Sunday, March 31, 2013

5000 People With Cancer Declared Fit For Work Boasts Grant Shapps

Internet con-man Grant Shapps has been crawling all over the papers today as the Government used Easter Sunday to launch an all out attack on sick and disabled people.

Tory party chairman Shapps claims in the Telegraph today that he will do his job from the pub from now on and his bizarre diatribe suggests that he’s already well on the way to being pissed. The notorious get rich quick scammer rants that sickness benefits are ‘evil’ whilst brandishing figures attempting to smear all those out of work due to illness or disability as scroungers.

Once again the Tories are suggesting that most claims for Employment Support Allowance are not genuine based simply on the fact that many people give up a claim for ESA before they are assessed. This is the exact same trick that the DWP tried to pull last year which simply reveals that for many people sickness is temporary and when they get better they end their claims.

Digging into the numbers however reveals some tragic statistics. Shapps’ pub bore rhetoric is based on figures which breakdown claims for ESA by condition, and provide details of the results of their assessments.

They make for depressing reading. Almost 5000 people with cancer were found ‘fit for work’ between 2008 and 2011, including ten people with malignant brain tumours. Over 1000 people diagnosed with schizophrenia were also deemed scroungers and had benefits stopped.

Two and a half thousand people with MS were found fit for workfare if not paid work and placed in the Work Related Activity Group. A further 800 MS sufferers were thrown off sickness benefits altogether.
Confirming that many claims are temporary in nature, the figures include many people who had broken a limb or suffered some other short term injury or condition. Unsurprisingly many of this group came off benefits before being assessed which can take place several months after making an initial claim.

There are many other reasons a claim might stop before an assessment takes place. Claimants could marry someone and no longer be eligible, or in many cases reach retirement age.

In a predictable spittle-flecked outburst, the right wing press have crowed that almost 10,000 people whose primary conditions was associated with drug use ended their claim before assessment, A similar number were found fit for work – as if employers are suddenly rushing to hire currently using heroin addicts.

Whilst some of this group may have stopped using drugs and therefore ended their claim, some may have found themselves in prison. Others may have slipped out of the benefits system completely due to the chaotic nature of their condition. Some will probably have died from an overdose before the assessment took place.

And it is this that reveals the truly nasty face of this Government. Around 14,000 people with cancer ended their claim before they were assessed. It should be hoped that this is because many of them went into long term remission. The sad truth is that some of them will have died whilst awaiting a benefit decision.

It is these tragic deaths that the vile Tory party are only too happy to exploit in an attempt to prove that half of people on sickness benefits were faking their conditions. They truly are beneath contempt.

The figures are available via google viewer for those without Excel or can be downloaded direct as an xls format.

Follow me on twitter @johnnyvoid

The Void

Welfare Reform Is Costing A Fortune IDS Admits – And It’s Barely Even Begun

The Daily Telegraph managed to bludgeon together a front page story yesterday after Iain Duncan Smith’s panicky response to hecklers in Edinburgh recently.

The hapless Secretary of State claimed the Government had given up trying to cut welfare spending and was now managing the rise in expenditure. This was after a speech he gave was interrupted by protesters causing a flustered IDS to go off message and give a hint of the truth behind his shambolic welfare reforms.
For once in his life Iain Duncan Smith was telling the truth. Welfare spending is rising, but that’s only down to his bungled back of the envelope schemes along with the equally incompetent George Osborne’s mismanagement of the economy.

It is hardly surprising for example that the Housing Benefit bill is soaring when Westminster Council are now housing homeless families, evicted due to the housing benefit cap, in 3 grand a week hotels.

It is little wonder that spending on in-work benefits is also rising when the so called fall in unemployment has really been an increase in workfare, part time jobs, zero hours contracts and tax credit funded self-employment. On top of this some Jobcentres stand accused of encouraging employers to convert real jobs to workfare, whilst the Work Programme seems to be causing, not curing unemployment.

£6 billion is budgeted to be handed out to the very companies causing the Work Programme shambles. Hundreds of millions more are being doled out to Atos who carry out the notorious assessments for sickness and disability benefits. All that happens to those found ‘fit for work’ is that they are moved from sickness benefits to the dole. Whilst this loss – of around just under £30 a week for most – can prove devastating for claimants, the saving to the tax payer is virtually wiped out by the cost of both the assessments and the hundreds of thousands of successful appeals against the company’s decisions.

The benefit bill is rising, but it’s not claimants who will see the money. Quite the opposite is happening and it’s going to get worse. Some victims of the bedroom tax and council tax benefit reform may see their £71 a week (or just £56.25 for younger claimants) Jobseekers Allowance almost cut in half next month. After paying for basic utilities, rent and council tax many people are going to be left with no money at all to buy food. The long term cost of the homelessness, child poverty, ill health and family breakdown that this will cause can barely even be guessed at.

Still at least IT companies are being handed £2 billion a year to implement Universal Credit – half the amount spent annually on Jobseekers Allowance for those unemployed. And this is already starting to look like money down the drain. Monster Jobs even managed to scrounge almost £20 million to build a job search website that is little more than a spammer and scammer’s paradise with all too real safety concerns that may one day result in tragedy.

Once again the DWP are mired in industrial action after the shabby way they treat their own staff. Meanwhile £1 million in back dated wages is set to be paid out after Iain Duncan Smith illegally sacked thousands of Jobcentre workers.

The DWP’s attempt to pay fast and loose with the Courts has already led to rushed concessions to the bedroom tax, which faces even more legal challenges. And as unemployment began to rise again this month, half the DWP management were scrambling to cover up for ministerial lies about benefit sanction league tables, whilst Iain Duncan Smith was busy retrospectively changing the law after another legal blunder. The legal bill alone at the DWP must be costing a fortune.

As for the skiving and rarely seen Employment Minister Mark Hoban, we seem to be paying him to sit at home all day on his silk cushions and watch his no doubt tax payer funded plasma TV.

Welfare reform is certainly hurting, but it isn’t working. But don’t expect this Government to change track. It is Iain Duncan Smith’s arrogance that is costing tax payers billions of pounds. His deluded obsession that unemployment is caused by unemployed people and bodged response to every shrill benefit bashing headline in the gutter right wing press is costing us all a fortune.

Welfare spending is soaring, but still the safety net of the welfare state is disappearing. Rarely has any government department been managed as chaotically as the current mess at the DWP. Yet Iain Duncan Smith ploughs on regardless, impoverishing those who already had nothing whilst handing out billions to the private sector poverty pimps living the high life on the welfare reform gravy train.

Follow me on twitter @johnnyvoid

The Void

Work For Free Or Lose Your Home Say Hammersmith and Fulham Council

Social housing tenants in Hammersmith and Fulham could be forced to carry out unpaid work or face losing their homes the Council’s new Housing Allocation policy reveals.

There was outrage last year when a Liverpool Housing Association boss claimed that those facing a shortfall in housing benefits due to the bedroom tax could carry out odd jobs such as “litter picking” on estates to cover rent payments.

But Hammersmith and Fulham intend to go much further and are enshrining unpaid work as a condition of maintaining a social housing tenancy.

Under the borough’s complex and draconian new regulations for social housing tenants, priority for housing will be given to those who make a ‘community contribution’. One of the ways that prospective tenants can qualify for this is by volunteering, which must have been for at least 20 hours a month for six months prior to any housing application being considered.

Astonishingly, if those housed stop volunteering at any point then they may face being sent on workfare by the Council or lose their home completely when their tenancies are renewed. The Council have declared that (PDF):

“Where an applicant for housing has been made an allocation of housing from Band 2 of the Housing Allocation Scheme, based on a Community Contribution award and the basis for that award ceases to apply during the term of the tenancy, the Council may seek to provide opportunities for the tenant to make a community contribution in an alternative way. Non-performance against an award of a community contribution may be one factor taken into account in the consideration of the renewal of a flexible tenancy.”

Volunteering can include working for non-profit organisations run by the council themselves. It should not apply to those in work, which is also counted as a community contribution by the council. However this is only the case if the tenant has worked nine out of the last twelve months. Very soon Hammersmith and Fulham council flat tenants who become unemployed even temporarily, may find themselves compelled to work for free*.

This will not be a condition of receiving benefits, as Jobcentre workfare schemes currently are. It will not even be to make up a bedroom tax shortfall to help pay the rent. Instead forced unpaid labour will be built into tenancy agreements with the direct threat of homelessness for those who refuse.

*these rules are for new tenants. Existing tenants will not be affected.

Follow me on twitter @johnnyvoid

The Void

Don’t turn your back. Because you’re going to be disabled too one day

(not satire – it’s UK today)

This report shows how disabled people in the UK are being hit the hardest by government cuts:

Cuts hitting disabled people hardest

A lot of able-bodied, fully healthy people switch off or turn away at the word ‘disabled’ – because they think the issue is of no concern to them.

And that’s exactly how the government has been able to get away with its vicious attacks on the weakest and most vulnerable members of society for so long. In fact, it’s the worse case of ‘Us‘ versus ‘Them‘ I’ve seen in a long time.

The fact is that disability affects all of us because every single one of us is going to be disabled eventually.

Of course, some people are born with a disability. But many more people have accidents or become sick sometime.

And we all become old.

People dying of cancer, for example, are not exempt from the government’s cuts:

The government has finally done something so outrageous even I can’t be bothered to satirise it

The real question is – will you be able to afford to live as full a life as possible without any outside help when you become sick or have an accident or just get old?

Because the real ‘Us‘ versus ‘Them‘ isn’t able-bodied versus disabled.

It’s ‘rich enough to survive‘ versus ‘the rest of us‘.

Which one are you?

Pride's Purge

IMPORTANT! BEDROOM TAX: TAKE ACTION NOW! HOW-TO AND WHY EVERYONE MUST APPEAL

IMPORTANT! BEDROOM TAX: TAKE ACTION NOW! HOW-TO AND WHY EVERYONE MUST APPEAL THEIR LOCAL COUNCIL’S BEDROOM TAX DECISION

Black Triangle Campaign endorses this tactic and we strongly urge all our members to use it.

The best way out for local councils will be to adopt Nottingham City Council’s policy of redesignating rooms in homes under attack as not subject to the Bedroom Tax!

If one council can do it, they all can. Kudos, Nottingham!

The UK government has no conceivable hope of policing such matters across hundreds of thousands of homes – or indeed the means to do so even if it wanted to, since any “inspections” to see how many “real” bedrooms homes had would fall under the remit of the councils who were doing the circumventing in the first place.

Resist and fight back immediately!

FB: Share this post Twitter: everywhere.

660,000 – 900,000 tenants must take up this tactic.

Spread the news! Self-organise in your neighbourhoods!

Unite in Solidarity and Let’s Beat the Evil Decree TOGETHER!

*************************

Standard Letter to be returned to your local council upon receiving notification that your home has been classed as subject to the ‘under occupancy’ rules (Bedroom Tax)

Dear Sirs,

I received your decision letter dated [INSERT DATE] and referenced above that imposed an under occupation charge, or bedroom tax of 14% / 25% (delete as appropriate) on my existing award of Housing Benefit.

I consider this unwarranted yet in order to challenge this in the correct way and potentially by way of formal appeal I require further information to be sent to me within 7 days of this letter and the urgency of that is to ensure I have enough time to formulate any such appeal and in full knowledge of the facts of my case within the time allowed; OR in the alternative I request the deadline for any such formal appeal be moved to 21 days after I receive the request information below:

1. A written copy of the Council’s policy and decision-making procedures in relation to referring a socially housed claimant decision to the Rent Officer Service.

2. A full explanation of how the council decided that [INSERT ADDRESS] was determined to be a 3 bed property for the under occupation charge and this to include what involvement if any of my landlord, [INSERT LANDLORD NAME] in this process.

Please state by way of covering letter with the requested information any changed deadline date from above with regard to a formal appeal.

Yours etc.

Comments

Time is of the essence given that the bedroom tax will be imposed from Easter Monday April 1st

The suggested wording is merely that, a suggestion, and not any form of legal advice or other formal advice from anyone involved. There was general agreement that the wording could be better yet also general agreement that it articulates what tenants should seek, namely as much information as possible so as to consider whether they want to issue a formal appeal. That is very reasonable for tenants to seek as are the requests for further information and the timescale issues and any letter of challenge should not be frivolous or give any reason to be perceived and dismissed as frivolous.

The full information requested is not available on any Council website normally and for any Council to simply suggest the tenant look on the website or even post it there assumes that all tenants are computer literate and have access to a computer and printer. That is unreasonable for any Council to suggest we maintain. There is full agreement that any such standard letter needed to be simple, understandable by every tenant and each Council and not be ambiguous as well as being reasonable. This we maintain is achieved.
At the risk of patronising, the HB Decision Notice the tenant receives will have the tenants HB reference number on and this needs to be put on any such letter. The tenant National Insurance Number as well and of course date and sign and keep a copy. Finally, it just seemed right to release this on the day of 57 demonstrations and marches up and down the country against the bedroom tax.

Good luck to all 660,000 tenants.

NB – On or around 7 April and after the pernicious bedroom tax HB letters have been sent out I will – with a little help from my friends – discuss how to launch a formal appeal with the new information you have received from the standard letter above. This will generate another (up to) 660,000 letters for every HB department to consider and respond to. If you think this is because doing so now would tip the wink to all local councils then you are correct.

BACKGROUND

Bedroom Tax – How to get rid of it quickly and simply

Uncategorized March 14, 2013 Comments: 50

Dear Bedroom Tax Affected Tenant.

This is a fully updated post on 16 March 2013 at 8pm and combines two previous articles that together say how you can get rid of the bedroom tax for good and very quickly. Yes its long but it is worth reading and will only take 5 minutes. It says why you should challenge the bedroom tax with a simple letter and gives a draft of that letter after having described what carnage and chaos a simple one-page letter from every bedroom tax affected tenant will create. It will cost you a stamp or you can simply hand it in to your nearest council one-stop shop.

Please read on:

This post looks at WHY and HOW every bedroom tax affected household should challenge their local council’s bedroom tax decision. It also explains using Liverpool City Council figures to illustrate the absolute pandemonium this will cause.

What do I mean by challenge?

Some tenants have received letters from their landlords to say the bedroom tax may apply to them. Any such letter is simply a letter and for the bedroom tax to apply to any tenant your will receive a formal letter from the council HB department – a Notice – with regard to the bedroom tax decision.

When a decision is taken by the Housing Benefit department that the bedroom tax applies you will receive a “Benefit Decision Notice” (BDN) and this by comparison is a legal letter – a Notice. Even if your landlord is the council they will need to send you a formal letter from the Housing Benefit department.

The BDN will say how you can appeal the decision, which is a right, and I copy below what HB decision letters from Liverpool City Council say and wherever you live this will be very similar. It says: -

“If you want to know more about this decision or think it is wrong, you must tell us within one month of this letter or we may not be able to help.
You can either:

Ask for an explanation
Ask us to look again at the decision
Appeal against the decision – this can only be in writing. If you appeal against the decision an independent tribunal administered by the Tribunal Service will hear your appeal.”

In short – ‘explain’, ‘look again’ and ‘appeal’ are your basic options. Any or all of these 3 options form the challenge. You can write asking for the council to send a more detailed explanation to you which you can then consider with a view to issuing a later appeal within the month or asking the council to look again after they have sent you the more detailed explanation.

Why this will create pandemonium?

1. The scale

Liverpool has 5 parliamentary constituencies which form the City Council local authority area which issues Housing Benefit decisions.
The National Housing Federation issued a breakdown of bedroom tax affected households by parliamentary constituency.
As such we know that Liverpool City Council (LCC) has 12,649 bedroom tax affected households in these 5 constituencies.
Therefore LCC would need to consider 12,649 bedroom tax ‘challenges’ if everyone challenged
UPDATE (see comments) For the avoidance of doubt Liverpool has 43,460 social tenants claiming HB at latest figures. The 12,649 is the number of those affected by the bedroom tax.

2. What does each ‘challenge’ involve?

The DWP (purported) impact assessment gives an estimate of each ‘appeal’ as a monetary cost of £200 to the council.
This gives a cost to LCC of 12,649 x £200 if we accept this extremely low DWP estimate of cost and a cost to LCC of £2,529,800 at face value.
Yet just as the tenant has a month to issue an ‘appeal’ or other form of challenge then LCC will need a policy of how long they will take to respond – probably a month as well – to explain, reconsider or refer to appeal at Tribunal.

3. Unpicking the LCC response needed

If we assess each hour of LA time at £25 or so – which is what a few years back the government advised as a cost per hour for councils to use for processing Freedom of Information requests - then the £200 cost of an ‘appeal’ or challenge (the DWP figure) broadly equates to 8 hours of LCC staff time per appeal or challenge
The total staff time needed to consider 12,649 challenges becomes 12,649 x 8 hours – a total staffing time of 101,192 hours!!
101,192 hours is one month’s staff time of 160 hours for approximately 632 full-time workers!

So Liverpool City Council would need 632 staff solely dealing with bedroom tax challenges.

That assumes they need to do this in one month. It further assumes that 8 hours of staff time per appeal or challenge is sufficient as per the DWP estimate. If further assumes each appeal or challenge is looked at by only 1 member of staff and doesn’t need 2 for example.

Even if they took a year to respond to each challenge this means 53 full-time staff!!
It further assumes LCC could find 632 or even 53 HB trained staff and LCC would be competing locally with Wirral, Sefton, St Helens, Knowsley, Cheshire West and Chester, and countless other LAs in a commutable area for these ethereal HB trained staff too

Of course every other council would be in the same boat of searching for HB trained staff. So this is impossible unless IDS can wave a magic wand and produce trained HB decision-making staff out of the ether.

It assumes LCC has budgeted for the cost of 632 HB trained staff and has a spare £2.5m plus recruitment cost or more likely much higher agency costs. Will existing trained HB staff need to be paid more to retain their services? Yes so there’s huge additional costs to the public purse involved here isn’t there reader?

I don’t need to continue at all with this as it is patently obvious that the entire bedroom tax system would come crashing to its knees.

Put simply, if you want to put a figurative bomb underneath the bedroom tax and force the coalition to rethink, and rethink bloody quickly, as they will be heavily pressured from EVERY local authority to do something, then every bedroom tax affected household should exercise their right to challenge their bedroom tax decision does precisely that!
Social landlords would be adversely affected as well. Their pre-existing arrears cases would likely see the tenant saying they are awaiting a decision or payment from HB, but this is taking forever as the system is clogged up with bedroom tax appeals and HB are way behind dealing with their normal workload! The district judge will likely adjourn and more arrears accrue on the rent account until HB decide. The judiciary itself will be concerned over this and also when a huge increased number of formal appeals is sent to tribunals. Will these need to be sitting 24 hours a day like magistrates courts did during the riots? More public purse costs anyone?

So the government would also have social landlords and the judiciary lobbying hard with all the councils too and all of a sudden all of the actors (councils, landlords, tenants and the judiciary) on one side and all lobbying the coalition. Remember this is an absolute right of appeal or challenge to a HB decision and perfectly lawful. The government would have little option but to think again and very quickly.

There you have a lawful plan to rid the pernicious bedroom tax and quickly. All it needs is a small effort and free contribution from some experts well versed in drafting arguments and experience of the HB appeals system – a couple of hours each would do it wouldn’t it?

One wonders why social landlords and particularly their lobby groups such as the CIH and NHF and others who, after all, are paid handsomely by their members the same social landlords to lobby on their behalf, hadn’t thought of this simple idea!

Anyone would think that social landlords wouldn’t benefit from transferring back to government the £500m per year financial risk of arrears this government imposed on them with the bedroom tax.

Let’s be clear that is what the bedroom tax policy is a massive transfer of financial risk to social landlords and a thinly veiled attack on social housing – and why hasn’t the CIH or NHF or other sector lobby shouted that from the rooftops? Just another tale of incompetency of the housing response to the bedroom tax anyone? Yes just like a worker in private housing needs £6,000 more in gross salary than a social housing tenant for the same job in order to pay the average £80 per week cost of private rent? No that argument has never been put out either by the social housing sector either! No argument that this means high private rents are a barrier to the take up of employment compared with social housing. No argument that the taxpayer gives £1bn or so more in subsidy per year to private landlords than it gives n total to social landlord through this HB added beneft cost to privately rented housing either.

Anyone see an argument that the bedroom tax called the ‘spare room subsidy’ by the coalition should be called the ‘cost of room subsidy?’

Yes you’ve guessed the wonderful social landlord not put that argument out ther either…and as there are more spare rooms in privately rented housing than in social housing…oh don’t get me started!

Sources:

NHF figures on numbers of bedroom tax households here by constituency
DWP estimate of appeals here and section 54 says:

“…if 20,000 claimants chose to appeal the decision made on their Housing Benefit entitlement, DWP estimates the additional administration cost associated with these appeals would be approximately £4m.”

Sample letters of challenge that all 660,000 tenants can use are needed. So come on people get circulating good quality sample letters of challenge and appeal and let’s get rid of this nasty pernicious drawn-up on the back of a fag packet bedroom tax policy.

Let’s each donate 2 hours of time and so every bedroom tax affected household can easily challenge its council for the cost of a first class stamp by simply cutting and pasting into their letter of challenge?

Isn’t the tenants lot stressful enough without having to trawl through the HB Regulations to see that, for example:

every council needs a policy to include where and when they refer a registered social landlord HB case to the Rent Officer; or
that this is standard practice for private housing yet the landlord is simply believed for social tenancies and as HB departments are ‘guardians of the public purse’ why do they discriminate against the social tenant here?
If a bedroom is what a social landlord says but not what a private landlord says cannot be fair can it?
Is that a blanket policy by HB departments, an unlawful fettering or restraint is the status quo!
Does the council have a policy on referring unsuitably large social housing accommodation to the Rent Officer?
What information was sent by the landlord to the HB department for HB to assess the bedroom tax? Did this include unnecessary information outside of any protocol between HB and the social landlord?
How does the HB department determine what is a bedroom? Is it just the acceptance of the social landlords word and what is the written policy where a claimant disputes that view?

How many separate challenges are there in that off the top of my head far from inclusive challenge list?

UPDATE – BEDROOM TAX MARCH DAY 16.03.2013

This ‘call to arms’ above received many responses for which so many thanks are deserved and resulted in one example of a standard letter to freely share. This is below. It is a simple and reasonable request for further information from the tenant to the Council so the tenant affected by the bedroom tax decision can then consider whether to lodge a formal appeal based on having much more information on the facts of how the decision was reached.

The guidance and other official documents released regarding the bedroom tax / under occupancy charge simply say the landlord informs the HB department whether a property has 1 bedroom or 2 or 3 or more and that is it. It does NOT say definitively it is whatever the landlord says. Further, the government and DWP have specifically stated they will NOT define what a bedroom is. Yet how can you tax (or charge) something which you cannot or will not define?

There is no definitive guidance on how landlords share information with the HB department. There are protocols in place that allow the sharing of information and information will have been shared. Yet when did this information sharing take place? And what if the tenant is a foster carer or has a teenage son or daughter in the armed forces that were exempted just this week? Would a social landlord know a tenant is a foster carer or has a teenage son in the armed forces? Probably not so the landlord could have inadvertently misinformed the Council’s HB department. Further, what role the landlord played in this process will differ in Birmingham to Bristol or Bradford or Brent or Brighton. It may well have different arrangements and processes between Landlord A and Landlord B within any town or city.

All any tenant knows is that there is an involvement of their social landlord in the HB department making the bedroom tax / under occupancy charge decision and no more than that. Hence for a tenant to consider whether a formal appeal – the start of a legal process – is warranted or not, the tenant needs to have all the facts and not just assumptions within the bedroom tax decision-making process in their given local authority area

http://speye.wordpress.com/2013/03/14/bedroom-tax-why-and-how-all-tenants-should-appeal-and-the-impact/

How can they justify persecuting the poor? [Michael Meacher MP]

The central Tory welfare mantra, which will reach a crescendo this weekend as the cascade of cuts kicks in, is that those on benefits are a millstone round the nation’s neck which cannot be afforded, and they should be made to work, with severe sanctions to force them to do so.   This ugly vilification of the poor is riddled with stereotypes, ignorance and prejudice which are a caricature of reality:

1   “Benefit scroungers’ swing the lead in 5-bedroom mansions in Kensington”. Indeed a recent poll revealed that people think that 27% of the welfare budget is claimed fraudulently, when the government’s own figure is only 0.7%.   Since April 2010 when the Coalition came into office, the use of B&Bs to take in homeless families beyond the 6-week legal time limit has ballooned 8-fold, and this type of temporary accommodation often crams families into one room and sharing a kitchen.

2   ” Work gets people out of poverty”.   Only if work is available, and with over 2.5 million unemployed and an average of 8 persons chasing every vacancy (22 in the North-East where joblessness is highest), it isn’t available for the great majority.   Even if you can get work, hundreds of thousands of low-paid workers still fall below the poverty line: 90% of new claims for means-tested housing benefit have come from families with at least one employed adult.

3   “There’s no real poverty in the UK and people on benefits aren’t really poor”.    Try living on job seeker’s allowance at £71 per week.   And contrary to the idea that there are no poor children in the UK, the truth is that some 3.6 million children currently grow up below the poverty line (officially defined as living in families with income below 60% of the median wage), and on current policies that is expected to rise to 4.2 million by 2020.

4   “Welfare benefits are too high”.   Nearly three-quarters of the welfare budget is spent on pensioners.   A recent poll found that people think that 41% of the entire welfare budget goes on benefits to the employed.   The true figure is just 3%.

5   “The best way to get rid of poverty is to reward businesses and entrepreneurs which will trickle-down to the rest of society”.   Pay at the top of the biggest companies has certainly soared in the past 10 years to £4.8 millions for CEOs, 185 times average pay, but there has been no trickle-down: if the minimum wage had risen at the same rate as executive pay, it would now be £19 an hour rather than £6.19.

Michael Meacher MP

When is Labour going to destroy the Tory welfare myths? Myths and stereotypes abound about welfare benefits, yet Labour shows ...
Child poverty : Labour’s acid test The latest child poverty figures make sober reading. ...
Why do the Tory devils have all the best tunes? By any standards the IDS so-called welfare reforms are extremely ...
What is really happening to the poor amid this avalanche of cuts? My own constituency, Oldham West, is one of the poorest ...
Osborne impoverisher Today, 6 April, the start of a new fiscal year, marks ...

Saturday, March 30, 2013

Homebase are so embarrassed about using workfare – they’re reduced to lying about it

On their Facebook page today, Homebase have denied they’re using unemployed people from the government’s Workfare scheme to work for them for free:

Which is a bit strange when you consider this tweet from Finsbury Park Job Centre Plus on Wednesday:

See what I mean?

Could it be that Homebase are so embarrassed by their participation in Workfare that they’re reduced to telling porkies about it?

Pride's Purge

Measures designed to punish the poor were test-marketed on asylum seekers

Letters: Figuring out jobseeker sanctions

The Guardian, Friday 29 March 2013 20.59 GMT

Illustration by Gary Kempston

David Freud asserted to the House of Lords that there is no clear trend in the proportion of the caseload of jobseeker's allowance claimants which receives sanctions (Lords reject inquiry into whether jobcentres have sanctions targets, 26 March). He claimed that "prior to 2007, the rate was running at around 4% and has since fluctuated between 3%-5%".

It would be a pity if the user-unfriendly nature of the web "Tabtool" by which the DWP publishes the relevant statistics were to allow Freud to get away with this gross misstatement. From 2000 until the end of 2006, the proportion of JSA claimants sanctioned each month ran at a fairly constant 2%, not 4%. After John Hutton was moved in as secretary of state to "toughen" the regime, there was a rise to around 3% by late 2007. James Purnell's tenure, which featured a sanctions review by Paul Gregg, saw a fall back to below 2% by early 2009. The last Labour secretary, Yvette Cooper, presided over a renewed rise but only to about 3%. Across all 121 months of Labour governments from April 2000, when the current statistics began, the monthly average was 2.6%.

The coalition's monthly average to October 2012 has been 4.2%. This will be revised upwards when the jobseeker's (back to work schemes) bill releases cases "stockpiled" since the Reilly-Wilson (Poundland) judgment of August 2012. The coalition's figures were also temporarily held down by the transfer of responsibility for initiating work programme sanctions to private contractors in summer 2011. Overall, therefore, the coalition government has shifted monthly sanctions to a level more than 60% above that of its predecessor.

A recent FoI request to the DWP (2012-4383) revealed that of all claimants to JSA in the five years to March 2012, no less than 19% were sanctioned. This gives a better idea of the astonishing scale of sanctioning activity.

Dr David Webster
Honorary senior research fellow, urban studies, University of Glasgow

• Some of the measures being designed to punish the poor were test-marketed six or seven years ago on asylum seekers (Comment, 28 March). It was asylum seekers first subject to the penalty of being thrust into destitution as an "incentive" to make them go back home. And it was asylum seekers who were first provided with vouchers in lieu of cash so that their purchases could be subject to controls. Those joining the current packhunt against migrants should be careful what they wish for. Yesterday asylum seekers, today the poor. And tomorrow?
Richard Henderson
Bristol

• I was receiving JSA for several months over the winter. When drawing JSA, a claimant must apply for a certain number of jobs per week to demonstrate they are making a good effort to look for work. At first, my claim was contingent upon applying for seven jobs per week. At the beginning of March, this abruptly rose to 21 jobs per week. Given the new information regarding sanctioning targets, I have no doubt that the increase was designed to cause me to fail my target and give grounds for sanction. Luckily, I was offered a job shortly afterwards.
Name and address supplied

• You report that there was "a total of 680,000 JSA sanctions handed out in the 10 months up to October 2012" (Report, 23 March). I have been contacting the DWP for some time to clarify whether those sanctioned are still included in the unemployment figures. I finally received an answer, which states: varied length sanction – "probably" not included in the figures; fixed length – "probably counted"; entitlement doubt (whether they fulfil obligations) – "probably" not counted. Given the vast number of sanctions handed out, it seems logical they must have a significant effect on the recent unemployment figures. Indeed, it also seems logical that unemployment is far higher than the coalition claims.
Christopher Munro
Liverpool

• Perhaps some of the new "compassion" in the health service could also be introduced into the social security system, with DWP/jobcentre managers and politicians spending some time on the front line, ie living off benefits for a year.
Guy Norris
Peebles, Tweeddale

Easter for some. Workfare for others

21 workfare workers in one Homebase store. (Photo: Sebastian Ballard)

Perhaps eager to claim a chocolate Easter egg bonus, Job Centre staff in Finsbury Park (London) this week congratulated each other for securing 21 workfare placements in a single Homebase store in Haringay. This is a store that is not advertising for workers: more evidence that workfare replaces paid work.

Last year the boss of Home Retail Group – who also own workfare exploiters Argos – was paid £1.1 million. You’d think they could afford a living wage for the people working in their stores.

Homebase have responded to the spontaneous public reaction calling for them to quit the scheme by deleting tens of comments on its Facebook Page, then disabling comments, then promising a statement on Tuesday, then taking the page down, then resurrecting the page free of any mention of workfare, then taking the page down again. It’s clear our actions are having an impact.

Let’s keep going until everyone working in their stores is paid!

Contact Homebase:

On Facebook (if they bring their page back again): facebook.com/homebase
On Twitter: Tweet to @homebase_uk
By email: order.enquiries@homebase.co.uk or info@homebase.co.uk or enquiries@homebase.co.uk
By phone: 0845 077 8888 or 0845 601 6911
Or contact the company they are owned by: The Home Retail Group.

Boycott Workfare

Members of the shadow cabinet don’t trust their leader to cover their backs, says Dan Hodges

Members of the shadow cabinet don’t trust their leader to cover their backs, says Dan Hodges.

BY DAN HODGES PUBLISHED 26 MARCH 2013 16:51

So much for unity. On 19 March, Ed Miliband experienced the most damaging parliamentary rebellion of his leadership so far, when 43 Labour MPs defied the whip and voted against the Jobseekers Bill, which enables the government to withdraw benefits from those refusing to participate in the Work Programme.

Ed Miliband. Photograph: Getty Images

On the surface, it looks like the standard fisticuffs between the hard left and the Labour leadership. Glance at the names of the rebels, however, and it soon becomes clear that these were not your daddy’s usual suspects. Gerry Sutcliffe, John Healey and Nick Brown were just three of those who defied their leader’s order to abstain and voted against the legislation.

Fault lines are widening between Miliband, his shadow cabinet, the Parliamentary Labour Party and his party activists. They have existed since Miliband’s election but his shift to the left, a succession of coalition crises and Labour’s stalled programme of policy development masked them. Not any more. No sooner had the rebels set foot in the division lobbies than what one Labour MP described as “Ed’s teenage outriders” began opening up on members of Miliband’s shadow cabinet.

“Labour will never offer a coherent alternative to the Tories so long as the likes of Liam Byrne wields influence,”

the Independent’s Owen Jones wrote.

“It is a question and a challenge for Jon Cruddas,”

wrote Sunny Hundal on the Liberal Conspiracy website.

“Will he take on Liam Byrne’s failed policies of the past or let him continue and take Labour into the ditch . . . again?”

The attacks did not go unnoticed by some of Byrne’s and Cruddas’s colleagues.
They are aware that Miliband’s office has been courting Jones and Hundal.

The suspicion is forming that whenever Miliband faces a backlash, individual shadow cabinet members will find themselves pressed into service as human shields, protecting their leader from criticism.

Much has been made in recent months about Labour’s “policy vacuum”. Less attention has been focused on its difficulty in holding the line on policies that have already been unveiled.

In the wake of the recent debacle, Byrne wrote what was in effect a mea culpa for LabourList. Acknowledging that the party’s “decision not to support the bill in the Commons but to abstain was very, very difficult”, he meekly concluded: “I think we made the right call.” Yet in January, Ed Balls was placing welfare sanctions – which the Work Programme seeks to enshrine – at the very heart of his “tough but fair” jobs guarantee.

A vicious circle is forming. Policy is announced. It generates a backlash. Miliband ducks for cover. His “outriders” start picking targets among the shadow cabinet. The shadow cabinet dives for cover. A vacuum develops.

Meanwhile, suspicion is increasing. Members of the shadow cabinet don’t trust their leader to cover their backs. The leader doesn’t trust them to cover his.

Labour MPs see a lack of authority and begin to act in their own interests – interests increasingly defined by activists, who see a leadership prepared to back down whenever they flex their muscles.

Unity may be strength but, in Miliband’s Labour Party, it is only skin-deep.

THE NEW STATESMAN

Black Triangle Comment:

Not so sure that we see a leadership prepared to ‘back-down’! Where’s the evidence? It’s still neoliberal ‘Progress’ faction all the way as far as we can see! But we will be unrelenting in our attacks on Labour while they attack sick and/or disabled people in particular and the 99% in general! Policy must radically change NOW. Solidarity!

Eleanor Firman of Disabled People Against Cuts DPAC and John McArdle of Black Triangle reading out the joint statement signed by 1,100 individual members of the public and campaigning organisations (36 pages of signatories!) on Monday 25th March 2013 at Southwark, South London

Black Triangle’s Joe Kane WRITES:

‘Dan Hodges, Telegraph columnist who voted for Boris Johnston in the London Mayor election, wants the kind of unity whereby careerist Tory neoliberals like himself can take over the Labour Party without a struggle.

‘Fortunately, Westminster Parliamentary Labour members such as John McDonnell, Tom Watson and Jeremy Corbyn have different ideas as to who they want unity with, and it doesn’t involve uniting with Thatcherite parasites, like Hodges.’

The Daily Telegraph: Dan Hodges

‘Dan Hodges is a Blairite cuckoo in the Miliband nest. He has worked for the Labour Party, the GMB trade union and managed numerous independent political campaigns. He writes about Labour with tribal loyalty and without reservation. He is on Twitter at @dpjhodges.’

Sources:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/author/danhodges/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Hodges

Backstory

On the Labour Party Campaign Against the Bedroom Tax: Joint Statement and Petition by DPAC and Black Triangle Anti-Defamation Campaign in Defence of Disability Rights Posted on March 19, 2013

Labour abstention on workfare bill prompts party infighting Posted on March 22, 2013

Labour in secret deal with Iain Duncan Smith on benefit sanctions – Michael Meacher MP Posted on March 24, 2013

Work makes you free Posted on March 23, 2013

OWEN JONES: Workfare ~ Why did so many Labour MPs accept this brutal, unforgivable attack on vulnerable people? Posted on March 22, 2013

Labour welfare sanctions betrayal ~ Unite’s Len McCluskey threatens to cut purse strings

Posted on March 22, 2013

The jobseekers bill: a shameful retroactive stitch-up Posted on March 22, 2013

Labour’s Workfare Shame – A New Low For the Party That Pretends to Care About the Poor Posted on March 21, 2013

Labour to help rush through bill to stop benefit rebates after Poundland ruling Posted on March 19, 2013

Liam Byrne is going too far by endorsing Iain Duncan Smith’s failed programme Posted on March 19, 2013

Labour needs to recapture the spirit and nerve of 1945 Posted on March 26, 2013

Is ME/CFS is an autoimmune disease?

Oncologist Professor Mella: Rituximab treatment suggests that ME/CFS is an autoimmune disease

Abstract

Background

Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) is a disease of unknown aetiology. Major CFS symptom relief during cancer chemotherapy in a patient with synchronous CFS and lymphoma spurred a pilot study of B-lymphocyte depletion using the anti-CD20 antibody Rituximab, which demonstrated significant clinical response in three CFS patients.

Methods and Findings

In this double-blind, placebo-controlled phase II study (NCT00848692), 30 CFS patients were randomised to either Rituximab 500 mg/m² or saline, given twice two weeks apart, with follow-up for 12 months. Xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus (XMRV) was not detected in any of the patients.

The responses generally affected all CFS symptoms. Major or moderate overall response, defined as lasting improvements in self-reported Fatigue score during follow-up, was seen in 10 out of 15 patients (67%) in the Rituximab group and in two out of 15 patients (13%) in the Placebo group (p = 0.003). Mean response duration within the follow-up period for the 10 responders to Rituximab was 25 weeks (range 8–44). Four Rituximab patients had clinical response durations past the study period. General linear models for repeated measures of Fatigue scores during follow-up showed a significant interaction between time and intervention group (p = 0.018 for self-reported, and p = 0.024 for physician-assessed), with differences between the Rituximab and Placebo groups between 6–10 months after intervention. The primary end-point, defined as effect on self-reported Fatigue score 3 months after intervention, was negative. There were no serious adverse events. Two patients in the Rituximab group with pre-existing psoriasis experienced moderate psoriasis worsening.

Conclusion

The delayed responses starting from 2–7 months after Rituximab treatment, in spite of rapid B-cell depletion, suggests that CFS is an autoimmune disease and may be consistent with the gradual elimination of autoantibodies preceding clinical responses. The present findings will impact future research efforts in CFS.

Trial registration

ClinicalTrials.gov NCT00848692

Citation: Fluge Ø, Bruland O, Risa K, Storstein A, Kristoffersen EK, et al. (2011) Benefit from B-Lymphocyte Depletion Using the Anti-CD20 Antibody Rituximab in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. A Double-Blind and Placebo-Controlled Study. PLoS ONE 6(10): e26358. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0026358

Editor: Markus Reindl, Innsbruck Medical University, Austria

Received: June 28, 2011; Accepted: September 25, 2011; Published: October 19, 2011

Copyright: © 2011 Fluge et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Funding: The work received financial support from Helse Vest grant no 911557, and also from the legacy of Torstein Hereid. These funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Competing interests: Haukeland University Hospital has patents and pending patent applications on the issue of B-cell depletion therapy for chronic fatigue syndrome. Family members of WO2009083602 A1 are pending, as well as granted US 12/348024. The two authors ØF and OM are named as inventors in these applications. This does not alter the authors' adherence to all the PLoS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.

Read more @ plosone.org

Source

Fury as Jobcentres are revealed to be keeping welfare axe 'scorecards'

JOBCENTRE insiders have revealed the most vulnerable claimants are being targeted because they are easier to penalise.

SCORECARDS are being kept at Jobcentres across Britain to encourage staff to get claimants off benefits.

The Department for Work and Pensions have set up a sanctions league table, with Jobcentres keeping a score of how they are doing at stopping benefits.

According to Jobcentre insiders, the league system on squeezing benefits means that the most vulnerable claimants are being targeted because they are easier to penalise.

Last night, Glasgow Labour MP Willie Bain said: “We are getting people ringing up about improper sanctions being imposed at Springburn and Parkhead. We have people sanctioned for 13 weeks when they shouldn’t have been.”

Ministers have denied information is collected as a league table but a leaked DWP graph shows precise information is kept on how Jobcentres are performing at stopping benefits.

Daily Record

Anxiety over Atos fit-for-work test brings on father’s heart attack

JIM ELLIOTT suffered a massive heart attack a day after his 20-minute work capability assessment during which he had complained of chest pains and struggling to breathe. He was still deemed fit to work.

A DAD who started feeling seriously unwell during his interview with Atos assessors – and suffered a massive heart attack the next day – has been deemed fit to work.

Jim Elliott says he was struggling to breathe, sweating and had chest pains during his 20-minute work capability assessment earlier this month.

He was given a glass of water – but then the assessors simply pressed on with the interview.

The 55-year-old said yesterday: “All they seemed to care about was getting through the ridiculous list of questions they have, which is supposed to determine whether someone is fit to work or not.

“I could have dropped down dead in front of them but all they are interested in is getting people off benefits.”

The controversial assessments by the French IT firm are part of a benefits shake-up by the Con-Dem Government, who are looking to cut billions from the welfare bill.

Former welder Jim, who had worked all his adult life until he suffered a heart attack 18 months ago, said: “It was very clear that I wasn’t 100 per cent.

“I was sweating profusely, my breath was very laboured and I had been confused during the interview.

“I wasn’t able to concentrate on a lot of what they were saying.

UK Austerity Nation