UK welfare system is sexist, says UN official

BRITAIN’S welfare system is so sexist it may as well have been compiled by “a group of misogynists in a room”, a UN expert has claimed.

Philip Alston, the UN’S rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, made the pronouncement at briefing on his report into poverty in the UK, where he also described the Government’s decision to limit benefit payments to two children as “forced and physical” as China’s one-child policy.

The Government said it “completely disagreed” with his analysis, in which he calls poverty in the UK a “political choice” and states that compassion and concern had been “outsourced” in favour of tax cuts for the rich. It pointed out there are now one million fewer people living in absolute poverty compared with 2010.

Critics of the UN’S involvement in UK politics suggested that the organisation should spend its time and money studying poverty in Third World countries rather than the world’s fifth largest economy.

David Gordon, director of the Townsend Centre for International Poverty Research at the University of Bristol, said: “There’s an oddity to this, obviously. When you think of the special rapporteurs on extreme poverty and human rights, you expect them to be visiting sub-saharan Africa or Haiti. You don’t expect them to be visiting the UK.”

In 2013, the UN criticised the UK for changes to housing policy, nicknamed the bedroom tax, claiming it undermined the right to adequate housing.

Ministers at the time condemned the report as a “misleading Marxist diatribe” and made an official complaint to the UN, describing the intervention in British politics as a “disgrace”.

Mr Alston also angered President Donald Trump’s administration earlier this year after a similar inspection resulted in accusations that his White House was implementing “cruel policies”.

The Australian human rights lawyer insisted his UK report was an “important case study to better understand the implications of an austerity approach”.

At a briefing on his 24-page report in Westminster, he said he had found “a really remarkable gender dimension” to many of the reforms.

“If you got a group of misogynists together in a room and said ‘how can we make a system that works for men but not women?’ they wouldn’t have come up with too many other ideas than what’s in place,” he said.

He singled out Universal Credit for particular criticism, claiming it means that women are often not able to control the family income putting them at greater risk of domestic violence.

He alleged that when he put this to Esther Mcvey, who was Work and Pensions Secretary until she resigned over Brexit this week, she said that “90 per cent of people the UK have joint bank accounts anyway so what’s the problem?” Mr Alston claimed she added: “Well if they’re having problems, they should get counselling and if things are really bad, they should leave.”

A Government spokesman said: “With this Government’s changes, household incomes have never been higher, income inequality has fallen, the number of children living in workless households is at a record low.

“Universal Credit is supporting people into work faster, but we are listening to feedback and have made numerous improvements to the system including ensuring 2.4 million households will be up to £630 better off a year as a result of raising the work allowance.”

Mr Alston will report to the UN’S human rights council in June 2019.