This map shows the impact of the new, lower, benefits cap in the UK:
What it makes clear, based on data from Shelter and published in the Guardian, is that large swathes of southern England, the south west, south east and south midlands plus some larger cities families suffering the misfortune of unemployment or disability will not be able to live.
Ut is estimated that 100,000 families may have to move as a result.
I think this has to be named for what it is. This is economic cleansing. And I find it deeply repugnant. It was bad enough when it impacted limited areas in London. Now it threatens the fabric of lives with devastating potential results.
I find it staggering that such a policy has been proposed my a major political party.
I find it astonishing that it has been put to the House of Commons.
And I am beyond words because it will, no doubt, become law.
And please do not justify these actions by saying 'the majority of people want this so politicians must go along with it'. First that does not attribute blame for the careful creation of the justifying the narrative, which has been deliberately nurtured.
Second, I suspect that this claim may still also be true of the death penalty
Third, regimes across the world that have been widely condemned for their actions have also won local popular support as a result of similar exercise in narrative control.
In that case this support is no defence for an act that is morally unjustifiable, and I do not care who disagrees with me saying so.
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And Labour are a disgrace for not opposing it. They could have defeated the bill if they had opposed it.
They and the SNP used their collective seats to oppose a re-introduction of fox hunting.
Why couldn’t they use that collective power to stop this in it’s tracks? Something that is equally as important and, some may well argue, even more so?
By the way, it is a disgrace that so many Labour politicians abstained to allow this to go trough.
Why are they even in the Labour party? That is a rhetorical question. The Labour party was hijacked by the right years ago.
This is entirely as a result of property prices. I, like most people, am sympathetic to to principle that poorer taxpayers (nor richer ones, to be honest) should not subsidise people who want (but cannot afford) to live in certain areas. However, when one policy treats only the symptom, whilst remaining policy positively fuels the cause, it is nonsensical. And when ‘certain areas’ covers the entire Southern third of the country, it’s obvious that the benefits system is not the problem here.
Talk about “narrative control” is rubbish. People are not stupid, Richard. People who work 35 hours a work see the family next door who don’t work at all are in a similar post-tax financial position. They don’t like that.
And talk about economic cleansing is also rubbish. Some people would like to live in Chelsea I suspect. They can’t afford it, however, so they move out and find somewhere where they can afford to live. That’s what most people have to do.
Narrative control is what vast quantities of people spend their lives doing in the UK
It’s advertising and PR, and now it’s politics
It’s not rubbish it’s real
And they don’t see the people next door in the same position: they usually will see them disabled (although it is not always physically obvious) and unable to work through no fault of their own
What you are doing is manipulating that fact without care as to consequence
Like the government
Jeffrey & Lee
You both fall for one of the classic Tory lies.
You both miss out the fact that these rent subsidies enable people in lower paid jobs to live in high value areas to service the needs of those who can afford to live in such areas.
These are the people who sweep your streets, man your shops, restaurants, police, clean your offices, teach your children, nurse you when you are sick, etc. Many will be on minimum wage or less and also facing wage cuts under austerity programmes. When the Tories deregulated rents in the 80’s I think, nursing recruitment nose-dived.
By shoving these people out of such areas by ending the help with their housing costs, you are making these people poorer as they have the increased expense of travelling further to maintain that job or they may also just lose the job and go back on benefits. They may also lose family ties and support networks that have existed for generations.
So it is not just about affording somewhere to live; it is also about affording somewhere to work.
To paraphrase the economist Paul Krugman “Everyone’s benefit is someone else’s benefit”. Think about those words next time you are kept waiting in a short staffed shop or hospital.
Pilgrim
Yes, most of the recipients are working and doing important jobs. But that doesn’t alter the fact that housing costs are much too high. The main financial beneficiaries of HB are landlords and land sellers.
I’m not arguing for people to be pushed away from places where their work is needed. I am arguing that it’s nonsensical to have a policy which would have that effect when the root cause of the problem is not being considered. If there was sufficient viable housing in the South East that people didn’t need such high HB then there would be no problem. Or, even, if the tax system ensured that those benefitting from the policies that makes housing in the South East also paid commensurate taxes to enable lower income people to live there (e.g. LVT).
Lee
You state above that you are ‘sympathetic’ to the thinking that people who live in high value areas should not be subsidised by other people’s taxes do you not?
Such sympathy directly affects people who DO live in high value areas for whatever reason – family ties, work, disabilities. This a market problem Lee not a people problem (and you rightly identify that it is).
You come across as a bit self-contradictory here. As you can tell, I and others have no ‘sympathy’ for that view at all, because it is wrong.
Jeffrey -your view represents the myopic, tunnel vision of perceptual possibilities!
If you don’t have the intellectual capacity to challenge it in yourself you are illustrative of how a narrative subconsciously becomes mental wallpaper – in short, you evince a zomboid acceptance of what happens to suit your little corner.
Look at the facts: People IN work have better health, both mentally and physically, that those who dont’ so it is more likely that the out of work family are very envious of the working one! You’ve bought the ‘scrounger’ myth hook-line and sinker.
Why do we live in such superficial times!
Lets talk facts:
0.7% of benefits are claimed fraudulently. The public believe (wonder why?) it’s 27%.
In 2010, 400,000 people claimed an average of £60pw Housing benefit, now over 1,000,000 claim an average of £95pw.
As a result of policies by the last government and this one, housing association would receive less than their minimum rent when leasing a 3-bed house to a childless couple or with 1 child/2 young/same gender children due to bedroom tax, and would receive significantly less when leasing the same 3-bed house to a couple with 2 different gender children due to the Benefit cap
(https://speye.wordpress.com/2014/11/14/no-job-no-council-house-the-lb-barnet-plan-affordable-rent-social-engineering/)
(https://speye.wordpress.com/2013/06/26/osborne-hammers-nail-into-social-housings-coffin-and-landlords-dont-even-see-it/)
Cuts to housing benefit are not saving money, they are in fact costing councils far more to cope with the cost of temporary accommodation
(https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2013/06/08/westminster-hit-by-soaring-costs-as-it-struggles-to-cope-with-homeless-epidemic/)
(https://speye.wordpress.com/2015/07/07/the-benefit-cap-saves-money/)
And that’s just talking about housing benefit cuts/benefit caps. It’s far worse when you take the cut to working tax credits into account!
Thank you
I was going to suggest SPeye too. This guy is passionate and knows his maths.
He’s that passionate he’s even threatened to quit a number of times in frustration.
He also agrees that the Benefit Cap – if left to fulfil its perverse logic – will make ALL affordable housing unaffordable to benefit claimants in the long run.
35 hours a week! If only… yes, and absolutely everybody has to live a miserable life unless they’ve got lots of money. After all, why should “someone next door” have children; a holiday; a dog; even use the bus – publicly subsidised by road maintenance; better still – use a dentist, doctor or optician, when they “can’t afford it”? Ye gods – has Ayn Rand’s corpse been brought over for sight-seeing and an orientation meeting? Watch out for that or those that you object to – else it or they may be visiting you sooner than you might imagine.
I thank the accidents of life and little else that not living next to you has been my fate. I hope you don’t play loud music in the early hours of the morning. I would have called a state-subsidised copper long ago.
People are not stupid, but they are profoundly wrong about a lot of things, because they have no direct knowledge and they are told consistent lies.
They do not see the “family next door…..in a similar post-tax financial position” because they know precisely nothing about the family next door’s financial position; they only think they do. I have seen this time and again at advice surgeries and it is frustrating and tragic in equal measure. People appear to assume that they are somehow unique in their poverty, and that everyone else is getting enormous sums which, somehow they have fallen through the net, and failed to secure. It is amazing how far the MSM narrative trumps their own lived experience
The recently unemployed expect to receive large sums, and find it hard to believe what they are being asked to live on: shurely shome mishtake, they cry. There is no mistake. The benefits rates are way below what they are led to believe. And they are astonished to discover that they who were “us”, are now “them”. They are not respected as benefits claimants and they think that is wrong: only those other people should be treated like this.
Frankly it is hard to remain sympathetic when you hear, day after day, why they are not like those others, and should be treated better. It is hard when those who had reasonably well paid jobs and no longer have those jobs whine when asked to accept the consequences they voted for in their complacency. Hard to listen to their outrage when they are expected to take menial jobs on very low wages and very poor conditions, and then find that there are few jobs of any kind: Sometimes I find myself thinking that these are the scum of the earth. Which is what they think of the poor, so perhaps we are quits.
I have noticed that cases of benefit fraud seem increasingly to involve concealment of capital by those same people: money they were able to save when working and which they consider to be their own and do not declare. But somehow that is different. Somehow that is not spelled out in the mainstream reports, either. But it is a familiar situation in tax fraud, and they got away with it when they were in work: so they do not even see that it is wrong for them: not even see it as fraud: not like what the underclass do, you see. Quite different
There was a time when the attitudes that this group espouse would have been a source of shame: and now they are proud of it when doing fine, and bewildered when they are subject to those same attitudes once they suffer misfortune
This post is truly jaundiced, and for that I apologise: but I honestly have days when I hate my compatriots. The long trek right from youthful trots to middle aged authoritarians is not my direction of travel: but oh it is hard to resist sometimes.
Please keep trying. You sound a remarkable lady.
We stand outside a JobCentre every week in support of anyone needing information on how to contest being sanctioned. Almost all are living with a disability or/and are young people. They are disoriented and fearful. Some are older women, have had a reasonably good job now made redundant from it and living alone. Most that we meet, and I could go on about many more instants e.g. young parents with children, are pleased to see us and get a leaflet of information but, granted, we get the – ‘get lost’ and worse from passers-by. Abuse also from the security people from inside the centre, these last people are really no different from the former people/claimants! So from experience I agree people are being brainwashed into scapegoating and stigmatising the very people that the following week they may be!
Thank you for what you are doing
I admire you
Jeffrey – this is a stupid policy that will force people to relocate. In many instances they may be temporarily unemployed, and forced to relocate from an area where there is in fact the greatest statistical probability of them finding (and staying in) a job.
If the government addressed rents in the PRS (rather than exacerbating the problem through their policies), very few people would exceed the cap anyway.
The fact is that the average rent in London is 1,500 per month. That means post-rent someone with £23k (the London limit) would have just £5k per year to live on. That’s £96 per week. A zone 1-4 travelcard (for one person) would leave you with less than £50 per week for food, bills etc.
Precisely put.
OK…say you live in an area you have lived all your life then, thanks to a shortage of housing (which is the key to what this is about) prices start to sky-rocket as demand increases. Through no fault of your own, you cannot afford to live there anymore.
As a result of the government policy of allowing people to buy their own council house (and not replacing them, even though they constantly stated that they would) demand has forced rents and housing prices sky high. Landlords are allowed to charge whatever the market will bear and has subsequently forced up the amount of benefit the government has to pay because it does not have the good sese to introduce rent controls.
You have lived in this area all your life but, thanks mostly to government policy, you are forced to move out to a cheaper area.
That’s fair in your view?
Yes of course it’s fair, if I can’t afford to privately rent in an area then I move. Why should someone be paid by the taxpayer to live in an expensive place which is too expensive for said taxpayer to live themselves? That is grossly unfair.
You really don’t get it, do you?
The vast majority of benefit claimants impacted will be short term – i.e. they will get work – except for the fact they will have been forced to move from all their support networks in the meantime – or are disabled – who this system directly penalises and also removes from their families and, again, all support networks
As such a) the process creates distress b) reduces the chance of people working c) increases costs d) harms long term outcomes
But all you can count is the pounds
Are you an accountant by any chance?
You’re right there are no rent controls but the government already capped what someone can receive in housing benefit when they are in the PRS – local housing allowance. Where I live that figure doesn’t even cover a tiny studio flat. This system came in years ago yet there wasn’t the outrage we saw over the bedroom tax – granted it only applied to new claimants but even so.
“Yes of course it’s fair, if I can’t afford to privately rent in an area then I move. Why should someone be paid by the taxpayer to live in an expensive place which is too expensive for said taxpayer to live themselves? That is grossly unfair.”
JSA is taxable income, and many who are claiming Housing Benefit are actually in work and paying tax, but I digress.
This is gentrification by government policy. If prices were moving up due to natural market forces, your argument would just about stand, but they doe not. Selling off council houses and not replacing them creates a forced demand, pushing up rents and property prices. Help to buy (or Help to Sell, as it should be called) forces house prices even higher and puts them even further out of the reach of first time buyers.
The government must love you. They deliberately cause a situation where house prices rise and you say “oh well”.
You are staggering in your naivety.
The servile English will swallow this happily for the following reasons underpinned by an atavistic psychopathology:
1) The poor now consider themselves ‘inferior’ after years of being bashed by perverted social Darwinism and eco-eugenics.
2) The Tories foul narrative has won out by playing the struggling middle (and ‘middle-middle’ as Orwell put it) against those they feel too close to becoming. The class system needs the underpinning of Schadenfreude to function-the Tories have injected people with a more virulent form of the virus.
3) Fraudulent explanations of how we got here via the housing bubbles and excessive bank money creation for socially destructive purposes. This based on free-market fundamentalism as a metaphysical truth.
4) A Labour party that is now revelling in self-disgust and shame as it tries to hook itself onto the false narrative in a last ditch bid to keep its foetid carcass ‘alive.’
Clearly things will have to get worse and we now have years of cultural wasteland ahead whilst watching, as Gladstone put it in the 19th Centurion, the ‘intoxicating augmentation of wealth’ by a gated South of England.
Thank you for keeping a candle of spirit alive-Richard!
I’ll keep it going Simon
I entirely agree with these comments. This is nothing but a full frontal assault on affordable housing.
In addition, as these properties become too expensive, even social landlords will have to either spend money to reconfigure them into smaller properties (which means spending money on them that as a result of the last budget they will not have) or sell them to the market to increase the supply of houses to buy – another part of this strategy methinks (this also keeps the NIMBYs happy because existing stock is being cannibalised instead of new developments being created, and also means the costs of reasonable brown field remediation are avoided and such sites ignored and left to rot so that they will continue blighting communities).
If one looks at the way the cap is set up, eventually ALL housing will be too expensive to rent as social rent (affordable housing). Councils and housing associations will cease to exist as landlords of affordable housing. The housing benefit bill will exist to prop up private renting only – or essentially be a wholesale transfer of public money into the private sector. Nice one George!
The Council I work for is now seriously considering developing stock or reassigning its existing stock for full market rent – not the 80% of market rent which is the highest we can charge at the moment. It will become in essence, another private landlord.
The human misery of having to move to other areas of the country that will then create enclaves in this Nation of concentrated poverty is just too much to bear to be honest. Two nation Britain – here we come. So much for ‘one nation Cameron’.
This exactly the fear I have as a Housing Association -I can already feel the sweaty hand of the Landlord on my shoulder and the dank breath down the back of my neck. I live in a rural area where house prices are high and will soon be prime targets for latterday Rachmanism. I suspect, over the next few years the HA’s will be starved out of their existence, the Chief Executives will leave with a huge pay deal and the wealth syphoners will step in. For me ,personally, it creates a background of fear and uncertainty, which is exactly what neo-liberalism wants- a cowed and defeated public.
This also from The Guardian, Richard, based on research carried out for Frank Field by the House of Commons Library. It shows the impact of two measures announced in he budget: the cut in the amount people are allowed to earn before they start losing tax credits, and the increased 48% taper rate (the amount claimants lose for every extra pound they earn).
Anyone who denies what the Tories are doing is anything other than a war on the poor is either actively or passively involved in a very cruel and ugly deceit or is naive to the point of stupidity. That Harman and the majority of the Labour party do not have either the capacity or balls to call this for what it is, is beyond shameful.
‘Here are the key findings, according to Field’s press release.
The analysis shows that:
· 3.2 million strivers will lose an average of £1,350 next year.
· 754,900 families earning between £10,000 and £20,000 a year will lose up to £2,184 next year. Families earning £10,226 will be exactly £1,500 worse off.
· 51,600 families earning between £20,000 and £30,000 will be made worse off by up to £2,884 next year.
· 580,100 of Britain’s poorest working families earning less than £6,420 a year face the prospect of being ‘taxed’ for the first time. Those earning between £3,850 and £6,420 will lose 48p in tax credits for each pound they earn. This is a higher withdrawal of income than that imposed on the country’s highest earners. Families earning £6,410 a year will be £1,200 worse off as a result.
I think that Field note may go on the blog
Thanks Ivan
Yet another I don’t like the result of democracy so I will ignore it because I am morally superior and just know better, others are stupid, deceived or ignorant blog.
For someone who spends a lot of time claiming everything you do is to protect democracy and ensure democracy you seem to have no problem ignoring it when you like…….
Must be that super sized ego, ideological purity and faith based self righteousness………thank god we have you around to decide when democracy applies or not……..I am sure everyone is onboard with your moral override!
If you had one iota of understanding of democracy you would realise that it is based on the principle of dissent
Your clearly do not have any such appreciation of its workings
Richard
We do not live in a democracy. I’m sure of it.
We like in a kakistocracy – a place where the worst people govern and influence things I’m afraid.
Our Kakistocrats all live off the wealth already created by their families and have no idea how real people live. They are deaf to the suffering they cause and lie to us barefacedly about what they are doing using the media to portray themselves as decent people making hard decisions.
They serve no other than themselves and other Kakistocrats.
A Tory proclaiming that his belief system is the acme of democracy is an affront to human decency.
Great article. Few typos in it though. Couldn’t find an email address to msg corrections privately. Feel free to delete this comment after reading. Much respect. Corrected copy follows:
What it makes clear, based on data from Shelter and published in the Guardian, is that large swathes of southern England, the south west, south east and south midlands plus some larger cities’ families suffering the misfortune of unemployment or disability will not be able to live.
It is estimated that 100,000 families may have to move as a result.
I think this has to be named for what it is. This is economic cleansing. And I find it deeply repugnant. It was bad enough when it impacted limited areas in London. Now it threatens the fabric of lives with devastating potential results.
I find it staggering that such a policy has been proposed by a major political party.
I find it astonishing that it has been put to the House of Commons.
And I am beyond words because it will, no doubt, become law.
And please do not justify these actions by saying ‘the majority of people want this so politicians must go along with it’. First that does not attribute blame for the careful creation of the justifying narrative, which has been deliberately nurtured.
Second, I suspect that this claim may still also be true of the death penalty.
Third, regimes across the world that have been widely condemned for their actions have also won local popular support as a result of similar exercises in narrative control.
In that case this support is no defence for an act that is morally unjustifiable, and I do not care who disagrees with me saying so.
– See more at: http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2015/07/21/it-is-time-to-name-the-benefits-cap-for-what-it-is-economic-cleansing/#sthash.yd4OvmQB.dpuf
Ben
Thanks
As in the Guardian of old typos are a feature here
I write a lot of material very quickly – frequently four or five blogs before I get to breakfast
I always can them – but seeing typos in your own work immediately after writing it is often hard
So a apologise for those I miss, but that’s the price of getting stuff out
Best
Richard
no need to apologise – all comments in solidarity, keep up the good work. 🙂
Thanks
Joe Halewood has been arguing that it will affect a lot more than 100,000 families: more like 245,000, and 805,000 children. See https://speye.wordpress.com/2015/07/20/the-benefit-cap-and-why-750000-children-homeless-is-reality-not-scaremongering/
The Guardian does seem very quick to publish DWP figures, without questioning whether they’re underestimates. Gradually rising estimates may just be softening us up for the worst.
FFS, most Housing Benefit is (legitimately, not fraudulently) claimed by people IN WORK. Blame the ridiculously high rents.
If low paid workers are pushed out of an area, who’s going to serve you your latte? Clean your toilets? Care for your children? People really haven’t thought this through, have they?
OMG Someone finally said it! Someone finally said it!!
oh.. Wales has been left off. Again.
Guess We’l have to wait to show the unfairness we’v had.
Brace yourself England.