Monthly Archives: September 2010

Love is politically effective when it is expressed in just legislation

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The Independent  24th September 2010

Jesus answered a trick question
Dominic Lawson (“Pope Benedict, an apology”, 21 September) is wrong to suggest that Jesus declared the temporal and the spiritual worlds should be entirely separate.

His hostile opponents were told to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s because he had been asked the trick question, “Should we pay taxes to Caesar or not?” They hoped he would say no so they could arrest him. He disappointed them with an ambiguous answer.

Mathew 25.31 to the end spells out the need to express love, a spiritual experience and value, with action here and now. In the story he told of the sheep and the goats, the sheep were commended because “I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me”.

To love your neighbour as your self is a commandment, disobedience to which has uncomfortable consequences for the goats. Such a love is politically effective when it is expressed in just legislation. Unjust legislation is expensive, as we are now discovering. Papal encyclicals have said wise things about the failure of the free market to promote the common good.

The Rev Paul Nicolson, Chairman Zacchaeus 2000 Trust, London SW1

Apply the cuts across the board

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The Evening Standard 15 September 2010

DAVID Cameron and George Osborne should hold their nerve over the threatened wave of strikes — the sabrerattling from public sector unions shows they are on the right track.

Unions are naturally worried that their members will lose jobs or pay. But most public sector costs are in the workforce, and these must fall to make the public sector affordable again. In any case the coalition will only win political support if as well as making cuts its programme succeeds in changing the way public services work so they deliver as much (or more) while costing less.

Some of the loudest wails have come from the police but Britain has the most expensive law and order in the developed world as a share of GDP; no exception should be made here.

Speaking last week in London, Ruth Richardson, New Zealand’s reforming finance minister, described “the scourge of special interests who will argue for preserving the privilege of the few at the expense of the many”. Ministers have made a rod for their own backs by ring-fencing certain areas of spending — not just the NHS but child benefit, international aid and so on. How much easier and more truthful it would have been to argue savings must be made in every budget. Andrew Haldenby, director, Reform. I WATCHED the firebrands at the TUC calling for co-ordinated action against the cuts. What was telling was that the two principal union leaders urging this, Bob Crow and Mark Serwotka, have in recent times called strikes in which less than 50 per cent of their membership took part in the ballot, but officials insisted there was a legal mandate to strike because half of those who did vote backed strike action.

Surely, in the name of democracy this government should amend the law to stipulate that only where 50 per cent + 1 of a union’s entire membership votes in favour of industrial action is it legal.

This would stop an active minority in unions with an unrepresentative agenda from bullying the majority. Second, any vote that did approve a strike would carry real weight.

With strikes harder to achieve it might even make some union leaders more reasonable in their demands. Pete Dobson MATTHEW d’Ancona claims David Cameron’s cause of radical deficit reduction is just. This illusion will be shattered when bankers’ bonuses go through the roof while thousands of families and individuals have their roofs snatched from over their heads by courts imposing evictions because they cannot pay rent arrears caused by proposed housing benefit caps.

Very high rents came about through the deregulation of lending and of rent controls, which inevitably increased the payment of housing benefit in an under-supplied housing market. The 1979 government started this process and the 1997 government let it rip. In addressing these errors we should not be making the poorest households poorer but spreading the burden to those more able to carry the load.

Rev P Nicolson, Zacchaeus 2000 Trust.

Life on Benefits

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Sir, The Chancellor of the Exchequer speaks with spectacular vagueness about people who think it’s a lifestlye choice just to sit on out-of-work benefits and uses this as a justification for cutting welfare (report, Sept 10). Where are these people and how many of them are there?

Anecdotes of fraud are by no means typical of the vast majority of benefit claimants. The reality is that unemployment benefits for adults are so low and debt-ridden at £65.45 per week that people are debilitated by poverty and stress, and often in no condition to apply for work and stay there. The companies and Jobcentres required to help them into sustained employement are faced with many people who long for work but have been demolished by parsimonious adult welfare in this wealthy nation.

The Times, Saturday 11 September 2010
The Rev Paul Nicolson
Chairman
Zacchaeus 2000 Trust

Housing benefit cap – economic injustice and the disintegration of mixed communities

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by Rev Paul Nicolson, Zacchaeus 2000 Trust.

Delivered at the Defend Council House Lobby in Committee Room 7 at the Parliament at 1pm on 11 Oct 2010.

The decision to cap housing benefit is a spectacular example of economic injustice. It continues decades of the disintegration of economically mixed communities, and hits the poorest households below the belt – while protecting the speculators and landlords who profit from high rents and therefore high housing benefit.

I was a Parish priest in a beautiful village in the Chiltern Hills from 1982 to 1999. Most people have seen it on television, where it is called Dibley.  During that time, a combination of the sale of council houses and private speculation ended the mixed community of rich, middle class and poor. The right to buy led to the sale of council houses to sitting tenants for £25,000 they are now being sold on at around £250,000; the villagers’ rented cottages were bought by a speculator in the 1940s and sold off for a fortune every time a tenant died. You have to raise at least ££400,000 to live in Dibleyland now unless you are a servant, a farm labourer or a vicar in tied houses. Continue reading →

How can the poor fund their own salvation?

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Letters The Observer 5 September 2010
From the Rev Paul Nicolson

Two major facts have been missed in suggesting the poor should fund their own salvation. First, the lowest levels of income in unemployment or in work are already creating high levels of misery and debt, which lead to household mental and physical ill-health which, in turn, create massive costs to the taxpayer.

Second, there is no affordable rented accommodation in the private sector in which the highest housing benefits are paid; the Labour government, with the local housing allowance, and now the coalition, with housing benefit caps, have created more debt by forcing the poorest households to pay rent out of already inadequate income.

Meanwhile, confidence in welfare reformers is undermined by the immediate evictions in the county courts of powerless households unable to find legal aid due to the same obsession with cuts, rather than justice, which created their unpayable rent arrears.

What is happening to the poorest house-holds as a result of the cuts?

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Church Times. 3rd September 2010.
From the Revd Paul Nicolson

Sir, — The circumstances of a family we are helping might help your readers understand what is happening to the poorest house-holds as a result of the cuts.

A mother and father with four children were homeless, in the sense of having no settled accommodation for 2.5 years. They applied to Westminster for help in May 2009, and eventually were able to move into appropriate accommodation in April 2010, because of the help in arranging a deposit provided by Hackney Social Services. Westminster provided no help whatsoever, despite there being four relevant children to whom Westminster owed a duty under the Children Act.

The family has suffered appalling stress through living in overcrowded accommodation and because of the continuous and imminent threat of eviction when in temporary accom mo dation. The health, education, and behaviour of children is known to suffer when they come from overcrowded and insecure homes.

The father suffers from psoriasis, a condition aggravated by stress, and the mother has problems with her heart. These medical conditions were made known to Westminster, who took no notice.

Without our intervention, this family would have been on the streets. Their situation remains precarious, because they cannot afford the only accommodation they could find. The rent is £1800 per month, and the local housing allowance (LHA) for four bedrooms in that area is £1495, leaving them to pay £305 per month above their housing benefit; they are very worried about getting into arrears again, as the father is on a very low wage.

None of the rise in the price of houses or rents in London over the past 30 years is the responsibility of housing-benefit claimants, but they are being punished for the errors of the 1979 and 1997 governments in deregulating lending and abolishing rent control in a housing market in short supply; this forced rents and prices to explode, and allowed landlords and banks to profit from the means-tested housing benefit at the expense of the taxpayer. Some of the landlords we encounter live, and hold passports, in nations not particularly friendly towards the UK.

The LHA was introduced by the Labour government as a response to the £21-billion cost of housing benefit to the Treasury. Claimants are now required to pay the balance of rents above the arbitrary caps of LHA out of means-tested wages or unemployment benefits, all of which are below the Government’s poverty threshold, which will be increased by two per cent less in perpetuity, because increases will be related to the Consumer Price Index, not the Retail Price Index.

The coalition plans to abolish the LHA and limit housing benefit to £400 a week for a family and £250 for an individual. It is certain that there will be a public outcry when the misery of thousands of cases of eviction of vulnerable debtors start going through the county courts. It is estimated that 750,000 of the households will be affected in the UK, 4500 in Westminster.