Benefits

Station staff on London Underground are balloting for strikes, and industrial action short of strikes, against job cuts. The ballot begins on 1 November and closes a fortnight later. Both the RMT and TSSA unions are balloting their members. London Underground’s “Fit for the Future” restructure programme on stations has seen nearly 1,000 jobs axed and thousands of workers forcibly regraded and displaced. Workers say that new rosters are unworkable, and recent incidents at North Greenwich and Canning Town stations have highlighted the risks of de-staffing. Unions are demanding a reversal of the...

After the UK premiere of Ken Loach’s latest film, ‘I, Daniel Blake’, in Liverpool at the time of Labour Party conference, I was filmed for a trailer. What did I think of it? I had wondered whether I was a wuss, for blubbing, but when I looked everyone was crying or laughing or both. Daniel is a carpenter in his late 50s who has had a near-fatal heart attack and been told not to work by his doctor. His inability to fill in forms on the computer in a library, and his honest but naive answers, get him moved from disability benefit (ESA) to JSA. When he admits he can’t take the jobs he’s applied...

Theresa May’s Tory government has said that it will decide no new welfare cuts. What makes this a half-truth, or even an outright untruth, is that big cuts, maybe even bigger cuts than the government can realistically manage, have already been programmed by previous Tory decisions. “We will meet the previous commitments we’ve made”, as Tory minister Damian Green put it. For example, over three million people currently claim a total of £14 billion disability benefits in the UK. The programme of replacing Disability Living Allowance by Personal Independence Payment is still rolling out. By 2018...

The government may have backed down over cuts to Personal Independence Payments [PIP, non-means tested benefit], but the new Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Stephen Crabb, has already said more cuts are in the pipeline. There are now attacks on the rights and living conditions of disabled people from almost every direction: • The cuts in benefit for new claimants on Employment Support Allowance (ESA), who are in the work-related activity group (WRAG) will be going ahead. This will be a £30 a week cut. From April 2017 nearly 500,000 will be hit by the ESA-WRAG cut. People who are...

Earlier debate on this issue here. The universal basic income (UBI) is the proposal that every adult should receive an unconditional cash benefit. The benefit is given even when the individual is working; it is given if they are looking after children, studying or spending their time on anything else they chose. UBI could, to a degree, replace some state benefits. The idea is that it is not means tested, but it could be counted as taxable income and clawed back from higher earners. The idea of UBI is distinct from a means-tested guaranteed minimum income from benefits as it is a payment to all...

On 18 March Iain Duncan Smith resigned as Work and Pensions minister — in protest, so he claimed, at a planned £4.4 billion cut to disability benefits. The cut had been announced in the Budget on 16 March. The Tories had already been forced to put it on hold before Duncan Smith’s resignation, but, he claimed, chancellor George Osborne still insisted that £4.4 billion must be cut from the benefits budget somehow. Whatever Duncan Smith’s motives — it looks like he resigned primarily to campaign along with other Tory right-wingers for EU exit free from Cabinet constraints — the resignation makes...

Disabled People Against the Cuts has posted the following after Iain Duncan Smith, the Tory minister for Work and Pensions, resigned on 18 March 2016, on his own account in protest against the 16 March Tory Budget's cuts to disabled people's benefits. It's been an amazing week – culminating in the resignation of Iain Duncan Smith Whatever he resigned for – and we don’t believe a word that he says about standing up for disabled people – the fact remains – he is gone. What happens with the new Minister Crabb, we have yet to discover, but what we do know is: The fight is not over – DPAC will...

Two victories have been won in the Court of Appeal against the bedroom tax. A woman who was a survivor of abuse from her ex-partner and had a panic room fitted by the police, and was then forced to pay the bedroom tax on it, won her case; so did Sue and Paul Rutherford, taxed for the spare room used to store equipment for their disabled grandson and to allow carers to stay over. Rather than give its victims some respite, the DWP will keep trying to overturn the verdict. The cost to the DWP of the legal fees in fighting the panic room case is several times more then it would cost to scrap the...

Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne will set out the Government's tax and spending plans when he delivers the annual Autumn Statement to the House of Commons on 25 November. As well as outlining how the Government intends to meet its target of cutting an extra £20 billion from public spending by 2019-20, the equivalent of Departmental budgets falling by between twenty-five and forty per cent over the next five years, Osborne is also expected to list ways in which the Treasury will look to minimise the impact of the £4.4 billion in cuts to tax credits paid to low-paid and part-time...

On 25 November chancellor George Osborne will declare his modifications (in response to the House of Lords vote on 26 October) of his tax credit cuts plans. He will do it together with his general annual Spending Review, in which he will announce cuts in other areas. The tax credit cuts, unmodified, would take around £2000 a year away from a wide range of lower-paid workers with children. Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party are campaigning against the tax credit cuts. Three weeks remain in which to rally loud-enough protest to force Osborne to make more than minimal adjustments to his cuts...