Food Banks and Poverty- was Nye right?

Huge rise in homelessness among ill and disabled people is no accident

Hours after Tories won election they cut benefits for disabled even more.

From Voxpoltical

The Tories have been stepping up their hate campaign against sick and disabled people, with a 53 per cent increase in homelessness over the last year.

People with long-term illnesses who can’t work can claim Employment and Support Allowance, but the government has tightened criteria to the point at which assessments might as well start with an official telling the claimant they are lying – or deluded – about being ill.

Disabled people can claim Personal Independence Payment (PIP), even if they can work – but the Tories have tightened criteria for that benefit too, meaning the chances of receiving the benefit are equally remote.

With PIP, 56 per cent of new claims, together with 28 per cent of claims by people who have been transferred from Disability Living Allowance, are refused.

Only 10 per cent of rejected claims go to appeal, which means 1,585,000 rejections have gone uncontested since the benefit – if you can call it that – was introduced.

With so many benefit claims rejected, sick and disabled people find it hard to make ends meet – especially if they have been housed in dwellings with more bedrooms than they need, laying them open to the Conservative government’s Bedroom Tax.

With all these Tory policies stacked up against them, it’s no surprise so many sick and disabled people end up presenting as homeless.

The Tories have made it the responsibility of local authorities to ensure that these people have a place to live, but – oh! That’s right – councils don’t get enough funding from Westminster to provide that service.

The upshot of all this is that, under the Conservatives, long-term illness or disability has become a fast-track to a life on the street.

A short life on the street; while Tory communities secretary Robert Jenrick says the number of people sleeping rough has fallen by two per cent in the last year, the reason for that is probably that a rough sleeper dies every 19 hours in the UK.

It’s all part of the Tory plan.

The Nazis went after the sick and disabled first, too.

Source: Homelessness among ill and disabled people rises 53% in a year, figures show | The Independent

PS The reason I put family sized cereal packets in food banks is because we read of children going to school without any breakfast and I hoped that at least some could get a bowl of cereal, and maybe the Waitrose lady had also read that, and they may well do other things to help the disadvantaged.

Milly My income places me in the lowest 10% in the country. I grow much of my own food and live extremely frugally. My health isn't wonderful, but I still have to work and also do voluntarily work with vulnerable families. No, I don't contribute to foodbanks. I try to spend less than £20 a week on groceries (including cleaning materials), so I'm afraid I'd be pushed to buy an extra packet or tin every week. I don't do virtual signalling, so try to help in practical ways, where I know I can do good.

more sympathetic person than...

I don't believe a more sympathetic than her exists.

On a more specific level, I know someone who was a volunteer at a food bank for years. Last time I saw her she spoke of being surprised that some people who had been helped over long periods to turn their lives around were still coming for food bank handouts. She could not understand it.

Steven Pinker puts it well: "progress does not mean that everything gets better for everyone, everywhere, all the time. That would be a miracle, that wouldn’t be progress.”

Despite all the gloom and doom projected onto Gransnet by a bevy of those suffering from what Mark Littlewood calls "traumatised pessimism", progress in improving people's lives — not every life, everywhere, all the time, but globally nonetheless — over the last decade has been fantastic by any statistical measure.

growstuff Universal Credit IS linked to a support system for training opportunities and saving money. It's all available at the claimant's Jobcentre Plus.

Because I live in a small town, know many people by face and have canvassed in elections and spoken to some of them.

Growstuff, I think you are being unkind about ladies who drop cereal packets in the Food Bank box at Waitrose. How do you know they complain about taxes. I drop Cereal packets or tinned meat in Tesco Food Bank box and dont complain about taxes. It is a disgrace that people have to use food banks at all but if the Waitrose ladies and people like me didn't do our little bit there wouldn't even be food banks. I hope you contribute .

I agree with you inkycog. The old system was ridiculous and there were too many "cliff edges". Initially, I thought Universal Credit was a good idea. It would be even better, if it were integrated into an advice service for training opportunities and ways of saving money, etc. However, it quickly became obvious that it was a cost cutting exercise and wasn't designed to be fairer and "make work pay". It was designed to be punitive, in the same way that workhouses were deliberately grim, so that people wouldn't use them.

Exactly growstuff

Anniebach If there is anybody who can live very comfortably "on benefit" (which benefits?), they should honestly be appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer, because such a person is a miracle worker.

£73.10 Don't exaggerate!

Anniebach Baggs claimed that she'd never seen any reports of anybody starving and thought she never would. She asked people to post links, so I did. That's all!

The point I was trying to make is that though bad things, like the starvation, lack of care, and death of David Clapson do sometimes happen and are truly awful, they are also rare, especially in developed countries like the UK, thank goodness and, globally speaking, getting rarer.

I don't think that quote attributed to Nye Bevan was prphetic in the least; I think it was highly, and wrongly, negative. For the most part things have improved since his time.

This does not mean everything is good.

Honestly, can you live comfortably on benefits? I would like to know, I would.

For what's it worth, I think the benefit system needed an overhaul. A one stop shop idea is sensible. But it was not properly piloted and applied cruelly .

Any discussion on these threads are pointless, one poor man died and this can be discussed but any mention of someone
living very comfortably on benefits would cause accusations of
one being a Tory or uncaring.

Perhaps somebody could come up with some sort of way to allocate £71.70 so that awful things like this didn't happen. Some sort of ratio so that all the bills would be covered.

Oh no, hang on a minute, that's actually impossible.

I agree with you Labaik. I see people (usually females) dropping a packet of cereal into the bin in Waitrose. These are the same people who moan all the time about tax rises.

I'm sure food banks help, but people in poverty have loads of other needs, which aren't covered by a tin of budget baked beans.

Or this …

"The coroner said that when David Clapson died he had no food in his stomach. Clapson’s benefits had been stopped as a result of missing one meeting at the jobcentre. He was diabetic, and without the £71.70 a week from his jobseeker’s allowance he couldn’t afford to eat or put credit on his electricity card to keep the fridge where he kept his insulin working. Three weeks later Clapson died from diabetic ketoacidosis, caused by a severe lack of insulin. A pile of CVs was found next to his body."

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/09/david-clapson-benefit-sanctions-death-government-policies

Is this emaciated enough?

Not as far as I know. The basic amount was set in stone ages ago and has increased slightly over the years. It's been frozen for years. It has no relationship to anything.

The basic weekly amount for a single person 25 and over is £73.10, £57.90 up to 25 and £114.85 for a couple.

Universal Credit means that people with temporary work/zero hours contracts and the self-employed usually receive less than that.

Does the DWP have a formula on which they base the benefits payments i.e. so much for food, heating, etc., etc?

So, do we have to wait till people are starving before we care? What about people sleeping rough on the streets? Do they count or are they not starving enough??