WE’RE RETURNING TO A 19TH CENTURY POOR LAW

LABOUR Peer, Jeremy Beecham, told me that when he was a young council candidate in Newcastle, the first leaflet he distributed before the 1967 council elections was about rate rebates.

This was a new initiative at that time which had been introduced by the then Labour Government. Fast forward forty five years and we are about to see massive changes in the system, now called council tax benefit.

The Tory-Lib Dem Government is introducing a 10% cut in council tax benefits, which for will leave many people considerably worse off.

Around half the people who receive council tax benefit are pensioners, who, in fairness, will be protected, but the effect will be to double the size of the cut for everyone else. Moreover it will be for councils to decide who gets what out of a capped allocation, instead of drawing down from a national scheme.

So people’s entitlement to what has been a national welfare benefit will now vary according to where they live. Decisions on who should qualify for benefit and how much they should receive will be decided by around three hundred and fifty councils. We sometimes hear about the “post-code lottery” in the NHS. The term will now apply to council tax benefit too.

The Government makes the ludicrous claim that putting councils “in charge of providing support for council tax in England will help more people back into work”. However, ministers have not produced a shred of evidence. After all council tax benefit is paid to people in work, and many other recipients are either incapable of working or unable to find a job. This is hardly surprising as unemployment is soaring.

And while the Government claims it will save up to £480m it proposes to do nothing about the much larger sum, £1.8bn, of council tax benefit which goes unclaimed. Much of this unclaimed entitlement should be paid to pensioners.

Nor is this the only change. Crisis grants and loans hitherto administered as part of the social security system will also be devolved to local councils. Furthermore, there will be no guarantee that the funding will be distributed fairly to areas most in need.

We are, in effect, returning to a 19th Century Poor Law system. Crucial decisions affecting individuals and families on low incomes who are working or unemployed will be made locally and paid out of stretched council budgets.

The very concept of National Insurance is being undermined. The Welfare Reform Bill will have a severe impact on vulnerable families especially those living in the private rented sector.

This year is the bi-centenary of the birth of Charles Dickens. He was all too familiar with, and did much to expose, the harshness and injustices of a fragmented local, and often charity-based system of welfare. By contrast the national system of entitlement related to need, that the welfare state has provided for decades, was introduced when Labour won the first election after WW2.

I wonder what Charles Dickens would have made of Cameron, Osborne and Pickles; perhaps they would be today’s Gradgrind, Wackford Squeers and Mr Bumble?