Pickles’ council tax benefit reform will disproportionaly affect the working-age population, incentivise local authorities to push poor people out to neighbouring boroughs, will penalise councils of poorer areas and create a patchwork of inconsistent systems.
The head of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales, the Most Rev Vincent Nichols, has slammed the coalition’s £18 billion welfare cuts.
The benefits cap was wonderful politics for George Osborne – but now the politics is turning sticky as the reality of its impcat hits home.
Eric Pickles’s leaked warning that government plans to cut welfare payments risk making 40,000 families homeless appears to reflect deep concern in the DCLG.
The Disability Alliance is taking legal action against the government’s disability reforms, arguing that they disproportionately affect disabled people and their families.
Shadow employment minister Stephen Timms MP writes on the failures that lie at the heart of Iain Duncan Smith’s Welfare Reform Bill – the coalition’s next train crash.
The prime minister and the leader of the opposition have debated whether a cut to a vital support for some of the most vulnerable in our society was indeed, a cut. Ed Miliband asked whether the coalition would consider reversing the decision to axe the Disability Living Allowance Mobility Payments for 83,000 claimants of the benefit living in care homes – as detailed in Part 4, clause 83 of the welfare reform bill.
Andrew Georgiou looks at the Tory NHS and welfare reforms and whether they will open up the service to European Union competition law.
More than 100 politicians, professors and campaigners have written to Minister for Disabled People Maria Miller calling for Disability Living Allowance reform and other “anti-disability” provisions to be removed from the Welfare Reform Bill.
IDS will drop plans to impose a 10% cut in housing benefit on anyone unemployed for more than a year. But the Welfare Reform bill includes other pernicious reforms.
