Update at the end of this post
Readers of this site will know that last week, Stockport council’s cabinet agreed that full council would vote next meeting on a motion which called on the government to halt the Universal Credit rollout.
Such a motion would hardly strike terror into Tory hearts, but it was marginally better than eff-all, so I wrote it down in my notebook seeing as I had a spare half-page and was at the meeting.
It’s all turned to turds, anyway.
On Wednesday, I attended the Stockport United Against Austerity protest against the launch of Universal Credit at Stockport jobcentre (the UC rollout started in Stockport on Wednesday).
A Labour councillor name of Laura Booth was there. She told me that councillors were still fighting about the wording of the Universal Credit motion they’d vote on.
Some wanted to vote to Stop and Scrap Universal Credit. Others still wanted to go with Pause and Fix – as though anyone on the planet thinks that’s even possible. Pause where? And Fix what?
Universal Credit is a disaster from beginning to end. Fiddling around with little bits will achieve nothing. You know the one about trying to polish a turd? That.
Anyway.
Don’t you just want to destroy the world.
Update:
God help us all.
This is the motion (page 8) on Universal Credit going to the full Stockport council meeting on 29 November. The motion calls for the council’s chief executive to write to Amber Rudd to request a pause to the Universal Credit rollout. Bet that’ll worry her.
This is hopeless. Tells you where Labour is on Universal Credit, though.
From the council’s 29 November agenda:
Motion (iv) Universal Credit
This Council notes:
– cross-party backing for the principles behind Universal Credit (UC), including the
amalgamation of benefits, access via one application portal and ensuring work always pays;
– the work of this Council and the Citizen’s Advice Bureau to help and support people in
relation to navigating the changing benefits system and mitigating the risks of change; and
– that despite this, the Government’s approach to UC rollout has raised significant concern in relation to monthly payments in arrears, overuse of sanctions, the pacing of transition and rollout; opacity in relation to the benefits entitlement, and cuts to the benefits system which are not reflective of need.
This Council further notes concerning reports that for many people, this has led to:
– exacerbated poverty and hardship, in particular for those living with disabilities;
– increased poverty for low income working families;
– people having to choose between food and rent;
– indebtedness due to delayed payments;
– increased rent arrears for tenants in social and private housing relating to the removal of the former direct payments system;
– making it harder for victims of domestic abuse to escape relationships;
– disadvantages for non-IT literate people; and
– instances where these factors have led to loss of employment.
This Council believes that
– measures contained in the recent Budget to provide resources to help improve the taper and help with return to work are to be welcomed, but as the Children’s Society has noted, they do not and cannot fully address the aforementioned concerns;
– as such, this Budget represented a missed opportunity to bring in both these measures immediately and pause Universal Credit rollout completely, allowing for the full review needed to fully address these problems.
This Council therefore resolves to:
– continue to work with partner organisations to mitigate as far as possible the risks and
challenges associated with this month’s UC rollout;
– request that the Chief Executive write to the Secretary of State for Work & Pensions urging a pause to further rollout of the ‘Full Service’ system;
– in that letter, emphasise the need to address all of the above points, with particular emphasis on ending the current system of monthly payments in arrears; and
– request that the Chief Executive write to the Chancellor of the Exchequer requesting that funding be urgently found to address the needs of UC recipients and plug the wait times gap.
I signed yet another petition yesterday, this one to Amber Rudd and the wording says something like to either fix UC now or scrap it altogether, so it looks like even 38 degrees can’t quite make their minds up either, but I thought what the hell and signed it anyway:
http://bit.ly/2Adjauf
The Fix part genuinely interests me – what do people mean by fix? Do they mean improve the technology by throwing further billions at it? Hire extra staff (a lot of them) to assist people who don’t use PCs? Get rid of the start delay altogether? Return the housing component to councils as housing benefit? Limit the deductions taken from benefit? God knows. It’s just a sop.
I know, meaningless. The only way to fix it is by scrapping the entire sorry mess completely and throwing its protagonists in jail.
Good luck with that one Trev. Amber Rudd is another true believer in the whole Universal Credit programme.
Yep, she’s not likely to take any notice of a petition, but what else can we do apart from piling on the pressure and continuingto oppose it. Rudd won’t even accept the UN poverty report because she doesn’t like its “tone”, never mind that it is based upon undeniable facts!
This ‘fix’ Universal Credit petition also includes support for benefit sanctions that “work”? https://speakout.38degrees.org.uk/campaigns/this-has-gone-to-far-fix-uc “All sanctions, that are proven not to work, are scrapped” making it a useless.
Doesn’t it mean scrap all sanctions because they are proven not to work, i.e. that sanctions are ineffective in getting people into work (so scrap them) ?
It seems to me that the meaning there is somewhat ambiguous, and could indicate that there are UC sanctions that work. Of course, this is a total nonsense, as we know that sanctions don’t work.
Evidence from around the world shows that punitive approaches towards the unemployed are not only ineffective, but erroneous, as there are a huge number of factors that govern why people are unemployed. One of the most glaringly obvious of those that are usually totally ignored is a total lack of available jobs. And, these days we are faced with a situation where someone might have a job, but no actual work that they get paid for.
I don’t know why sanctions are seen as an essential element the benefits system, and even less why otherwise positive attempts to ameliorate a cruel system, such as the current petition, should seek to apparently condone some element of a sanctions regime other than as a rather feeble attempt to persuade the self-lobotomised readership of the likes of the Daily Mail to support the petition. A total waste of time.
I don’t think it’s intended to be ambiguous, it’s just the way it’s worded, perhaps rather clumsily. It’s not supporting Sanctions, it’s saying scrap them, and is making the point that there is no valid argument for keeping Sanctions (from the government’s point of view) as the effectiveness of Sanctions as a tool in ‘helping’ people back to work has been disproven. Sanctions don’t work, so scrap them.
I meant ambiguous as meaning clumsy Trev. It was written in such a way as to be unclear, and could quite easily be construed as somewhat supportive of the idea of sanctions. Personally, I don’t know what it means, as it is so vague. Though I do very much take your point that it might not have been meant to be ambiguous.
Totally agree with you however, but I don’t think a small matter of international study is going to make the Tories and their friends in the Labour Party change their ideas about how to motivate poor people. This could have been ascertained if they’d paid attention to all those Scandinavian studies that concluded that things like sanctions and workfare are counter-productive long before those ideas became mainstream in the UK. Indeed, by the time those ideas were becoming flavour of the month for IDS and McVile they’d long been given up on as being demeaning, inhuman and cruel as well as being ineffective.
If there ain’t any jobs, no-one is going to get one. The fallacy that there is work available i.e. a zero hours contract or something very like it, (look how Tescos and the like exploit their workers, with contracts that stipulate a handful of ‘core hours’ and then require the worker to be ‘on call’ just in case things get busy – it’s just another form of slavery) allows the Tories and their Labour friends to get away with all this sleight of hand.
I’ve just been reading about the contortions that Corbyn and Co are going through over Brexit, and the total lack of anything approaching principles is depressing. Ditto about the position of London’s Labour Mayor towards iconic 1960s and 1970s developments of council housing, such as Cressingham Gardens, where the tenants seem to have managed to run rings around both the council and their appointed developer. Khan has refused to meet the tenants and leaseholders, claiming he is too busy… It would seem that the old council trick of filling an estate with ‘problem’ people and then not doing things like repairs or maintenance so things get so run down that demolition and gentrification is seen as the only way to go, rather than actually spending relatively small amounts of money to bring things up to standard. It says it all when you realise that the tenants reckon their estate could be brought up to scratch, and supply 37 extra homes for £7m, whilst the counci’s scheme would cost £110m and provide fewer extra homes.
Of course, like with everything else, as well as what we are usually discussing here, it’s not about people at all, but about wealth for the greedy few.
Because Labour are still more interested in hedging their bets until the very last minute. The whole welfare debate is absolutely toxic as far as Labour is concerned.
To Corbyn & Co. it’s a lose / lose situation. They would rather keep out of it as long as they can.
The Universal Credit ‘Journal’ :
https://intensiveactivity.wordpress.com/2018/11/23/the-universal-credit-journal-another-millstone-in-the-system/
Why can’t the DWP just fuck off?
Homelessness continues to rise thanks to Tories:
https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2018/11/24/tories-have-increased-homelessness-by-13000-after-449-people-died-achievement/
Imagine sleeping rough in this weather.
Crime increase too, linked to Universal Credit:
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/universal-credit-linked-to-rise-in-robberies-says-police-scotland/ar-BBQ2V0Y?li=BBoPRmx
No surprises there then Trev. I remember attending some sort of council sponsored event in the mid 90s in Cardiff where Alun Michael gave a presentation to support his notion that crime increases in times of economic hardship. I can remember thinking to myself, ‘No shit!?’. Even the mid Victorians had tumbled to the fact that there is a correlation between people not having any money and crime rising – also increasingly diminishing numbers of police has some effect, and I’d hazard a guess that present day policing is reverting to it’s mud 19th century role of not so much addressing crime, particularly if you’re an ordinary citizen, but to containing it, controlling the ‘lower orders’ Truly, the ‘thin blue line’ envisaged after the Peterloo Massacre.
You never see a copper in my neighbourhood until after the fact, then there’s loads of them stood about nothing for a day whilst the street is cordoned off. We had about 5 or 6 major incidents this summer, shootings etc.
Same here, Trev, though for some reason they increasingly seem to turn up all tooled up and heavily armed, even for relatively non-threatening events.