Benefits

What’s behind the rise in demand for food banks? Over the past few years, the default Conservative line has been that the reasons people need emergency help are ‘complex’. This is certainly true: the figures released by the Trussell Trust, which runs the largest network of food banks in the country, show that there is no one factor in food bank use. But those figures also show quite clearly that problems with the payments of benefits, or cuts to benefits, are a major driver: the top four reasons cited for referring someone to a food bank in 2017-18 were low income (28.49 per cent), benefit delays (23.74 per cent), benefit

Amber Rudd left the Home Office over the Windrush scandal and has joined the Work and Pensions department just as its flagship benefits reform is under fire from all angles. The new Secretary of State spent most of her first session at the dispatch box this afternoon answering questions on Universal Credit – and she had arrived determined to strike a rather different tone from her predecessor. Esther McVey, who resigned from the role last week, had garnered a reputation for being rather hardline when dealing with criticisms of the benefit roll-out, while also managing to give far more away about some of its problems than Number 10 would have

It’s rare that a government pauses the implementation of a flagship policy. There’s so much ego involved in these matters that to do so is to admit a failing, rather than merely being sensible. But the government has had little choice but to further delay the roll-out of Universal Credit while it sorts out some of the problems with it. The plan had originally been that a further roll-out to four million people would start in January, with more claimants moving in July. But today the Work and Pensions department confirmed that the July deadline has moved to November as a result of fears across Parliament that those who are

I was born in north London, at the Whittington Hospital in Archway, and at the age of 62, after many years of trouble and wandering, I have come to rest in the streets where I was born. And in my usual cunning way I have become one of the roughly 300 or 400 people living in inner London you perhaps think of as ‘homeless’, making the rounds from drop-in centres to churches, from morning till night, in the hunt for free food. For this is what my life has come down to as I stand on the threshold of old age, the endless movement from one soup kitchen to the

If you’re not familiar with the term, then ‘salary sacrifice’ is a bit of a puzzler. Just what is your boss expecting you to sacrifice? A chunk of your wages? A goat in the car park at lunchtime? Put simply, salary sacrifice arrangements enable employees to give up salary in return for benefits-in-kind that are often subject to more favourable tax treatment than their wage packet. They’re a nice little earner for staff and employers as they essentially permit a bypassing of National Insurance (NI) payments. So, employers allow their workers to take a so-called ‘pay cut’ and that money is funnelled into a pension or another benefit such as childcare or

MPs are voting on the Welfare Reform and Work Bill this afternoon, with the big story being about Labour turmoil over the second reading. Harriet Harman’s amendment looks rather forlorn on the order paper this morning, with just five frontbenchers signed up to support it. Helen Goodman, who was explaining why she was pressing ahead with her own rebel amendment on this morning’s Today programme, has 57 MPs — not all of them Labour — supporting her motion. The difference between the two amendments is mainly that Goodman’s declines to give a second reading to the Bill and offers only the ‘potentially useful provisions on apprenticeships’ in its favour, while

In his Budget, the Chancellor claimed that ‘those currently on the minimum wage will see their pay rise by over a third this Parliament, a cash increase for a full time worker of over £5,000.’ But this wasn’t quite the whole story. What he didn’t say is that a full-time worker could see just 7pc of this pay rise in their pockets due to the withdrawal of benefits and tax credits. Osborne’s Treasury will accrue the remaining 93pc in reduced welfare payments and increased tax revenue. The simple truth is that the Living Wage helps government more than it does workers. In Britain, tax credits and other benefits conspire to make

Each year Anjem Choudary earns more in benefits than a soldier does starting off in our armed forces. This is a fact I never tire of pointing out – especially to Anjem’s face whenever we have the misfortune to meet. The follow-on point, which I think also worth continuing to make, is that there is something suicidal about a society that rewards its enemies better than it does its defenders. Choudary and his family rake in around £25,000 each year  and – as you can see from this newly-released video above  – we taxpayers now get even more for our money than we had previously thought.  For now we do not only pay

Close your eyes for a moment and place an image in your mind of the sort of person who needs to claim state benefit for their disability. The most common picture is someone almost destitute, reliant on the benefit just to function in their day to day life, likely to be claiming a multitude of other entitlements; the sort of person who won’t ever be able to derive a normal income. Whisper it: the majority of people claiming Disability Living Allowance are the sharp elbowed middle classes, with incomes placing them in the top half of those in the UK. Amongst pensioners, arguably those who need the most help with their

I was signed off work five years ago. I had lost my job and was, unsurprisingly, feeling low; I went to see my GP, as I was having difficulty sleeping. Rather than dishing out a few sleeping pills, as I had hoped, my doctor googled the letters PHQ-9 on his computer and quickly went through the multiple-choice test for depression he found. Within a few minutes, I walked out of the surgery with a diagnosis of depression and a sick note stating that I was, in his medical judgment, unfit for work. Looking at the Patient Health Questionnaire now, one thing immediately stands out: the copyright notice. The copyright in