Just been a report on ITV news following the government proposals having been leaked. PIP to be frozen next year and a further £6 billion of cuts to be made. PIP claim criteria to be made much stricter and other out of work benefits to be linked to much stricter rules on looking for work. No longer speculation. It seems that the Labour government are going where the Conservatives felt was a step too far!
I saw an interview with ‘Rachel from accounts’ (or Rachel from customer services as I more accurately call her) on Sky News yesterday. She specifically highlighted the fact that since the pandemic the number of young people (under 25?) not in employment, education or training, has risen to over 1 million. I am no fan of this disastrous government, but that does need tackling. People of working age should look for reasons why they can work, not reasons why they can’t.
IMHO the bar for being able to get benefits does need to be higher, but this will be very difficult now as the flood gates opened a few years ago when qualifying criteria and definitions of what constitutes a ‘disability’ was widened to include things that were previously deemed ‘health conditions’. The unintended consequence of this change is that when hard working tax payers see people with conditions that the majority of people would not consider to be ‘disabilities’ languishing at home on benefits, sympathy levels vanish and that has a negative impact on everyone.
The one thing that I wouldn’t agree with would be the freezing of PIP rates, but I doubt that would happen. We are in the run up to a budget and governments of all colours always adopt the same pre-budget approach. They allow discussion documents to be leaked that include things that would be deeply unpopular but have already been discounted. These things cause outrage and grab the headlines, but when the budget is finally announced they don’t happen. However, plenty of other negative things do happen, but rather than generating negative headlines, there is relief that the worst of the proposals didn’t happen, so all the negative stuff slips in under the radar. Call me a cynic, but it’s happened prior to every budget that I can recall over many decades!