I'm sure there are times when this blog appears to exist primarily to take pot shots at my local paper, and this post may appear one such salvo.
Let's start with its resident 'humourist' looking at the very serious situation of a woman with three children told to move to Stoke-on-Trent as, thanks to the 'Benefit Cap', she will have to leave her north London home. Entitled 'Stoke-on-Trent is not a dumping ground for Londoners' it starts by informing us 'A woman from London this week complained that being forced to move to the Potteries is inhumane. A bit rich from the city which gave us the jellied eel.'
The same gift for wit and cultural sensitivity shines through as the article continues:
and
Depressingly, someone was indeed paid to write this - and without having to use a Tardis to return to a 1970s variety show to collect the cheque. http://www.stokesentinel.co.uk/John-Woodhouse-Stoke-Trent-dumping-ground/story-22838895-detail/story.html
The 'serious' news item on this story was little better, treating it as if the woman herself had 'dissed' Stoke-on-Trent and seeking to reassure her it was a wonderful and welcoming place, while giving no explanation of how the 'Benefit Cap' of an apparently generous £500 per week, coupled with obscenely high London rents, was forcing her to move to a city she had never heard of. Predictable consequence - a troll-fest of cliches about lone parents on benefits, a sprinkling of racism once a photograph showing her to be black appeared and any impression of Stoke-on-Trent being a friendly, welcoming city obliterated by its own knuckle-dragging army of keyboard warriors.
Meanwhile, 'darn sarf', at least the political context got a fairer airing, though 'Things to do and see... it’s a 28 minutes drive to the Alton Towers theme park. Surrounding area? Mainly just the Alton Towers theme park,' is perhaps the faintest praise dished out to what is actually a great part of the world to live in (this from a southern exile) since the Hitchhiker's Guide summed up planet Earth in two words. So, better than the Sentinel's approach, but 'could do better.' http://www.getwestlondon.co.uk/news/local-news/mother-dealt-inhumane-ultimatum-council-7651899
As none of these august publications have explained it, here's a brief guide to the 'benefit cap', not to be confused with the 'welfare cap' on overall Social Security spending.
In a nutshell, exempting some claimants in receipt of certain disability benefits, it limits the total amount that can be paid in benefits each week to no more than £350 for a single person and £500 for a couple or family, including housing costs. The justification is that the average wage of £26,000 amounts to no more than £500 per week, therefore those who don't work, and don't have to contend with serious disabilities, shouldn't receive more than this. A deceptively simple premise which sounds fair (as indeed does most effective propaganda), especially in this part of the world where £500 per week is a damned good wage. Or it does, until you break it down a bit.
Do all families 'on benefits' get £500 per week? Of course not! Excluding housing costs, a lone parent with three children and no other income (like the woman facing rehousing in Stoke) would get £72.40 income support for the adult, plus £169.28 child tax credit and £47.60 child benefit. Letter after letter will tell her 'this is the amount the Government says you need to live on.' A total of £289.28. The maximum she could receive in housing benefit for a private tenancy in this area would be £109.62 per week, taking the total to £398.90, plus 70% of her Council Tax bill. But at no point does she have anything like £500 to spend on herself and her children.
If this person was instead in paid work and earning £26,000 gross per annum, she could still bring home more than her benefits after tax and NI, and qualify for £105.75 child tax credit every week and her child benefit, and in her first year back to work, it would be more than that. In Stoke-on-Trent, her rent would be too low for her to receive housing benefit and she would have her full Council Tax to pay. Until the present Government reduced the percentage to 70%, she would also have got 80% of any reasonable childcare costs covered by working tax credit. How cutting support for childcare costs is 'making work pay' escapes me, but in the Secretary of State's world I'm sure it makes perfect sense.
But I digress.
Let's run those sums again with some London rents. Harrow's Local Housing Allowance for a three bedroom house is exactly £300 per week, the sort of happy coincidence that usually only happens in made up examples, so without the 'benefit cap', our lone parent with three children would get £289.28 benefits for herself and her children, plus £300 housing benefit (all of which would go out in rent) - a total of £589.28.
The 'benefit cap' limits what she gets to £500 per week, but does so by reducing housing benefit payments - shifting the perceived blame for the measure to the councils who administer HB and keeping the anger at arms length from the Government in the process. So every week, her rent payments are £89.28 short. Or, to put it another way, if she pays her full rent, her weekly disposable income is almost a third less than 'the amount the Government says you need to live on.' It's more than the allowance she receives for keeping herself, as an adult, fed, clothed, clean and warm. That is unsustainable. It is 'inhumane'.
In work - again at £26,000 - our Londoner still gets her £105.75 tax credits and £47.60 child benefit, in addition to her wage, and she'll get housing benefit too. On £300 per week rent, it works out at about £189 HB per week. But at no point, either in Stoke or Harrow, is our 'worker' worse off than her counterpart on benefits. I'm not saying it isn't possible when you start to take work-based expenses into account, but you don't make the worker better off by cutting the claimant's income - you make the system fairer by allowing the real costs of transport, work clothes, childcare, union subs etc to be disregarded as income when assessing in-work benefits.
There is an argument that the worker isn't sufficiently better off, but taking money away from someone else does not actually make them a penny richer. It merely makes the workless person poorer and, as driving down benefits drives down wages, neither actually wins in the long run.
The immediate consequence of this policy for someone like Cecilia Bruce-Annan and her children isn't just to uproot them from a neighbourhood they know and send them 200 miles north to live among strangers, some of whom have already formed their hostile opinions based on a half-telling of her story in the local press. It also moves them away from a location where there are more job opportunities, and at a higher typical rate of pay, than there are in Stoke. In the long run, there is a strong possibility it will cost the state more in benefits, as Ms Bruce-Annan may well be jobless for longer here than in Harrow and whatever is 'saved' now on her housing costs will be lost in long-term tax credits to compensate for the local lousy wages. What price too the disruption to her children's education, the loss of the family's circle of friends? Talk about knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing!
Of course the sensible way to solve this isn't a 'benefit cap' but a 'rent cap', which would take the steam out of the Capital's run-away house price inflation (predicted today at a possible 26% this year) and help benefit claimants and non-claimants alike, though from the comments in the papers, you'd think the reintroduction of the Workhouse was the preferred option.
Does anyone else understand what the benefit cap is and why it's unfair? Actually, they do. Unsurprisingly, it took a local Green to write to the Sentinel with what we might once have hoped a local Labour politician would have the guts to say.
'The 'bedroom tax' and other reforms conducted in the name of austerity have created a gulf of inequality that may be impossible to bridge. They have hammered mercilessly the poorest and most vulnerable members of society, whilst large corporations and wealthy individuals are allowed to evade tax with impunity. Even though the sum lost to the Treasury as a result dwarfs spending on welfare.'
The full letter is here: http://www.stokesentinel.co.uk/Situation-makes-Stoke-Trent-inhumane-Cecilia/story-22831018-detail/story.html
After a barnstorming performance at a public meeting on the threatened privatisation of local cancer services, it really won't take much more from the Greens for my party membership fee to be in the post.
