Government to take £40 from everyone who loses their job

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

From this Autumn anyone who loses their job in Britain will receive £40 less as a result of government plans to make people wait for longer for any job support, according to a consultation published on Friday, May 23, 2014 by the Social Security Advisory Committee (SSAC) – an official body that advises the Department of Work and Pensions on benefits issues.

The TUC (Trades Union Congress) believes that the new policy will make newly unemployed people easy prey for loan sharks, with even the government admitting that the change may increase reliance on short-term loans.

The government plans to make all new claimants for Jobseeker’s Allowance (JSA) or Employment Support Allowance (ESA) wait seven days before they are eligible for help (at the moment they have to wait three days). The

committee’s consultation reveals that, according to the government’s own assessment, JSA claimants will lose £40 on average, while disabled people claiming ESA will lose £50.

The government’s impact assessment of the change, published by the SSAC as part of its consultation, shows that over 1.3 million people a year will be affected.

The government also believes that disabled people will be disadvantaged by the new policy and that under Universal Credit, “the potential hardship for claimants is much greater.”

TUC General Secretary Frances O’Grady said: “Forcing people to wait for job support will not help anyone find work. Instead it will make them easy prey for loan sharks. This has nothing to do with making work pay. It is simply

a mean attack on the welfare safety net and could affect any one of us.

“It won’t matter how long anyone has had a job or how much they have contributed to the system, they will all suffer the same penalty. The vast majority of people who lose a job thankfully find another one within a few months, but this is when they need help to tide them over between jobs. That is why we have a national insurance system to which we contribute when we are in work – a system that is now under attack.”

This is yet another attack, as Frances O'Grady so rightly said, on the British welfare system that was designed to stop people from having to resort to the methods they did have to in bygone days before.

The Con-Dem coalition is hellbent on bringing back not just Victorian values but the Victorian era, it would seem, with all the misery that goes with it.

When there are no jobs to be had for many who find themselves out of work they want to make it even harden on the people who find themselves in such a predicament. Not, I am afraid, that a Labour government would be acting much better, I am afraid, a the Labour Party today is as much for the working people as the Tory Party. The working class no longer has a true champion in Britain.

What was started under Thatcher (Tories) was continued under Blair and Brown (Labour) and is now being completed under Cammeron-Clegg (Tories/Liberal-Democrats). And from that we can see that none of the three main parties in British politics are prepared to champion the working class. The opposite rather.

© 2014