Category Archives: ukcuts

Social care is bearing the brunt of council cuts

January 29, 2013   Carers, disability, ukcuts

Statistical manipulation disguises the fact that disabled people are being hit the hardest by cuts to benefits and services

 

Sally Bercow (centre) and Jane Asher (left) join protesters on the Hardest Hit march against cuts to disability benefits and services.

One of the extraordinary features of the cuts programme has been the fate of social care. At the same time as announcing the deepest cuts in public expenditure since the creation of the welfare state, there have been several pronouncements about extra funding for social care and how any failure to safeguard services for disabled children, adults or older people would be because of failings in local government.

For instance, the 2010 comprehensive spending review declared that there would be “£2bn a year of additional funding by 2014-15 to support social care”. However, a closer examination of these figures shows it was merely a statistical manipulation, achieved by closing one small funding stream, restarting it and then publishing the cumulative figure for a five-year period. The truth is very different.

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Carer to be hit by introduction of ‘bedroom tax’

January 24, 2013   Carers, ukcuts

Carer to be hit by introduction of ‘bedroom tax’

By Nick Spoors
Published on Thursday 24 January 2013 07:50

A carer from Northamptonshire said he would be financially better off with his disabled wife in a nursing home when a new bedroom tax comes in.

Tony Sharman, 60, gave up work to look after his wife Anne, 56, full-time at their two-bedroom housing association flat in Towcester following her second brain haemorrhage.

Mr Sharman sleeps in the second bedroom because Anne’s special bed, designed to prevent pressure ulcers, is too small for them both. She also needs too much medical kit to fit in another bed.

Yet from April, the Government will dock the couple £60 a month in bedroom tax from their benefits because they say Mr Sharman’s room is a ‘spare room’, even though he has to sleep in it, and the flat is therefore ‘under-occupied’.

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Households with disabled person will be average of £156 a year worse off under Government benefits plans

January 20, 2013   Carers, disability, ukcuts

Millions of disabled people to lose out

Sunday 20 January 2013

Millions of disabled people will lose out under the Government’s plans to keep the annual rise in benefits below the cost of living, it emerged last night.

Pensions minister Steve Webb has confirmed that one in three households with a disabled person will be £156 a year worse off on average of under new rules capping the rise in most benefit payments to 1 per cent – 1.7 per cent below the current rate of inflation.

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