novaramedia:

UK welfare spending 2011/12…3% of which is spent on Jobseeker’s allowance

The selflessness of carers for elderly and disabled people saves the economy multi-billions. And they get paid pittance for it.

 I wonder how much of Housing Benefit goes on subsidising parasitic private landlords?

We call for a Cumulative Impact Assessment of Welfare Reform, and a New Deal for sick & disabled people based on their needs, abilities and ambitions

We call for:

A Cumulative Impact Assessment of all cuts and changes affecting sick & disabled people, their families and carers, and a free vote on repeal of the Welfare Reform Act.

An immediate end to the Work Capability Assessment, as voted for by the British Medical Association.

Consultation between the Depts of Health & Education to improve support into work for sick & disabled people, and an end to forced work under threat of sanctions for people on disability benefits.

An Independent, Committee-Based Inquiry into Welfare Reform, covering but not limited to: (1) Care home admission rises, daycare centres, access to education for people with learning difficulties, universal mental health treatments, Remploy closures; (2) DWP media links, the ATOS contract, IT implementation of Universal Credit; (3) Human rights abuses against disabled people, excess claimant deaths & the disregard of medical evidence in decision making by ATOS, DWP & the Tribunal Service.

On behalf of the basic well-being and human rights of all disabled people, please sign this if you are in the UK! (And pass it on whether you are or not).

So why does Obamacare run through the private sector? Raw political necessity: this was the only way that it could get past the insurance industry’s power. OK, that was how it had to be.

But you should really be outraged at the efforts of some states to ensure that the Medicaid expansion is done not via direct government insurance but run through the insurance industry. What you need to understand is that this is a double giveaway, both to the insurers and to the health care industry, because private insurers don’t have the government’s bargaining power. It is, bluntly, purely a matter of corporate welfare for the medical-industrial complex.

(Source: azspot)

Iain Duncan Smith: The Movie

Brilliant.

From April, social housing tenants deemed to be under-occupying their properties will be charged an under-occupation penalty, which will be deducted from their housing benefit entitlements.

Riverside Housing, which manages 50,000 properties nationwide, says 24 per cent of its tenants who will be affected are searching for alternative accommodation, while 63 per cent intend to stay in their homes and pay the penalty.

The new levy, dubbed the “bedroom tax”, is central to the government’s welfare reform agenda, but has attracted criticism from housing associations and charities.

The penalty will be applied to working age social housing tenants who are judged to be under-occupying their homes. Couples and children of the same sex are expected to share a room, as are any two children under 10 regardless of gender.

Tenants with disabilities will also be subject to the penalty, unless a bedroom is used by a non-resident carer who stays overnight.

Jayson and Charlotte Carmichael from Southport received a letter informing them they will be expected to contribute an additional £11.90 per week towards the cost of their two bedroom flat.

Charlotte suffers from spinal bifida and sleeps in a hospital-style bed which is designed especially for her condition, while Jayson sleeps in the second bedroom. The couple are now deemed to be under-occupying the property.

The letter tells them their options are to pay the penalty, move to a smaller home or take in a lodger.

“It’s so depressing,” says Charlotte. “I have to sleep in this bed. I didn’t ask to live like this.”

“I’ll have to give up bus travel,” says Jayson. “And we’ll have to cancel the television subscription.

“I don’t know why we’re being penalised. We’re not under-occupying this flat. Charlotte needs to sleep in a hospital bed because she’s severely disabled. We’re already pushed for space with all the medical equipment. It’s disgraceful.”

The housing benefit changes are expected to hit hardest in the north of England, where there are fewer one and two bedroom properties available to social housing tenants.

It is predicted that 600,000 people will be affected nationwide, around 20 per cent of social housing tenants. However, in some parts of the North West more than 40 per cent of those in social housing will be subject to the penalty.

“Nobody wants to move, but some people have to because they simply won’t be able to pay,” says Christine Frazer from Riverside Housing.

“The problem is those that are moving to avoid the penalty need one and two bedroom flats and there just aren’t the properties for them. We work so hard to build strong communities, but a quarter of people leaving all at once will tear them apart and there’ll be more anti-social behaviour.”

According to figures from the Department for Work and Pensions around 600,000 one bedroom flats will be needed to accommodate tenants currently under-occupying larger homes, but national housing stocks for this kind of property stand at just 300,000.

In the Liverpool city region there are 10 potential tenants for each one bedroom flat that comes on the social housing market. Estimates suggest it will take seven to eight years to find smaller properties for those willing to downsize in this area, not taking into account new demand.

Councillor Karen Garrido, leader of the Conservative group on Salford Council, admits the process will take time. Her advice to those facing a long wait to be re-housed is to move into the private rental sector or take in a lodger. She insists social landlords will not evict tenants who cannot afford to pay the under-occupation penalty.

However, while Riverside Housing says it will do all it can to assist those who come into financial difficulty, it admits repeated failure to pay will result in tenants being evicted from their homes.

Hateful and ideologically violent abuse and impoverishment of the poor, at a benefit to landlords.

uknewspolitics:

Thousands of sick or disabled people have died after being assessed to find out whether they were fit to work, the Commons was told

MPs attacked Atos, the firm contracted to conduct work capability assessment (WCA) tests for the Government.

Former Labour minister Michael Meacher accused the firm of “ruthlessly” pressurising the sick and disabled into work.

Opening a Commons debate, he said 1,300 people had died after being placed in the “work-related activity group”, for those currently too ill to be in a job but expected to take steps towards an eventual return to employment.

Some 2,200 died before the assessment process was completed and 7,100 died after being placed in the group for those entitled to unconditional support as they are too ill or disabled to work.

Mr Meacher said: “Atos is an IT firm and uses a so-called logic integrated medical assessment, often described as rigid and tick-box because computer-based systems make it very difficult for health professionals to exercise their professional judgment.

“Because such a mechanistic system has little or no regard to the complexity of the needs of severely disabled or sick persons, the British Medical Association and others have condemned the current WCA as not fit for purpose.”

Mr Meacher continued: “The real fundamental issue is this: how can it be justified to pursue, with such insensitive rigour, 1.6 million claimants on incapacity benefit at a rate of 11,000 assessments every week when it has led – according to the Government’s own figures – to 1,300 persons dying after being put into the work-related activity group, 2,200 people dying before their assessment was completed and 7,100 people dying after being put into the support group?

“Is it reasonable to pressurise seriously disabled persons into work so ruthlessly when there are already 2.5 million people unemployed and, on average, eight persons chasing every vacancy, unless they are also provided with the active and extensive support they obviously need in order to get and to hold down work, which is certainly not the case at present.”


Read More »

The UK government is perpetrating institutional violence, humiliation and mass killing of the most vulnerable people in society. Non-medical Atos are contracted to profit from it. The tabloids supply fascistic, ableist propaganda is justify it in the public consciousness. This is the banality of evil at its purest.

(via uknewspolitics-deactivated20130)

(Source: Guardian)

A RETIRED painter and decorator died while living in his garden shed after being kicked out of his house by a landlord.

Malcolm Frost was left begging for food after he was evicted from his home in Ashmores Lane, Alsager, where he had failed to pay rent.

The 61-year-old was found dead in his garden shed around 10 days later by a neighbour who discovered he had been living there.

The death of Mr Frost, who was severly malnourished, has led to changes in Cheshire East Council’s Adult Services department after it emerged staff failed to help Mr Frost.

His friend and neighbour Roy Edwards, yesterday told an inquest at Crewe’s Municipal Buildings how Mr Frost had stopped working a few years before his death and rarely went out.

Mr Edwards said money worries had prompted his friend to sell his childhood home to a private landlord and pay rent to live there.

But the locks were changed after Mr Frost fell into arrears.

(Source: philosophy-of-praxis)

(via azspot)

(via azspot)

The Conservative Party-led destruction of the welfare state will deprive us of future J.K. Rowlings. And tax revenue.

(via ansia)

Becky Bell’s ashes lay in her empty bedroom in Hartlepool, County Durham. It remains immaculately preserved and cared for, following Becky’s death from cancer at the age of seven. We can imagine that room to be a symbolical shrine for Becky’s parents and brother: of inexpressible sentimentality and unfathomable grief in Becky’s loss, and providing priceless psychological consolation in their bereavement.  But due to new Department of Work and Pensions rules, charging social housing tenants for “under-occupied” spare rooms through cuts in their Housing Benefit—a policy termed the Bedroom Tax—Becky’s family will be charged £672 a year for Becky’s empty bedroom, deemed to be “surplus” by the local council under these guidelines. It is a policy dictated by DWP minister Lord David Freud (who almost certainly be diagnosed with sociopathy by his great-grandfather Sigmund), who resides in an eight-bedroom country mansion in Kent, when not residing at his £1.9 million property in North London. (Incidentally, the Conservative Party refused to consider the idea of a Mansion Tax on properties worth over £2 million). The Bedroom Tax will begin in April 2013; coinciding with the coalition government’s 5% income tax cut for the rich. If the Bells refused to pay Bedroom Tax, they would be forced to leave their and Becky’s home (aggressively via bailiffs). To cover the expense, they will have been advised in an unsubtly vindictive letter to occupy Becky’s bedroom with a lodger.

The monkier “Bedroom Tax” is in itself, however, misleading. The government has given council landlords permission to define a “bedroom” in whatever manner they seek fit to tax the poor with. So therefore, contrary to taxing tenancy in luxurious suites, which politicians such as George Osborne is keen to portray, the charge will be applied to the most tiny and inhospitable of spare rooms. It will have a particularly adverse affect on disabled persons (additionally being affected by the DWP’s damaging disability benefit cuts), including disabled children, and their families and carers. 

Angel Cooper, a 5-year-old girl in Hull cared for full-time by her parents, developed septicemia due to contracting meningitis as a baby, leaving her severely disabled. The National Health Service built Angel an extended room for her specialist needs under the orders of her therapists. But because this is deemed to be a “spare room” by the council, and due to a Dickensian rule of the Bedroom Tax dictated by Lord Freud expecting young children to share rooms, the Cooper family will be charged £20 a week for their disabled daughter’s requirements.

The Cameron coalition’s Bedroom Tax is easily the most arbitrary and vindictive attack on the poor since Margaret Thatcher’s Poll Tax. It will in many cases irreparably destroy thousands of lives, and swathes of the social fabric (in a sickening irony for a Conservative Party which claims to stand for family values and localism). Of course, the real solution to the UK’s housing crisis is to invest in the construction of homes, and counteract the extortion of private sector landlords, to reduce the Housing Benefit bill. The sheer barbarism and wickedness being perpetrated against families like the Bells and Coopers is out of pure ideological choice.

Thatcher’s Poll Tax was defeated with mass resistance and non-compliance, and also majorly contributed to bringing down her government. The Cameron government’s Bedroom Tax ought to be deservedly met with the same sort of reception.

Combat the Bedroom Tax

Even though it’s January, and it’s 2013, it feels like a Victorian Christmas. It’s not just because of the beautiful snow, and the laughter of kids throwing snowballs. It’s also because Britain is returning to levels of inequality not seen since the time of Dickens. And because of a welfare bill which makes Dickens’s Christmas Carol feel disturbingly current:

“External heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge. No warmth could warm, no wintry weather chill him. No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty.”

The Welfare Uprating Bill, which returns to the House of Commons on Monday for its third reading and report stage, is a cold-hearted bill. It will stop maintaining benefits by inflation rates and cap them at just one per cent for the next three years. When inflation is taken into account, this is a cut. Through our work on the ground with organisations like the Trussell Trust, we’ve seen a dramatic rise in the number of people resorting to food banks.

Last year 120,000 people in Britain relied on a food bank to stave off hunger. That’s double the number the year before. And it is predicted to double this year again. Poverty in Britain is real, and it is getting worse. In a decent society, nobody should be forced to go to a food bank in order to feed their kids or be forced to go without heating when temperatures plummet. But even the government admits that this Bill alone will put 200,000 more children into poverty.

One third of the people whose benefits are being cut are out-of-work. Government figures show that most people who are out of work are out of work for months, not for years, which illustrates that they have not chosen a life on the dole. They need help in hard times as they look for a new job. They are people like the staff of the famous High Street stores now going bust every week. In our work with communities we find people want to work, and we support them in finding work: but we also find, as they do, that it is hard - especially hard, today.

The other two thirds of the people whose benefits are being cut are in work. Yet wages are so low, rent so high, and even food prices growing at double the rate of inflation, that they still struggle to make ends meet. They are the cleaners who look after our offices, the nurses who take care of us when we are sick, the teachers who educate our children, the soldiers who put their lives on the line. The IFS have predicted that if the welfare uprating bill passes it could make seven million working households worse off. They are also the people on whom local economies depend. Slashing the incomes of those at the bottom is not just cold-hearted, it is also wrong-headed. It will depress the economy further.

And there is an alternative. We do have a choice. Rather than making the poorest people in Britain pay for the financial crisis, Oxfam proposes we should start at the top. People earning a million pounds a year should have their £40,000 tax cut cancelled. Out of control casino banking should be tempered by a Robin Hood tax to raise funds to tackle poverty. Tax dodging companies who pretend the money they make in Britain was really transacted in a tax haven should be made to pay their fair share, in full. This would balance the books, but not on the backs of the poor.

“Bah!’ said Scrooge, “Humbug!’”

Louise Davidson  20 from Paisley, Scotland, has had Cystic Fibrosis since birth, has been left in tears by the decision to chop her benefits from £130 per week to just £21 per week.

And to compound matters, the DWP are taking back her mobility motor.

This has happened just six months after her gruelling transplant operation.

Louise had her DLA case reviewed by a GP who came to visit her at her home. Louise was asked to walk from one side of the room to the other. An act that she able to do – and that was enough for her DLA to be withdrawn.

(Source: class-struggle-anarchism)

Cory Booker’s Food Stamp Challenge: Actual Food Stamp Users Weigh In

(via pearlfectchassi)

(via other-stuff)