economies of Asia and Latin America are good reason to believe these elevated levels of inflation are more than just temporary.

These countries now compete aggressively with the West for all forms of resource, from labour to energy and food ...

The idea, as expounded by the G20, that with a little bit of deficit reduction and financial market reform, we'll soon be back to "normal", looks sadly deluded.

The world's changed. It will be a while before we understand precisely how.

Telegraph  28 June 2010

[US] Recovery Slows With Weak Job Creation in June

Shirking fathers should lose their benefits

Welfare debate should shift from obsession with single mothers, says Labour MP Frank Field ...

Field, the Labour MP who was commissioned by the government to carry out a review of poverty, said:

"The reason why we have so many single mums is because we have so many single dads who cannot fulfil what most single mothers want from their partners, and the children from their fathers." ...

The Tories are to require single mothers with children aged five or over to make themselves ready for work.

Field, a former welfare minister in the Blair government, said the drive to put lone mothers into work had also led to employers exploiting women by making it easier to drive down the wage rates of women who want to work full time.

"I believe we have been obsessed with getting young mothers back to work, irrespective of what they think and whether we think it is best for their children to do so," he said.

He hoped his poverty review would take out from the shadows "the unmarried father who is often young, unemployed and often unemployable and who is unskilled, and the way society has changed has made him redundant.

"The position he once held as breadwinner has been taken over by taxpayers. If they ever dare think about it, they are entering into an abyss of a life on benefit, trying to make ends meet with petty crime and drug dealing." ...

Guardian  28 June 2010    

Millions face incapacity benefit cuts

There are 2.6 million people claiming incapacity benefit, costing the taxpayer £12.5 billion a year.

With cuts of at least 25 per cent needed to meet public spending targets set out in the Budget, Mr Osborne knows the welfare bill must be reduced sharply.

Speaking before he left for Toronto, he said discussions would take place over the summer about how far specific welfare bills would be cut.

This week the new Public Expenditure Committee will look at how the pace of change can be stepped up ...

The Government is testing 10,000 claimants a week as part of a drive to determine exactly how many genuinely need state help.

Mr Osborne’s case will be strengthened by figures showing that £10 million was paid last year to people who said they could not work because they were prone to headaches.

Data released under Freedom of Information showed that £1.8 billion was given in incapacity benefit to people suffering from depression, anxiety and stress ...

Telegraph  28 June 2010    

A minimum income standard for Britain in 2009

A new model of welfare

Welfare crackdown begins

A new model of welfare

Budget cuts mean the coalition charm offensive is over

Only Labour Can Save the Coalition

Osborne's budget cuts will hit Britain's poorest families six times harder than the richest

Coalition to tell unemployed to 'get on your bike'

Tackling the poverty that Labour ignored

Budget will hit poor harder than rich

Flawed benefit system ...

CAB

Welfare crackdown begins

Previous attempts to cut back on the cost of funding incapacity benefit, now claimed by around 2.6 million people, met with major criticism.

A new system introduced by the last government to assess whether or not the sick and disabled were capable of working wrongly found seriously ill people ready to work, according to a report in March by the Citizens Advice Bureau.

People with advanced Parkinson's Disease or Multiple Sclerosis, with severe mental illness, or awaiting open heart surgery were registered as fit to work ...

Guardian  28 June 2010    

The Third Depression

We are now, I fear, in the early stages of a third depression ...

... the cost — to the world economy and, above all, to the millions of lives blighted by the absence of jobs — will nonetheless be immense.

And this third depression will be primarily a failure of policy.

Around the world — most recently at last weekend’s deeply discouraging G-20 meeting — governments are obsessing about inflation when the real threat is deflation, preaching the need for belt-tightening when the real problem is inadequate spending.

In 2008 and 2009, it seemed as if we might have learned from history.

Unlike their predecessors ... today’s governments allowed deficits to rise. And better policies helped the world avoid complete collapse: the recession brought on by the financial crisis arguably ended last summer ...

... unemployment — especially long-term unemployment — remains at levels that would have been considered catastrophic not long ago, and shows no sign of coming down rapidly. And both the United States and Europe are well on their way toward Japan-style deflationary traps.

In the face of this grim picture, you might have expected policy makers to realize that they haven’t yet done enough to promote recovery. But no: over the last few months there has been a stunning resurgence of hard-money and balanced-budget orthodoxy.

... the revival of the old-time religion is most evident in Europe, where officials seem to be getting their talking points from the collected speeches of Herbert Hoover, up to and including the claim that raising taxes and cutting spending will actually expand the economy, by improving business confidence ...

... there is no evidence that short-run fiscal austerity in the face of a depressed economy reassures investors.

On the contrary: Greece has agreed to harsh austerity, only to find its risk spreads growing ever wider; Ireland has imposed savage cuts in public spending, only to be treated by the markets as a worse risk than Spain ...

It’s almost as if the financial markets understand what policy makers seemingly don’t: that while long-term fiscal responsibility is important, slashing spending in the midst of a depression, which deepens that depression and paves the way for deflation, is actually self-defeating.

So I don’t think this is really about Greece, or indeed about any realistic appreciation of the tradeoffs between deficits and jobs.

It is, instead, the victory of an orthodoxy that has little to do with rational analysis, whose main tenet is that imposing suffering on other people is how you show leadership in tough times.

And who will pay the price for this triumph of orthodoxy?

The answer is, tens of millions of unemployed workers, many of whom will go jobless for years, and some of whom will never work again.

NYT  27 June 2010

It's 'negflation' that Britain really needs to worry about

'Negflation'

A sadistic attack on the jobless

People who have lost their jobs are shocked ... to discover they are expected to eat, pay their bills, clothe themselves and get around – including for job interviews – on just £64.45 a week if they are over 25.

For those under 25, weekly subsistence must be attained on just £51.85.

Osborne's announcement that the rate at which benefits rise will decrease, by linking them to the consumer price index (CPI) rather than, as currently, the retail prices index (RPI), was actually set out by the Treasury under the heading "Fairness".

On current figures, with the RPI at 5.1%, and the CPI at 3.4%, jobseeker's allowance was due to rise next year, to £67.87 a week for the over 25s, and a princely £53.77 for those under 25.

Instead, the figures will be, respectively, £67.22 and £53.25. The loss is 65p a week for the over-25s, and 52p per week for the under 25s.

Those pennies all add up, as the government itself understands, calculating that this flick of the scythe across the benefit system will save it £1.17bn in 2011-12, and almost £6bn by 2014-15.

Over a year, somebody unemployed over 25 will lose £33.80, while the under-25s will each be £27.04 worse off.

Before the election, I wrote that this poverty level of unemployment benefit, and the cruelty of a system that allows people to earn just £5 in part-time work before additional earnings reduce the benefit pound for pound, was a scandal no party was prepared to address.

Donald Hirsch, author of a Joseph Rowntree Foundation report on the minimum needed for an acceptable standard of living – £13,900 last year, he found, way above jobseeker's allowance penury – said: "Everybody knows you cannot survive on that level of benefit." ...

Guardian  27 June 2010    

A minimum income standard for Britain in 2009

Coalition to tell unemployed to 'get on your bike'

Mr Duncan Smith, the MP for Lord Tebbit’s former parliamentary seat of Chingford, disclosed that ministers were drawing up plans to encourage jobless people living in council houses to move out of unemployment black spots to homes in other areas, perhaps hundreds of miles away.

The former Conservative Party leader said millions of people were “trapped in estates where there is no work” and could not move because they would lose their accommodation.

The proposed scheme would allow them to go to the top of the housing list in another area rather than lose their right to a home if they moved ...

Telegraph  26 June 2010    

Why should I again prove my disability to satisfy George Osborne?

Those who thought David Cameron understood disability because of his late son were very wrong. Anne Wollenberg wrote an excellent article in defence of disability living allowance (DLA) yesterday.

It was greeted by comments confusing incapacity benefit (now employment support allowance) with DLA, and a general "nail the benefits cheats" attitude ...

Rarebite
24 Jun 2010, 7:51PM

Good article. There is a difference between DLA and ESA (previously invalidity benefit) but you did come across as a bit fastidious about being associated with those on out of work benefits.

ESA is important to people with disabilities - who in this time are finding themselves out of work and newly claiming - and they have first-hand experience of the horror of the tightening of the medical criteria, the barely competent medical assessors and the burgeoning appeal system.

The medical assessors don't have to be medical doctors and are told to establish 'what you can do'; this apparently a consultant is not competent to decide.

So medical reports, I have several consultant reports, saying that what work I can do is severely prescribed they are ignored.

So instead of getting on with looking for work, despite the limits of my disability, I am spending a significant amount of time preparing an appeal.

The stress impacts on seeking a job.

So you are right to fear the tightening of the DLA test and the use of the French company ATOS who employ people probably not capable of getting jobs in the NHS to process their claims.

The results will be discriminatory. Employees of Working Links are stunned by people who get described as fit to work - a man a couple of weeks after a quadruple by-pass or a woman with terminal cancer (despite the guidelines which say otherwise).

The cost of the appeals system is huge. Money could be saved through better assessment practices - but that would pass more people the first time and the aim is to discourage the 'scrounger' regardless of the impact on the sick.

I believe about half are winning appeals. Crazy. But don't distance yourself from us - you could be one of us tomorrow - any of you who are part of the working population can become ill.

I became ill and lost my job after 20 years - the others on my training course all had similar stories.

Guardian  24 June 2010    

Labour's Frank Field to head poverty review

... the Review on Poverty and Life Chances will look at whether measures need to be reformed, how children's learning is affected by their home life and recommend action to reduce poverty for the least advantaged "consistent with the government's fiscal strategy".

He will work with officials from a number of government departments, including the Treasury and Home Office, as well as Work and Pensions.

Mr Field told the BBC he will look at new ways of measuring poverty and of measuring how effective public spending is in helping to tackle its root causes ...

BBC NEWS  05 June 2010

Victorian Contrasts

Welfare 'trapping' people in poverty

We must not 'park' people on benefits, says Duncan Smith

It's important to offer IDS full marks for realising there's a problem, even if he cannot bring himself to recognise it's one his predecessor - Margaret Thatcher - made infinitely worse when she took the country on a journey to neoliberalism. (Pinochet with strike-breaking police rather than air force jets.)

IDS's speech to The Heritage Foundation in March 2009 provides many clues as to where he is coming from.

Britain is 'broken' - in social terms - and needs:

... a strong family, a completed education, good employment opportunities and freedom from drugs and other addictions ...  [BB]

Only one problem: there aren't the 'good employment opportunities' any more because, as Thatcher's chief economic adviser Alan Budd admitted:

"' ... the 1980s policies of attacking inflation by squeezing the economy and public spending were a cover to bash the workers ... (to create an) ... industrial reserve army' which would undermine the power of labour ... The result: wages stagnated."   [DH]

The implementation of article six of the Washington Consensus since the 1980s has been so successful that IDS has brazen cheek to inform us that he will be "addressing the root causes of poverty at every level"!

So there's going to be full employment under the coalition, is there, Mr Duncan-Smith?

I don't think the IMF and the guys from Davos will be onside with that one, it would seriously damage profits.

The creation of unemployment is policy. Attacking benefit 'scroungers' is simply another deployment of the third face of power.

[IDS] wants to transform his Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) from one which pays out benefits to one with a mission to reduce poverty and remove the barriers to social mobility and equal opportunity.

He will promise to tackle a "culture of dependency" by addressing the root causes of poverty at every level.

The scale of his challenge will be highlighted in a "state of the nation" government report published today showing that: 1.4 million people have been on an

• out-of-work benefit for nine or more of the last 10 years;
• income inequality is now at its highest level since comparable statistics began in 1961;
• social mobility is worse than in the US, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Canada, Finland and Denmark;
• and a higher proportion of children grow up in workless households in the UK than in any other EU country.

Mr Duncan Smith will say:

"A system that was originally designed to help support the poorest in society is now trapping them in the very condition it was supposed to alleviate. Instead of helping, a deeply unfair benefits system too often writes people off.

"The proportion of people parked on inactive benefits has almost tripled in the past 30 years to 41 per cent of the inactive working age population. That is a tragedy. We must be here to help people improve their lives – not just park them on long-term benefits." ...

"For many people, the move from welfare into work means they face losing more than 95p for every additional £1 they earn. As a result, the poor are being taxed at an effective tax rate that far exceeds the wealthy. We have in effect taken away the reward and left people with the risk. That must and will change." ...

Independent  27 May 2010    Blog

IDS ... a worrying ignorance about welfare

Tax credits scheme may be scrapped

Iain Duncan Smith declares war on 'bust' benefits system

Coalition government sets out radical welfare reforms

IDS: I will tackle root causes of poverty

Plan to link retirement age to life expectancy

The last official figures, issued in February, showed that the total was 5.8 million.

There were 1.4 million people on Job Seekers’ Allowance and 2.6 million on Employment Support – formerly known has incapacity benefit. The total also includes people claiming benefits as lone parents, as carers and because of disability.

The Daily Telegraph revealed earlier this year that the state will pay out more in social security benefits than it raises from workers in income tax this year.

In 2009/10, the Treasury is expecting to take in £140.5 billion in gross income tax receipts. Social security benefits are projected to be £164.7 billion.

Official unemployment figures last week said there are now almost 2.5 million people unemployed in Britain.

Neil O’Brien, Director of Policy Exchange, said the benefits data showed that the real number of people not working is much higher than that.

He said: “Any day now the total number on benefits will officially pass the six million mark. The narrow unemployment figures we are used to seeing tell you less and less about the real number of people who are trapped on benefits.”

“Instead of investing in the future, we are paying the price for failing to reform the benefits system.”

“Our unreformed benefits system is too complicated. It gives people too little financial incentive to work, and too little pressure and help to find work. Other countries have successfully reduced the number on benefits. We will need to totally change our benefits system. There’s nothing kind about leaving people to rot on benefits ”

Telegraph 18 August 2009

Six million Britons to claim benefits