Links today – reach your own conclusions. I spared you from a photo of Alastair Campbell.
Secret memo shows key role for Blairites in Labour’s election team (Alan Milburn started the privatization of the NHS under Blair)
conflicts with David and Ed Miliband turn leadership race into verdict on New Labour
Iain Duncan Smith’s catalogue of waste and poverty
Mandela: never forget how the free world’s leaders learned to change their tune
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Andrew Lansley, the Leader of the House, earlier this month told the Commons that there was “no truth” to allegations that ministers had approached Tory MPs on the public accounts committee to ask that its report name and shame his department’s permanent secretary, Robert Devereux.
The PAC report said that £140million had been squandered on the flagship welfare reform and accused the Government of “alarmingly weak” management.
Mr Duncan Smith denied allegations that he had attempted to have anyone blamed in the report.
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However, Margaret Hodge, the committee’s chairman, has now cast doubt on those claims and said that senior figures in the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) had sought to influence her report.
In comments to students on November 11 – four days after the publication of he committee’s report – Mrs Hodge said: “I can’t tell you how much inappropriate talking there was to me and other members of the committee, by both ministers and civil servants, either to get me to blame the permanent secretary in the DWP and therefore transfer blame away from Iain Duncan Smith or to put the blame on Mr Devereux and to ensure ministers escaped blame.”
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http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/nov/21/universal-credit-benefit-training-cost-millions
Equipping benefit claimants with the digital and financial skills to use the government’s new universal credit welfare system is likely to cost hundreds of millions of pounds, unpublished research commissioned by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has found.
The study, carried out by three London councils using DWP data and a methodology agreed with Whitehall officials, found they would each need to spend about £6m over a two-year period to support vulnerable claimants to get online, help them open bank accounts and manage monthly budgets.
The research, seen by the Guardian, , reveals the extent to which socially excluded claimants will struggle with the huge cultural and behavioural changes demanded by universal credit, and warns that without help, those who fail to get to grips with the new welfare system will face debts, arrears and eviction, leading to a rise in homelessness.
It suggests councils, charities and private companies will be required to deliver millions of hours of specialist training and support face-to face and over the telephone to ensure claimants are confident and technically proficient enough to use the system.
Around one in 10 users of the system are likely to need intensive or ongoing support, it finds.
The scale and cost will unnerve ministers, who are struggling to roll out the beleaguered £2.4bn universal credit system, and have admitted that they have already written off at least £140m on failed IT systems for the project. Ministers are expected to decide by Christmas whether to write off universal credit altogether and start again, or reduce it in size and complexity to make it more manageable.
Those behind universal credit see it as an opportunity to tackle digital and financial exclusion for up to 8m households. Iain Duncan Smith, the work and pensions secretary, has called it a chance for claimants to “get back in to the 21st century“.
But while they anticipated that this would require some investment, they are understood to be taken aback by the potential size of the support bill – which could reach £100m for London alone – and have ordered departmental analysts to see if it can be reduced.
Under universal credit, six existing benefits will be rolled into a single monthly payment, out of which claimants will be expected to pay rent, spread living costs over a four-week period, and provide regular online updates marking changes in their income and job status. Unemployed claimants will also have to search for jobs online.
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People under the age of 25 would be barred from claiming unemployment benefits under proposals being considered by the Labour Party.
The Institute for Public Policy Research will publish a paper later this week proposing a new means-tested “youth allowance” for 18 to 24-year olds who are not in work or education.
Only those who prove they are in “purposeful” training or carrying out an “intensive” job search would be eligible for the allowance, the group will say.
The allowance would be dependent on family income, with the children of parents earning more than £25,000 a year unable to claim it, the IPPR will suggest.
The youth allowance would be set at £56.80, the same level as Job Seekers’ Allowance.
Under-25s would be banned from claiming additional benefits including Employment Support Allowance and Income Support. Paying those two benefits to under-25s costs taxpayers almost £1.3 billion a year.
It is understood that Rachel Reeves, the Labour shadow work and pensions secretary, is considering adopting the policy, though is undecided about applying a means test.
Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, has also hinted at taking young people out of the benefits system.
The Conservatives have also suggested stripping benefits from under-25s. David Cameron said last month that if he was re-elected in 2015, he would insist that young people would either “earn or learn”, without the option of claiming welfare.
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George Eaton claims that Labour isn’t planning to scrap benefits for under-25s. That’s exactly what they’re planning.
I find the continuous attacks on the young difficult to understand. Is it simply that they are relatively powerless and can’t fight back? It may have something to do with low voting rates.
1.30pm update
Shadow work and pensions secretary Rachel Reeves has denied that Labour is planning to strip young unemployed people of unemployment benefits.
Previously: Labour will be tougher than Tories on benefits, promises new welfare chief
“Nobody should be under any illusions that they are going to be able to live a life on benefits under a Labour government,” she said. “If you can work you should be working, and under our compulsory jobs guarantee if you refuse that job you forgo your benefits, and that is really important.”
She added: “It is not an either/or question. We would be tougher [than the Conservatives]. If they don’t take it [the offer of a job] they will forfeit their benefit. But there will also be the opportunities there under a Labour government.
“We have got some really great policies – particularly around the jobs guarantee and cancelling the bedroom tax – that show that we are tough and will not allow people to linger on benefits, but also that we are fair. Where there are pernicious policies like the bedroom tax, we will repeal them.”
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/nov/19/food-poverty-archbishop-york-john-sentamu
John Sentamu calls for ‘more equitable, more caring world’ and questions effects of government’s welfare reformsThe archbishop of York has attacked the “new and terrible” blight of food poverty and increasing malnutrition in Britain, questioned the effects of the government’s welfare reforms and called for a renewal of the postwar spirit that hungered for “a more equitable, more caring world”.
In a long and often angry address to the Church of England general synod on Tuesday, John Sentamu said static salaries and rising prices had left nine million people living below the breadline at a time when the chief executives of the UK’s 100 biggest companies were earning on average £4.3m – 160 times the average national wage.
“We are an advanced economy, a first-world country, and we have been one for longer than most,” said the archbishop. “But we suffer from blight – increasing poverty in a land of plenty.”
Sentamu, who chairs the Living Wage Commission, said politicians needed to stop referring to “hard-working” families and recognise that they were instead “hard-pressed” families struggling to survive despite their best efforts.
“Once upon a time you couldn’t really be living in poverty if you had a regular income,” he said. “You could find yourself on a low income, yes. But that is not longer so. You can be in work and still live in poverty.”
Reports of malnutrition and food poverty in Yorkshire “disgrace us all, leaving a dark stain on our consciences”, he said. “How can it be that last year more than 27,000 people were diagnosed as suffering from malnutrition in Leeds – not Lesotho, not Liberia, not Lusaka but Leeds?”
The effects of the government’s welfare reforms, Sentamu said, were “beginning to bite – with reductions in housing benefit for so-called under-occupation of social housing, the cap on benefits for workless householders and single parents, and the gradual replacement of the disability living allowance with a personal independence payment”.
He questioned whether the bedroom tax made economic sense, as those leaving accommodation to avoid the under-occupancy charge were being rehoused in private lodgings at a greater cost. He expressed incredulity that the statutory minimum wage had been raised by just 12p last month.
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