133

Exclusive: Special rapporteur Olivier De Schutter to urge ministers to increase welfare spending on visit to country this week

top 18 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[-] HowManyNimons@lemmy.world 23 points 1 year ago

Does Olivier De Schutter not know what a Tory is?

[-] obinice@lemmy.world 18 points 1 year ago

What if, and hear me out here, we were to turn the executives into a fine, nutritious powder (with many uses!) and distribute it to the poor?

[-] AlbertSpangler 3 points 1 year ago

AHH, that cools the fire

[-] Squizzy@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago

£85 is insane to live on, is that part of a separate payment? The jobseeker's, dole, disability in Ireland is over twice that. Is social insurance a separate provision?

[-] fakeman_pretendname@feddit.uk 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

You can also get Council Tax benefit, and Housing Benefit (more of a Landlord Benefit, really).

Council tax benefit saves you either some or all of the local council tax payment (~£1000 - £2500 per year in most places). Amusingly, it tends to be cheaper in wealthy areas.

Landlord benefit pays a percentage of what the Landlord asks for rent, generally compared to average rents in the area you live - so that might be £2000 - £3000 per year where I live in the North, but £10000 per year down South somewhere. You don't see any of that money personally, but it helps to make good headlines for angry "newspapers" and government policies.

There's additional bits of payment for caring for children under a particular age, disability etc, but generally, yeah, that's your lot.

[-] PsychedSy@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 year ago

You guys have to pay over 1k pounds to your local towns?

[-] smeg@feddit.uk 6 points 1 year ago

How much you pay is proportional to how much your property is worth (see Wikipedia for deets)

[-] PsychedSy@sh.itjust.works 6 points 1 year ago

Okay, so like property taxes here. Gotcha. I was just interested in different methods of collecting funds there are.

[-] tankplanker@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

I wish we had a proper property tax here that was based on house and land value that was the same nationally. With the way council tax works richer areas, which almost always have more expensive houses and land, pay less annually than the same property in the cheaper area and yet their local council is better funded. A national system is the only way to reverse this.

[-] smeg@feddit.uk 1 points 1 year ago

I don't know where your property tax goes, but that might overlap with our Stamp Duty, which is basically our tax on buying a house and is a nationwide government thing. Council Tax I think goes to your local council and is used for things like bin collection, buses, potholes, and local community events (and it keeps going up because the Tories keep cutting the amount that councils get from the government).

[-] autotldr 5 points 1 year ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:


Olivier De Schutter, the UN’s special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, cited research showing universal credit payments of £85 a week for single adults over 25 were “grossly insufficient” and described the UK’s main welfare system as “a leaking bucket”.

In an interview with the Guardian five years after his predecessor, Philip Alston, angered the Conservative government by accusing it of the “systematic immiseration of a significant part of the British population”, the Belgian lawyer risked a fresh confrontation by saying: “Things have got worse.”

De Schutter said the UK had signed an international covenant that created a duty to provide a level of social protection which ensured an adequate standard of living but that it was being broken, with welfare payments falling behind costs for the poorest people.

“If you look at the price of housing, electricity, the very high levels of inflation for food items over the past couple of years, I believe that the £85 a week for adults is too low to protect people from poverty, and that is in violation of article nine of the international covenant on economic, social [aand cultural] rights.

According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, in 2022 3.8 million people experienced destitution (struggling to afford to meet their most basic physical needs to stay warm, dry, clean and fed).

Alston, an internationally respected human rights lawyer, said “much of the glue that has held British society together since the second world war has been deliberately removed and replaced with a harsh and uncaring ethos”.


The original article contains 788 words, the summary contains 255 words. Saved 68%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2023
133 points (98.5% liked)

United Kingdom

4091 readers
99 users here now

General community for news/discussion in the UK.

Less serious posts should go in !casualuk@feddit.uk or !andfinally@feddit.uk
More serious politics should go in !uk_politics@feddit.uk.

Try not to spam the same link to multiple feddit.uk communities.
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.

Posts should be related to UK-centric news, and should be either a link to a reputable source, or a text post on this community.

Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.

If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread.

Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.

Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS