5 benefit changes the government don't want you to know about

Threats to take away children from families is a new low for the coalition government's war on benefit claimants.

It used to be that when politicians wanted to bury bad news they’d orchestrate its release to time with a distracting event. Seeing Iain Duncan Smith publicly criticized for wasting at least £140 million of public money over Universal Credit at the start of this month, it struck me how we’ve slowly reached another level. “Unmitigated disaster”? “Alarmingly weak”?

These words were used to describe Universal Credit but could easily have been levelled at a number of largely unreported changes to the benefit system. Nowadays, bad news is buried by even worse news. The sheer volume of inefficient and unethical changes to social security this Government has enacted means some of it doesn’t even get noticed. Which, for a set of politicians hacking at vulnerable people’s support systems, is worryingly convenient.


So, here’s five benefit changes the government doesn’t want you to know about.

1. Disabled people denied a key benefit have had their right to appeal reduced   

2. Long-term sick people are having their benefits sanctioned ... for being sick 

3. 50,000 disabled people are being cut out of work 

4. There’s now a one-year limit on hundreds of thousands of people’s sickness benefit 

5. Eviction letters are now including veiled threats to remove people’s children 

Empty threats concerning people’s children may be a new low. Then again, against the recent actions of this Government – be it imposing sanctions on the disabled or removing the benefits of the sick – ‘a new low’ seems to come weekly.     

Britain’s homelessness crisis evident in record number of calls to Shelter

Charity has received 175,000 inquiries in the past 12 months, up 10 per cent in the previous year. Emily Dugan reports

 

The scale of the nation's homelessness crisis is laid bare in figures published exclusively in The Independent today which show that the numbers calling the housing charity Shelter for help is at an all-time high of almost 175,000 calls in the last year, up 10 per cent on the previous year.

Visits to the advice pages of the charity’s website are also up more than 20 per cent, with almost 400,000 people seeking help online.

The latest Government figures show statutory homelessness is up 6 per cent, while the number of households living in temporary accommodation such as B&Bs is at 56,0000, up 9 per cent on last year.

Some 80,000 children are expected to spend Christmas without a proper home.

Helpline staff believe the impact of welfare reforms – including the benefit cap, the ‘bedroom tax’ and increasingly punitive benefit sanctions – could be one the reasons behind the marked rise in calls for help. The continued fallout from the recession, the rise of the cost of living and an apparent increase in rogue landlords as the rental market grows have also contributed.

It's business that really rules us now

Lobbying is the least of it: corporate interests have captured the entire democratic process. No wonder so many have given up on politics

 
It's the reason for the collapse of democratic choice. It's the source of our growing disillusionment with politics. It's the great unmentionable. Corporate power. The media will scarcely whisper its name. It is howlingly absent from parliamentary debates. Until we name it and confront it, politics is a waste of time.

The political role of business corporations is generally interpreted as that of lobbyists, seeking to influence government policy. In reality they belong on the inside. They are part of the nexus of power that creates policy. They face no significant resistance, from either government or opposition, as their interests have now been woven into the fabric of all three main political parties in Britain.

On Monday, for instance, the Guardian revealed that the government's subsidy system for gas-burning power stations is being designed by an executive from the Dublin-based company ESB International, who has been seconded into the Department of Energy. What does ESB do? Oh, it builds gas-burning power stations.

On the same day we learned that a government minister, Nick Boles, has privately assured the gambling company Ladbrokes that it needn't worry about attempts by local authorities to stop the spread of betting shops. His new law will prevent councils from taking action.

Last week we discovered that G4S's contract to run immigration removal centres will be expanded, even though all further business with the state was supposed to be frozen while allegations of fraud were investigated.

Now opposition MPs stare mutely as their powers are given away to a system of offshore arbitration panels run by corporate lawyers.

Since Blair, parliament operates much as Congress in the United States does: the lefthand glove puppet argues with the righthand glove puppet, but neither side will turn around to face the corporate capital that controls almost all our politics.

This is why the assertion that parliamentary democracy has been reduced to a self-important farce has resonated so widely over the past fortnight.

So I don't blame people for giving up on politics. I haven't given up yet, but I find it ever harder to explain why.

When a state-corporate nexus of power has bypassed democracy and made a mockery of the voting process, when an unreformed political funding system ensures that parties can be bought and sold, when politicians of the three main parties stand and watch as public services are divvied up by a grubby cabal of privateers, what is left of this system that inspires us to participate?

UK child poverty survey reveals cold facts about freezing homes

The reality for a growing number of children in poor families in Britain is cold, damp houses and not enough to eat, a new survey by a leading children’s charity reveals, as living standards decline for most people across the country.

“This is a damning incitement of how children feel about their chances of their future and the opportunities they will have in life,’ Hersfield told RT.

“For millions of children up and down the country, poverty is a grinding reality – and it is getting worse. Many families are facing stark and unacceptable choices, like heat or eat. 

This is disgraceful in any country, especially in one of the world’s richest,” Matthew Reed, the chief executive for the Children’s Society, said in a statement. Children’s Centers in crisis

A separate survey published on Tuesday by another charity, 4Children, shows that an increasing number of families are using the services offered by children’s centers, despite the fact that many are being starved of cash due to local government funding cuts.