Sunday Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Why can’t U.C. unfair credit rules, Esther?
Let’s say you’re earning £1,600 a month. Some paydays are earlier than others so they don’t fall on weekends or bank holidays. This might be cause for a small celebration.
But if next month you were only paid £1,342 you’d be outraged, right? Right. Yet that’s what’s happening with Universal Credit.
When paydays and claim assessment dates get out of sync the Child Poverty Action Group reckons one in 20 claimants can be up to £258 worse off. It’s because UC is so inflexible. And that’s why it needs urgent reform or abolition.
Here’s what happens. If your pay is early, DWP computers can wrongly record wages as paid twice that month so UC is cut accordingly.
The following month you won’t appear to be paid at all, so UC goes to full whack. Only it doesn’t because you crash into the benefit cap which stops you getting what’s due.
Yet of 1.1 million people now on UC, 37 per cent are in work. So they are not scroungers.
Households get an average £630 a month and nearly four million more will go on to UC from July next year. Even someone as dim as DWP boss Esther McVey must see this benefit is not fit for purpose.
Former PM Sir John Major suggests there might even be riots if it is not overhauled. You could fix this, Esther, by averaging earnings out over three months.
It is by no means the first time Tory benefit tinkering disproportionately messes up the lives of those who can least afford it.
Bedroom Tax is an ugly, austerity punishment beating for the worst off. Its stated aim was to force social housing tenants to downsize, doing this by docking housing benefit for unused bedrooms.
But it was doomed to failure because councils tend to build family-size homes.
In Hull, for example, 5,500 downsizers had only 70 suitably smaller properties to squeeze into.
Iain Duncan Smith had Esther’s job when this turkey was created and his brain was full of stuffing too.
I heard last week of a hostel for vulnerable 16 to 24-year-olds facing closure. They may be offered places miles away where they know no one and are frightened to go. Refusal means making themselves deliberately homeless and having benefits stopped.
One of them plans to turn to minor crime and go to prison for the roof it will put over his head and the chance to get a skill and some book learning. It makes sense, he says, because that’ll equip him for work.
How sad. How utterly and intolerably heartbreaking that a young man’s future hopes rest in the further education college he perceives to lie behind a prison gate.