Research shows many benefit claimants will need extensive help to get online, open bank accounts and manage budgets
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skills to use the government’s new universal credit welfare system is likely to cost hundreds of millions of pounds, unpublished research commissioned by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has found.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.
Only those in “purposeful” training or carrying out an “intensive” job search would be eligible for the allowance, under proposals being considered by the party
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.
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.
“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.”
John Sentamu calls for ‘more equitable, more caring world’ and questions effects of government’s welfare reforms
The 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.
The technology used by Britain’s spy agencies to conduct mass surveillance is “out of control”, raising fears about the erosion of civil liberties at a time of diminished trust in the intelligence services, according to the former Liberal Democrat leader Lord Ashdown.
The peer said it was time for a high-level inquiry to address fundamental questions about privacy in the 21st century, and railed against “lazy politicians” who frighten people into thinking “al-Qaida is about to jump out from behind every bush and therefore it is legitimate to forget about civil liberties”. “Well it isn’t,” he added.
Ashdown talks frequently to the deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, and is chair of the the Liberal Democrats‘ general election team. Though he said he was speaking for himself, his views are understood to be shared by other senior members of the Liberal Democrats in government, who are also keen for some kind of broad inquiry into the subject.
This idea is also supported by Sir David Omand, a former director of GCHQ. He told the Guardian he was in favour of an inquiry and thought it would be wrong to “dismiss the idea of a royal commission out of hand”. It was important to balance the need for the agencies to have powerful capabilities, and the necessity of ensuring they did not use them in a way parliament had not intended, Omand added.
Ashdown is the latest senior politician to demand a review of the powers of Britain’s intelligence agencies – GCHQ, MI5 and MI6 – and the laws and oversight which underpin their activities.
In an interview with the Guardian, Ashdown said surveillance should only be conducted against specific targets when there was evidence against them. Dragnet surveillance was unacceptable, he added.
Ashdown made clear revelations in the Guardian about GCHQ and its American counterpart, the National Security Agency, had raised important issues that “could not be ignored or swept aside in a barrage of insults”.
He also criticised the Labour party, which was in power when the agencies began testing and building many of their most powerful surveillance capabilities. Labour’s former home secretary Jack Straw was responsible for introducing the Regulation of Investigatory Power Act 2000 (Ripa), which made the programmes legal.
“Ripa was a disgraceful piece of legislation,” Ashdown said. “Nobody put any thought into it. Labour just took the words they were given by the intelligence agencies. I don’t blame the intelligence agencies.
…
Pantsdown continues in the article to discuss witnessing the steaming open of envelopes by spooks. In line with the full disclosure policy of this blog I can reveal that nowadays they use endescopes to read letters. The tell-tale sign is a small rip to the seal of the envelope at one end.
[19/11/13 The tell-tell sign of the use of an endescope will usually be on the right-hand side of the envelope’s seal and occasionally on the left-hand side. Why is that?
Cameron and the UK government are simply hugely censoring the internet. This measure will not affect paedophiles since they don’t use Google to search for paedophile material. Instead it will frustrate users legally searching for legitimate materials. It is quite simply huge censorship of the web. It will actually – and is quite possibly intended to – have the opposite effect of assisting internet paedophiles by posing difficulties to independent researchers.
It is a mistake to think that the internet is not already hugely censored. Do you think that search engines do not already censor paedophile and alternative political materials? This blog is hugely censored for political reasons: you won’t find this blog in a school or library. Try searching for some terms from this blog like “war of bullshit”. [Just realised that it works on Google]
There are not 100,000 paedophile search terms and paedophiles don’t use Google anyway. How can this be anything except a huge exercise in censorship?
If it is accepted that there simply is not 100,000 search terms related to paedophilia then what is going to be censored? There are elite paedophile rings protected by the UK authorities. Jimmy Savile and Cyril Smith were protected by UK authorities. I know of one paedo who was close to Tony Blair who is protected by UK authorities. When you censor the web, you are protecting these paedos.
Jim Gamble, former Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP) chief executive, said that while Mr Cameron’s influence has “accelerated” the process of getting the search engines to ban 100,000 search terms.
However he said it was the peer-to-peer networks that need to be targeted if the Government wants to track down paedophiles.
He said: “Very few paedophiles in my experience use Google.”
“At the end of the day a pop up message is not going to inform, educated or scare a paedophile they know what they do is wrong, that’s why they are secretive about it that’s why they hide in the peer to peer of the dark web where they cant be found.”
Confirmation that paedos do not use Google as I stated earlier in this post.
There is a confused use of terms. The dark web is a reference to Tor, which is not a peer-to-peer network (like BitTorrent).
The paedos are using Tor not peer-to-peer.
[19/11/13 This story seems to have died very suddenly – there are only a few mentions today of yesterday’s events.
… Cameron claimed the search queries targeted, which were drawn up by child protection experts, were “unambiguous,” but that seems quite frankly impossible. There are reportedly as many as 100,000 terms on the list—for comparison, the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionarycontains 231,100 entries. There seems a real risk, then, of the algorithm overreaching and preventing web users from accessing perfectly legal content. …
[like (conservative or tory or lord or rich or falconer or blair) and (paedo or paedophile or nonce),
“straw rendition torture”,
“dodgy dossier”,
“misled parliament”,
“public inquiry”,
“conservative broken promises”,
etc. ]
Join the IWF to see child porn. This achieves nothing – police and intelligence services already have access.
[20/11/13 To clarify this.
Tor works by routing encrypted requests through a circuit of relays. The circuits change often. The Tor exit node is at the other end to the user and is unencrypted to the requested resource (on the open web, not if the target resource is on a Tor hidden service e.g. illegal paedo porn). The Tor user cannot be identified unless she has made a mistake e.g. identifying herself through an email address or has been infected as Anonymous did.
The confusion that spooks, ex-spooks, prime ministers and news reporters are showing between the Tor anonymity network and peer-to-peer networks is due to two issues.
Prime Ministers and news reporters don’t understand it and are following the lead of spooks, ex-spooks and spooky advisors, and
At the network level i.e. where spooks are intercepting traffic, they can’t distinguish Tor from peer-to-peer traffic so to them it is the same. {Later edit: 2 is based on intuition. It should not be taken as a statement of fact or knowledge.} ]
Confusion between Tor and peer-to-peer continues. Pursuing peer-to-peer seems a wasted effort.
The Internet Watch Foundation does not at the moment pursue images and videos on so-called peer-to-peer networks because it lacks permission from the Home Office. But it was announced on Monday that the watchdog would begin a six-month pilot scheme in collaboration with Google, Microsoft and the Child Exploitation and Online Protection agency (Ceop), so that IWF can develop procedures to identify and blacklist links to child abuse material on P2P services.
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.
