City facing cliff edge
ARE COVID SCHEMES MASKING PROBLEMS?
NEWCASTLE could be hit with a “tidal wave of need” once emergency government support to help people through the Covid-19 pandemic ends.
Council bosses have warned that many of the city’s most vulnerable residents could be plunged into crisis as the furlough scheme closes, support for homeless people ends, and a suspension of evictions is lifted.
The two months from March to May showed a massive increase in the number of people claiming Universal Credit benefits in Newcastle, with 9,463 new claims compared to normal monthly increases in the low hundreds, according to a council report.
But deputy Newcastle City Council leader Joyce McCarty told a cabinet meeting on Monday that those stark figures were “just the tip of the iceberg” and that furlough was “hiding” the reality of many people’s problems.
The furlough scheme, in which the government has paid 80% of employees’ wages, will come to an end on October 31 and there are fears that there could be a massive spike in redundancies once the support is withdrawn.
Labour council leader Nick Forbes added that the Government could “dump a load of problems on our doorstep” if it fails to extend an emergency ban on evictions from private sector rented housing beyond August 23.
Coun Forbes said: “The report demonstrates that, sadly, the cracks for people to fall through in terms of the national welfare system are as wide as ever.
“Secondly, there is a huge amount of work going on at a local level to try to make sure that where people do fall through those cracks there is at least a local safety net to try to pick them up.
“But my worry, as is highlighted by this report, is that we are facing a number of cliff edges: a cliff edge around the ending of temporary homeless support; a cliff edge around the moratorium on evictions; and a cliff edge around the furlough scheme ending.
“It would be good to get some thoughts around what else we could do to lobby the Government to take these issues seriously so that we are not faced with a tidal wave of need in the next few months when all of these temporary schemes come to an end.”
The council says that 2,470 requests for help were made to its Citylife Line service between March 24 and May 31, with 1,070 of those being because residents could not pay for food.
The council delivered 800 emergency provision food parcels, while other people said they needed help paying higher bills because they were spending extra time at home during the lockdown – sometimes leaving them “forced to make the choice between heating and eating”.
Coun Nick Cott, the city’s Lib Dem opposition leader, said he was concerned about a potentially “extraordinary” volume of need in the city for months and years to come.
Coun McCarty responded that he suspected the council would struggle to meet that demand itself because of its limited resources, adding that there is “very, very clear evidence” of families living in poverty that the Government needed to be shown to help convince ministers to extend support.