The social housing costs stuff isn't bad, but we can't keep the cost of social housing low and the quality of social housing effective unless we invest some capital in actually building new social housing - the government seems rather keen on doing the opposite and trying to sell off social housing stock. Also, yes, cuts to housing support are going ahead; there is some fluff text about "exemptions for hardship cases" but not any detail on how these will be administered yet. There's clearly an aim that out of work U21s should be forced to stay with their parents where possible, which concerns me as some families will just kick their kids onto the street at that age.
Cambridge is undeniably affluent - my home area, as Penty says, really rather less so, there are a fair few middle class people but also pockets of extremely low pay and poor housing in rural areas, which often are much less well geared up to deal with those problems than city areas. Working benefits are being frozen - the minimum wage is increasing which will partly counter that, as long as you're not self-employed, but the increased wage will only cover part of the losses for low-wage workers. If you are self-employed the news is only bad, of course; I'm not really sure why the government dislikes the self-employed, but they get no breaks to make up for their loss of tax credits whatsoever.
People on low income with young kids often do work - older kids looking after younger ones, two-parent households trying to scrape by on one low-wage job, etc. The idea that it will ultimately be the parents not the kids who suffer from this is, I think, spurious, and also takes a very tight definition of "luxury". Sure, a foreign holiday is a luxury. But what about, say, books, or being able to buy toys for your children? These are not necessities for survival, but it's well known that children who lack appropriate and diverse sensory inputs at a young age will go on to do less well in school. The reason I have done well in life is, as much as anything else, because I was brought up in a house where I had books, computers, etc. Do I think we should try to make sure work pays better than benefits? Sure. Do I think that is best done by humiliating those who are out of work into a lifestyle that revolves solely around survival to the detriment of even having the resources to bring up their children well? No, and that's what this bill is set to do.
These things don't affect the people that just got unlucky or haven't got the ability/good health/whatever to break out of needing benefits.
This simply isn't true. For just one example, the benefit cap. If you're "using" most of your 20K cap for housing benefit because you've got artificially inflated house rents in your area (eg London, but also with the lower cap most city centres), then lose your job through no fault of your own, you'll probably end up getting kicked out of your house. The reforms do thankfully by and large exempt the disabled, though support for them is being cut elsewhere.
I'm not suggesting overall expenditure will increase, but there will be fewer savings than anticipated, social problems as a result of low income may well increase which means more pressure for social services and potentially police, and things like diets will get worse meaning storing up more future problems for the NHS. This bill is implemented with the assumption that large families are purely down to the fact that benefits allow people to afford them, something that simply isn't borne out by the evidence. It's also based on the assumption that when faced with tighter financial circumstances parents will make sound decisions for their children and their upbringing - also something a little hard to justify from the evidence base. I don't think we will see a shrinkage in family sizes after this bill, and haven't seen any evidence as yet that would indicate otherwise.
Anyway, a) too tired to go hammer and tongs at this, did that on twitter plenty already
b) moved to new thread
