But then, to explain his point, Jones said that if he cut his children’s pocket money by £10 a week, but told them to set a Saturday job, an impact assessment would say they were losing £10 a week – without taking into account the extra cash they would get from the Saturday job.
Jones was not saying that Pip was like pocket money, or that disability benefit claimants are like children. But that hasn’t stopped his comment being interpreted as if he were (which on its own is enough to show that he probably should not have said it).
The Liberal Democrats are calling for an apology. Steve Darling, the Lib Dem work and pensions spokesperson, said:
This is incredibly insulting and shows the government just doesn’t understand the challenges facing people with disabilities. Darren Jones owes an apology to the hundreds of thousands of people his government’s decision has pushed into poverty and the millions more whose lives they have made more challenging.
cause such pain for millions of families, are necessary, given they have not put the UK on a better path:
The Chancellor announced a series of spending reforms to appease her self-imposed fiscal rules. We forecast that the Chancellor is now due to meet her fiscal rules and has restored some – though insufficient – headroom.
Despite this fiscal restructuring, NIESR judges that today’s policy announcements have neither improved the United Kingdom’s trend growth outlook nor placed the public finances on a fundamentally more sustainable path. This calls into question the necessity of the spending cuts that have financed the new fiscal headroom.
5.19pm.)
Now, it may come as a surprise to some of you, that I’m not personally a Sabrina Carpenter, being a 46-year-old woman, but a member of my family did want to go and see that concert.
I’m not in a position now that I can easily just go and sit in at the concert, and some of the things that I might have been able to do in my everyday life in the past are not so easy now.
And so I had advice that it would be better to be in a box. The owners of the O2 had a box, tickets that are not available to buy, and they said that I could go in there, and that was better for security reasons.
I do recognise that people think that that’s a bit odd, but that’s the reason why I did that rather than just being in normal seats, which, to be honest, for me and my family, would have been a lot nicer and a lot easier.
Reeves has two children.
Many people will sympathise with Reeves’ explanation – although she did not say why she did not offer a payment to cover the notional costs of the ticket, which would stopped this turning into a controversy.
More here.
Tax campaigner Dan Niedle reckons that this could be the toughest ever suite of anti-tax avoidance proposals introduced in the UK.
Niedle explains that the government would be able to issue a “promoter action notice” to third parties (such as banks, employment services or social media networks) who facilitate a scheme. It would also become a criminal offence to not report a tax avoidance scheme to HMRC.
4.53pm.)
In effect, she is saying that the DWP projection is unreliable.
1.49pm.)
But she says the last time Donald Trump was president, trade between the UK and the US increased. She says the UK will continue to make the case for free trade.
on social media.
It is a political choice to plunge 50,000 more children into poverty by the end of this parliament, as a result of the health and disability benefit cuts. This news will be devastating for families across the country struggling to make ends meet.
The UK Government committed to tackling child poverty, and right now it is rising. At the moment, this will be the first Labour Government likely to oversee a significant rise in the number of children in poverty.
We must see support for these children in the upcoming child poverty strategy, and the full scrapping of the two-child limit and benefit cap to prevent even more children being denied the childhood they deserve.
(This may be true of the post-war period, but probably isn’t if you include the second Ramsay MacDonald government, which covered the aftermath of the Wall Street crash.)
Economics Foundation
Today’s assessment confirms that ill and disabled people will see cuts to benefits amounting to around £6.5bn a year by 2029-30. Yet the Department for Work and Pensions and the OBR between them have not yet been able to forecast any impact on employment outcomes.
The government’s narrative to justify benefit cuts for ill and disabled people has completely fallen apart – it is clearer than ever that the real driver has been pressure to meet an arbitrary savings target.
Resorting to the failed playbook of cuts and conditionality will push people into poverty and poorer health rather than helping them into work.
From Ed Davies, policy director at the Centre for Social Justice
The government is in danger in getting caught in a spider’s web of its own making. The knee-jerk panicky measures we are seeing in welfare – to prop up our flatlining economy – just before record tax rises hit – don’t feel like a plan. I feel sorry for Liz Kendall, as her efforts to get people off benefits and back into work are about to become much harder as employers reel from the impending rise in national insurance.
The chancellor was right to say that repairing the welfare system requires “hard yards” and “long-term decisions” but by tinkering with it in the hunt for short-term cash she is not helping those on benefits or the taxpayers funding them.
Source: theguardian.com
