Thursday, December 19, 2013

The year government cuts changed the face of the welfare state


From the dramatic rise of food banks to the drastic withdrawal of benefits, our writers assess how the coalition's austerity measures have left millions of households across Britain struggling to survive

Ransford Amoah helps out at a food bank in Croydon, south London
Ransford Amoah helps out at a food bank in Croydon, south London. Photograph: Graeme Robertson

Patrick Butler: Retreat of the welfare state


A new wave of poverty crashed over the voluntary sector. Food banks, almost entirely dependent on volunteers and donated food, grew rapidly to try to take the strain caused by low wages, rising living costs, and benefit cuts and delays. Demand surged after April, when welfare changes started to take substantial chunks from the incomes of the poorest, many of them ill and disabled.

Breakfast clubs, clothes banks, and even "baby banks" also sprang up as in-kind support began to replace dwindling welfare cash entitlements.

Poverty charities organised ever-bigger national food drives with large supermarkets for food banks to give out. This was a charitable food effort not seen since the second world war. Police reported a rise in shoplifting of groceries, often by mothers desperate to prevent their children from going hungry. Doctors declared that food poverty was now a "public health emergency".

The Department for Work and Pensions refused to admit there was any evidence of a link between welfare reform and food bank use.

Charities told tales of injustice, fear and humiliation endured by the most vulnerable, as a result of increased benefit sanctions, the bedroom tax and the Atos-run fit-for-work tests. The "heat or eat" dilemma slipped into the public consciousness. The church rediscovered its campaigning heart on debt and payday lending.

Corrosive cuts to charities and community groups continued. There were veiled political threats to campaigning charities through the lobbying bill. The big society may not be dead, argued a recent audit, but it was healthiest as a form of reactive crisis voluntarism. The outlook was far less rosy for small charities reliant on state funding to supply specialist welfare services in deprived areas; they, the audit concluded, were "left out in the cold", their future increasingly bleak.

Amelia Gentleman: Disabled people bear the brunt of cuts


This has been a year of exceptional uncertainty for recipients of disability benefits, as new payments were introduced and eligibility criteria narrowed. Anger about some of the new policies triggered successful protest campaigns.

Two-thirds of those affected by the bedroom tax, introduced in April, were disabled – and many subsequently found themselves obliged to pay extra for rooms where carers sleep and specialist equipment is stored. A survey revealed that 90% of disabled people affected by the bedroom tax, who hadn't received a safety-net payment, were cutting back on food bills.

Two ongoing legal reviews criticised the government. Three charities that support people with mental health problems pursued a judicial review of the work capability assessment (WCA) the fitness for work test used to determine whether hundreds of thousands of disabled people are eligible for benefits. Judges in a preliminary hearing agreed that the system was unfair for some of the most vulnerable people in society. The charities called for the testing process to be halted, until the test was fairer.

Meanwhile, five disabled people won their case to overturn the government's abolition of the £330m independent living fund.

Delays in paying the personal independence payment (which replaces the disability living allowance) to people with terminal illnesses meant hundreds of very ill cancer patients faced months without money, and some died before they received the benefit. The new disability minister, Mike Penning, promised the system would improve.

Grassroots campaigners set up the War on Welfare (Wow) petition, and gathered 100,000 signatures calling for an end to the WCA and demanding a cumulative impact assessment on all cuts and changes affecting disabled people, their families and their carers. Comedian and Wow campaigner Francesca Martinez said the campaign was "beginning to challenge this idea that disabled people are scroungers".

Randeep Ramesh: Young people losing out


When the OECD warned that England was the only country in the developed world where the generation approaching retirement is more literate and numerate than the youngest adults, it was a stark reminder of a rift emerging between the old and young. Politicians begin to recognise that, for the first time since the war, young Britons embarking on their careers cannot expect to be any better off than their parents, while those approaching retirement have never had it so good. The prime minister's response was to tough it out. In his party conference speech, he made it clear that Britain would only be a "land of opportunity" if young people understood the only choice was "between earning or learning".

The direction of Tory party policy was that under-25s will lose the right to housing benefit and jobseeker's allowance. By comparison, benefits for over-64s consume £111bn (55%) of the £202bn welfare budget. While welfare reform bites into young people's incomes, elderly people keep their bus passes and winter fuel payments, and are granted exemptions from cuts to housing and council tax rebates.

What is shocking is that the link between growth and jobs for young people has been broken. The jobless rate among under-25s is now 3.74 times the adult rate.

More than 950,000 young people are now unemployed and almost a third (30% ) have been looking for work for more than a year. Yet the government's flagship Work Programme, undertaken mainly by private sector contractors, is failing to deliver. In the second year, providers were expected to get a third of young people into sustained employment. This was met in only 18 out of 40 contracts. The problem is that often the coalition's tough-love policy – of mandatory schemes involving work experience and community activity – doesn't work. Academics point out that the strictest schemes are less likely to work, largely because they can deter people from claiming benefit without improving their chances of finding employment. It may be time to change.

Hannah Fearn: Bedroom tax and benefit cap hits home

An inauspicious year for housing was ushered in by the much-maligned bedroom tax, a cut in housing benefit for each bedroom that a social tenant under-occupies. The divisive policy led to a number of legal challenges. A £500-a-week cap on all benefits as private sector rents soar is having a devastating impact. Across London and some other cities, private tenants claiming housing benefit to pay their rent are unable to find anywhere to live within the cap level, and landlords are refusing to rent to benefit claimants, most of whom are working. In parts of the capital, housing benefit no longer even covers the cost of "affordable rent" charged by social landlords. As a result, households are being shunted out of London to cheaper cities as far away as Hull and Stoke-on-Trent, leaving their communities behind. The government stands accused of presiding over the end of social housing and a huge rise in homelessness. More than 2,000 homeless families with children were in emergency bed and breakfast accommodation on 30 September, the highest figure for a decade.

Two important milestones: councils no longer have a duty to house homeless people in social housing, offering an unregulated private tenancy instead, taking us back to Cathy Come Home-style housing for poor families; meanwhile, housing associations are moving into private rent, in a bid to house the priced-out younger generation.

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