Devastating.
Unjust. Unfair. Mean-spirited. The words used to describe governmental
policies accused of deepening levels of poverty in the UK by the UN Rapporteur
Professor Philip Alston.
In
a land where the laughable pantomime of Brexit has become the be all and end
all of political discourse, the basic well-being of families and their children
seems to be nothing more than an afterthought for this shameful government.
The charity Action for Children described the Universal Credit roll out as
responsible for creating ‘Dickensian levels of poverty.’
The
MP Frank Field, Chair of the Work and Pensions Committee said the scheme was
having ‘appalling human consequences.’
What
a disgrace that the fifth largest economy in the world has so many thousands of
vulnerable men, women and children living in destitution while a few others
rollick in luxury.
The
report should have provoked a howl of enraged protest from the leaders of our
Health, Education and Social Services and Universities. It should have provoked a national debate
about our moral impoverishment as citizens and professionals that we have
allowed this to happen. Instead there
has been silence from the towers of the Universities, from the offices of the
leaders of Children and Adults Social Work Services: (Please let us stop
calling these services-Social Care!)
There has been not a word from the British Medical Association or NHS
leaders. I have seen nothing from the
Labour Party with some exceptions, reflecting a serious consideration of
Professor Alstons Report and a resulting response.
It
is a national disgrace! That we have
allowed millions of children and their families to slip into the corrosive
cancer of poverty while we dance to Brexits crazy tunes.
The
country is reduced to moral penury by Austerity. But Austerity IS child abuse! Austerity requires impoverishment like a car
requires petrol. It is the political equivalent of a daily assault on material,
emotional and spiritual well-being.
Created
by an old Etonian boys political cabal.
An assault by the self-entitled toffery on the disempowered minority. A steadily growing minority now figuring in
millions of men, women and children, young and old. It is cruelty materialised into social policy.
Breast
beating however is no cure for such ills.
Please
let this be the end of the road for the Neoliberal plague. Despair is neither a plan nor an option. We
need to gather our collective strength, our skills, our communities to bring an
end once and for all to this monstrous vision.
While
acknowledging our generational failure to hold governments to account we must
find a means to collectively use this report as a template for radical
transformation of our welfare services and our society.
This
report is a map of the deforestation of our Welfare State. It reveals where we need to start replanting
the trees. Now!
I
make no apology for reproducing this important and, I hope, landmark, document
in full here.
Statement
on Visit to the United Kingdom, by Professor Philip Alston, United Nations
Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights London, 16 November
2018
Introduction:
The
UK is the world’s fifth largest economy, it contains many areas of immense
wealth, its capital is a leading centre of global finance, its entrepreneurs
are innovative and agile, and despite the current political turmoil, it has a
system of government that rightly remains the envy of much of the world. It
thus seems patently unjust and contrary to British values that so many people
are living in poverty. This is obvious to anyone who opens their eyes to see
the immense growth in foodbanks and the queues waiting outside them, the people
sleeping rough in the streets, the growth of homelessness, the sense of deep
despair that leads even the Government to appoint a Minister for suicide
prevention and civil society to report in depth on unheard of levels of
loneliness and isolation. And local authorities, especially in England, which
perform vital roles in providing a real social safety net have been gutted by a
series of government policies. Libraries have closed in record numbers,
community and youth centers have been shrunk and underfunded, public spaces and
buildings including parks and recreation centers have been sold off. While the
labour and housing markets provide the crucial backdrop, the focus of this
report is on the contribution made by social security and related
policies.
The
results? 14 million people, a
fifth of the population, live in poverty. Four million of these are more than 50% below the poverty
line,1 and 1.5 million are destitute, unable to afford basic essentials.
The
widely respected Institute for Fiscal Studies predicts a 7% rise in child poverty between 2015 and
2022, and various sources predict child poverty rates of as high as 40%.3
For
almost one in every two children to be poor in twenty-first century Britain is
not just a disgrace, but a social calamity and an economic disaster, all rolled
into one.
But
the full picture of low-income well-being in the UK cannot be captured by statistics
alone. Its manifestations are clear for all to see. The country’s most
respected charitable groups, its leading think tanks, its parliamentary
committees, independent authorities like the National Audit Office, and many
others, have all drawn attention to the dramatic decline in the fortunes of the
least well off in this country. But through it all, one actor has stubbornly
resisted seeing the situation for what it is. The Government has remained determinedly in a state of
denial. Even while devolved authorities in Scotland and Northern Ireland
are frantically trying to devise ways to ‘mitigate’, or in other words
counteract, at least the worst features of the Government’s benefits policy,
Ministers insisted to me that all is well and running according to plan. Some
tweaks to basic policy have reluctantly been made, but there has been a
determined resistance to change in response to the many problems which so many
people at all levels have brought to my attention. The good news is that many
of the problems could readily be solved if the Government were to acknowledge
the problems and consider some of the recommendations below. In my travels
across England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland I met with people living
in poverty, whether old, young, disabled, in work or not. I talked with civil
society, front line workers, work coaches, and officials from local, devolved,
and UK governments; and visited community organizations, social housing, a
Jobcentre, a food bank, an advice center, a library, and a primary school. I
also met a range of Ministers in the central government and in Wales, as well
as with the First Minister in Scotland. I spoke at length with politicians from
all of the major political parties. In the past two weeks I have talked with
people who depend on food banks and charities for their next meal, who are
sleeping on friends’ couches because they are homeless and don’t have a safe
place for their children to sleep, who have sold sex for money or shelter,
children who are growing up in poverty unsure of their future, young people who
feel gangs are the only way out of destitution, and people with disabilities
who are being told they need to go back to work or lose support, against their
doctor’s orders. I have also seen tremendous resilience, strength, and
generosity, with neighbors supporting one another, councils seeking creative
solutions, and charities stepping in to fill holes in government services. I
also heard stories of deeply compassionate work coaches and of a regional Job center
director who had transformed the ethos in the relevant offices.
Although
the provision of social security to those in need is a public service and a
vital anchor to prevent people being pulled into poverty, the policies put in
place since 2010 are usually discussed under the rubric of austerity. But this
framing leads the inquiry in the wrong direction. In the area of
poverty-related policy, the evidence points to the conclusion that the driving
force has not been economic but rather a commitment to achieving radical social
re-engineering. Successive governments have brought revolutionary change in
both the system for delivering minimum levels of fairness and social justice to
the British people, and especially in the values underpinning it. Key elements
of the post-war Beveridge social contract are being overturned. In the process,
some good outcomes have certainly been achieved, but great misery has also been
inflicted unnecessarily, especially on the working poor, on single mothers
struggling against mighty odds, on people with disabilities who are already
marginalized, and on millions of children who are being locked into a cycle of
poverty from which most will have great difficulty escaping. Most of the
political debate around social well-being in the UK has focused only on the
goals sought to be achieved. These goals are in many respects admirable, even
though some have been controversial. They include a commitment to place
employment at the heart of anti-poverty policy, a quest for greater efficiency
and cost savings, a determination to simplify an excessively complicated and
unwieldy benefits system, a desire to increase the uptake of benefits by those
entitled, removing the ‘welfare cliff’ that deterred beneficiaries from seeking
work, and a desire to provide more skills training.
But
Universal Credit and the other far-reaching changes to the role of government
in supporting people in distress are almost always ‘sold’ as being part of an
unavoidable program of fiscal ‘austerity’, needed to save the country from
bankruptcy. In fact, however, the reforms have almost certainly cost the
country far more than their proponents will admit. The many billions advertised
as having been extracted from the benefits system since 2010 have been offset
by the additional resources required to fund emergency services by families and
the community, by local government, by doctors and hospital accident and
emergency centres, and even by the ever shrinking and under-funded police
force.
Leaving
the economics of change to one side, it is the underlying values and the ethos
shaping the design and implementation of specific measures that have generated
the greatest problems. The government has made no secret of its determination
to change the value system to focus more on individual responsibility, to place
major limits on government support, and to pursue a single-minded, and some
have claimed simple-minded, focus on getting people into employment at all
costs. Many aspects of this program are legitimate matters for political
contestation, but it is the mentality that has informed many of the reforms
that has brought the most misery and wrought the most harm to the fabric of
British society. British
compassion for those who are suffering has been replaced by a punitive,
mean-spirited, and often callous approach apparently designed to instill
discipline where it is least useful, to impose a rigid order on the lives of
those least capable of coping with today’s world, and elevating the goal of
enforcing blind compliance over a genuine concern to improve the well-being of
those at the lowest levels of British society.
I
provide various examples later in this statement.
Brexit
My
report comes at a critical moment in the debate over Brexit. I take no position
on its merits or on the optimal terms for undertaking it, but anyone concerned
with poverty in the UK has reason to be very deeply concerned. Whatever happens
in the period ahead, we know that deep uncertainty will persist for a long
time, that economic growth rates are likely to take a strong hit, and that tax
revenues will fall significantly. If current policies towards low income
working people and others living in poverty are maintained in the face of these
developments, the poor will be substantially less well off than they already
are.
This
could well lead to significant public discontent, further division and even
instability, thus underscoring the importance that steps be taken now to avoid
such outcomes. There are many concerns linked to Brexit. Given the vast number
of policies, programs and spending priorities that will need to be addressed
over the next few years, and the major changes that will inevitably accompany
them, it is the most vulnerable and disadvantaged members of society who will
be least able to cope and will take the biggest hit. The IMF has suggested that a no-deal Brexit could
cost the UK economy somewhere between 5% and 8% of GDP, representing a loss of
thousands of pounds per household. In my meetings with the government, it was clear to me
that the impact of Brexit on people in poverty is an afterthought, to be dealt
with through manipulations of fiscal policy after the event, if at all.
But
Brexit will have serious consequences in this domain and the challenges need to
be dealt with head on.
A
lack of clarity is preventing families at risk of poverty from planning for its
impact. People feel their homes, jobs, and communities are at risk. Ironically,
it was these very fears and insecurity that contributed significantly to the
Brexit vote. The fall in the value of the pound has already increased the cost
of living for people in poverty by £400 pounds per year, and researchers have
estimated that the UK economy is already 2- 2.5% smaller than it would
otherwise have been. Almost all studies have shown that the UK economy will be
worse off because of Brexit, with consequences for inflation, real wages, and
consumer prices. According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, if the government
does not adequately uprate benefits to account for inflation after Brexit, up
to 900,000 more people could fall into poverty.
This
would strain a social support system that has been gutted in recent years. The
vote for Brexit reflects a great value being placed on the notion of
sovereignty. But while people in a democracy are entitled to prioritize
sovereignty through such a vote, it is imperative for steps to be taken to
protect the most vulnerable and to ensure that the further fiscal consolidation
measures called for by the Government and the International Monetary Fund
should not be achieved at the risk of making that group of people even worse
off.
The
UK stands to lose billions of pounds in EU funds that will disproportionately
affect the poorer areas that have most benefited from them, including almost £9
billion in poverty reduction funding between 2014 and 2020.
Although
the government has announced a “shared prosperity fund” to replace this
funding, local and devolved governments told me they had no information about
the fund or how it would operate—just five months before Brexit. Time is
running out.
Brexit
could also have particularly harsh consequences for people living in Northern
Ireland, with people living on the border and dependent on trade or
cross-border employment. If the European Charter of Fundamental Rights becomes
no longer applicable in the UK, the level of human rights protections enjoyed
by the population will be significantly diminished. The UK should not roll back
EU-derived human rights protections on workplace regulation and inequality.
Universal Credit
No
single program embodies the combination of the benefits reforms and the
promotion of austerity programs more than Universal Credit. Although in its
initial conception it represented a potentially major improvement in the system,
it is fast falling into Universal Discredit.
Social
support should be a route out of poverty, and Universal Credit should be a key
part of that process. Consolidating six different benefits into one makes good
sense, in principle. But many aspects of the design and rollout of the
programme have suggested that the Department for Work and Pensions is more
concerned with making economic savings and sending messages about lifestyles
than responding to the multiple needs of those living with a disability, job
loss, housing insecurity, illness, and the demands of parenting.
While
some surveys suggest certain claimants do have positive experiences with
Universal Credit, an increasing body of research makes clear that there are far
too many instances in which Universal Credit is being implemented in ways that
negatively impact many claimants’ mental health, finances, and work prospects.
In
addition to all of the negative publicity about Universal Credit in the UK
media and among politicians of all parties, I have heard countless stories from
people who told me of the severe hardships they have suffered under Universal
Credit. When asked about these problems, Government ministers were almost
entirely dismissive, blaming political opponents for wanting to sabotage their
work, or suggesting that the media didn’t really understand the system and that
Universal Credit was unfairly blamed for problems rooted in the old legacy
system of benefits. The
Universal Credit system is designed with a five week delay between when people
successfully file a claim and when they receive benefits. Research suggests
that this “waiting period,” which actually often takes up to 12 weeks,
pushes many who may already be in crisis into debt, rent arrears, and serious
hardship, requiring them to sacrifice food or heat.
Given
the delay, which will only be partially mitigated by a recent concession, it is
no surprise that the majority of claimants seek “advance payments,” which in
turn must be repaid to DWP in relatively short order. Additionally, debts to
DWP and to third-parties can be deducted from already meager Universal Credit
payments at a rate much higher than is the case with the older benefit system.
While supposedly deductions are capped at a maximum rate of 40% of the standard
allowance portion of the payment (which will change to 30% in a year’s time),
the Government told me that in fact additional clawbacks can occur. These
so-called "Last Resort Deductions" are for matters such as rent, gas,
and electricity arrears, if it is judged to be in the best interest of a
claimant or their household. The rationales offered for the delay are entirely
illusory, and the motivation strikes me as a combination of cost-saving,
enhanced cashflows, and wanting to make clear that being on benefits should
involve hardship. Instead, recipients are immediately plunged into further debt
and inevitably struggle mightily to survive. There are undoubtedly many people
who have benefited from the Universal Credit system, and many of the Jobcentre
staff play important roles in supporting and encouraging their clients. But
many claimants also feel that they are forced to jump through hoops for the
sake of it, fill out pointless job applications for positions that do not match
their qualifications, and take inappropriate low-paid, temporary work just to
avoid debilitating sanctions.
One
Conservative Party MP with whom I spoke criticized DWP for adopting a
military-style command and control approach rather than seeking to empower
their clients and instill confidence. The digital-by-default feature of
Universal Credit is highly controversial and a detailed assessment of this
aspect is found on page 7 below. When claimants contest assessments that they
consider to be wrong, there is a clear sense that the Orwellian named anonymous
‘decision-maker’ rarely varies the approach. Similarly the requirement that
before appealing a disability assessment to a tribunal a phase of mandatory
reconsideration must take place is considered by many observers to be little more
than a delaying tactic. One of the key features of Universal Credit involves
the imposition of draconian sanctions, even for infringements that seem minor.
Endless anecdotal evidence was presented to the Special Rapporteur to
illustrate the harsh and arbitrary nature of some of the sanctions, as well as
the devastating effects that resulted from being completely shut out of the
benefits system for weeks or months at a time. As the system grows older, some
penalties will soon be measured in years. Recent statistics indicate dramatic
fluctuations in sanctioning, perhaps reflecting different instructions from on
high. For unemployed people, between 6% and 8% are subjected to sanctions, and
31% of sanctions were for a period exceeding three months, and one in eight
were over six months.12 A
recent book characterized the sanctions as being cruel, inhuman and
degrading,13 and the Inquiry undertaken by the UN Committee on the Rights of
Persons with Disabilities found “evidence of grave and systematic violation of the
rights of persons with disabilities,” partly on the basis of the
sanctions regime. Many detailed studies have been undertaken which give
substance to the harsh consequences that ensue for vulnerable claimants who are
sanctioned.
Departmental
and Ministerial insistence notwithstanding, there is no clear evidence that
recent high employment rates in the UK are due to sanctions, or that blunt and
harsh sanctions are superior to far less harmful methods to encourage
compliance with conditionality. Indeed, a real deficiency in the data DWP
provides about sanctions makes it difficult to assess the regime. DWP does not
make public sanctions data disaggregated by race or ethnicity, much less
certain other claimant statuses such as single parents or carers. It is also
impossible to determine from the data the number of sanctions that an
individual has received, so it is not clear if the duration of sanctions is due
to consecutive sanctions or rather an individual sanction of longer duration. What
is clear from those with whom the Special Rapporteur has spoken, is that
sanctions succeed in instilling a fear and loathing of the system in many
claimants.
The
government says it is taking an experimental “test and learn” approach to
Universal Credit, but there seems to be an unacknowledged risk that this
approach could treat vulnerable people like guinea pigs and wreak havoc in real
peoples’ lives. “Test and learn” cannot be a decade-long excuse for failing to
properly design a system that is meant to guarantee the social security of so
many, and it does not remedy the damage done to those who were thrown into debt
or out of their houses, or made to rely on food banks before the improvements
kicked in. As I spoke with local authorities and the voluntary sector about their
preparations for the future rollout of Universal Credit, I was struck by how
much their mobilization resembled the sort of activity one might expect for an
impending natural disaster or health epidemic. They have expended significant
expense and energy to protect people from what is supposed to be a support
system. Scotland has repeatedly urged the Government to halt the rollout and
paid DWP for the introduction of certain flexibilities for claimants, such as
the ability to receive payments more frequently. This is a constant complaint,
and while some beneficiaries are happy with monthly payments, a great many
suffer as a result of the arrangement, and may end up visiting the food bank or
forgoing heating just to stretch a very small amount out over an entire month.
While cost has been cited by DWP as one justification for being inflexible and
unresponsive, vast amounts have already been expended on automating the system
and I am unaware of any precise costing estimate to justify the resistance to
implementing this reform.
A Digital Welfare State
Relatively
unnoticed amidst the turmoil of Brexit, the UK government announced the ‘total
transformation’ of government in 2017. The 2017 Government Transformation
Strategy was presented as “the most ambitious programme of change of any
government anywhere in the world.” 15 Not only will government services become
‘digital by default,’ as was first announced in 2012, but the inner workings of
government itself will be transformed in a push for automation aided by data
science and artificial intelligence. There are few places in government where
these developments are more tangible than in the benefit system. We are
witnessing the gradual disappearance of the postwar British welfare state
behind a webpage and an algorithm. In its place, a digital welfare state is
emerging. The impact on the human rights of the most vulnerable in the UK will
be immense. Universal Credit as a Digital by Default Service The UK government
made Universal Credit the first major government service that is ‘digital by
default.’ This means that an entitlement claim is made online and that the
beneficiary then interacts with authorities mainly through an online portal.
One wonders why some of the most vulnerable and those with poor digital
literacy had to go first in what amounts to a nationwide digital experiment.
From the outset, the belief within DWP has been that the overwhelming majority
of Universal Credit claimants are online and digitally skilled, and confident
enough to claim and maintain benefits digitally. Despite contrary indications
from some officials, the relevant documents show DWP’s assumption that most
people are at ease and competent online.
Overall
rollout of broadband internet in the UK may be high, but those figures hide the
fact that many poorer and more vulnerable household are effectively offline and
without digital skills. According to 2017 Ofcom figures, only 47% of those on
low income use broadband internet at home. Only 42% of those who are unemployed
and 43% of those on low income do their banking online.16 According to the
Lloyds Bank UK Consumer Digital Index 2018, 21% of the UK population do not
have five basic digital skills and 16% of the population is not able to fill out
an online application form.
Universal
Credit has built a digital barrier that effectively obstructs many individuals’
access to their entitlements. Women, older people, people who do not speak
English and the disabled are more likely to be unable to overcome this hurdle.
18 According to a 2017 Citizens Advice survey, 52% of its clients in ‘full
service’ Universal Credit areas found the online application process
difficult.19 According to DWP’s own survey from June 2018, only 54% of all
claimants were able to apply online independently, without assistance.20 As of
March of this year, only about one third of all Universal Credit claimants
could verify their identity online via GOV.UK Verify, a crucial step in the
application process.21 Again, despite official protestations to the contrary,
‘digital by default’ is really much closer to digital only. Since Universal
Credit was announced in 2010, DWP has always underlined that alternative routes
to this benefit needed to be “kept to a minimum.” 22 According to its own
figures, 95% of Universal Credit claims they receive are made online. DWP points
to the Universal Credit Helpline as an alternative route, but long waiting
times and call center staff who, according to civil society organizations, are
often poorly trained, make this a very frustrating alternative. Jobcentres,
many of which have been closed, offer online access, but very little digital
assistance is available and official policy is to keep ‘face-to-face’ help at a
minimum.
Only
in really exceptional cases will work coaches make a home visit to offer
digital support. The reality is that digital assistance has been outsourced to
public libraries and civil society organizations. Public libraries are on the
frontline of helping the digitally excluded and digitally illiterate who wish
to claim their right to Universal Credit.
While
library budgets have been severely cut across the country, they still have to
deal with an influx of Universal Credit claimants who arrive at the library,
often in a panic, to get help claiming benefits online.
In
Newcastle alone, the first city where ‘full service’ Universal Credit was
rolled out in May 2016, the City Library has digitally assisted nearly 2,000
customers between August 2017 and September 2018. Many claimants also rely on
digital help from benefits rights organizations and charities that are already
under pressure from a range of cuts and other demands. They currently receive
minimal funding from DWP to deliver Assisted Digital Support, which only covers
2 hours of help with the original application and is not nearly enough to cover
the demand for support. As of next year, Citizens Advice will be funded by DWP
as the sole provider of Assisted Digital Support, with a total budget of £39
million spread out over several years, which must also cover personal budgeting
support. Not only is this a small amount in light of the need, but it diverts
funding away from public libraries and other organizations which have set up
improvised digital support programs. Around one third of new Universal Credit
claims fail in the application process and never reach the payment stage. Many
of those cases may be related to the design of the DWP system.
I
am unaware of any effort by DWP to estimate the number of people who do not
even attempt to apply due to digital exclusion.
Automated Benefits
While
Universal Credit is a very visible example of digital transformation, an even
more significant digital change is happening within the walls of central and
local authorities. The merging of six legacy benefits into one new Universal
Credit system aimed at reaching millions of UK citizens is in fact a major automation project. The
collection of data via the online application process and interactions with the
online journal provide a clear stepping stone for further automation within
DWP. One example is the Real Time Information (RTI) system, which takes HMRC
data on earnings submitted by employers and shares it with DWP, which in turn
uses this data to automatically calculate monthly benefits. As DWP explained to
the Special Rapporteur, Universal Credit is only possible because of the
automated calculation of benefits via RTI. But with automation comes error at
scale. Various experts and civil society organizations pointed to problems with
the data feed, including through wrong or late information transmitted by
employers to HMRC. According to DWP, a team of 50 civil servants work full-time
on dealing with the 2% of the millions of monthly transactions that are
incorrect. Because the default position of DWP is to give the automated system
the benefit of the doubt, claimants often have to wait for weeks to get paid
the proper amount, even when they have written proof that the system was wrong.
An
old-fashioned pay slip is deemed irrelevant when the information on the
computer is different. Another area of major transformation is that of
automated fraud and error detection and prevention. Serious investments have
been made by DWP to undertake data matching to identify fraud and error in the
context of the Generalised Matching Service. Over the years, millions of
inconsistency matches have led to further investigations for fraud and error.26
At the local level, DWP has subsidized ‘risk-based verification systems’,
mostly built by private IT vendors, which flag claimants for low, medium or
high risk of fraud and error, thus allowing local authorities to investigate
high risk cases more closely.27At present, DWP is developing a “fully automated
risk analysis and intelligence system for fraud and error,” 28 which will go
beyond automatically finding inconsistencies between different databases and
aims to prevent fraud and error by using new tools including Artificial
Intelligence. An Artificial Future? Artificial Intelligence is very much in
fashion and there are many related initiatives in the UK. The Prime Minister
aims to “propel Britain to global leadership of the industries of the future”
including through the use of big data and artificial intelligence, and one of
the ‘Grand Challenges’ of the November 2017 Industrial Strategy is to put the
UK “at the forefront of the AI and data revolution.” The House of Lords will
debate a recent report on Artificial Intelligence on Monday,29 and new
institutions such as the AI Council, the government Office for AI and the
Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation are being set up. Government is
increasingly automating itself with the use of data and new technology tools,
including AI. Evidence shows that the human rights of the poorest and most
vulnerable are especially at risk in such contexts.
A
major issue with the development of new technologies by the UK government is a
lack of transparency.
The
existence, purpose and basic functioning of these automated government systems
remains a mystery in many cases, fueling misconceptions and anxiety about them.
Advocacy organizations and media must rely on Freedom of Information requests
to clarify the scope of automated systems used by government, but such requests
often fail. Central and local government departments typically claim that
revealing more information on automation projects would prejudice its
commercial interests or those of the IT consultancies it contracts to, would
breach intellectual property protections, or would allow individuals to ‘game
the system.’ But it is clear that more
public knowledge about the development and operation of automated systems is
necessary.
The
segmentation of claimants into low, medium and high risk in the benefit system
is already happening in contexts such as ‘Risk-based verification.’
Those
flagged as ‘higher risk’ are the subject of more intense scrutiny and
investigation, often without even being aware of this fact. The presumption of
innocence is turned on its head when everyone applying for a benefit is
screened for potential wrongdoing in a system of total surveillance. And in the absence of transparency
about the existence and workings of automated systems, the rights to contest an
adverse decision, and to seek a meaningful remedy, are illusory. There is
nothing inherent in Artificial Intelligence and other technologies that enable
automation that threatens human rights and the rule of law.
The
reality is that governments simply seek to operationalize their political
preferences through technology; the outcomes may be good or bad. But without
more transparency about the development and use of automated systems, it is
impossible to make such an assessment. And by excluding citizens from
decision-making in this area we may set the stage for a future based on an
artificial democracy. Transparency about the existence, purpose, and use of new
technologies in government and participation of the public in these debates
will go a long way toward demystifying technology and clarifying distributive
impacts. New technologies certainly have great potential to do good. But more
knowledge may also lead to more realism about the limits of technology. A machine
learning system may be able to beat a human at chess, but it may be less adept
at solving complicated social ills such as poverty. The new institutions
currently being set up by the UK government in the area of big data and AI
focus heavily on ethics. While their establishment is certainly a positive
development, we should not lose sight of the limits of an ethics frame. Ethical
concepts such as fairness are without agreed upon definitions, unlike human
rights which are law. Government use of automation, with its potential to
severely restrict the rights of individuals, needs to be bound by the rule of
law and not just an ethical code.
While
the overall innovation agenda may point in the direction of light-touch
regulation and ethics, the Special Rapporteur would argue for a strengthening
of the existing legal framework and its enforcement by regulators such as the
Information Commissioner’s Office. While the EU General Data Protection
Regulation includes promising provisions related to automated decisionmaking37
and Data Protection Impact Assessments, it is worrying that the Data Protection
Act 2018 creates a quite significant loophole to the GDPR for government data
use and sharing in the context of the Framework for Data Processing by
Government.
The Dismantling of the Broader Social
Safety Net
Before
describing the ways in which the overall social safety net is being
systematically dismantled, it is important to acknowledge some of the positive
developments of which I was informed by the Government. The latest budget
introduced several positive changes to Universal Credit, including a welcome
increase in work allowances, as a consequence of which an estimated 2.4 million
households will be better off next year to the tune of £630.39
The
Joseph Rowntree Foundation estimates that 200,000 people will move out of poverty
as a result of this change. By the same token, such improvements will be partly
offset by the continuing freeze on benefits combined with the effect of
inflation. The government has also taken steps to prioritize important social
care issues through the launch of the government’s first loneliness strategy
and the appointment of a Minister for suicide prevention. There are many ways
in which the overall safety net has been reduced since 2010, but this section
focuses specifically on the effects of the benefit freeze and cap, the
reduction of legal aid, the reduced funding of local authorities, and resulting
cuts in other specific services. (i) Benefit reductions and limits Significant
reductions in the amount of and eligibility for important forms of support have
undermined the capacity of benefits to loosen the grip of poverty. Capping
benefit amounts to working-age households, limiting support to two children per
family, reducing the Housing Benefit for under-occupied social housing, and
reducing the value of a wide range of benefits, have all made it much harder
for people to make ends meet. While the Government has commendably sought to
protect the pension entitlements of older people, especially by introducing in
2010 a ‘triple lock’ to ensure that annual pension levels rise in accordance
with whichever is highest among the rate of inflation, average earnings, or
2.5%. This helped to reduce poverty among pensioners, although the recent
picture is less positive.
But
the triple lock contrasts dramatically with the freeze on benefit rates for
working age people since 2016. Poor households typically spend a higher
proportion of their income on consumer goods than wealthy households and already
often struggle to put food on the table after bills are paid. Despite this, the
Government froze benefit rates in 2016, thus enabling continuing inflation to
systematically reduce the value of the benefits. Poor families have thus had to
do more with less as the prices of goods has gone up and the value of their
income has declined. Households are expected to have to cope with a reduction
of £4.4 billion in 2019/20 alone.
This
year, when the Chancellor could have used the windfall he received from the Office
for Budget Responsibility to end the benefit freeze a year earlier than
planned, he instead chose to change income tax thresholds in a way that will
help those better off and will do nothing to move the needle on poverty.
Legal aid
There
have been dramatic reductions in the availability of legal aid in England and
Wales since 2012 and these have overwhelmingly affected the poor and people
with disabilities, many of whom cannot otherwise afford to challenge benefit
denials or reductions and are thus effectively deprived of their human right to
a remedy. The LASPO Act (Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act)
gutted the scope of cases that are handled, ratcheted up the level of
means-tested eligibility criteria, and substituted telephonic for many
previously face-to-face advice services.
Local authorities’ cuts
In
2010, the Government pledged to radically reform public services by cutting
funding to local authorities in England. This has had tremendous implications
for local authorities, which are obligated to balance their books and whose
revenue raising powers are limited. According to the National Audit Office,
local governments in England have seen a 49% real-terms reduction in Government
funding from 2010-11 to 2017-18 alongside a rise in demand for key social
services. As a result, they have transferred a greater share of service costs
to users who are often the least able to pay. They have cut spending on
services by 19% and focused their spending on statutorily mandatory adult
social care and child protection services.43 The leader of one city council
told me local governments have cut preventative, proactive services and then
had to cope with a rise in crisis intervention– which can in fact be much more
costly than preventative services. More than 500 children’s centers closed
between 2010 and 2018,44 and between 2010 and 2016 more than 340 libraries
closed and 8,000 library jobs were lost.
Anyone can rely on public services like the library, but they are of
particular significance to those living in poverty who may need to access a
computer or a safe community space.
I
spoke with a group of young people from London who made it clear how valuable a
community center is as a safe space in a crowded city where people are squeezed
by an immensely challenging housing market, and where being stuck out on the
street could lead to crime and gang life. Local welfare funds, a vital resource
for people on the brink of crisis, have been another casualty of austerity.
Many local governments in England have closed or cut their Local Welfare
Assistance Schemes, leaving vulnerable people and those facing emergencies
without anywhere to turn. At least 28 authorities have shuttered their local
welfare funds and councils reported reducing their related expenditures by
72.5% between 2013 and 2018.46 From 2015 to 2018, the proportion of destitute
people who reported receiving in-kind help from local welfare funds dropped
sharply by 28%.47 The collapse of this resource for people who face sudden hardship
has apparently been of no concern to the government, which decentralized
responsibility for the funds and does not collect any information on what has
become of them. Local governments are even struggling with the basic services
they are statutorily obligated to provide.
Northamptonshire County Council has
twice this year issued a formal notice indicating that it was at risk of
unlawfully spending more than the resources it has available.
As a result there are concerns that hundreds of vulnerable children are at
greater risk of harm due to rapidly deteriorating frontline child protection services.
In
March 2018 the National Audit Office criticized the lack of ongoing,
coordinated monitoring of the impact of funding cuts on local authority
services and raised the alarm that statutory services are at risk.
The
government plans to update its funding methodology for local governments from
2020-21, and in December 2017 it launched a formal consultation on the matter
-- the Fair Funding
Review. Many people with whom I spoke from local and central government
expressed concern that this review could lead to even more negative policies
affecting people living in poverty.
Cuts in other services
As
I toured the country, I was told time and again about important public services
being pared down, the loss of institutions that would have previously protected
vulnerable people, services that are at a breaking point, and local government
and devolved administrations stretched far too thin.
Cuts
are being made without either measuring or accounting for their broader impact,
such as increasing the need for crisis support and mental health services.
People are being pushed toward much more expensive services that can’t turn
them away, like accident and emergency rooms. Other parts of the government are
now starting to feel the excessive resulting burden. And cuts that pare back
the government’s ability to tackle poverty don’t even make economic sense. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation
has estimated that poverty is costing the UK £78 billion per year in measures
to reduce or alleviate poverty—not counting the cost of benefits. £1 in every
£5 spent on public services is making up for the way that poverty has damaged
people’s lives.
The
voluntary sector has done an admirable job of picking up the slack for those
government functions that have been cut or de facto outsourced. One pastor told
me that because the government has cut services to the bone, his church is
providing meals paid for by church members. But that work is not an adequate
substitute for the government’s obligations. Food banks cannot step in to do
the government’s job, and teachers—who very well may be relying on food banks
themselves—shouldn’t be responsible for ensuring their students have clean
clothes and food to eat. By emphasizing work as a panacea for poverty against
all evidence and dismantling the community support, benefits, and public
services on which so many rely, the government has created a highly combustible
situation that will have dire consequences. As one city council leader told us,
“If there is another recession, our capacity to react to it has been completely
cut.” Government officials dismissed such concerns and claimed that Universal
Credit would work equally well when a future recession brings high levels of
unemployment.
Measuring and Monitoring Poverty
It
became clear from my many meetings and encounters in the UK that people want to
work, and are taking hard, low paying, and insecure jobs in order to put food
on the table. They want to contribute to their society and communities, support
their families, live in safe, affordable housing, and take control over their
lives. A just and compassionate UK can ensure these people are able to escape
the restrictions of poverty. But a social safety net is not just for people
already in poverty. It is equally important for a very large number of people
whose margin of error is small and for whom a single crisis can lead to disaster.
Many of the people I heard from ended up struggling to overcome financial
hardship because of a surprise health condition, a divorce, or a child’s
disability. More and more working people are trapped in poverty by a rising
tide of low pay, debt, and high living costs, and a majority of the UK
population will use some form of benefits over an 18-year period.51 In other
words, a majority of the British people have a personal stake in the welfare
system functioning effectively. To address poverty systematically and
effectively it is essential to know its extent and character. Yet the United
Kingdom does not have an official measure of poverty. It produces four
different measures of people who live on “below average income.”
This
allows it to pick and choose which numbers to use and to claim that “absolute
poverty” is falling. Seen
in context, however, other measures show that progress in reducing poverty has
flat lined, child poverty is rising, and poverty is projected to rise in the
coming years.
The
bipartisan Social Metrics Commission’s New Poverty Measure represents an
attempt to create a single comprehensive measure of poverty, and these are the
numbers I reference here unless otherwise noted. I would urge the Government to
respond to the Commission and adopt its approach, which has received an
impressive degree of cross-party support. The government told me that there are
3.3 million more people in work than in 2010, that so called “absolute poverty”
is falling, and that the social support system is working. An elected official
added that there is no extreme poverty in the UK and nothing like the levels of
destitution seen in other countries. But there is a striking and almost complete disconnect between what I
heard from the government and what I consistently heard from many people
directly, across the country. People I spoke with told me they have to choose
between eating and heating their homes, or eating and feeding their children.
One person said, “I would rather feed my kids than pay my rent, but that could
get us all kicked out.” Children are showing up at school with empty stomachs,
and schools are collecting food on an ad hoc basis and sending it home because
teachers know that their students will otherwise go hungry. Many
families are living paycheck to paycheck. And 2.5 million people in the UK
survive with incomes no more than 10% above the poverty line. They are thus
just one crisis away from of falling into poverty through no fault of their
own.
In
Jaywick, Erin described how she and her husband used to work full time and had
a savings account, but one crisis changed her life. “I needed full time care,
and my husband had to leave his job,” she said. “Suddenly we were living on
disability. Then our landlord gave us eight weeks to vacate the apartment. We
discovered that no one will let you view a house when you’re on disability
benefits…. I do not know where I’ll be putting my child to bed soon. Should he
be made homeless?”
Cuts
to social support, preventative services, and local councils mean that when
people need help, there are fewer resources to support them, causing them to
rely on charities and crisis services. One front line worker told me that they
are referring people to food banks because “people have exhausted the possibility
of borrowing from their families and friends, defaulted on their loans, and
have nowhere else to go.” I also heard story after story from people who
considered and even attempted suicide, and spoke with multiple organizations
that have instituted suicide prevention training for frontline staff in recent
years. One person said, “The cumulative impact of successive cuts has been
devastating.
Not
only does the government not measure food poverty, but a Minister dismissed the significance of foodbank
use as being only occasional and noted that foodbanks exist in many other
western countries. The clear implication was that their rapid growth in the UK
should not be seen as cause for concern, let alone for government action.
Employment
as the Cure-All for Poverty The government says work is the solution to poverty
and points to record employment rates as evidence that the country is going in
the right direction. But
being in employment does not magically overcome poverty. In-work poverty
is increasingly common and almost 60% of those in poverty in the UK are in
families where someone works.58 There are 2.8 million people living in poverty
in families where all adults work full time.59 Families with two parents
working full time at the national minimum wage are still 11% short of the
income needed to raise a child. 60 One person told me “I know people who are
working five jobs to make the national minimum wage, which isn’t a living
wage.” Low wages, insecure jobs, and zero hour contracts mean that even at
record unemployment there are still 14 million people in poverty. Government
Ministers emphasized that only 3% of the workforce on zero hours contracts,
with no benefits or security. But that amounts to almost one million workers,
and a great many of them will be among the most vulnerable members of society.
And the Equalities and Human Rights Commission found that 10% of workers over
16 are in insecure employment.61 Jobs aren’t even a guarantee against people
needing food banks. The Trussell Trust told me that one in six people referred
to their food banks is in work. One pastor said “The majority of people using
our food bank are in work…. Nurses and teachers are accessing food banks.”
The Hardest Hit
The
costs of austerity have fallen disproportionately upon the poor, women, racial
and ethnic minorities, children, single parents, and people with disabilities.
The changes to taxes and benefits since 2010 have been highly regressive, and
the policies have taken the highest toll on those least able to bear it. The government
says everyone’s hard work has paid off, but according to the Equalities and
Human Rights Commission, while the bottom 20% of earners will have lost on
average 10% of their income by 2021/22 as a result of these changes, top
earners have actually come out ahead. According to 2017 research by the
Runnymede Trust and Women’s Budget Group, as a result of changes to taxes,
benefits, and public spending from 2010 through 2020, Black and Asian
households in the lowest fifth of incomes will experience largest average drop
in living standards, about 20%.62
Women
Women
are particularly affected by poverty. Reductions in social care services
translate to an increased burden on primary caregivers who are
disproportionately women. Under Universal Credit, single payments to an entire
household may entrench problematic and often gendered dynamics within a couple,
including by giving control of the payments to a financially or physically
abusive partner.
Changes
to the support for single parents also disproportionately affect women, who
make up about 90% of single parents, and
as of August of this year, two thirds of Universal Credit recipients who had
their benefits capped were single parents.
Single
pensioners are also driving the uptick in pensioner poverty, and are
significantly more likely to be women.
Children
Many
of the recent changes to social support in the UK have a disparate impact on
children, including the deeply problematic two child policy, the outrageous
rape exception, and the benefits cap. The Equality and Human Rights Commission forecasts that
another 1.5 million more children will fall into poverty between 2010 and
2021/22 as a result of the changes to benefits and taxes, a 10% increase from
31% to 41%.66
Sanctions
against parents can have unintended consequences on their children. According
to the Social Metrics Commission, almost a third of children in the UK live in
poverty.
After
years of progress, child poverty is rising again, and expected to continue
increasing sharply in the coming years.
According to Child Poverty Action Group, the
child benefit will have lost 23% of its real value between 2010 and 2020, due
to sub-inflationary uprating and the current freeze. And low paid jobs and
stagnant wages have a direct effect on children, with families where two adults
earn the minimum wage still falling short of the adequate income needed to
raise a child.
Because
of changes to benefits and taxes, the Equality and Human Rights Commission
projects the poverty rate for children in single parent households to jump to a shocking 62% by
2021/22.70
People with disabilities
Nearly
half of those in poverty, 6.9 million people, are from families in which
someone has a disability.
People
with disabilities are more likely to be in poverty, and are more likely to be
unemployed, in insecure employment, or economically inactive.
They
have also been some of the hardest hit from austerity measures. As a
result of changes to benefits and taxes since 2010, some families with
disabilities are projected to lose £11,000 on average by 2021/22, more than 30%
of their annual net income.
People
with disabilities told me again and again about benefits assessments that were
superficial and dismissive, and that led to findings that contradicted the advice
of their doctor.
Pensioners
Despite
the protections offered by the triple lock, pensioner poverty has begun to rise
after decades of decline. Between
2012/13 and 2016/17, the number of pensioners living in poverty rose by
300,000.
As
was made clear to me in a number of submissions and through powerful personal
testimony, a group of women born in the 1950s have been particularly impacted
by an abrupt and poorly phased in change in the state pension age from 60 to
66. The impact of the changes to pensionable age is such as to severely
penalize those who happen to be on the cusp of retirement and who had
well-founded expectations of entering the next phase of their lives, rather
than being plunged back into a workforce for which many of them were
ill-prepared and to which they could not reasonably have been expected to adjust
with no notice.
Asylum seekers and migrants
Destitution
is built into the asylum system. Asylum seekers are banned from working and
limited to a derisory level of support that guarantees they will live in
poverty. The government promotes work as the solution to poverty, yet refuses
to allow this particular group to work. While asylum seekers receive some basic
supports such as housing, they are left to make do with an inadequate,
poverty-level income of around £5 a day.
For
those who have no recourse to public funds as a result of their immigration
status, the situation can be particularly difficult; such individuals face an
increased risk of exploitation and enjoy restricted access to educational
opportunities.
Rural poverty
Despite
the idyllic traditional image of the English countryside, poverty in rural
areas is particularly harsh. Rural dwellers are particularly impacted by cuts
to transportation and public services, are at a higher risk of loneliness and
isolation, and often face higher fuel costs. An organization working on rural
poverty that I met with in Bristol told me, “If you’re poor in the countryside
it’s twice as bad, because you don’t have access to services. People can’t
afford the bus and the bus doesn’t go where you need it to anyways.” Without
adequate access to transportation, people can’t get to work even when they are
able to get a job. One person told me that it was easier for her to go to find
a job by going to another city and staying with friends there than it would
have been to find a job at home without public transportation. And with the
government’s new dependence on digital-by-default benefits applications, lack
of broadband internet or access to libraries are particularly painful.
Government officials assured me that anyone can walk off the street and get
support to make an online claim for benefits, but that’s simply not the case
for people living outside major cities. Devolved Administrations Devolved
administrations have tried to mitigate the worst impacts of austerity, despite
experiencing significant reductions in block grant funding and constitutional
limits on their ability to raise revenue. Scotland and Northern Ireland each
report spending about £125 million per year to protect people from the worst
impacts of austerity. And unlike England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales
have continued to provide access to welfare funds for emergency hardships. But
mitigation comes at a price and is not sustainable. The Scottish government has
urged the UK to put an end to the benefit freeze and the two child limit on
certain benefits, and told me that they have reached the limit of what they can
afford to mitigate, because every pound spent on off-setting cuts means taking
away from other vital services.
Northern Ireland’s mitigation package
runs out in 2020, leaving vulnerable people facing a “cliff edge scenario.”
But more broadly, it is outrageous that devolved administrations need to spend
resources to shield people from government policies.
Scotland
Scotland,
despite having the lowest poverty rates in the United Kingdom,76 has the lowest
life expectancy77 and the highest suicide rate in Great Britain. In the North
East, where, according to one local councillor, 48% of people are out of work,
life expectancy is six years lower than the national average, about half of
families are single-parent households, and about a third of households lack an
internet connection. However, Scotland has recently put in place schemes for
addressing poverty, including its Fairer Scotland Action Plan and Tackling
Child Poverty Delivery Plan. It has also used newly devolved powers to
establish a promising social security system guided by the principles of
dignity and social security as a human right, and co-designed on the basis of
evidence. The system
eschews sanctions entirely and, in contrast to Universal Credit, is decidedly
not digital by default. Rather, the stated goal it to make benefits equally
accessible however people want to access them. It is too soon to say if these
ambitious steps—and Scotland’s new powers of taxation—will make a difference
for poverty, health outcomes, and life expectancy in Scotland. However, it is
clear to me that there is still a real accountability gap which should be
addressed. The absence of a legal remedy or a more robust reference to
international standards in the Social Security (Scotland) Act is significant
and should be addressed. I will be following closely the forthcoming
recommendations from the First Minister’s Advisory Group on Human Rights.
Civil
society groups also raised concerns about a general lack of awareness of local
welfare funds for people in crisis and the considerable variation in how local
authorities process applications for these emergency grants; in Glasgow only 3%
of local welfare fund applications were decided in a day, whereas other
councils managed to decide these claims within a day 99% of the time.
Wales
Wales
faces the highest relative poverty rate in the United Kingdom, with almost one
in four people living in relative income poverty.80 Like the rest of the United
Kingdom, employment has not proven to be an automatic route out of poverty in
Wales. In-work poverty has grown over the last decade, despite considerable
improvement in the employment rate.81 Twenty-five percent of jobs pay below the
minimum wage,82 and low-paid, part-time or insecure jobs are often
disproportionately taken up by women, due to difficulties in balancing work and
caring responsibilities.83 difficult because different countries, even within
the UK, use different definitions and methodologies to define and measure
suicide.
Faced
with these challenges, the Welsh Government has determinedly shifted its focus
to increasing economic prosperity and employment as the gateway to poverty
reduction. A poverty specific action plan and the post of the Minister for
Communities and Tackling Poverty were scrapped in 2017, in favour of adopting a
“whole Government” approach to poverty reduction. The new Prosperity for All
Strategy, however, has removed the strategic focus on and the Ministerial
responsibility for poverty reduction, and lacks clear performance targets and
indicators to measure progress and impact. In the absence of devolved power
over social security benefits, the Welsh Government’s capacity to directly
mitigate the reduction in benefits is limited, thereby shifting the burden to
low-income households. There is a wide consensus among stakeholders that the
benefit changes are one of the structural causes behind the increase in
poverty, rough sleeping, and homelessness in Wales.84 Parliamentarians and
civil society voiced serious concerns that Universal Credit may exacerbate the
problem, particularly in light of the Welsh Government’s inability to introduce
flexibilities in its administration, unlike its Scottish counterpart.
Northern Ireland
In
Northern Ireland, the lack of a government forecloses the possibility of any
major efforts to tackle poverty and results in an accountability vacuum. Like
Scotland, Northern Ireland has taken steps to mitigate some of the worst
effects of austerity measures, and is taking a different and seemingly more
humane approach to certain aspects of Universal Credit. But a £500 million
mitigation package is set to run out in 2020, and its expiration could have
dire consequences for people living in poverty. According to the government, rates of long term
unemployment are more than twice those of the UK as a whole. In Belfast,
I was struck by the extent to which communities in the city are still
segregated by physical barriers and I was concerned to learn about persistent
inequalities along religious lines. A startling 69% of those long-term unemployed are Catholic, compared
with 31% Protestant as of 2016.
People
in Belfast told me that the government was not building sufficient social
housing in predominantly Catholic areas, and Northern Ireland’s Equality
Commission found that Catholics experience longest wait times for social housing
among all religious groups.
Conclusion
The
experience of the United Kingdom, especially since 2010, underscores the
conclusion that poverty is a political choice. Austerity could easily have
spared the poor, if the political will had existed to do so. Resources were
available to the Treasury at the last budget that could have transformed the
situation of millions of people living in poverty, but the political choice was made to fund tax cuts
for the wealthy instead. It was a British philosopher, Thomas Hobbes,
who memorably claimed that without a social contract, life outside society
would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
The
risk is that if current policies do not change, this is the direction in which
low-income earners and the poor are headed. Loneliness rates have soared in
recent years and life expectancy rates have stalled in the United Kingdom, with
the latest statistics showing a sharp drop in the annual improvement that has
been experienced every year since the records began, and an actual drop for
certain groups.
The
compassion and mutual concern that has long been part of the British tradition
has been outsourced. At the same time many of the public places and
institutions that previously brought communities together, such as libraries,
community and recreation centers, and public parks, have been steadily
dismantled or undermined. In its fiscal analyses, the Treasury and the
Government constantly repeat the refrain that fiscal policy must “avoid burdening
the next generation.” The message is that the debt burden must be paid off now.
The problem is that the next generation’s prospects are already being
grievously undermined by the systematic dismantling of social protection
policies since 2010.
The
negotiations surrounding Brexit present an opportunity to take stock of the
current situation and reimagine what this country should represent and how it
protects its people. The legislative recognition of social rights should be a
central part of that reimagining. And social inclusion, rather than increasing
marginalization of the working poor and those unable to work, should be the
guiding principle of social policy.
The
UK should introduce a single measure of poverty and measure food security. The
government should initiate an expert assessment of the cumulative impact of tax
and spending decisions since 2010 and prioritize the reversal of particularly
regressive measures, including the benefit freeze, the two-child limit, the
benefit cap, and the reduction of the housing benefit for under-occupied social
rented housing. It should ensure local governments have the funds needed to
tackle poverty at the community level, and take varying needs and tax bases
into account in the ongoing Fair Funding Review.
The
Department of Work and Pensions should conduct an independent review of the
effectiveness of reforms to welfare conditionality and sanctions introduced
since 2012, and should
immediately instruct its staff to explore more constructive and less punitive
approaches to encouraging compliance. The five week delay in receiving benefits
under Universal Credit should be eliminated, separate payments should be made
to different household members, and weekly or fortnightly payments should be
facilitated.
Transport,
especially in rural areas, should be considered an essential service,
equivalent to water and electricity, and the government should regulate the
sector to the extent necessary to ensure that people living in rural areas are
adequately served. Abandoning people to the private market in relation to a
service that affects every dimension of their basic well-being is incompatible
with human rights requirements. As the country moves toward Brexit, the
Government should adopt policies designed to ensure that the brunt of the
resulting economic burden is not borne by its most vulnerable citizens.
Rubbish! Watch Bergman's 'The Virgin Spring' if you want to see a proper revenge movie.
