The Coalition adds more hardship to the very poorest members of society. This latest attack on part-time workers receiving Housing Benefit seems to me to be actually calculated to put people out on the streets. How many landlords, after all, will want to take on tenants, who are only doing part-time work, if there’s a chance that their HB, and thus the landlord’s own income, will be lost? This can only result in more homelessness, more poverty and more despair.
Part-time workers who are judged to be doing too little to find full-time work could have their Housing Benefit sanctioned by the government when Universal Credit comes into full force, according to Inside Housing.
The revelation is the latest in a long line of benefit betrayals to be inflicted on the poor by the Coalition government. The new development also means landlords stand to lose out.
The Department for Work and Pensions has confirmed to Inside Housing that under Universal Credit, where a tenant is working less than 35 hours per week at minimum wage and is not eligible for JSA or ESA, then the housing element can be sanctioned instead.
It seems clear that the government is determined that it should be able to take income away from everyone who is not being properly paid by their employer. Does this seem fair to you?
Under the present system…
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Beastrabban\'s Weblog 
February 27, 2014 at 10:46 pm |
Landlords will not lose out. They will simply rent properties to higher waged earners, who themselves are priced out of city centres.
The Tories and Lib Dems (Liberals as were) did not betray those on benefit. They did exactly the same in the 19th century with the workhouse and the New Poor Law that forbade a parish from giving outdoor relief to the starving, with a shilling for a loaf of bread.
5 million died with the workhouse, of the same people as now.
Did the government care for the starving of the Irish potato famine? No.
The Tories have not changed. It is Labour who has changed.
It was Labour who betrayed the people who invented the party back in 1906 and voted for it generation after generation to this day.
Labour began Welfare Reform and brought in Atos and invented the Bedroom Tax.
It was Labour who talk just as much as the Tories about getting people off benefit and into work and making work pay. When neither is true.
The benefits bill goes on as subsidy to business to pay far below a living wage like in the 3rd world. The working poor are half the benefits bill and it is they who are 50% of the victims of welfare reform, that is a reason why the working poor needs to go to food banks to feed the kids.
Food banks themselves are a lie, as you can only get 3 vouchers in a year. If you are hungry one day, you are hungry every day. Society and politicians see food banks as the soup kitchens of 1930s USA Depression, when these do not exist.
The social supermarkets starting up, selling cheap food, sell only to those on benefits, yet it is those losing benefit who are the bulk of the starving, and these are working poor and pensioners in the majority.
Left Unity Party, the recently relaunched communists, offer hope to the working poor, but could not care less about the life or death of anyone over 60, that including half women 60-66 within working poor and majority reason over 50 to 66 not in work is due to being disabled and/or chronic sick, and those benefits being lost.
No state pension no winter fuel allowance, but this is soon to be lost to all pensioners.
No benefit, no cold weather payments, but this soon to be lost to all anyway.
The United Nations reporting on Bedroom Tax had no affect.
So when the United Nations report on UK’s Welfare Reform causing preventable deaths and suicides, all UK political parties will continue to ignore and go on with leaving anything up to and more of around 13 million people to struggle to make ends meet each day.
My petition on 38 Degrees includes millions of people:
https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/state-pension-at-60-now
a) women aged 60-66 from those born 1953 (30,000) and 1954 (half a million) onwards.
b) men and women lost £3000 tax allowance above basic, aged 65 from 2013.
c) The millions of low waged / less than 14 hours in any single job who lost NI credits, so no benefit and no state pension forever.
d) People with less than 10 years NI credits – no benefits, no state pension.
e) Housewives and widows that will now be left destitute as no NI credits of their own and losing right to a share of husband’s NI contributions.
f) Pensioners age 80 losing a little pension that added to their low little pension.
All petitions and charitable campaigns will end, in effect, when the gagging law comes into force from September. So signing the petition now and encouraging family, friends and colleagues to sign, would help get the 100,000 to bring about a debate.
But as this also effects the children and grandchildren of women aged 60 and men aged 65, then, really, it effects us all.
https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/state-pension-at-60-now