AS hard evidence emerges about how the ‘local welfare assistance’ scheme is operating in practice across England, it is quite clear that deliberately starving the poor and privatising benefits is the official policy of this Tory led coalition.
This scheme was introduced in April 2013 to replace the social fund – which was abolished in 2012 as part of Iain Duncan Smith’s notorious Welfare Reform Act – with the government claiming that it would provide a safety net for the unemployed and low paid who found themselves destitute, as a result of having their benefit stopped or for delays in processing their benefit claims.
Unlike the scheme it replaced, this new local welfare assistance was not ring-fenced – meaning that the money allocated to local councils by central government could be used for other purposes, and not solely for those families left penniless, due to the thousands of ‘sanctions’ that can be used to drive people off benefit for the slightest infringement of the harsh regimes imposed on benefit seekers.
No one would starve under the new brutal regime of benefit caps or find themselves homeless as a result of cuts and the bedroom tax, according to the propaganda pumped out by Duncan Smith and the DWP. Information obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, however, presents a very different picture.
Out of the paltry £136 million allocated by the coalition to the 150 local councils in England for this new form of ‘poor relief’ it turns out that £67 million remains unspent – instead of assisiting those in poverty, it sits unspent in the accounts of these councils or has been spent on other council projects, presumably ones that the councils consider more worthy than the undeserving poor.
A half of the councils spent less than 40 per cent of the allocated funds on relief while on average four in ten applications for emergency funds were turned down by councils despite the fact that the majority of applicants were totally penniless as a result of having their benefits withheld – under the old ring-fenced system only two out of ten were denied.
This figure is an average, and in some parts of England only one in ten get any help at all. The excuses given by local councils to justify this vicious attack on families, literally facing starvation, range from an admission that they have not publicised the new fund, to families not fulfilling the residency criteria.
Some Tory run councils just deny that there is any problem, echoing the position of the government expressed by the local government minister, Lady Stowell, who proclaimed in January that local authorities were ‘doing a good job of supporting people in times of crisis and are doing it without using all the funding that has been provided so far from DWP’.
The only ‘good job’ being done by the councils and the DWP, is to drive the unemployed and low paid onto the mercy of charities, food banks and the loan sharks – as one Labour MP put it, the government has ‘privatised the lender of last resort’, by using starvation as a weapon against the working class in its drive to smash the benefit system completely, and replace it with charities and pay day lenders.
It is not enough for Labour MPs and the trade union leaders to sit back and content themselves with expressions of outrage at the inhuman treatment meted out by this government. The burning issue is to put an end, not just to the government, but the bankrupt capitalist system that is determined to smash every gain made by the working class in order to pay back the debts of the bankers.
This requires the immediate demand that the TUC call a general strike to kick out the coalition and replace it with a workers government and a socialist system, where the wealth of the country is used for the benefit of all and not for the enrichment of the tiny handful of capitalist leeches.
