Post by nickd on Jul 3, 2011 18:58:21 GMT 1
Government is getting an increasingly bad press of late over their plans to crack down on welfare reform. Non-one is saying welfare doesn't need reforming, but it has to be fair; - and crucially it has to work.
The latest furore comes over the coalition's plans to impose a cap on the total amount of money people can have on benefits. Eric Pickles has written to the powers that be saying that the welfare reforms will create large numbers of people being made homeless. Shelter has spoken out on the effect it will and some are saying up to 40,000 will be made homeless.
Here's what an earlier article in the Guardian says...
"£26,000? The truly nasty cap fits
The crude limit on family benefits does not make financial sense. But it works for the Sun"
Tom Clark guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 15 June 2011 22.15 BST
"George Osborne launched the £26,000 cap at the 2010 Conservative party conference in Birmingham.
No one believes you can raise a child decently on £3 a day, and yet the House of Commons today passed a law that will impose that hardship on youngsters across much of the south of England.
This prospect flows from a crude £26,000 cap being applied to all of a family's annual benefits, which will bite hard wherever households are large and rents are high. Designed to win George Osborne Tory conference cheers and tabloid plaudits, it achieved both these things before anyone had bothered to think it through.
The rhetorical logic is ensuring that benefits should never exceed typical pay, and this line has been parroted in the Sun. But there is no real logic, since the whole argument rests on wilful misunderstanding. For one thing, the policy deliberately confuses average individual pay with family income. Only a truly nasty party would want to visit the sins of the fathers and mothers it deems to have too many children on the children themselves. Yet, by ignoring the number of mouths that a family has to feed, the cap does precisely that.
For another thing, the cap muddles wages with total income, and so ignores welfare paid to people in work. Many a parent on the minimum wage receives more in tax credits and housing benefit than in earnings. Jobs can just about pay for these people, but only because the state tops them up so that they get more in work. A benefit cap is hardly going to help them.
The effect will be most pronounced where rents are high, and consequently housing benefit entitlements can be large. But for large families renting privately, there will be pain across great swaths of London and the south-east. The economist and active Liberal Democrat Tim Leunig has crunched the numbers for a couple with four children paying typical rent in Tolworth, an area branded "the scrag end of Kingston Borough" by London's Evening Standard. Even assuming the youngest children share a room, after footing their rent, council tax and basic utilities out of their capped £26,000, that family would be left with less than £3 per person per day.
No one can defend this position and yet, bizarrely, no mainstream politician is willing attack it. The welfare secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, doesn't much like the policy himself. As a champion of family values he will be worried about the financial pressure it would place on couples to split into smaller households. Even so, after his deputy, Lord Freud, conceded exceptions may be required, he felt obliged to slap him down.
Meanwhile, Labour knows the cap is crazy but doesn't regard this as a fight to pick. It quietly proposed tweaks not about the principle but the conditions where the cap would apply. Many a concerned Lib Dem stayed silent, crossing fingers and trusting that the legion problems can be ironed out well away from the floor of the Commons.
It is a moment to be grateful for what remains of Labour's hard left: an amendment to scrap the cap was at least tabled by John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn but stood no chance. Other elected politicians prefer to pass a busted law and trust the unelected Lords to fix it. They may do so, but what does it say about the state of politics that this thing cannot be sorted by democratic means?
A week after the archbishop of Canterbury warned that the distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor was creeping back into our discourse, the whip hand in the debate over benefits is held by Vicky Pollard. While caricatures of welfare dependents reign unchallenged, pressing practical questions about how poor people can make ends meet are ducked. Instead of a failure to speak truth unto power, we have a failure on the part of power to speak the truth about this unwearable cap."
www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jun/15/benefit-cap-london-poor-families
The latest furore comes over the coalition's plans to impose a cap on the total amount of money people can have on benefits. Eric Pickles has written to the powers that be saying that the welfare reforms will create large numbers of people being made homeless. Shelter has spoken out on the effect it will and some are saying up to 40,000 will be made homeless.
Here's what an earlier article in the Guardian says...
"£26,000? The truly nasty cap fits
The crude limit on family benefits does not make financial sense. But it works for the Sun"
Tom Clark guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 15 June 2011 22.15 BST
"George Osborne launched the £26,000 cap at the 2010 Conservative party conference in Birmingham.
No one believes you can raise a child decently on £3 a day, and yet the House of Commons today passed a law that will impose that hardship on youngsters across much of the south of England.
This prospect flows from a crude £26,000 cap being applied to all of a family's annual benefits, which will bite hard wherever households are large and rents are high. Designed to win George Osborne Tory conference cheers and tabloid plaudits, it achieved both these things before anyone had bothered to think it through.
The rhetorical logic is ensuring that benefits should never exceed typical pay, and this line has been parroted in the Sun. But there is no real logic, since the whole argument rests on wilful misunderstanding. For one thing, the policy deliberately confuses average individual pay with family income. Only a truly nasty party would want to visit the sins of the fathers and mothers it deems to have too many children on the children themselves. Yet, by ignoring the number of mouths that a family has to feed, the cap does precisely that.
For another thing, the cap muddles wages with total income, and so ignores welfare paid to people in work. Many a parent on the minimum wage receives more in tax credits and housing benefit than in earnings. Jobs can just about pay for these people, but only because the state tops them up so that they get more in work. A benefit cap is hardly going to help them.
The effect will be most pronounced where rents are high, and consequently housing benefit entitlements can be large. But for large families renting privately, there will be pain across great swaths of London and the south-east. The economist and active Liberal Democrat Tim Leunig has crunched the numbers for a couple with four children paying typical rent in Tolworth, an area branded "the scrag end of Kingston Borough" by London's Evening Standard. Even assuming the youngest children share a room, after footing their rent, council tax and basic utilities out of their capped £26,000, that family would be left with less than £3 per person per day.
No one can defend this position and yet, bizarrely, no mainstream politician is willing attack it. The welfare secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, doesn't much like the policy himself. As a champion of family values he will be worried about the financial pressure it would place on couples to split into smaller households. Even so, after his deputy, Lord Freud, conceded exceptions may be required, he felt obliged to slap him down.
Meanwhile, Labour knows the cap is crazy but doesn't regard this as a fight to pick. It quietly proposed tweaks not about the principle but the conditions where the cap would apply. Many a concerned Lib Dem stayed silent, crossing fingers and trusting that the legion problems can be ironed out well away from the floor of the Commons.
It is a moment to be grateful for what remains of Labour's hard left: an amendment to scrap the cap was at least tabled by John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn but stood no chance. Other elected politicians prefer to pass a busted law and trust the unelected Lords to fix it. They may do so, but what does it say about the state of politics that this thing cannot be sorted by democratic means?
A week after the archbishop of Canterbury warned that the distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor was creeping back into our discourse, the whip hand in the debate over benefits is held by Vicky Pollard. While caricatures of welfare dependents reign unchallenged, pressing practical questions about how poor people can make ends meet are ducked. Instead of a failure to speak truth unto power, we have a failure on the part of power to speak the truth about this unwearable cap."
www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jun/15/benefit-cap-london-poor-families