TORIES LAUNCH ATTACK ON THE UNEMPLOYED

The ConDem coalition government announced on Thursday that it will cut £4bn from out-of-work benefits.

Additionally, a leaked letter revealed by the Observer on Sunday showed that the government has agreed to cut £2.5 billion from Employment Support Allowance. This is the relevant extract:

“Given the pressure on overall public spending in the coming period, we will need to continue developing further options to reform the benefits as part of the spending review process in order to deliver further savings, greater simplicity and stronger work incentives. Reform to the Employment Support Allowance is a particular priority and I am pleased that you, the Prime Minister, and I have agreed to press ahead with reforms to the ESA as part of the spending review that deliver net savings of at least £2.5 billion by 2014/15.”
Chancellor to SoS DWP, 19 June 2010, copied to PM, Deputy PM, SoS CLG, and Chief Secretary to the Treasury.

These cuts are in addition to the £11 billion cuts in the Budget, which already hit the poorest harder than the rich, women much harder than men, and children and pensioners harder than everyone else. Now the Government is clearly targeting people it agrees are genuinely too sick or disabled to work.

The government told the BBC on Thursday that it would cut £4 billion from out of work benefits.

The government gave no detail about where the £4 billion cuts would fall. There are five million people claim out-of-work benefits, meaning that if the cuts are applied uniformly each claimant would lose an average of £800 per year.

The government’s measures will do nothing to get more people into work if there are no jobs for people to go into, and when the government is cutting support for jobs.

A leaked letter from George Osborne to Iain Duncan-Smith set out a secret agreement to cut an additional £2.5bn from reforms to Employment Support Allowance (ESA) as part of the Spending Review.

The £2.5 billion cut to Employment Support Allowance will hit only those people that the government has already assessed – through the work capability assessment – to be genuinely too sick or disabled to work.

They are on top of savings already built into Treasury plans based on the anticipated results of work capability assessments, where around two-thirds of people so far tested have been found fit to work.

If these cuts are made uniformly, each claimant would lose an average of around £1,000.

This gives the lie to government claims that welfare reforms will tackle worklessness and protect the vulnerable.

The June Budget Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) report showed that budget reduced growth and increased unemployment compared to the pre-budget OBR - cutting jobs and putting more people on benefits.

The government scrapped the Young Person’s Guarantee of a job, training or work experience for all young people who are 6 months unemployed – and the Future Jobs Fund.

The last Labour Govt was making huge savings by getting more people than expected into work. Labour had set out plans to save £20bn over 4 years through getting more people into work – through:
• unemployment being 500,000 lower than expected due to Labour policies
• testing people on ESA/IB to ensure those who can work are expected to do so
• increasing the number of lone parents in employment
• introducing tough conditions on people who refused to work, and strong requirements on jobseekers
• bringing in the Young Person’s Guarantee and the Future Jobs Fund

The Tories, aided and abetted by the supine Liberal Democrats, are still the same old nasty Tory party of old. George Osborne’s rhetoric about living on benefits as a “lifestyle choice” is a smokescreen to hide vicious cuts on the poorest people in society.