Jeffs posts
The Department of Work and Pensions has put back harsh plans to change the rules for new claimants for pension credit from next June to sometime next year.
The decision not to implement savings that could lead to tens of thousands of elderly people having to live on half the money paid out by pensioner credit is not motivated by a change of heart on a heartless measure.
It is because of incompetence and failure by the ministry itself to roll out another major benefit called universal credit - which replaces a whole series of benefits - on time. This was supposed to be nationwide by June this year. But the civil servants who planned it failed in their job - despite collecting bonuses worth £20,000 on top of six figure salaries for introducing the new benefit. You can read all about it in my blog last year here.
So now instead the benefit will not be rolled out across the country until the end of December 2018. The proposed timetable is here- and you can see which local area changes when.
Of course the department has not announced the delay to the new pension credit cuts until I contacted them to check the date. Rather like they forgot tell 3.9 million women pensioners about the rise in the pension age until some 14 years later.
A spokesman told me:
“The timetable for the introduction of any policy changes will be determined by the roll out of universal credit – this change will not now be implemented this year.”
The measure as I reported earlier is particularly harsh if there is a big age difference between pensioner couples - with one say years younger than the other.
Previously the law said when the oldest person in a relationship reached pension age they qualified for pension credit. Now it is being changed to the youngest person in the relationship reaching pension age. This means if there were a 10 year difference – the oldest person could get no pension credit payment until they were 76 – ten years after the raised retirement age. On person has told me of a 17 year difference - meaning one of them would wait until they were 83.
What is as shocking is the department's disclosure to me on how the new system is planning to work. When it comes in they are proposing both people in a couple apply for universal credit when there is an age difference between the two- and only one is over 65. The change is devastating.
If you are on pension credit these are the rates (per week) for 2017 - 18 and the proposed rate for 2018-19
PENSION CREDIT
Standard minimum guarantee
single £159.35 rising to £163.00
couple £243.25 rising to £248.80
Additional amount for severe disability
single £62.45 rising to£64.30
couple (one qualifies) £62.45 rising to £64.30
couple (both qualify) £124.90 rising to £28.60
But when you switch to Universal Credit these are the rates for 2018-19 per month:
Single claimant 25 and over £317.82
Joint claimants, either/both 25 and over £498.89
This means a couple instead of receiving £995.20 for 4 weeks would see their income halved to £498.89 a month until both of them were over, by then, 66.
Furthermore the younger person in the marriage will be subject to benefit sanctions if they fail to continually seek work. This would cut their benefit compared to pension credit by two thirds to just £313.82 a month.
Notice there are no new rates for universal credit for 2018-19 as the benefit is frozen unlike pensioner credit which rises in line with pensions. This in theory could mean the people deprived of pension credit could be forced to live on a frozen benefit for years and see their living standards fall every year.
The DWP is being generous enough to say they would not force a person over 65 to seek work and sanction them if they don't succeed. Presumably even Mr Opperman, the pensions minister, would not want to be seen trying to force a 77 year old into a job while he or she waits for pension credit.
Frankly this is an appalling situation and I hope Backto60 people take this up as well as demanding their pension and try and put pressure on MPs to tell the government not to go ahead next year. This is a real and sustained attack on the poorest pensioners in the country and ministers should be ashamed of thinking of implementing it.
Posted by jeffrey davies on 30 March 2018
jeffs posts
Don’t be fooled – the huge council tax rise is all part of Conservative government policy to transfer public debt, held by the government, into private debt, owed by you.
Look at the report below: Government funding to councils has been halved since 2011. That’s not because of any necessity, but because the Conservatives don’t want central government to pay for vital services.
They want you to fund them – even if you can’t afford it.
They don’t care if you go into debt trying to pay for them.
In fact, that is precisely the point.
You go into debt – the government goes into surplus. And the very rich continue to do quite all right, thank you very much, due to cuts in taxes that affect them.
But you don’t get the services that local government should be able to deliver.
Remember: The loss of services is not because we, as a country, can’t afford them.
It is because the Conservative Party doesn’t want you to have them.
Households will be hit with the steepest council tax rise in 14 years from April, with the average household in England paying £81 more at a time when most local authorities are driving though big cuts to services.
The inflation-busting average 5.1% increase on band D properties in England pushes up the average bill to £1,671. Almost all councils that provide social care have opted to levy an average £30 charge to help meet the spiralling cost of adult care services, official figures show.
Council leaders warned that despite the steep rise, town halls would still have to reduce services. They said they had little choice but to ask residents to pay more as they struggled to balance the books since government funding had been halved since 2011.
Posted by jeffrey davies on 30 March 2018
Jeffs posts
Mrs May really has a nerve.
Not only has she lied about police numbers, but her campaigners in the local government election are blaming the fall on the Labour Party.
The ‘Keep Havering Safe’ leaflet – now withdrawn – warned that a Labour victory would result in “a London crime wave with even less police”.
And whose fault would it be?
The Tories’ fault.
But they didn’t mention that!
Theresa May has secretly slashed 7,000 local cops she claimed were safe from Tory cuts.
The Prime Minister has repeatedly boasted of protecting the budgets of police forces.
But her Government’s own figures directly contradict her claim.
A total of 6,853 police officers and PCSOs were axed from local policing units between 2015 and 2017, according to a Labour analysis of Home Office figures.
Two thirds of forces suffered a fall in the number of uniformed officers and PCSOs in local policing despite Mrs May’s claims she hadn’t cut cops.
Posted by jeffrey davies on 30 March 2018
jeffs posts
In 2015, Welfare Weekly exposed the Department for Work and Pensions for using fake testimonies from fake characters via a well-placed freedom of information (FoI) request, revealing that the lengths that the government is prepared to go to justify extremely punitive policies. Remarkably, even the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) were alarmed at the level of deception, and said it had written to all of its members who work at the Department to find out whether they had played any part in putting the leaflet together.
Sarah Pinch, the CIPR’s president, said: “Falsely creating the impression of independent, popular support is a naive and opaque technique which blatantly disregards the CIPR’s standards of ethical conduct. It is deeply disappointing if public relations professionals allowed it to be published.”
This happened during the same month that the it was only this month that the UK statistics watchdog censured the DWP for “understating the scale” of its sanctions regime – essentially failing to release adequate data to give jobseekers or the public a genuine picture of the way it’s imposing sanctions, and of monitoring the real impact of this draconian policy. The revelation that the DWP has faked information to distort the reality that so many citizens face is reflective of how deep the rot is in the entire system.
Then there are the fictional statistics. Iain Duncan Smith was rebuked by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) for the ‘misuse’ of benefit statistics – his claim that 8,000 people moved into work as a result of the benefit cap is “unsupported by the official statistics”, says the UK Statistics Authority.
In letter to Duncan Smith, Andrew Dilnot writes: “In the manner and form published, the statistics do not comply fully with the principles of the Code of Practice, particularly in respect of accessibility to the sources of data, information about the methodology and quality of the statistics, and the suggestion that the statistics were shared with the media in advance of their publication.”
Another claim by Duncan Smith later in the same month also drew criticism and a reprimand. The (then) minister said around 1 million people have been stuck on benefits for at least three of the last four years “despite being judged capable of preparing or looking for work”.
However, the figures cited also included single mothers, people who were seriously ill, and people awaiting testing. Grant Shapps was also rebuked by UK Statistics Authority for misrepresenting benefit figures – the Tory chairman claimed that “nearly a million people” (878,300) on incapacity benefit had dropped their claims, rather than face a new medical assessment for its successor, the employment and support allowance.
The figures, he claimed, “demonstrate how the welfare system was broken under Labour and why our reforms are so important”. The claim was faithfully reported by the Sunday Telegraph but as the UK Statistics Authority confirmed in its response to Labour MP Sheila Gilmore, it was entirely fabricated.
In his letter to Shapps and Duncan Smith, UKSA chair Andrew Dilnot wrote that the figure conflated “official statistics relating to new claimants of the ESA with official statistics on recipients of the incapacity benefit (IB) who are being migrated across to the ESA”. Of the 603,600 incapacity benefit claimants referred for reassessment as part of the introduction of the ESA between March 2011 and May 2012, just 19,700 (somewhat short of Shapps’s “nearly a million) abandoned their claims prior to a work capability assessment in the period to May 2012.
The figure of 878,300 refers to the total of new claims for the ESA closed before medical assessment from October 2008 to May 2012. Thus, Shapps’s suggestion that the 878,300 were pre-existing claimants, who would rather lose their benefits than be exposed as “scroungers”, was entirely wrong. Significantly, there is no evidence that those who abandoned their claims did so for the reasons ascribed by Shapps.
Now the DWP have been found out submitting fake claims to the Work and Pensions Committee. The DWP claimed the Institute for Fiscal Stdies (IFS) had reviewed its data which asserts that UC will help more than 250,000 people into employment, once the flagship welfare reform is fully implemented across the UK. However the IFS have contradicted the claim, leading to heavy criticism regarding the DWP’s statement and ‘evidence’ regarding Universal Credit’s ‘causal relatonship’ with employment.
The Committee says:
“A central part of the Department for Work and Pension’s (DWP) case for the benefit of Universal Credit (UC) is their assertion of its effect on employment. In to a request for an estimate of the magnitude of that effect, DWP stated it has “determined” that UC will result in 250,000 more people in employment once it is fully implemented.
Inquiry: Universal Credit rollout
Work and Pensions Committee
How the Department ‘arrived’ at these figures
In a follow up letter to Employment Minister Alok Sharma (PDF PDF 1.38 MB)Opens in a new window the Chair asked a set of specific questions about how the Department had arrived at each of the stated constituent parts of that figure:
150,000 more due to “increased financial incentives to work”
50,000 more due to “increased conditionality”
60,000 due to “simplification of the benefit system”
(That’s basically euphemisms for cuts, sanctions, and more cuts and sanctions)
The Department’s response (PDF PDF 800 KB)Opens in a new window did not answer any of the Chair’s specific questions, although it did supply an account of academic research papers that have informed the Department’s work on UC, and restated the principles underlying those three ostensible benefits of the reform.
DWP concluded by stating: “The approach to our analysis underpinning these estimates was reviewed by the Institute for Fiscal Studies.”
Accordingly, the Committee wrote to the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) (PDF PDF 141 KB)Opens in a new window asking if, in that review, it had found those three estimates reasonable, and what the margin of statistical error might be on the numbers.
The IFS’ reply (PDF PDF 197 KB)Opens in a new window starts out “clarifying the role we had in reviewing DWP’s approach” in coming up with the numbers:
“Note that at no stage did we review their approach to estimating the impact of increased conditionality or simplification, to which they attribute 50,000 and 60,000 respectively of the overall 250,000 forecast effect on employment”.
The employment impact of Universal Credit is highly uncertain
The IFS goes on to say: “Neil Couling’s letter to Baroness Hollis on 16 November states that the 250,000 figure is based on the same methodology we reviewed in 2012. For the reasons given above, that can only be true of the element (150,000) which is a result of changes to financial incentives. And we are not in a position to confirm whether and to what extent DWP took on board our comments and implemented our recommended improvements before applying the methodology….”
“The employment impact of UC is highly uncertain. The move to UC involves a number of changes for which it is hard to find comparable precedents (especially UK precedents)” — casting doubt on DWP’s use of academic evidence to substantiate its estimates — “It is not even possible to produce statistical margins of error for estimates of the employment impact, as the nature of the uncertainty is not conducive to standard statistical analysis…”
“Sadly, it will be difficult even after the event to produce convincing estimates of the overall employment impact of UC. The early impact estimates that DWP have published – cited in the Minister’s letter of 12 March – apply only to a small group of claimants who are not affected by UC in the same way as most other claimants […]” and;
“We emphasise that the overall employment impact of UC will conceal very different effects for different groups in the population, with employment rates likely to rise for some and fall for others.”
The last point contradicts what DWP have previously told the Committee when asked about the impact on other groups:
“We remain committed to producing robust comparative analysis of the employment impacts of Universal Credit. As we informed the Committee we are planning to expand the analysis for single cases in the Live Service to couples and families in both services.
This analysis will estimate a labout market impact for these broader claimant groups. In this instance it is misleading to draw a distinction between two services. The underlying policy for both is the same so any comparative analysis will hold true for both systems”.
Lack of evidence
Rt Hon Frank Field MP, Chair of the Committee, said:
“The ongoing lack of evidence to back up the much-vaunted employment impact of Universal Credit was already extremely disappointing. But to have our specific queries about basis of this claim answered with airy, irrelevant and, it appears, plainly inaccurate assertions adds insult to injury.
The IFS’ letter shows that Old Mother Hubbard hasn’t got much in the cupboard, despite the bragging of the Department. This clumsy and ill-judged attempt to piggyback on one of the most trusted, unimpugnable authorities on public policy and finance would be farcical if it was not so deeply worrying.”
Call it what it is, Frank. It’s just more glib, ideologically driven lies.
Posted by jeffrey davies on 26 March 2018
