Benefits

Universal Credit action on 1 August

A national day of action against Universal Credit on 1 August may be a chance to revive this campaigning and to put forward the kind of welfare system that is needed. After apparently being held back since November 2017, a joint report by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and HMRC has shown the government has been well aware of the problems associated with the transition from tax credits to Universal Credit. More than 50% of the claimants surveyed were not prepared for the delay of six weeks till their first payment and of those who expected some delay almost half were unaware it was...

Universal Credit workers to strike

Universal Credit Service Centre workers in PCS at the Walsall and Wolverhampton offices are the first to ballot for strike action over staffing levels and capacity within the Universal Credit operations in DWP. Members have long standing grievances with DWP bosses over a horrific lack of staff (their demand is for at least 5000 new staff to cope with the workload), a reduction in the amount of calls per day each worker is expected to handle and an end to the draconian target driven culture in offices. While the employer has finally accepted that staffing levels are too low and announced extra...

Universal Credit: still hurting

For other articles in the debate in Solidarity and in Workers' Liberty on Universal Credit, see here. The article below is the fifth article in the debate. Amber Rudd, the new Tory Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, has scrapped the plans to extend the two-child limit on Universal Credit for those with children born before April 2017. She has also postponed the next stage of Universal Credit roll-out, due to hit three million in-work tax-credit claimants within the next few weeks was postponed. Just 10,000 will be moved to UC over the summer of 2019. Universal Credit payments will now...

Universal Credit: a positive alternative

For other articles in the debate in Solidarity and in Workers' Liberty on Universal Credit, see here. The article below is the fourth article. Luke Hardy ( Solidarity 488) accuses me of trying to separate out the introduction of Universal Credit (UC) from the cuts to benefit that the Tories have introduced since the coalition government of 2010. In 2015 the government announced £12 billion of welfare cuts, but only a quarter of these were directly related to Universal Credit, and specifically to the in-work allowance, the total amount you could earn before the amount of benefit paid is reduced...

Labour and housing markets breed insecurity

When the Minimum Wage was introduced, the bottom scale of local government pay was well above it. Now each time the Minimum Wage is increased, a couple of points at the bottom of the local government pay scales have to be removed because they’re now below that Minimum Wage. One reason why the decline in local government services is not so noticeable is that there’s been a huge hit to the pay of what was always mostly a low-paid workforce. Productivity figures are usually dubious — on the standard measures, real estate is reckoned to have the highest labour productivity of any sector — but it...

Cuts, calamity and councils

Peter Kenway is director of the New Policy Institute, and author of much research on local government. He talked with Martin Thomas. Philip Alston’s recent report on “social calamity” in the UK focused on cuts in benefits. There have also been huge cuts in local government. What is their impact? Local government delivers about 200 distinct services. The best-known is social care for adults and children, which takes over a third of the money. There’s the bins, and an increasingly residual role in education. And then a bunch of mundane but essential stuff: school crossing patrols, maintaining...

Scrap, not pause, Universal Credit

For other articles in the debate in Solidarity and in Workers' Liberty on Universal Credit, see here. The article below is the third article in the debate. Will Sefton ( Solidarity 486) talks of the origin of Universal Credit in separation from the Tories’ benefit cuts. Its intellectual origins are from the same neoliberal place. Universal Credit’s intellectual inspiration is “negative income tax”, an idea promoted by the likes of Milton Friedman as an alternative to the welfare systems developed after World War 2 under the pressure of a militant working class. Unlike those systems, which had...

Universal Credit: a way forward

For other articles in the debate in Solidarity and in Workers' Liberty on Universal Credit, see here. The article below is the second article in the debate. Luke Hardy argues in Solidarity 482 that the Labour should “stop and scrap” Universal Credit. But that position lacks a positive alternative. The immediate implications of stop and scrap are to return to the legacy benefits including Job Seekers Allowance, Employment Support Allowance and Disability benefit — all benefits with their own levels of conditionality, poor levels of payment, and sanctioning, and further complicated by having...

The spikes of austerity

Pay volatility is much greater than has previously been assumed, with the vast majority of workers in stable jobs experiencing significant month-to-month changes in pay. Low pay comes with spikes. A recent report by the Resolution Foundation looks at month-to-month changes for workers in stable employment. Previous research has only looked at how workers’ pay varies year-to-year. The better paid (those earning more that £35,000 take home) see their pay fluctuating month-to-month, but for them it’s mostly a matter of months where they get something extra (a bonus, commission or overtime). The...

Labour should scrap Universal Credit

For other articles in the debate in Solidarity and in Workers' Liberty on Universal Credit, see here. The article below is the first article in the debate. The intervention by Gordon Brown, together with the campaign being run by the Daily Mirror to stop Universal Credit, exposes how weak Labour’s policy is on this area and benefits in general. Labour's policy on Universal Credit is “pause and fix”, which means: opposing the latest cut to tax credits that is being rolled into universal credit; reducing the waiting period and making it easier to opt for the housing element to be paid direct to...

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