The savings accounts and health in pregnancy grant bill had its first reading in the House of Lords on 23 November. The Speaker of the House of Commons ruled, after the third reading in the Commons, that it was a money bill. This means that out of the 21 cuts to the poverty incomes of welfare claimants proposed by the coalition, any amendments to the three of them proposed by the bill cannot be debated in the House of Lords. This approach could be used to prevent the Lords from discussing other money-related changes in legislation.

The bill has been strangled without thought to the consequences. Our greatest concern is that incomes that in all government and independent measures are substantially below the poverty line will suffer cuts – of which the health in pregnancy grant is one – without any assessment of the impact on the health of women of child-bearing age, their foetus or their offspring; or the cost of the consequential mental and physical ill health to the NHS or the economy at large.

The NHS has announced that mental illness already costs the economy £105bn a year, including days lost at work – far more than heart disease, cancer or obesity. The Government Office for Science has shown there is a relationship between debt and mental ill-health. Cutting poverty incomes creates the need to borrow, normally at high interest, for necessities like food and to pay bills like utilities. Claimants of welfare already owed the state £3bn last year due to errors by them and officials in the delivery of benefits.

Lord Bassam’s motion enabling amendments to the bill to be debated and decided in committee in the House of Lords should be supported by peers on Monday 29 November.

The Guardian, 27 November 2010 by Paul Nicolson, Chairman of Zacchaeus 2000 Trust

Polly Toynbee made the below comment in her column of the same date.

And how about this? The Speaker has just declared every bill with a cut in it as a “money bill”, and not eligible for Lords debate, amendment or vote. This week the bill cutting the child trust funds, health in pregnancy grant and the savings gateway for low-income families was deemed as a money bill-although the Lords voted on it when Labour originally introduced it.

As there is no appeal against a Speaker’s diktat, Labour is seeking to protect the right of the Lords to debate and scrunitse these bills that have deep social implications. If they can’t, no cuts stand a chance of scrutiny, and the second chamber becomes virtually redundant when cutting is the government’s business. For the first time, a coalition gives the government a majority in the Lords, yet Cameron is stacking in another 67 on their side. Those Lords resisted an elected chamber had better prove their vaunted independence by kicking up an almighty stink at being denied any voice in the main cuts legislation whizzing through Westminster.

The Guardian 19th October 2010

Simon Jenkins believes the government needs all the poor it can muster to defend the cause of cutting from the rich. (Cutting from the rich and clobbering the middle, Cameron looks like a lefty, 15 October). There are many poor people in the UK but, standing justice on its head, the government’s propaganda has thundered the message that they are exploiting the rich, so opening the way to cutting the welfare of the poorest.

Britain has the lowest adult unemployment benefits in western Europe at 40% of average earnings – others are around 60% to 70%. They are also half the UK poverty threshold and 40% of the Joseph Rowntree minimum income standard. Despite this deep poverty the coalition has moved the annual uprating from the more generous RPI to the meaner CPI. Even the RPI never kept up with the increase in prices of essentials such as food and fuel.

The effect of the move will reduce the buying power of jobseeker’s allowance/employment and support allowance of £65.45 a week, £51.85for under-25s, by about £1 a week per year if current inflationary trends remain unaltered. This is a cumulative £3bn taken
from the pockets of the poorest over the next 10 years assuming a steady claimant count of one million, without a thought to the existing misery”, poor maternal nutrition, poverty-related illness and educational under achievement, with their huge costs to the taxpayer.

Rev Paul Nicolson
Chairman, Zacchaeus 2000 Trust

The Times, October 15 2010

Justice has traditionally been about ensuring the powerful do not unreasonably exploit the weak.

Sir, Daniel Finkelstein’s discussion of fairness should hit reality when it has to be translated into laws that promote justice (“Why the Tories are now the party of fairness”, Opinion, Oct 13). Fairness is sprinkled liberally on the polices of all political parties but the issue for many voters is not about the politics of left or right, but whether Parliament has the capacity or the wisdom to turn policies into just laws.

In recent history a public sense of justice made Parliament overturn the closed shop, a law of the left, and the poll tax, a law of the right. Justice is about making judgments in the light of the evidence and has traditionally been about ensuring the powerful do not unreasonably exploit the weak.

The Rev Paul Nicolson
Chairman, Zacchaeus 2000 Trust

The Times, Saturday 2 October 2010

Sir, Camilla Cavendish is right to draw attention to the precedence given in the governmental policy-making to cutting costs over promoting justice. For years legal aid has been made inaccessible for vulnerable people. The shortage of solicitors who have a housing contract with the Legal Services Commission has resulted in many unrepresented evictions and far too much dependence by governments on voluntary unqualified advisers.

This injustice will be compounded in Westminster, where the rents of more than 4,000 tenants are higher than the £250-£400 a week housing benefit cap.

In any event, this benefit cannot be claimed without a means inquiry; which the arbitrary caps render pointless because they ignore the low incomes of the claimants.

Debt, court and bailiffs costs, eviction and misery are inevitable unless the rush to cuts is tempered with both economic and civil justice.

The Rev Paul Nicolson
Chairman, Zacchaeus 2000 Trust

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

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.

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.