Category Archives: Welfare Benefits

Will Hutton review on fair pay in public sector

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This submission is made on behalf of Citizens UK and London Citizens which among other things have been successfully campaigning for the London Living Wage since 2001 (download this article in PDF). See below for more information about these two charities.

  1. How to introduce a public sector pay multiple that would mean that no public sector manager can earn over 20 times more than the lowest paid person in their organisation.
  2. When meeting with organisations to request that they pay a Living Wage, we commonly encounter the argument that all in house staff are paid a Living Wage. Our case is usually based on the experience of staff who work in that organisation on a regular basis but have been contracted out. Typical jobs include cleaners, security guards and domestic staff such as cooks. No organisation is able to function without these jobs being done. Continue reading →

Reforming welfare – our response

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On the 5th June 2010, it was announced that Frank Field MP will lead an independent review - Review on Poverty and Life Chances, on poverty in the UK and what the Government can do to improve the lives of the least advantaged people in our society

On 30th July 2010, the 21st Centrury Welfare Paper was published. It sets out the plans of Iain Duncan Smith, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, to completely change the benefits system.

Below are our views, which is also available as a PDF for download Continue reading →

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 →

Our Response to the Welfare Reform Bill 2009

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In the Queen’s speech on 3 December 2008, it was mentioned

“A bill will be brought forward to reform the welfare system, to improve incentives for people to move from benefits into sustained employment and to provide greater support, choice and control for disabled people.”

Our response to the Government’s Welfare Reform Bill and White Paper

We support in principle the policy of helping the unemployed find work, which will lift them out of poverty and the introduction of a single organisation to be contacted by welfare applicants for all benefits; but the fully-evidenced inadequate levels of unemployment benefits and the failure of the national minimum wage to lift people out of poverty are ignore in the White Paper and in the Gregg and Freud reports, on which is is based. Continue reading →

A summary of our response to the Child Poverty Bill

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We fully support the aim of the Child Poverty Bill to reduce the number of children in poverty, which using the relative measure of assessing family income after payment of housing costs and taxation is currently 4 million and more.

Our main concerns about the Bill include:
- Enforceability of obligations
- Incorporation of well being principle
- Minimum income standards
- Measuring success

Read our proposed amendments to the Bill (PDF)

Continue reading →