Lynn Perry, Chief Executive of the children’s charity Barnardo’s, says: ‘The Spring Statement today offered little hope to the 4.3m children and their families who are living in poverty. In fact, the welfare changes announced today will make things even worse, putting an extra 50,000 children into relative poverty. These children face devastating impacts on their health, well-being and life opportunities long into adulthood.
‘While we welcome the investment to recruit 400 new foster carers, much more action is urgently needed to achieve the government’s ambition to create the healthiest generation of children. Planned freezes to universal credit will add to the worry facing families already struggling to make ends meet. Looking ahead to the Spending Review, we urge the government to prioritise investment in lifting children out of poverty – an investment in children is an investment in the country’s future.’
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Dr Sarah Hughes, CEO of mental health charity Mind, adds: ‘The extra cuts to benefits announced today are devastating and will push more people into a mental health crisis.
‘It’s a political choice to try fixing the public finances by cutting the incomes of disabled people, including people with mental health problems. Benefits are a lifeline for so many people. Cuts will push people into poverty. This is policy making by numbers with little recognition of the impact on real people’s lives.
[UK prime minister Keir Starmer poses in front of soldiers. He] has vowed to put more money in the pockets of working people, but those on lowest incomes are predicted to be hardest hit financially. Photograph: Simon Dawson/No 10 Downing Street
Living standards for all UK families are set to fall by 2030, with those on the lowest incomes declining twice as fast as middle and high earners, according to new data that raises serious questions about Keir Starmer’s pledge to make working people better off.
The grim economic analysis, produced by the respected Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF), comes before the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, makes her spring statement on Wednesday in which she will announce new cuts to public spending rather than increase borrowing or raise taxes, so as to keep within the government’s “iron clad” fiscal rules.
In December, the prime minister announced a series of new “milestones” that he said would be passed before the next general election, which is likely to be held in 2029. The first of these was “putting more money in the pockets of working people”.
But with many Labour MPs already deeply concerned over Reeves’s plan to raise about £5bn by cutting benefits, including for disabled people, evidence that living standards are on course to fall markedly under a Labour government – and to decline most for the least well off – will add to the mood of growing disquiet in party’s ranks.
The JRF analysis rests on a realistic assumption that the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) will adjust its forecasts in line with the Bank of England and other main forecasters when it makes them public on Wednesday. The OBR is expected to halve the expected growth rate for this year from 2% to about 1%.
In what it describes as a “dismal reality”, the JRF said its detailed analysis shows that the past year could mark a high point for living standards in this parliament. It concludes that the average family will be £1,400 worse off by 2030, representing a 3% fall in their disposable incomes. The lowest income families will be £900 a year worse off, amounting to a 6% fall in the amount they have to spend.
The JRF also said that if living standards have not recovered by 2030, Starmer will not only have failed to pass his No 1 milestone but will also have presided over the first government since 1955 to have seen a fall in living standards across a full parliament.
Keir Starmer commits to play the caretaker role for Capitalism through the “hard times”.Keir Starmer confirms that he’s proud to be a red Tory continuing austerity and targeting poor and disabled scum.
dizzy: Despite being intended as satire, my satire is proving very prophetic, even correct. 26/3/25. That’s not correct is it? While satire was an intention, it’s clear that the intention of many instances was to project into the future.
Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves during a meeting at Downing Street in London with regulators. She is expected to use the meeting to announce more detail on how the Government will cut the cost of regulation by a quarter and set out plans to slim down or abolish regulators themselves, March 17, 2025
CHANCELLOR Rachel Reeves is set to announce a huge new programme of spending cuts as unemployment rises and anger at Labour’s assault on disability benefits mounts.
She will use her spring spending statement next week to unveil a fresh austerity programme as the government continues to rule out tax rises on the wealthy as an alternative.
Despair is turning to anger among backbench Labour MPs and trade unions at the government’s course, which is already seeing Labour plunge to record lows in the opinion polls.
Ms Reeves’s death-wish economics come as official statistics showed joblessness increasing, including among young workers.
Unemployment is up by 0.1 per cent, with a youth unemployment rate of 12.9 per cent.
Commenting on the figures, Public and Commercial Services union general secretary Fran Heathcote said: “The labour market figures today highlight the cruelty of the government’s reforms to disability benefits.
“Unemployment is rising, and the wider measure of underemployment is now at 4.75 million with only 816,000 vacancies in the economy — meaning there are already nearly six people chasing every vacancy.
“Those figures exclude disabled people currently deemed unable to work or with only limited capacity for work.
“The reality is that the government’s proposals will not help disabled people off of benefits and into work, but off benefits and into deeper poverty.”
Keir Starmer says pensioners can freeze to death and poor children can starve and be condemned to failure and misery all their lives.Keir Starmer explains the moral case for cutting disability benefits. He says work will set you free.
A woman walks into a Social Security office in Houston, Texas on July 13, 2022. (Photo: Mark Felix for The Washington Post via Getty Images)
“One has to ask why the world’s richest man—who has received in the tens of billions of dollars in federal contracts—is targeting the agency that helps so many Americans keep their heads above water,” said one advocate.
The Trump administration aims to “ultimately collapse the system” that allows tens of millions of Americans to collect their earned Social Security benefits each month, said one leading advocate for the system Wednesday after officials announced a major change to the Social Security Administration.
Acting SSA Commissioner Leland Dudek claimed the agency needs to “identity-proof” Social Security beneficiaries as he told reporters that millions of people will now be required to verify their identities using an online system—and will have to provide documentation at local field offices if they’re unable to use the SSA website’s verification system.
The change is set to take effect March 31 and comes as President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, his billionaire ally whom he named to lead the so-called Department of Government Efficiency( DOGE) with the aim of slashing government jobs and spending, have baselessly claimed that the Social Security system is riddled with fraud and sends benefits to millions of deceased Americans and to undocumented immigrants.
A source at the SSA told Judd Legum, author of the newsletter Popular Information, that there are “no significant concerns about fraud at intake” and said the change is aimed at creating “additional hurdles to filing claims and [overwhelming] the system.”
Max Richtman, president and CEO of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, noted that for decades, senior citizens and people with disabilities who rely on Social Security payments have been able to verify their identities over the phone when applying for benefits.
“The new process would force seniors and people with disabilities to navigate a needless technical hurdle in applying for their earned benefits. If these claimants (who do not always have computers or smartphones, reliable internet service, or the technical skills to complete the process online) cannot verify their identity online, they would have to call SSA via the already overburdened phone line to set up an appointment, and travel in person to an SSA field office,” said Richtman.
“The combination of fewer workers, fewer offices, and a massive increase in the demand for in-person services could sabotage the Social Security system.”
With DOGE pushing to cut 7,000 jobs within the SSA and close at least 47 regional and local field offices, the change would particularly harm the ability of people in rural areas, with mobility limitations, and with limited internet access to obtain their monthly benefits.
“The combination of fewer workers, fewer offices, and a massive increase in the demand for in-person services could sabotage the Social Security system,” said Legum, who reported on the SSA memo on Monday.
Doris Diaz, the SSA acting deputy commissioner for operations, is among those who have warned Dudek against forcing seniors to verify their identities online, saying the change would cause longer wait and processing times and would send an estimated 75,000-85,000 beneficiaries to increasingly understaffed field offices per week.
Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works, which works to counter right-wing claims about Social Security and lobbies to strengthen the system, told Common Dreams that “despite Leland Dudek’s claims, the only thing putting the American people’s personal Social Security data at risk is that Dudek turned it over to DOGE operatives.”
The new plan “will make it far harder for the American people to claim their earned benefits. It could even cause major delays, and ultimately collapse the system, by overwhelming the field offices,” said Altman.
“It is part of what appears to be an ongoing effort to cause Social Security to collapse,” she added.
Richtman said that the only “rational conclusion” regarding the coming change in SSA operations is that Trump and Musk want to “undermine public support for Social Security by rendering the SSA dysfunctional, so that the program can be squeezed for cash, cut, and privatized.”
“Intentionally erecting obstacles for the people who’ve earned these benefits (and who pay for SSA operations with every paycheck) betrays at the least an indifference—and more likely, an outright hostility—to the elderly, people with disabilities, their families, and survivors who rely on Social Security,” said Richtman. “One has to ask why the world’s richest man—who has received in the tens of billions of dollars in federal contracts—is targeting the agency that helps so many Americans keep their heads above water financially.”
Neo-Fascist Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
The DWP has launched an entirely bogus consultation on changes to personal independence payment (PIP) and universal credit (UC) by refusing to consult on almost everything that matters most to claimants.
It also proposes to freeze the LCWRA (health) element of UC and abolish the WCA.
Non-consultation
Yet the list of things that the DWP is refusing to consult on, meaning there are no questions about them in the online consultation, includes:
Scrapping the WCA
Creating a single assessment for PIP and the UC health element
Freezing the health element of UC until 2029/30
Only awarding PIP daily living if you get at least one descriptor scoring 4 or more points
Restarting WCA reassessments until the WCA is scrapped
(You can find a full list of the issues the DWP will and won’t be consulting on at Annex A of the Green Paper).
Leading questions
Instead of asking for feedback on these vital issues, the consultation asks questions that make the assumption that participants accept that people should lose their PIP:
2. What support do you think we could provide for those who will lose their Personal Independence Payment entitlement as a result of a new additional requirement to score at least 4 points on one daily living activity?
3. How could we improve the experience of the health and care system for people who are claiming Personal Independence Payment who would lose entitlement?
Keir Starmer explains that he feels no shame or guilt benefiting personally from gifts from the rich and powerful while insisting on policies of severe austerity.
