Minority Report

This week, a report was released by Citizens Advice entitled 'Responsive Welfare', setting out what 'we' think is needed to reform 'welfare' in the UK.  There's a link here:

http://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/press_20150128

This report has not been well-received at my workplace.  It appears to be founded on a false premise - that what makes 'welfare' unpopular with the public isn't the relentless output of 'Poverty Porn' on TV and 'cheating scrounger' stories in the press, but the real problems people encounter when they seek to claim benefits.   

This ignores the fact that most of the population don’t claim benefits and rely on the media to tell them what it involves, giving estimates that are far too high of what they believe benefit rates to be and exaggerating the percentage of benefits lost to fraud by a factor of 386 when asked to guess that.  Because the media tells them lies about scroungers, advisers regularly see clients who believe that it’s right to ‘crack down on the cheats’ - though 'genuine' people (like them) should be left alone.  It also excuses Citizens Advice from any duty to engage in 'myth-busting'; this is alleged to be 'counter-productive, so presumably we also stop challenging racism and other forms of discrimination?

The three prongs of Citizens Advice's reform are greater localisation, more scope for discretion in benefits administration and better use of information technology - resulting in a state where 'welfare' stops being a 'political football' and becomes something we can all take pride in again.

The idea that ‘welfare’ stops being a ‘political football’ by being localised is demonstrably wrong.  Stoke-on-Trent’s decision to opt for a 30% minimum Council Tax payment from working age people was highly political (whether the motive was to highlight Government cuts, discourage poor people from moving here or another) with the result that the people CitA believe are best placed to make sound decisions for the benefit of their locality have seen over 21,000 liability orders made for Council Tax arrears in the last 12 months; many of the people concerned are entirely unable to pay.  

Without substantial additional funding, local government will continue to blame national government for any failings, even those (as above) it brings upon itself.  There is no mechanism to improve accountability, as the groups most likely to see cuts or tougher conditionality often don’t vote and don’t have any major party nationally or locally defending their rights.  While you can say the same of national government, at least there are national charities and interest groups who can and do challenge bad policy - several charities focused on mental health have been outspoken in their criticism of ESA.

 

The pace at which the game of 'political football' is played in the 'League One' of local government is often faster than in the 'Premiership' of national politics too.  National governments change every 5 years – local councils in some areas might shift the balance of power annually.  Therefore the risk of having stop-start social security policies is actually much higher through decentralisation.  I suspect the authors of this report never stopped to imagine what a benefits system decentralised to a UKIP-controlled or dominated council might look like.  Perhaps they fondly imagine councils will ask their local CAB to devise and manage their 'welfare' scheme?  In which case, to whom would a claimant look if they wished to challenge a decision?  And how brave a 'critical friend' can a CAB be to a council making bad benefits policy, without fearing for its funding?

Another illogical feature of localisation is the ‘postcode lottery’, which could leave people in identical circumstances living either side of a council boundary entitled to entirely different support, as we see with the piecemeal roll-out of Universal Credit.  We might very well see a ‘race to the bottom’ in hard-pressed regions.  No council would bring in policies which might be a ‘magnet’ to benefit claimants; this (real or imagined) risk would make it easy for local politicians to play the same game as national politicians regarding EEA migrants’ benefit rights - if 'they' come here because our benefits are too generous, then we must cut benefits!  There might be attempts to introduce residence conditions, which would restrict opportunities to move to find better job opportunities or other life chances.  

That whole argument around 'welfare' and job creation simply perpetuates the myth that people 'choose' benefits rather than work and that cuts to benefits are needed to make low-paid work more attractive.  Better pay and working conditions make jobs attractive - if £72.40 a week looks better than a job offer, there is something very wrong indeed with that job!  If 'welfare' policy existed to shore up economic policies, as this report encourages, why would you offer generous benefits for sick or disabled people?  Councillors and officers would be careful not to speak it aloud, but why encourage people to live in your area who might add to your social care costs?

The report claims to oppose cuts, but allowing local benefit rates to reflect wages and work opportunities gives the excuse for them and one example explicitly endorses them:

Greater Manchester would have a simple statutory responsibility for using this funding to promote core social objectives.  Within a fixed budget they could use the framework of existing benefits, or they could adjust the design of those benefits. They could reduce unemployment benefits for young people, for example, in order to strengthen incentives to work or stay in education, as part of a wider skills and labour market strategy. (p 17)

The last time I looked, ‘unemployment benefits’ for young people were inhumanely low already; it’s shameful for CitA, of all organisations, to suggest it might be legitimate to cut still further.  But perhaps I should not be surprised after their suggestion that the taper for Universal Credit should be steeper and that low-paid childless people should pick up the tab for a slightly improved allowance for working parents, rather improve this benefit for all and shift the burden higher up the income scale?

Improving digital services is a laudable aim, if it really does free staff for better face-to-face interaction, but what is happening within the DWP, HMRC and local government is digital systems (and under-skilled call-centre staff) are used to cut staff and costs, resulting in a poorer quality service.   This document dodges the real issue regarding poor ‘welfare’ customer service – falling numbers of skilled, experienced staff and an exodus of those not in step with IDS's tune.  

An example quoted concerning the ‘severe disability premium’, which supposedly illustrated the need for better digital services, actually shows the need for interaction with real people, as it is doubtful that this client would have been able to navigate a computer-based system unaided any better than a couple of forms.  The examples quoted around sanctions, supposedly demonstrating the benefits of greater discretion and independence, actual prove the opposite.  Clients, support workers, library staff and others have all raised issues around particular members of JC+ staff being keener to hand down sanctions than others.  'Discretion' is a two-edged sword – it can very easily become discrimination and it is almost impossible to challenge effectively.

In fact one of my biggest fears with all this is the authors’ alarming keenness to move away from a rights-based system.  Whatever the faults and failing of the current Social Security system, claimants do have enforceable rights, and these are the same throughout the country.  This enables organisations like CAB, CPAG, Disability Rights and others to provide training and resources, enabling professional advisers, volunteers and claimants themselves to find out about their rights and access them.  Bad law and regulation can and is challenged through the tribunal and upper tribunal system.  If this is working less well now than a while back, the cause is lack of funding for specialist advice and tribunal representation – not a need for more unaccountable ‘discretion’. 

That would be impossible with numerous localised systems subject to constant change.  Advice workers could realistically only really know one or two local schemes well, and could not swap strategies and ideas with their counterparts elsewhere.  National information and training organisations would struggle to provide effective support, national campaigning organisations would lose power and influence.  The online forums that enable isolated victims of 'welfare reform' to share their stories and swap information would be far less help to their users if Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Newcastle-under-Lyme had different qualifying conditions for quite different sickness benefits.  Where do claimants seek redress in the event of an incorrect local decision?  Housing Benefit appeals were brought within the Tribunals Service and away from councillors for the sake of independence and transparency.

If I were a government looking to rip the guts out of the campaigning side of the voluntary sector and keep claimants isolated and ignorant, I would indeed be missing a trick not to take up these ideas.

'Kippers' and Red Herrings

Prime Minister David Cameron made what was billed as his big speech on immigration a few miles east of me yesterday, at the massive JCB factory near Uttoxeter.  Headlines stressed the plan to make EU national workers wait at least four years for 'in work' benefits such as Tax Credits and we were all invited to applaud this as a 'good thing', on the grounds that it will reduce 'benefit tourism' and save money on 'welfare' - a further attack in a year that has already seen their entitlement to Tax Credits, Jobseekers Allowance and Housing Benefit significantly cut back.

Today, the headlines are all about 'modern slavery', particularly the plight of exploited workers in agriculture, domestic service and sex work.  There are UK citizens among them - often vulnerable due to learning disability or mental health issues - but the majority of those affected appear to be migrants.  The two issues are linked: the fear-of-UKIP fuelled policies which have seen access to benefits for EU migrants systematically degraded have contributed to the problem of 'modern slavery' by leaving people already unsure of their rights with still fewer of them. 

When politicians of all parties (except the Greens, who don't play this game) talk about 'migrant workers', it's very obvious that they're thinking of an able-bodied, resilient male who can, in the absence of work that pays enough to feed and house him, sleep on a mate's sofa or under a bridge until his luck changes, or hitch a lift back to Victoria Coach Station and thence back to his homeland. 

They trust their audience to picture this same worker: if you start seeing vulnerable young men and women instead, under the thumb of illegal gang-masters who take most of their earnings in fees and rent, all the talk of 'fairness' starts to ring hollow.  Take away their right to benefits if they leave and they're trapped.  Many won't have earned enough to be treated as 'workers' despite labouring on the land from dawn to dusk, so would get nothing if they fled.  Domestic and sex workers are in the same desperate predicament, especially if they have dependent children, with no proof of earnings and no NI contributions - and their exploiters will know this and point it out to them. 

Similarly, people who have been working legitimately but have reached the end of their benefit entitlement are easy prey.

If this or any other Government were serious about cutting Social Security paid to migrant workers and ending modern slavery, they would realise that the humane way to tackle both is to rigorously enforce payment of the minimum wage (and ideally raise it) and clamp down on exploitative gang-masters.  Every £1 in extra wages paid to a migrant worker is, potentially, 41p less paid out in Tax Credits or 65p less housing benefit.  The same applies to UK workers too, of course. 

Odd then, that since the present Government came to power, only two employers have been prosecuted for not paying the minimum wage; though more have faced 'civil penalties', this is hardly a deterrent. 
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/nov/22/firms-minimum-wage-not-prosecuted

Contrast the 'get tough' attitude to benefit fraud - claimants can expect to go to Court or prison for deliberate acts and face a financial penalty even for innocent mistakes.  Arguably, this is benefit fraud by employers, since the people they underpay will often rely on the state to make up the shortfall, but that's different...   

Ditto prosecutions of gang-masters acting illegally: where they do occur, the penalties are again derisory.  One is left with the feeling that the Government will do anything to stop migrants allegedly exploiting the system, but is quite happy for the system to exploit migrants. 
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/nov/14/gangmaster-prosecutions-decline-home-office-hanson-may

Did the Opposition raise either of these issues in response?  Not where it was reported, if at all, and since they have been involved in an ugly arms race to be tougher than the Tories, I'm not holding my breath waiting.

What to do with Universal Credit

Channel 4 - not necessarily the advisers' favourite TV company since the ghastly Benefits Street - is promising us half an hour on the Universal Credit debacle this evening.  I may be jumping the gun to post about this benefit ahead of the show, but while preparing some notes for a talk on UC, it struck me that the fiasco we have now could easily have been avoided and the 'good bits' of UC already introduced if this ridiculous concept of 'Pathfinder' areas had been scrapped and an altogether different approach to bringing in changes adopted.

Here's my alternative plan.  If we accept that it would actually be helpful to claimants to combine some benefits into one to save a new claim having to be made every time there's a change from sickness to health, part-time worker to carer etc (and I think we all do), that's surprisingly easy.  What we now call Income-based Jobseekers Allowance and Income-related Employment and Support Allowance are no more than mutated forms of Income Support, which once provided means-tested support for jobseekers and the sick as well as lone parents and carers.  It even encompassed what we now call Guarantee Pension Credit. 

It cannot surely be beyond the wit of even IDS's minions to stitch IS, IbJSA and IrESA back together as Income Support, with multiple routes to entitlement.  Do this, and you're already half way to Universal Credit - and without any expensive new IT.  It could literally happen overnight and nobody would notice the difference, except the poor souls currently caught floundering about between ESA and JSA while they challenge a 'fit for work' decision. 

On a technical point, I would dump the separate ESA components and use the existing IS 'disability' and 'enhanced disability' premiums to supplement the personal allowances of people in the WRAG and Support groups respectively, with transitional protection for any losers, though most claimants and couples will stand to gain.

Stage 2 is to tackle earnings disregards.  IDS claims his reforms will 'make work pay', but he's left these untouched, like all of his predecessors since 1988 (there's a previous post from 27th March 2014 on this very point) while we wait for UC to come to the rescue.  Nothing at all stops these from being uprated now.  If you want to 'make work pay', make it!  Put the disregard for a single person up from the insulting £5 per week to something vaguely credible - a day's work at the minimum wage, at least?  What could be easier?  I don't recall the system going into meltdown when the capital limits were made more generous.

Bringing Tax Credits back from HMRC and into this system is much more challenging but again, if we remember that personal allowances for children used to be an integral part of Income Support, to make them so again and to use these personal allowances and income disregards as the basis of in-work benefit calculations would seem the logical starting point - it is, after all, the basis of Housing Benefit.  Key to this being seen as 'fair' would be a reasonable 'taper' applied to excess income.  The current 65% for HB and UC, which diminishes additional earnings by more than half of their value and exceeds the top rate of income tax, is not 'reasonable'.  Full credit for childcare costs should also be on our wish list.
As for housing costs, that is where I find myself in a quandary.  The 'easy' option is to allow actual costs (subject to some restrictions on excessive rents and high mortgages) as part of the 'applicable amount' and let the DWP do the calculations, but there are arguments for keeping HB separate and under Council control.  Local authorities are in a far better position than the DWP to spot landlord fraud; they know how many homes there are in a particular street, how many rooms in any given HMO.  And what about discretionary payments?  I am unclear on where or how (or if) these will be administered under UC.

As for payment - why not let claimants choose their payment interval?  If they are used to budgeting on a monthly basis, tick for that; if weekly payments are more managable, tick for those.  Let them choose to have their landlord paid direct too, if they want.  Why is 'choice' the mantra for the middle-classes, whether we're talking education or healthcare, but benefit claimants are denied it to the point where they now face the prospect of pre-paid storecards for 'sensible' purchases only.

However we tackle any reform, a key factor in keeping the system 'fair' should be that it is not a 'postcode lottery', which is precisely what we have with UC.  Claimants in neighbouring Councils currently have entirely different regulations applied to their claims, more or less generous disregards to part-time earnings.  People in identical circumstances claiming a few days apart as UC 'rolls out' get paid different sums at different intervals, but both receive letters telling them they are getting 'what the Government says you need to live on.'  The same problems plague PIP. 

This isn't 'simplification' - it's a scandal.  It will be interesting to see what Channel 4 makes of it.

The Children Tax

Looking back at the party conference season, it's hard to decide which left me fearing most from next election. 

I expect to be depressed by the Conservatives' self-righteous parade of prejudice, so George Osborne's miserly pledge to freeze working-age benefits and IDS's plans for a pre-paid card to stop feckless claimants splurging the hard-working taxpayers' largess on booze and fags (or public transport, charity shop clothes and market stall food for that matter) did little more than raise my usually low blood pressure to near-normal levels. 

I have also pretty much abandoned hope of hearing anything truly compassionate or inspriring from the red corner when it comes to Social Security.  Yes, they will abolish the Bedroom Tax - but we knew that already.  We also know - for certain now the rest of the picture starts to take shape - that this is because it is already unpopular and it is hurting the budgets of Labour councils who retain their own housing stock.  That it is wrong alone is not enough - other wrongs remain and are not to be righted.

On the contrary, we again had the unedifying spectacle of Labour again trying to look 'trustworthy' and 'tough' on economic issues at the expense of the poor.  They would extend the freeze on Child Benefit beyond Osborne's original timescale - despite CB being disregarded for means-tested benefit purposes, making it something that can be increased without the gain being lost elsewhere, but meaning losses aren't compensated for by a corresponding rise anywhere else. 

Ed Balls also made a point of stating that a future Labour Government would retain the 'Benefit Cap', limiting the weekly sum any family or individual could receive in certain benefits to no more than the average wage.  I pulled apart the Tories' justification for this in an earlier post which showed how benefits payable to someone on the average wage would keep them ahead of their counterpart on benefits only:

http://raggedskirt.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/cloth-caps-benefit-caps-and-northsouth.html 

The excellent 'Benefits in the Future' blog did a neater job with more maths and graphs here:

http://blog.cix.co.uk/gmorgan/2014/02/07/the-benefits-cap-and-real-income-levels/

The calculations aren't that difficult - I'm sure Ed Balls is more than capable of working them out for himself or has minions available. 

What he isn't apparently willing to do is scrap something 'popular' with voters, because they wrongly believe it is dealing with the stereotypical - yet mythical - single parent choosing to have children solely as an alternative to working for a living, despite the fact that even very 'average' out-of-work families with two or three kids can no longer afford to live in most London Boroughs, even in supposedly affordable Social Housing. 

In areas with lower rents the Benefit Cap is, to borrow an expression coined by the Chief Executive of our CAB, a 'Children Tax', as singles, childless couples and small families aren't affected.  In this low-rent region of the north Midlands, you're allowed the equivalent of four-and-a-half children before the current cap kicks in.  More than that and you'll lose a chunk of Housing Benefit, putting you in immediate danger of Court procedings (with costs) and ultimately eviction.  If you receive no more than 'the amount the Government says you need to live on' in other benefits, it's inevitably going to be a struggle to make up the difference.   

The maximum Child Tax Credit for one child is £2750 per annum, so trimming another £3,000 off of the cap as proposed this week - thus breaking any possible justification based on average wages - is the equivalent of telling families they are allowed one less child and for four and a half weeks of the year they are allowed two fewer children. 

It's not as if affected families can retrospectively do anything about this policy.  Even if it puts someone off having another child, what about the 'surplus' children they already have?  Should they put them up for adoption?  Leave them in baskets outside the door of the local Workhouse or Foundlings Hospital?  Expose them on a hillside to await the fate appointed for them by the Gods?  You could move away from the south, but £3000 per year less means you're going a couple of shires further up country this coming year for an insecure private tenancy - unless you're lucky enough to get a house on a northern Council estate full of voids left by the Bedroom Tax. 

Don't be ridiculous, the Tories will say - the feckless poor simply have to find more affordable places to live, get jobs and in the meanwhile cut back on the booze and fags.  Which completely disregards the fact that there are generally more and better-paid jobs where property prices are highest, that finding and moving to a new address isn't something that happens overnight and that unemployed people are less, not more, likely than their working counterparts to spend money they haven't got on cigarettes and alcohol.    

I cannot stress enough that the real losers in all of this are children.  Uprooted from the schools, friends and communities they know or going short because their parents are having to keep three of them on the money for two, education disrupted, family strife increased, living in cheaper, smaller and less safe or secure accommodation 'because we are too many'.  As rents continue to rise and this cap stays in place, increasing numbers of families will literally have insufficient money to cover their rent anywhere in the country and landlords - including social landlords - will become wary of letting to large families, even those in work, in case unemployment or separation leaves them unable to pay their way.  They will be forced to share or squat, borrow to cover debts with no chance of repayment or put children into care.

In short, this policy is so utterly morally bankrupt that it is frightening how little debate it now raises, let alone condemnation.  But Ed says it stays, and George says it's going to be cut by £3000 per annum.  I'm not holding my breath waiting for Ed to argue that it needs to go back up.  The social ideals of 'Cathy Come Home' have turned into 'Cathy - f**k off to a slum up north, and take your kids with you.'

Why I write what I write

I had planned something light-hearted for this post, but events have overtaken 'Plan A' so apologies in advance if this comes across as something of a ranty one - more Martin Connolly than Toby Novak, for those of you familiar with my characters.  It's all Atos's fault - naturally.  Or perhaps it's the Daily Mirror's fault - yep, that is Mirror not Mail, this time.  See what you think. 

What's got me riled is a story doing the rounds of various social media disability rights and anti cuts groups (several of which I support) which has recently been published in the Mirror.  Headlined "Humiliated blind woman asked by ATOS benefits assessor: 'How many fingers am I holding up?' " it describes a fairly typical Work Capability Assessment - typical in that the probably under-trained and inappropriately qualified assessor stuck to a standard script rather than tailoring the assessment to the obvious impairment of the claimant.  Discourteous, humiliating and arguably in breach of the Disability Discrimination Act.  Maddening - but that's not what's making me seethe.

My problem is with the alleged quote from the subject of the story.  According to the Mirror:

'Natasha said: "There are so many people receiving benefits that they don't really deserve, people who don't want to work.  And yet people like me who have genuine disabilities, many much worse than mine, are being forced to do humiliating tests like this.  Benefits Street is being filmed a couple of miles away in Stockton and programmes like that give people the impression benefits are being handed out to everyone.  I listened to the first series and there was someone on there with 11 kids who didn't seem to want to work.  And yet I'm told I have to find a job based on tests I am still struggling to understand."'

Natasha may very well have said just that.  People naturally lash out when they're angry.  My former clients often did - so often, that there were times I could have hurled someone's appeal papers at them for being so damned self-righteous.  It's what we're all told: it's what Benefits Street exists to tell us.  But the Daily Mirror proports to be a left-wing, or at least a Labour, newspaper.  I don't expect the same old, same old.  I expect proper analysis and truth.  If this is a journalistic licence version of what she said, shame on them.  Even if it is what was said verbatim, I fail to see how it helps the story to incite ill-feeling towards other benefit claimants who are already frequent victims of hate crime.

Proper analysis of this story wouldn't be asking readers to vote on whether Natasha should be reassessed either.  You could reassess Natasha a dozen times and, if you followed the regulations, you'd get the same result.  Seriously.  'Atos' are not the problem here.  Yes, their assessor was clumsy, insensitive and sceptical, but a paragon of good practice would also have to give 9 points because, since April 2011, that is the law.  I know this, because I wrote a minor character with an identical degree of visual impairment and mobility into Limited Capabilty to make that very point (Linda Jenkins - ebook Episode 2).  She got 9 points from one of the 'good' assessors at my fictional assessment centre; there were no solid grounds for her to appeal.

Unless the actual Work Capability Assessment is changed - or scrapped - the real Natasha's and Linda's will keep being found fit for work.  Arguably, they are - the DWP itself had a blind Secretary of State in 2005!  But they are also quite obviously of 'limited capability for work' in any meaningful sense of the phrase since many roles and professions would be precluded by their disability and many others by the unsuitability of too many workplaces and inflexibility of too many employers.  Benefit entitlement should surely reflect this.

Finally, I'm not at all sure where the Mirror got their numbers from, but I sincerely hope they haven't gone away without telling Natasha about PIP (if she isn't already getting DLA - high rate mobility, low rate care?) and that in fact her JSA wouldn't be a basic £72.40 at all, but should include a disability premium of over £30 a week. 

Sorry - does that count as a spoiler?

What's in a name?

I am trying not to be cynical about the way the Parliamentary Labour Party is patting itself on the back for supporting a motion by a Libdem back-bencher to water down the 'Bedroom Tax', and thus manage a rare defeat of the Government, but it's hard.  Great though it always is to see the Tories defeated and the Coalition coming apart at the seams, Labour's fixation with the 'Bedroom Tax' as the big evil of Welfare Reform, from which they will deliver us all when they come to power, strikes me as either deeply naïve or horribly disingenuous.

I often wonder if Labour would have been so willing to stand up against this policy if they weren't under pressure from northern Labour councils, who still have large amounts of their own housing stock and are feeling the financial pinch as their tenants struggle to pay the shortfall.  In short, is it concern for councils, rather than compassion for claimants, that drives this policy at all?

The 'under-occupation penalty' or 'removal of the spare room subsidy' - as the Tories spectacularly failed to christen it - is set apart from the other Coalition benefit horrors by one key thing; a catchy, derogatory nickname.  Coining the phrase 'Bedroom Tax' has helped to make the policy unpopular and catch the critical public eye in a way other 'reforms' have failed to.  To be fair, the Bedroom Tax is also relatively easy to explain and to debunk as policy.  To the Government's claim that it stops 'hard-working families' and 'tax payers' subsidising 'spare rooms' in workshy council tenants' homes, there is the response that many of these rooms aren't really 'spare' at all, but necessary to meet the special needs of disabled adults or children.  And that there is nowhere for the 'under-occupier' - workshy or otherwise - to downsize to.
 

But other 'Welfare Reforms' are at least as easy to knock down if you care to try.  Private tenants are treated at least as unjustly, since the Local Housing Allowance was cut to give benefit claimants access to only the cheapest 30% of properties.  A steep rise in non-dependent deductions amounts to a 'tax' on those grown up children stuck at home with mum and/or dad, unable to afford a place of their own.  The 'benefit cap' is demonstrably unfair if you show the benefit entitlement of a family on the average wage (see previous post).  

What about terminating Contribution-based ESA for those in the work-related activity group rate after 12 months, when both ESA and the Incapacity Benefit which pre-dated it were payable for the duration of the claimant's illness - until the Coalition came to power?  Contribution-based benefits are earned through paying NI contributions and are most useful to those with 'hard-working' spouses whose wages take the couple's joint income over the miserly means-tested benefit rates, or who have saved for a rainy day.  A canny Labour politician could surely sell repealing this mean-spirited measure to the most ardent of Daily Mail readers.


Then there's turning Council Tax Support into the ultimate 'postcode lottery', with a mess of different schemes and only the vulture flocks of the bailiffs gaining anything from the charges.  The cruel chaos of PIP's bungled implementation.  The morass of local Social Fund schemes - and the fact that, having landed councils with responsibility for administering these, the Government is ceasing to fund them next year.

The Opposition has fought shy of taking on these issues from a claimant-focused angle until now, believing the public to have swallowed whole the 'strivers and skivers' tales they also once told.  But perhaps there are important lessons to be learned from the Scottish Independence debate.  North of the border, an awful lot of people haven't bought that story.  They aren't fooled by the 'ending the something for nothing culture' and 'making work pay' mantra trotted out in the face of every reported injustice by increasingly desperate DWP ministers and nameless spokespeople.  They have seen the stories about suicide and starvation in their local papers, on social media and even - occasionally - the national press.  They know this is wrong.  More than that, they're prepared to register to vote, sometimes after decades (post Poll Tax) of not doing so, and to risk a great deal on the chance of a genuinely fairer society.  Women and younger voters in particular like this vision.

With Labour's conference almost upon us, I'll be curious to see whether they'll grasp this last chance before the election to change the debate from one about cutting the cost of 'welfare' to saving Social Security.

Cloth Caps, Benefit Caps and the North/South Divide

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:

'I can imagine too that, in her head, Ms Bruce-Annan is wondering whether the city can match the multi-cultural mix of the capital. She should be reassured that, at any one time, there's at least three lots of gypsy caravans occupying green spaces within its boundaries...'

and

'Of course, Stoke-on-Trent wouldn't wish to be overrun by Londoners. No-one wants to see the Stanley Matthews statue replaced by one of Dennis Wise. And few of us would wish our local pub despoiled by 25 gin-sodden southerners stood round an upright piano singing Any Old Iron.'

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.