Over the past couple of days I have been delivering training on the new 'Council Tax Reduction Schemes' that Local Authorities are in the process of devising ready for the replacement of the current national Council Tax Benefit scheme in April 2013. This situation has been foisted on them by Central Government - for reasons best known to themselves, but which must surely include a pathological hatred of benefit claimants and poor cities from the inevitable consequences - who have decided that this coming finacial year Local Authorities will have the discretion to devise their own schemes for working-age claimants, but must protect the entitlement of people over Pension Credit age.
But they will have to deliver this from a budget reduced by 10% from current expenditure on Council Tax Benefit in their area.
I have already explained in my post 'Poll Tax Reloaded' how this has a disproportionate effect on Councils where more Council Tax payers are reliant on benefit. It is also the case that working-age claimants in a district with a high proportion of poorer pensioners are also likely to take a harder hit on their own entitlement, since all of the cut must come from the younger claimants' benefits. Factor in Councils' social and economic policies, and councillors' and officers' preferences, prejudices and misunderstandings, and we are left with getting on for 300 different schemes across the country, with some subsidising the benefit budget to protect their less well-off residents and the businesses and communities dependent on their spending power, and others being altogether less far-sighted or charitable.
Locally, I looked at our five nearest Councils. An attempt to create a county-wide framework collapsed, and instead there are wild variations between neighbouring authorities. The majority of working-age claimants in Stoke-on-Trent will pay at least 30% of their Council Tax even from what are supposed to be merely subsistence benefits such as Income Support and Jobseekers Allowance. In neighbouring Staffordshire Moorlands, the figure is 8.5% for someone in the same circumstances. Stafford Borough appears to have tried to be 'family friendly', allowing families with children under five potentially a maximum 100% benefit if their incomes are low enough, but promptly undermined this by taking both child benefit and child maintenance into account in full as income where it is generally disregarded, a move that will hit working lone parents especially hard.
One especially frustrating feature of several schemes is their insistence of using eligibility for an element of means-tested benefit calculations called the 'severe disability premium' (SDP) to define severe disability, and give entitlement to a potential 100% reduction. It sounds to the lay person as if that is what it might define, but it actually does no such thing. To be entitled to a 'severe disability premium' in the calculation of your benefit, you must meet three conditions. Firstly, you need to qualify for Disability Living Allowance at the middle or higher rate for care - arguably, a reasonable measure of severe disability. But the other two qualifying criteria are not. For the SDP, you must also 'live alone' (although certain other disabled people, children and young people in your household are ignored) and not have a carer claiming Carers Allowance for looking after you. These latter criteria are clearly about household composition and care provision, not the extent of your disabilities.
The consequence of adopting this benchmark is iniquitous. You might have two people living next door to each other in identical properties, with identical health problems, both entitled to DLA at the higher rate for care and receiving identical earnings-replacement benefits. One has a single regular carer who claims Carers Allowance as his/her main income: the other has two carers who share the role, so neither provides sufficient hours of care to qualify for Carers Allowance. The first claimant doesn't qualify for a 'severe disability premium' and so can receive no more than 70% or 80% of their Council Tax bill in benefit, no matter how poor. The other, simply on account of having different arrangements to provide the same level of care, can receive up to 100%.
Logically, if the intention was to devise a scheme to protect the entitlement of severely disabled people, you would link it to receipt of given components of DLA - or rather, if you knew anything about benefits, that's what you would tend to do. Sadly, even this botched attempt to give some protection to disabled people is more than some Councils have resolved to provide.
Similarly, elements of the Discretionary Social Fund are also transfering to Local Authorities in April, also with a slice of funding based on current expenditure. While Stoke have produced some broad principles, we are still waiting for any clue as to what the County Council have in mind for this, so it is too soon to do a detailed critique.
What I can say from looking at both Council Tax Support/Reduction schemes and 'son-of-Social Fund' is that there is a disturbing trend here towards the localisation of Social Security provision, which if not checked may lead to area rates for all Social Security Benefits, potentially decided locally, possibly with discretion even not to provide them at all - the Social Fund budget for Councils isn't ring-fenced, for example, and some Councils may opt to use the funds elsewhere. Hard-pressed districts will struggle to provide for their poorest citizens, even where they have the political will to do so. In privileged districts the plight of the 'undeserving poor' may be left increasingly to the well-intentioned, under-funded and occasionally judgmental sphere of charities and churches. This may lead to a 'race to the bottom' to keep provision at the bare minimum required in law, to deter long-term claimants who know their job prospects are poor from moving to areas seen as a 'soft touch'.
That's hardly the spirit of 1945.
