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The Budget 2010
- Welfare
George Osborne came down
hard on those people who are unable to work through disability,
as well as those low income earners who struggle to survive on
low incomes.
The child benefit cuts announced at the Tory party conference
have been confirmed. If both parents earn less than £44,000
a year, they will continue to receive child benefit. But families
with one main earner on more than £44,000 will see their
benefit stopped. A married couple with 3 children and one parent
working and earning just over the £44,000 limit, will lose
there benefit. A married couple with 1 child and both parents
earning £40,000, a total of £80,000 will keep their
child benefit. That is obviously fair. Over the next 4 years the
tax threshold for high earners is to be reduced to £39,000
meaning more people will lose their chid benefit.
People on ‘Incapacity Benefit’, that is people who
are disabled or have an illness which limits their ability to
work, are going to have their benefits changed to an ‘Employment
and Support Allowance’
which will be limited to 1 year, for those who are able to do
some work, and whose payments are based on their National Insurance
Contributions. What is the definition of ‘Some work’?
What this government doesn’t realise or even care about,
is that a lot of people on incapacity benefit would like to work,
apart from the fact there are precious few jobs, even for able
bodied people, most employers cannot afford to specially adapt
buildings and equipment to give these incapacitated people the
dignity of a job. Being trapped in your own home every single
day, is not being lazy and sponging off other people, it is lonely,
depressing and degrading.
For those people living in care homes that currently enjoy the
Mobility element of their disability living allowance, will lose
the mobility allowance.
Working families, who currently get 80% of their child care paid
to enable them to work, will have the allowance reduced to 70%
Local councils who have been subjected to cuts over the last few
years will face a further 28% cut over the next 4 years, with
expected job losses of 500,000 in this sector.
The police are facing cuts of around 25%, but this is expected
to be reduced by grants from local councils. The number of job
losses is expected to be substantial.
Jon Snow of channel 4 news quotes in his blog. “When it
comes to military procurement, Israel spends £9 billion
a year and administers its purchases with 400 people. Britain
spends £10 billion annually on procurement and has a staff
of 23,700 to do it. The Secretary of State for Defence is getting
rid of 25,000 jobs at the MOD. But when I pressed him last night
on Channel 4 News, there was no clear sense that the vast majority
of those redundancies will be in procurement. Indeed my analyst
told me that the main MOD headquarters will bear the brunt”.
It’s still jobs for the boys while the country suffers.
If Israel can manage on 400 staff, it would appear we could as
well, then we could make better use of the 23,300 tea and coffee
makers.
The ConDems promised that education would not suffer; they have
increased the budget by 0.1%. Nick Clegg proudly announced
he’d secured an “additional £2.5bn of investment
each year” – extra money paid direct to schools
to encourage them to take on children from deprived backgrounds.
In June, David Cameron promised to “take money from
outside the education budget to ensure that the pupil premium
is well funded”. It turns out that £1.7bn
of the £2.5bn comes from other education cuts – things
like the educational maintenance allowance. And £800m comes
from the welfare budget. A case of robbing the poor, to
give to the poor. The ConDems promised a rise in the
school budget of 0.1%, when you consider that the number of pupils
is set to go up by 0.7%, the school budget will actually fall
by 0.6%. If you remove the £2.5bn the Condems are claiming
is new money, the reduction in the budget is greater still.
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Vic
Farron RFT
Express. .
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