Tag Archives: social security

Jack Meredith

Attendance Allowance should not stop at the hospital door

By Jack Meredith | Wed 15th April 2026 - 1:30 pm

My grandfather, or as I affectionately call him, Bampa, is currently in the hospital awaiting urgent heart treatment.

It’s frightening enough on its own. The hospital is 40 minutes away, so I’m relying on phone calls during the day to keep up to date on my bampa, get on with my work day, and keep my family members updated on what the hospital tells me; suffice it to say, it’s a lot.

And then, recently, my mum had a letter. My mum has been told that, due to how long my bampa has been in the hospital, if he is still there by Sunday, 26 April, his Attendance Allowance will stop.

Now, we’re not expecting him to be in there that long, and he should (we hope) be home by the end of the week. But what kind of state treats its citizens like this? A man who has worked his entire life, never complained about the cards he was dealt in life, having lost his wife only a few months ago, is now in the hospital, and the response from the state is, “Yeah, sorry about that, but if you’re there any longer, we’ll punish you.”

It’s one of those moments when the welfare state shows you why, once again, it is not fit for purpose. What should be a humane system built around the realities of illness, frailty and care is just an administrative machine that is constantly scanning for the point at which it decides support no longer counts.

Attendance Allowance is designed to support older people with the extra costs of disability and ill health. It can range from £76.70 to £114.60 per week. But if someone has the misfortune of being ill and being in hospital for 28 days, their support is suspended, and only resumes when they’re back home.

While this makes sense to Whitehall, considering they fund the hospital stay and therefore the benefit is not needed, life is not lived on a spreadsheet.

Extra pressures do not disappear when someone is in the hospital. Families need to travel, buy essentials for the person in the hospital, spend money on food, parking and transport, manage calls and paperwork, chase updates, prepare for discharge, and carry the emotional and practical stresses of caring. Depending on the treatment, the person coming home from the hospital will need more support than before, not less.

This is what makes the rule on Attendance Allowance so cruel. It operates on a fantasy version of illness, one in which the hospital somehow automatically removes the burdens of care, rather than intensifying them.

The impact on Attendance Allowance has a knock-on effect on the carer’s allowance, too. If the Attendance Allowance stops, the linked Carer’s Allowance also stops, triggering a second financial impact on the same family. This is a direct penalty on ill health and care itself, delivered by a system supposedly in place to support both.

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Katharine Pindar

Deep poverty rises again: Lib Dems have the policies to fix it

By Katharine Pindar | Mon 2nd February 2026 - 12:43 pm

The new annual report of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, UK Poverty 2026,  makes disturbing reading. Poverty was suffered by 21% of the population in 2023-4, more than 14 million people: the rate of 20-22% had been steady throughout the previous decade.  The average person in poverty had an income 29% below the poverty line of 60% of average income. But in its latest measurement, in 2023-4, the JRF found that 6.8 million people, almost half of those living in poverty, were in very deep poverty, with an average income an appalling 59% below the poverty line. This is the highest proportion of the population suffering very deep poverty on record, says JRF. They report that, around 3.8 million people experienced actual destitution in 2022, including around a million children. These figures have more than doubled since 2017.

‘The basic state of benefits continues to be around the threshold for destitution’ states the report. 

How has this chronic state of so many of our citizens come to this, and what is the Government doing about it? JRF explain that before the pandemic benefits were being cut, deepening poverty. Then a decade of weak growth in real incomes was succeeded by the pandemic and next the cost of living crisis, driving up the numbers of people lacking essentials and having to rely on emergency charity such as Food Banks (surely no longer considered so much as an emergency as a sadly necessary extra provision today).

The Government’s Child Poverty Strategy is indeed likely to reduce child poverty by 400,000 over the current Parliament. Scrapping the Two Child Limit for benefits, a long-held Liberal Democrat policy, is at the centre of the strategy. Child poverty is indeed a chronic need, but the DWP forecasts that over 4 million children will still be in poverty in 2029-30.

Which are the families most likely to be in very deep poverty? While being in work vastly reduces the likelihood of being in poverty, in-work poverty has been rising. And the JRF states that ‘Economic growth on its own will not reduce poverty.’  Indeed, they point out that growing living standards and falling poverty could be spurs to growth.

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Jack Meredith

Liberty does not end where caring begins

By Jack Meredith | Wed 17th December 2025 - 9:38 am

The Liberal Democrats exist to build and safeguard a fair, free and open society, in which we seek to balance the fundamental values of liberty, equality and community, and in which no one shall be enslaved by poverty, ignorance or conformity.

I’m sure everyone knows this preamble by now, emblazoned on the back of our membership cards. I want to focus on the concept of liberty and how it doesn’t apply to carers.

Liberty and carers

My perspective on liberty encompasses the relationship between individuals and the state.

Society cannot function …

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Jack Meredith

This isn’t the future Beveridge fought for

By Jack Meredith | Thu 3rd July 2025 - 9:16 am

Social security must be achieved by co-operation between the State and the individual. The state should offer security for service and contribution. The State in organising security should not stifle incentive, opportunity, responsibility; in establishing a national minimum, it should leave room and encouragement for voluntary action by each individual to provide more than that minimum for himself and his family.

These were the words of William Beveridge in his work on “Social Insurance and Allied Services”, more commonly known as The Beveridge Report.

Thanks to Beveridge, the UK has a healthcare system that is free at the point of use and a welfare state that cares for the sick and elderly. While Nye Bevan may have been the implementer of the NHS, Beveridge was the architect.

How ironic, then, that this week the same party which implemented Beveridge’s plans for healthcare would be the same to trample on the welfare state. The sentiment of encouraging individuals to get back on their feet was abandoned entirely by Labour this week, as their welfare reforms passed through Parliament, ensuring that future Personal Independence Payment (PIP) claimants would need to face a harsher means test just to receive support to afford necessities.

And to top it all, 430,000 people will be plunged into poverty with not a penny saved with these reforms.

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Andrew Chandler

Labour’s social security fiasco and “ERG” moment

By Andrew Chandler | Wed 2nd July 2025 - 1:36 pm

In the slow unravelling of Labour’s Welfare Reform Bill, something revealing happened — not just about policy, but about power. For all the promises of “stability” and “competence” that Keir Starmer had promised a year ago, we instead saw a government conducting itself like an actor who forgets their lines but insists on taking centre stage anyway. 

The Bill, in its first draft, was a monument to both arrogance and clownish stupidity. The Government insisted for weeks that its plan would still go ahead for economic and social necessity, despite the mounting rebellion that they faced. 

Under pressure — moral, political, and parliamentary — the government stumbled backwards in a desperate attempt to save face. Concessions were made. Even more new commitments and concessions emerged as the Bill was being debated. They conceded in the last hurdle that the Stephen Timms Review will now be conducted before the changes to Personal Independence Payments are implemented, although, there is not yet a timetable for this, nor is it actually written into the Bill.

What manner of government operates like this, by surprise and stumble? What arrogance thinks it can turn the lives of carers, disabled people, and the chronically ill into footnotes in a budget sheet? This is no way for a Government to conduct policy,  making changes as the clock was ticking towards the time for them to huddle around the voting chambers. It is something you would expect from a “Thick of it” or “Yes, Minister” episode – not pantomime played in the real world of politics. 

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Victor Chamberlain

Labour’s welfare cuts are a choice – Liberal Democrats choose compassion

By Victor Chamberlain | Sun 27th April 2025 - 10:30 am

The welfare cuts – which according to charities are bigger than the Tories’ – are set to impact 15,000 disabled households here in Southwark alone, costing most thousands of pounds a year. That is not what people voted for. That is what Rachel Reeves and the Labour Party has chosen to do.

When people put their cross next to Labour in 2024, they did not vote to push 250,000 disabled people, including 50,000 children, into poverty. But that’s exactly what’s happening – not to fund hospitals, or schools, or social care – but because Labour refuses to tax tech giants and the super-rich.

This wasn’t a mistake. This was a choice.

Here in Southwark, I’ve seen the impact of these decisions firsthand. I’ve knocked on the doors of people waiting on disability assessments for months, carers juggling unpaid work with relentless bureaucracy, and families living with the daily pressure of foodbanks and fuel debt.

And yet, this Labour government is offering nothing but more of the same.

Southwark Labour councillors – who once campaigned against austerity – have twice voted unanimously against Liberal Democrat proposals to push for change. In November, they refused to call on the Government to reinstate the Winter Fuel Payment for pensioners. Then in March, they rejected our motion to scrap the two-child benefit cap – a cruel and arbitrary limit that is currently affecting 7,670 children in 2,170 families across Southwark.

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The Voice

Watch: Daisy Cooper respond to the Spring Statement

By The Voice | Wed 26th March 2025 - 11:09 pm

Watch our Treasury Spokesperson Daisy Cooper respond to the Spring Statement:

The text is below:

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Jack Carter

Are we still the party of Beveridge?

By Jack Carter | Sun 20th October 2024 - 12:24 pm

The Liberal Democrats, ran on a manifesto focusing on health and social care. However upon reading it on the day of its release I was disappointed – because it actually said very little about reforming welfare. To put this in blunt terms, approximately 24 percent of the United Kingdom’s population is disabled – we had, in our manifesto, three insubstantial commitments on welfare reform for disabled people. That is not nearly good enough.

As Rachel Reeves’ first budget approaches, with new announcements on welfare “reforms” being made – including £3 billion in welfare cuts, it is a scary time to be a disabled person reliant upon the welfare state. With “workfare” being put before healthcare, it is estimated up to 500,000 people suffering from long-term sickness will be forced back into work, just so HMRC can drum up some more tax revenue. We must stand firmly against this cacophony of harmful policies, one of which includes putting job coaches on mental health wards, where vulnerable patients are receiving care for often severe mental health conditions. The Labour Party also wants to cut benefits for mentally ill people, which would imply they do not view mental health conditions to be valid as disabilities – an ableist notion.

So, I put to you, the reader, the first of two simple yet blunt questions; where is our opposition to these harmful policies which will disproportionately hurt the most vulnerable in our society? I have looked at our party’s social media pages, I have looked at the social media pages of our Members of Parliament, and I must say I am bitterly disappointed. Make no mistake, our party has not done nearly enough to regain the trust of disabled people, and I say that as someone who disabled. We have not been a voice for the disabled community, we have not stood with them nor have we acknowledged our responsibility for the policies which harmed them, during the 2010-2015 coalition government.

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NewsHound

LibLink: Claire Tyler The time for radical reinvention is now

By NewsHound | Wed 22nd May 2024 - 8:20 pm

Our Claire Tyler has written an essay for a Make Every Adult Matter publication on the next steps for policies to tackle multiple disadvantage. These issues are important to think about as we head into the General Election on 4th July.

Claire wrote about the need for local, joined up services alongside a much stronger safety net.She set out the problem:

The accepted post-war norm has been for successive generations to experience better lives than their parents. That is not true anymore for the younger generation, as they are experiencing worse outcomes in terms of pay, security and housing. And the two-child limit for benefits continues to hold many families in poverty. The Marmot Review: 10 Years On highlighted that in the past decade, people can now expect to spend more of their lives in poor health. This is a crisis that will grow rather than fade without radical intervention.

What would the Liberal Democrats do about this?

Liberal Democrats would finally put mental health on the same footing as physical health, and invest in public health and prevention so that fewer people get ill and need treatment. We would break the cycle of reoffending by improving rehabilitation in prisons and on release. We would commit to building 150,000 social homes a year by the end of the next parliament. And we would set a target of ending deep poverty within a decade with a major anti-poverty strategy. Crucially, Liberal Democrats also understand that radical reform will take more than just good policies in each government department. We also need to reform our public services, taking a coherent, joined-up approach so that they work for those who are most in need. In tackling multiple disadvantage, this means committing to action in three key areas: leadership from the heart of government, local autonomy and co-production, and shared outcomes that endure for the long term.

And decisions being made locally is really important:

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Katharine Pindar

Poverty in the UK is deepening – how should Lib Dems respond?

By Katharine Pindar | Wed 24th January 2024 - 8:40 am

Poverty in the UK is deepening.

We knew this, we can see it all around us in the rise of expanded food banks, the active community charities, the special price reductions on basic supermarket foods and the increase of homelessness. But now Joseph Rowntree Foundation in its annual report on poverty levels reveals the grim facts.

More than one in five people in the UK, 22%. 14.4 million, are living in poverty, having less than 60% of the UK average for the type of household they are in after adjusting for housing costs. And 6 million of them were in very deep poverty at the last count, having less than 40% of the UK average – a category that has increased by 1.5m over the past two decades.

The report says:

A couple with two children under 14 living in very deep poverty would need an additional £12,800 a year – more than double their household income – to get out of poverty.

Of the 14.4 million people living in poverty, 8.1 million were working age adults, 4.2 million were children, and 2.1 million were pensioners. Around three in every ten children in the UK live in poverty, and the proportion rose between 20/21 and 21/22, as did overall poverty. The report says that poverty rates across the different groups has returned to around their pre-Pandemic levels.

Of the different groups affected, informal carers were much more likely that those households with no caring responsibilities to be living in poverty: 28% compared with 20%. In 2021/2 nearly one in ten adults, 4.8 million people, were informal carers.

Around two-thirds of working age adults in poverty lived in a household where someone was in work, evidently unable to get out of poverty through employment.

Among the worst affected groups were Pakistani and Bangladeshi households, around half of whom were living in poverty, compared with 19% of households headed by someone of white ethnicity.

After recording these grave findings, the Report says:

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NewsHound

LibLink: Christine Jardine – Sturgeon’s dead cat distracts from multiple failures

By NewsHound | Wed 15th February 2023 - 9:25 am

In her Scotsman column this week, Christine Jardine highlights 3 major SNP Government failures and suggests Nicola Sturgeon’s publication of her tax returns is merely a dead cat to distract from them.

The first failing is the lack of dualling the main route to the north of Scotland, the A9. It was supposed to be one by 2025 but that is not going to happen and fatalities on this road are going up.

Failure to make the promised improvements will impact the economy as well as the health and well-being of isolated communities with poor access to vital services. But most of all it is a failure to make the main route north safe for all of us. Safety was a major factor in the decision to upgrade a road on which the number of deaths still managed to record a heart-breaking 20-year high in 2022.

Thirteen people lost their lives on the stretch from Inverness to Perth of which approximately 77 miles remain to be dualled and the tender for the latest stretch – Tomatin to Moy – was announced this week to have been delayed. Promised improvements now will have to wait while thousands continue to face the real fear of driving on a road which switches intermittently from dual to single carriage and on which you can meet a tractor or road works at any moment.

And then there is the unbelievable capacity to make a mess of a good idea that is the proposed Deposit Return Scheme. Anyone who wants to sell drinks in bottles, or cans, in Scotland after August is supposed to sign up for the new scheme by the end of this month, but businesses are saying they may not bother because of the additional costs they will incur. This weekend no Scottish Government Minister would appear on the main Sunday morning shows to defend the scheme which has even been criticised by SNP MPs.

On a practical level, retailers are unhappy that the vending machines will cost around £20,000 to install and take up valuable retail space. Producers are also beginning to ask questions, and then there are the problems of different pricing for different parts of the UK. Which raises another not insignificant problem: the Internal Markets Bill.

A leading lawyer this week claimed that Scotland’s Deposit Return Scheme could create an unlawful trade barrier with the rest of the UK where a similar scheme will be introduced in 2025.

Finally, the Government is yet again delaying the full implementation of welfare powers.

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Caron Lindsay

Wendy Chamberlain slams Government for “callous” benefits decision

By Caron Lindsay | Wed 19th January 2022 - 7:30 am

The UK Government has confirmed that it is only going to raise benefits by the rate of inflation last September. This is what it normally does. However, it looks like inflation is going to almost double between September and April, when the changes take place.

The Government will be putting an order before Parliament to raise benefits by 3.1% which is not much good when inflation is expected to be 6% by April.

If you think about how energy costs are soaring, this is really going to impact on disabled people. They tend to have higher heating bills to start with, but when you factor in the special equipment, for example scooters, electric wheelchairs or oxygen tanks, which gobble up electricity, this is going to cause huge hardship.

Wendy Chamberlain, the Lib Dem DWP spokesperson has called on the Government to raise benefits by 6% to match the expected rate of inflation in April:

She said:

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Caron Lindsay

Therese Coffey should listen to those who really do understand how Universal Credit works

By Caron Lindsay | Tue 14th September 2021 - 8:32 am

It is pretty staggering when a Government Minister goes on national television and exposes their own ignorance of something they are in charge of. But when that ignorance leads to them doing things that make it more difficult for the poorest people in our country to put food on the table and heat their homes, it is particularly reprehensible.

MPs’ inboxes are full of really heartbreaking stories from people who are already struggling to survive on Universal Credit and are dreading the £20 cut which comes in at the end of this month.

And then you have Therese Coffey, Work and Pensions Secretary, blithely say that all people will have to do is work an extra couple of hours. Well, er, no. It’s more like nine hours. She firstly assumes that people are getting £10 per hour when the minimum wage is £8.91. Then she forgets that for every £1 people earn over £293 per week, they lose 63p of their Universal Credit. The Lib Dems could have embraced the power of and in this tweet:

Therese Coffey fails to understand that it’s low paid working people with children who are struggling the most. Work really doesn’t always pay. And that is if you can get it. We haven’t started to really feel the long term economic impact of both Brexit and the pandemic yet. And with furlough ending at the end of this month, we may well see significant job losses.

Back in July, the Child Poverty Action Group set out why those families need the £20 uplift to stay:

Seventy-five per cent of children growing up in poverty in the UK live in households where at least one adult works. Low-income working families are struggling to pay for essentials like utility bills, new school uniforms and the food shop. In a couple household, having both members of a couple in work is increasingly important in preventing child poverty but in reality, universal credit does little to support parents trying to increase their income through work.

Firstly, as soon as a family with children earns more than £293 a month (their ‘work allowance’), for every pound they earn through work their universal credit is reduced by 63p. The very limited single work allowance, combined with the high reduction rate, makes it very difficult for families to increase their income through work.

And that is before you get to the practicalities of paying for childcare:

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Caron Lindsay

Research highlights devastating financial impact of pandemic on young lower income women

By Caron Lindsay | Tue 31st August 2021 - 3:47 pm

It was clear right from the start that Covid shone a super trouper on the inequalities in our society. As older, more affluent office workers worked from home and saw their bank balances increase, younger, lower income workers kept us fed and cared for.

New research commissioned by a number of women’s organisations, including Close the Gap, Engender and the Fawcett Society has laid bare the impact on women on low incomes. Younger women were more adversely affected than older women andhit than lower income men.

Even before the pandemic hit, the report says that almost half of young women on …

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James Baillie

This week, fight for our values on social security 

By James Baillie | Wed 11th December 2019 - 10:55 am

As we enter one last push before the election, it’s important to remember why we’re doing this. It’s tempting to clamp down into an unhelpful, wearying “shut up and deliver leaflets” mode, but really the best way to get motivated and to motivate others in politics is to have something to fight for. For me, the Liberal Democrats’ social security policies are exactly such a motivator.

A good safety net that liberates people from poverty and the threat of income insecurity is an absolutely crucial part of a liberal society. One of the reasons why coalition-era cuts in this area were so damaging for us as a party is that it jarred strongly with our natural position fighting for a society that supports and enables and empowers people. As liberals, we believe in people being supported to choose their own paths in life, and few things disempower people like time and energy and health being absorbed by a lack of good living standards. Fortunately, five years on, we’ve responded to that challenge, and are now exactly where we should be, leading the two main parties in having the most progressive welfare system plans on offer according to a Resolution Foundation analysis.

First, we have a plan to fix the system so it’s fit for purpose. Our root and branch reforms to Universal Credit, reducing the waiting time from weeks to days and scrapping the two child cap and bedroom tax, would rapidly and significantly improve people’s lives. Simply spending more on raw benefit levels is also urgently needed, and something that our Liberal Democrat MPs will fight for in the next parliament.  Since 2016 we’ve also been committed to the even bigger step of abolishing the benefit sanctions system: it is unconscionable, no matter what the circumstances are, that people should be left with insufficient income to live on. 

One area we’ve talked about less, nestling among the wide constellation of official Lib Dem policies not explicitly mentioned in the manifesto, is the longer term future of the system. As of Autumn Conference, our long term plan is to pilot turning the standard element of UC into a guaranteed minimum income, removing all claiming conditions other than income level. This is a natural evolution of policy from the abolition of sanctions, and also fits with our policies on lifelong learning and providing living cost support for startup businesses: by piloting an unconditional minimum, we will be looking towards having a single, streamlined system that will provide people with new opportunities, as well as giving people the stability they need to take care of themselves and those around them.

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Michael Berwick-Gooding

Restoring the benefit cuts – a look at our manifesto and the Labour Party’s manifesto

By Michael Berwick-Gooding | Wed 27th November 2019 - 8:55 am

In 2017 we proposed spending more than the Labour Party on reversing some of the benefit cuts since 2010. This year the Institute for Fiscal Studies after looking at both of our manifestos concluded, that while we both increase benefit spending “to around its 2010 level … this money doesn’t go as far as it used to, because of underlying pressures pushing up benefits spending, including rising housing costs and a bigger population. Taking these into account, these pledges would only reverse around a quarter of discretionary cuts to benefits since 2010.”

According to the Labour Party’s costings they plan to increase spending on working-age social security by £8.4 billion by 2023/24 (page 4). (They just give a total without breaking the figures down.) In their manifesto they state they will scrap the benefit cap and the two-child limit, they will split benefit payments for couples, and they will restore fortnightly payments and paying the housing element directly to landlords (page 73).They will also end the ‘digital only’ approach for claiming benefits. All these reforms were suggested by Philip Alston the UN Rapporteur on extreme poverty in his report this year. Furthermore, they will scrap the bedroom tax and increase the Local Housing Allowance by an unspecified amount, end Work Capability and PIP Assessments and make sure these are done “in-house”. They will restore the extra money for those in the Work-Related Activity Group receiving Employment and Support Allowance cut by the Conservatives.

The Labour Party claim that they “will eradicate in-work poverty in our first term by tackling the structural causes of poverty and inequality, such as low pay and high living costs, while raising the floor provided by our social safety net” (page 59 of their manifesto). I couldn’t find in their manifesto what they would increase benefit levels to. I believe for a couple, one of which works 16 hours a week on Labour’s new National Living Wage of £10 an hour, for their income to reach the poverty line the couple’s benefit level would need to be increased by just over £46 a week (about 40%) even assuming work allowances were restored to their 2015 level for people without children. I estimate this would cost in the region of £11 billion a year.

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Paul Hindley

We Lib Dems need to oppose austerity

By Paul Hindley | Fri 26th July 2019 - 11:55 am

The Liberal Democrats are the party of David Lloyd George, John Maynard Keynes and William Beveridge. We are the party that laid the foundations of the welfare state and pioneered support for Keynesian economics, which strived to create an economy of public investment in infrastructure, growth and full employment. Our party’s history is one which is staunchly against ‘slash and burn’ austerity.

Of course, during the Coalition Government, the party’s leadership supported the austerity programme of David Cameron and George Osborne. This continues to be used against us by supporters of other progressive parties, not least Labour, despite the fact that Labour also supported austerity. I hope no-one joined the Liberal Democrats to introduce the ‘bedroom tax’, support the benefits cap, cut legal aid, cut housing benefit to young people, introduce assessments for disability benefits or to support benefit sanctions. It is not a nice thought, but whether you think Coalition austerity was right or not, it has ruined people’s lives and led to thousands of preventable deaths.

Coalition austerity was not compatible with the liberalism of Lloyd George, Keynes or Beveridge and many Lib Dems opposed austerity during the Coalition Government. Since the Coalition, the party has clearly begun to move away from austerity. This began in 2015, when the Liberal Democrats opposed the Conservatives’ Welfare Bill, while Labour abstained. In the general election of 2017, our party was committed to reversing more welfare cuts than even Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party. 

At our Autumn Conference last year, the ‘Demand Better’ policy motion committed the party to ‘a better society, in which everyone is supported in times of need, with an end to austerity’. Those three words, ‘end to austerity’, are absolutely essential if we are to win over more Remain voters, most of which vote for progressive parties. They are as important as the other two words for which our party is known for, ‘Stop Brexit’. Indeed, austerity has helped to fuel the rise of Brexit populism and therefore if we want to stop Brexit, we must end austerity.

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Katharine Pindar

It’s time for us to prove our progressive credentials

By Katharine Pindar | Tue 11th June 2019 - 8:55 am

We want to hang on to the Remain voters who flocked to us in the Euro elections. We believe that our party could radically change our conflicted country for the better, while we see that the two main parties at present are, in the expressive vernacular, of as much use as a fart in a bottle.

This husk of a government continues to do harm. As if it were not enough that Chancellor Philip Hammond ignored the poorest in his March Spring Statement despite bumper tax receipts, the continuing impact of the roll-out of Universal Credit, the two-child limit on some welfare payments and the continuing benefits freeze will, according to research by experts, cause a big increase in families unable to make ends meet this year. Cover-up attempts by Work and Pensions Secretary Amber Rudd to alleviate the effects have done little. For example, repaying the advance payments for UC will plunge one in ten low-pay households into deficit. Although UC has made 56% of households better-off by £172 a month, 40% are worse off and will lose an average of £181.

Amber Rudd’s latest wheeze to stem the flow of criticism is denial. She is to complain to the UN about the final UK report of its Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, which was published last month, apparently on the grounds that his personal fact-finding tour was only eleven days long and his conclusions on the Government’s approach to tackling poverty are ‘completely inaccurate’. The 20-page report, which upholds the statement made in November discussed here in LDV is in fact extensively referenced by many authoritative public bodies. 

The report’s summary points out that one-fifth of Britain’s population, 14m.people, live in poverty, and that the policies of austerity introduced since 2010 continue largely unabated. Its final conclusion is that Brexit presents an opportunity to reimagine what the UK stands for, and that recognition of social rights and social inclusion rather than marginalization of the working poor and the unemployed should be the guiding principle of social policy. The report combines recommendations of practical steps to tackle poverty with humane proposals for restoring our social contract.

So, its fourth recommendation demands reversal of the “regressive measures” pointed out by experts and ignored by the Government  (see above) –  continuation of the benefits freeze, the two-child limit, the benefit cap, and the reduction of housing benefit including for under-occupied rental housing. This is already Liberal Democrat policy, and we would also support the recommendation to eliminate the five-week delay in receiving UC benefits.

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Time to scrap disability assessments and bring them in house

By Matt | Sat 20th April 2019 - 10:42 am

With each month passing there is more and more evidence that now is the time to bring an end to the failed DWP disability assessments and private outsourcing by companies such as Maximus and Capita and bring all assessments in house.

Appeal success rates for those that go to tribunal  for both Personal Independence Payment and Employment and support allowance are at their highest rates ever, with success rates of 73% for Pip and 74% for ESA. This is an increase of 4% and 5 % respectively.

At the same time, waiting times for mandatory reconsiderations, which a claimant has to go through before appealing to a tribunal has increased by 86%. Average waiting times for a reconsideration have increased from 32 days to 54 days. This leaves many sick and disabled people in a severe financial hardship. This is totally unacceptable and is it any wonder that the use of food banks is at an all time high. The success rate of PIP Mandatory reconsiderations stands at a measly 19%. That is 2 opportunities that the DWP has had to get an assessment correct and fail and nearly three quarters of those people who go on to appeal are successful at tribunal. This is simply unsustainable, on top of the human suffering that this costs, there is the financial costs to the DWP and the justice department all because the private healthcare assessment providers and the DWP are failing to do their jobs. The system is broken.

There is also evidence of a canteen culture of contempt  at the DWP. In official tribunal papers for a woman’s appeal to Personal Independance Payments by a welfare official for the department of work and pensions, they wrote

In this lying bitches case she is receiving the mid-rate carers allowance component for providing day time supervision to another disabled person. The tribunal may wish to explore this further.

 

The mother of small children has a degenerative condition affecting her heart and lungs that leaves her prone to infection and in constant pain. 

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NewsHound

LibLink: Christine Jardine: All consuming Brexit is making this country a less caring place

By NewsHound | Tue 2nd April 2019 - 10:25 am

Sarah Newton resigned as Disabilities Minister 3 weeks ago but she still hasn’t been replaced.

In her Scotsman column this week, Christine Jardine outlined why a new minister was needed and soon.

The Personal Independence Payments system is broken, she said, highlighting a local example:

Alexandra Mitchell from Cramond, has already highlighted the shortcomings. Born with a disability and entitled to a Motability car for years, she was mysteriously told she no longer qualified for the support, with no adequate reasoning behind the decision. Although we managed to have the decision overturned on appeal that, in itself, is not good enough. Nor is it an isolated, or even unusual, incident.

That wasn’t the end of the story, though, for Alexandra:

I again raised the case of Alexandra Mitchell who has now been told that there is an ‘end date’ of her lifelong disability. Wow, who knew the department had such powers? That they could end disability at the stroke of a pen. They can’t. And to get to the bottom of why the department thought it could, I was due to have a meeting with the Minister for Disabilities in the very week she decided that she could no longer stomach her own Government’s approach to Brexit. Since then, there has been nobody in Government tasked with addressing those issues, of which there are so many, that myself and other MPs have been keen to raise. Fortunately I had also arranged a meeting with Amber Rudd, the current Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, to ask if she would consider changes to a Universal Credit system that has proven not fit for purpose. Again Brexit, as ever, intervened and foreshortened our meeting, but not before I had grasped the opportunity to confront the Secretary of State with the problem. To be fair, she asked me to send details of Alexandra’s case directly to her and I have.

Christine highlighted the ridiculous amount of money that the Government spends on holding appeals, most of which are upheld:

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The Voice

15 March 2019 – yesterday’s press releases

By The Voice | Sat 16th March 2019 - 8:06 am

Lib Dems call on retailers to scrap the gender price gap

To mark World Consumers Rights Day, Liberal Democrat MP Christine Jardine has written to major cosmetic manufacturers and retailers across the UK as part of her campaign to scrap the gender price gap.

Commenting on her campaign, Ms Jardine said:

We are a quarter of the way through 2019 and still men and women pay different prices for the same basic products. This is entirely unacceptable.

For World Consumer Rights Day I am writing to the most prominent cosmetic manufacturers and retailers across the UK to ask them to change their outdated

…

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Katharine Pindar

Alleviating poverty in our country. How should Liberal Democrats aim to help?

By Katharine Pindar | Sun 27th January 2019 - 8:55 am

Should Universal Credit simply be abolished? That’s not our policy. .Perhaps we should replace it with a new benefit, National Credit, as suggested here recently by Michael BG. But how about abolishing the Department for Work and Pensions?

That is the radical idea just advanced by a man who worked in national mental health policy for more than ten years, and who latterly was seconded to the DWP for 18 months to advise on mental health across a range of policy issues. 

Tom Pollard of the think-tank Demos has written a short paper, Pathways from Poverty: A case for institutional reform, published by Demos this month. He writes that the Government should consider abolishing the department after its failure to help ill and disabled people out of poverty. He maintains that the DWP is “institutionally and culturally incapable of making the reforms needed to deliver better outcomes for society’s most vulnerable.” 

Referencing the post-war Beveridge social contract, he declares that modern governments have failed to deliver a parallel radical agenda. Specifically, he complains that the DWP has a ‘benefit lens’ where case-handlers perceive employment as a condition for receiving benefits, rather than as a means for enabling claimants to pursue fulfilling work. Speaking at a recent Demos discussion with industry experts and senior parliamentarians, he maintained that for many claimants the problems were not a question of their motivation, but of their disability or illness that impeded their securing work.

His conclusions recall points made by the UN Special Rapporteur Philip Alston, whose hard-hitting report  was discussed in LDV articles on November19 and 28 and December 2. 

Philip Alston observed a ‘command and control’ approach to Universal Credit which imposed harsh sanctions which the evidence tended to show were counter-productive. He too referred to elements of the Beveridge contract having been overturned, inflicting misery on the poor and the disabled. While discussing practical needs such as the restoration of local authority services, with the viewpoint of a compassionate outsider he also deplored what he saw as a decline in British traditional values of compassion and concern for everyone.

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Caron Lindsay

Heartbreaking: Homelessness among children in Scotland rises 22% over 3 years

By Caron Lindsay | Sun 23rd December 2018 - 1:55 pm

Homelessness can happen so easily. All it takes is for a landlord to decide to sell the home you have always lived in and you have nowhere to go.

If you are a child in temporary accommodation, your toys and all of your family’s furniture will be in storage. There will be no tree to put presents under.  

You could be in a bed and breakfast with all your family in one room with nothing to cook on. You could be in a cold, damp flat somewhere you don’t know.

You could be moved somewhere else at a moment’s notice.

You’ll be away from your friends.

Imagine what that does to your sense of security and wellbeing. It’s going to damage your health, both physical and mental and harm your development.

That’s hard enough at any time of year but at Christmas it’s devastating.

I’m furious that every year the number of children going through this goes up. We cannot stand for this. Both Scotland’s Governments should be ashamed of themselves

Every Christmas, the Scottish Lib Dems ask Scottish Ministers how many children are included in live homelessness applications. This year’s see yet another rise. 12,858 children are in some sort of temporary accommodation at this time. That’s about a fifth of the size of the town where I live and it’s a 22% rise on 2015’s figures.

Both Scotland’s governments really need to get on with ending this misery. The SNP has to stop making excuses and build more social housing and ensure councils have resources to fix poor housing. There are thousands of neglected and vacant properties across the country which, with the right incentives, could be renovated to boost the housing stock.

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NewsHound

LibLink: Stephen Lloyd: Universal Credit was meant to make work pay – it’s causing nothing but grief, pain and anger

By NewsHound | Fri 14th September 2018 - 1:48 pm

Our social security spokesperson Stephen Lloyd has been talking about how badly the Government has cocked up the implementation of Universal Credit for a while. We supported it in coalition but as soon as we were consigned to the back benches, depleted, the Tories ripped loads of money out of it.

He’s now written for the Huffington Post about what a nightmare this new system is.

And a crucial part of this incentive was the Work Allowance. This is the maximum amount a UC claimant can earn through employment, before their benefit payments are reduced. However in the Summer 2015 budget, with the

…

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Caron Lindsay

How do benefit sanctions affect mental health?

By Caron Lindsay | Wed 16th May 2018 - 10:25 am

There are few things more obvious than if you are deprived of the means to feed yourself, it’s going to be stressful and more than likely affect your mental health and not in a good way. This Mental Health Awareness Week, the excellent Scottish Association for Mental Health is collecting evidence to present to the House of Commons Work and Pensions Committee inquiry into benefit sanctions. 

People on benefits can lose up to all of their personal allowances if they are deemed to have not done enough to find work or have missed an appointment or have been sacked for …

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Caron Lindsay

Stephen Lloyd calls for action to help victims of domestic violence through Universal Credit

By Caron Lindsay | Fri 11th May 2018 - 2:55 pm

I’m really glad to see that Stephen Lloyd has written to Esther McVey to ask for action to reform Universal Credit to ensure that victims of domestic violence have access to their own money.

The Scottish Party’s landmark Social Security Bill allows for the default splitting of payments between members in a household, but ideally we need to find a solution for the whole UK.

At the moment, the benefit is paid to one person, usually the man.

If domestic abuse is going on in a relationship, there is likely to be financial abuse too so it’s important to ensure that each …

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The Voice

Lloyd: Government must delay “horror” changes to mortgage support

By The Voice | Wed 21st March 2018 - 9:15 pm

Support for Mortgage Interest is a benefit given to people claiming Universal Credit or certain other income-related benefits who have a mortgage or who have taken out loans to make repairs to their home. It pays for the cost of interest on up to £200,000 of a person’s mortgage in order to prevent claimants from defaulting on their mortgage.

From next month, SMI will be replaced by a loan of the same value, which is repaid (with interest) when the property is sold.

It’s pretty cheap, as benefits go, costing the Government around £300 million a year. It is certainly about 3.5 times cheaper than letting someone’s home be repossessed and then having to pay housing benefit to put that household in the rented sector.

Apart from the whole principle being flawed, the implementation seems to have been botched as only around 10,000 of the eligible families have taken up the loan. Some people haven’t even been sent the information about it so that they can make an informed choice about whether to take the loan.

Our Work and Pensions spokesperson Stephen Lloyd said the whole thing was a horror and called for implementation to be delayed.

Every month we seem to be hearing yet more examples of this Conservative government being both mean-spirited and unintelligent; this mortgage interest benefit change is a classic example. It will force some homeowners into even more debt, and will force others to sell their homes putting themselves at the mercy (and cost) of their local council’s housing department. Which, naturally, will cost the taxpayer more in housing benefit than keeping them in their own house by paying mortgage interest payments. An absolutely ridiculous decision.

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The Voice

Vince calls on Government to delay changes to mortgage interest payment for people on benefits

By The Voice | Sat 17th March 2018 - 5:16 pm

In less than 3 weeks’ time, the Government stops paying mortgage interest to for those on certain benefits.

Some bright spark at the Department of Work and Pensions came up with a way to save the Government money – by getting a private company, Serco, to operate a loan scheme. Instead of having payments covered by the state, they will be covered by the homeowner taking out a private loan with Serco in return for a charge on the property. That means that they will have to pay back an unspecified sum of money if they eventually sell their house.

The Government …

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Caron Lindsay

ESA appeals figures “absolutely appalling” – Stephen Lloyd

By Caron Lindsay | Fri 9th March 2018 - 1:25 pm

New stats from the Department for Work and Pensions show that not far off two thirds of decisions that people are fit for work are overturned on appeal.  Now, think about it. You have to go through a stressful assessment process. You get your decision. You then have to ask for a mandatory reconsideration which will almost always have the same outcome. You then have the stress of waiting for months for an appeal. Then you have the stress of actually going to the Tribunal and facing questions from a panel. By this time a year or more could have gone by.

In any other organisation, such figures would lead to sackings and questions and enquiries  and sorting stuff out. Not in the Department of Work and Pensions under Tory misrule.

Our Work and Pensions spokesperson Stephen Lloyd called the figures “absolutely appalling.”

These figures are absolutely appalling, but of little surprise to me. With the many constituents who come through my office and those of other MPs’ across the country, we see with our own eyes some shocking decisions by Work Capability tribunals.

It is time that we stop faceless corporations making money off the backs of disabled people, while providing poor quality service.

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Caron Lindsay

It’s not just the ridiculous and ignorant mistakes made in PIP and ESA assessments that should worry us

By Caron Lindsay | Sun 11th February 2018 - 11:00 am

You judge whether a society is civilised or not by how it treats its most vulnerable people.  The Work and Pensions Select Committee will publish a report this week which has recommendations for the reform of social security for sick and disabled people.

If one of your relatives suffered from a debilitating, life limiting physical or mental health condition, you would want them to have the best support possible. You wouldn’t want them to have to endure a social security system that is complex, demeaning and stressful.

As a prelude to their full report, the Work and Pensions Committee published a taster of the evidence they have received which outlines the awful things that people go through.

For me, it wasn’t the absurd and ridiculous incidents that caught the headlines (people being asked why they hadn’t killed themselves yet, or how they caught Down’s Syndrome) that upset me the most. It was the clear evidence that the way the system operates is harmful to people that made me angriest.

To be fair, none of this was news to me. I’ve been aware for some time that the system is broken. It particularly fails those with fluctuating conditions, Autism and poor mental health, but it’s stressful for everybody.

Filling in the massive form is particularly difficult. For some, it is even more so. I spoke at an RNIB Scotland fringe meeting at Scottish Conference about a year ago, The RNIB Scotland Chair, Sandra Wilson, talked about her experience of the dreaded form. She has no sight. They sent her a paper copy and expected her to fill it in. They knew she had no sight when they sent her the form.

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