Category Archives: benefits

Welfare Reform Bill is crucial for the sick, disabled and carers writes Jenny Willott MP

February 6, 2012   benefits, Carers, disability

Jenny Willott MP writes… The Welfare Reform Bill – What’s happened on ESA?

Benefits are not an easy subject to get your head around: we have a benefits system with enough acronyms, assessments, taper rates and tax credits to make your head spin. That’s why this Government is finally undertaking a hugely important and long-overdue reform of benefits.

Universal Credit will replace the complicated mix of tax credits, JSA, ESA, Housing Benefit and so on with one simple benefit. And the Universal Credit is why the Welfare Reform Bill is so crucial. It will revolutionise the way we support those who are unemployed, disabled, sick or caring for a loved one and is why we have to support the Bill and ensure it becomes law.

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Lords back disability benefit shake-up

January 17, 2012   benefits, Carers

The government has headed off a House of Lords defeat over plans to replace the Disability Living Allowance.

17 January 2012 Last updated at 20:25

Ministers want to amend the system to make sure claimants have more medical tests, but opponents say this will mean 500,000 people will lose benefits.

A proposal to delay the scheme by carrying out an extended pilot project before it is implemented across the country was beaten by 16 votes.

The government suffered three Lords defeats on the issue last week.

Introduced in 1992 to help disabled people cope with the extra costs they face in their daily lives, Disability Living Allowance is paid to two million people of working age.
Deficit

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Welfare Reform Bill

January 12, 2012   benefits, Carers, disability

‘We won’t go back to the work house’

By · January 12, 2012 at 10:00 am ·
Protesters outside the House of Lords on 11 January

‘We won’t go back to the work house’ – a melodramatic slogan maybe, but one that captures the sense that many feel, that the Welfare Reform Bill, currently going through its first reading in the House of Lords before becoming law next month, represents a major step in the dismantling of state welfare, a return to a darker, pre-Beveridge age of a ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor.

Certainly it was a slogan that summed up the feelings of those gathered opposite the House of Lords on Wednesday, many of them living with disabilities, single parents and carers, a coalition of the dispossessed who feel victimised by the Bill.

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