'Bout time he jumped aboard with this !!!

Keir Starmer has finally criticised those responsible for the shambles of the Universal Credit system - not before time !!!



Sir Keir Starmer has urged ministers to use the upcoming domestic abuse legislation to overhaul disaster-hit universal credit to protect survivors from controlling partners.

The Labour leadership contender warned that joint payments of the benefit risk trapping women in abusive relationships, as the current system allows abusers to take control of the household budget.


He appealed to ministers to split universal credit payments between couples by default, rather than automatically requiring couples who live together to make a single claim.

The warning comes as the flagship welfare reform – which rolls six working-age benefits into one payment – was hit with fresh delays, with the full roll-out now planned for 2024.


Sir Keir said that the current system of payments gives domestic abusers an “easy mechanism” to commit financial abuse, with a survey by Women’s Aid and the TUC revealing that 52 per cent of people living with their abuser could not afford to leave.

Read more

• 
  Universal Credit completion to be delayed until 2024

He said: “Ministers have promised that they would bring back the Domestic Abuse Bill. When they do they must take steps to ensure it provides greater financial independence in universal credit payments.


“Joint payments are unnecessary and offer an easy mechanism for abusers to coercively control their partners.

“Universal credit should be scrapped and replaced with a social security system fit for the 21st century. Until then, we must fight to reduce the damage caused by this deeply flawed system.

“Removing the risk of survivors being trapped in abusive relationships is an important first step.”

Official figures show 1.6 million women and 786,000 men experienced domestic abuse in the year up to March 2019, according to the Office for National Statistics.

Read more

• 
  EU nationals domestically abused in UK may be pushed onto the streets
• 
  What Brexit means for survivors of domestic abuse
• 
  ‘Dangerous’ government advert for universal credit banned by watchdog
• 
  Women turning to ‘survival sex’ to bridge universal credit benefit gap
• 
  Two-thirds of young single parents to lose out under universal credit

Long-awaited updates to tackle domestic violence were finally brought forward in 2019 but the bill failed to complete its parliamentary stages before the election in December.

Boris Johnson promised to reintroduce the bill as part of his new legislative programme but no date has been set for when it returns to parliament.

The roll-out of universal credit has been hit by repeated controversies, with claimants facing debt, rent arrears and reliance on food banks due to delays in payments.

Adina Claire, acting co-chief executive of Women’s Aid, told The Independent: “Universal credit was not designed with survivors’ safety in mind.


“We know that perpetrators will use single household payments as a form of control, restricting access to money, which makes it even harder for a woman to leave.

“We have long been calling for the government to deliver separate payments that protect women’s financial independence, alongside wider reforms to ensure universal credit provides a safety net for every survivor of domestic abuse.”

 

Oh God the article has ads in the middle. Where do you pull these from, Facebook?

 

People on here, you included, criticised because you couldn't read the link I added, so now I copy and paste the article as printed and you still moan, so make up your bloody mind !!!

 

but it makes it look so amateur.
i mean you cannot expect a person like me who's already topsy turvy over the media to believe an article that has adverts all through the center right? i see those articles on facebook all the time and they're all garbage filled with spam and mindrot.

Don't fall victim to it Vlad!

Alright, here's what you're gonna do next. Buy the newspaper every day and take a photo of the article and then post that to us here. that way we know it's as legitimate as the newspaper is haha, not very IMO.

 

Absolutely not, you'll just have to wade through the article in future and be capable of showing a little intelligence in differentiating between the article and an advert.

 

So was/is Starmer right? - or is your finger of blame pointed at someone who; at least, raised their head (be it belated or not) to state the case?

 

I jut read a piece (the guardian I think but not sure) highlighting cases of suicide committed as a direct result of this grossly unfair system. The fact that more politicians are not standing up and being counted is a national disgrace!!!

 

The idea makes some sense, but it would add additional admin costs to systems that they are trying to simplify because they are 'top heavy' with overheads. It could also be abused by being claimed by couples who are not even together on a full time basis.
However benefits are paid, their will always be people abusing the welfare state in one way or another.
We all feel sorry for anyone with a disability, but disability benefits suffer the largest amount of fraudulent claims. As I am sure that you know, the last attempt to sort it out ended in total disaster.

 

There was very little wrong with the Disability Living Allowance system, it worked and worked well. The Government cut back on the numbers of Civil Servants running the system in Blackpool and it then fell into chaos and disrepute. Had Cameron left the system alone with the numbers of civil servants to administer it, we would not now be in this mess !!!

 

Any death is sad, but with one MP for a complete ward of region of a borough, what is the solution.?
Reports of the type that you mentioned, seem to be full of the words, somebody, anybody, and nobody, but the reporter never suggests a viable solution.
With so much domestic upheaval caused by violence, drugs and alcohol abuse, the amount of social workers would need to increase tenfold to make a real difference. People would then complain of the nanny state, while the dysfunctional families will insist that someone slipped on a banana skin when police arrive to see a house wrecked and people bruised and bleeding,

Until recently, we were virtually ignoring the number of homeless people who die on our streets every winter, a number that exceeds suicides tenfold.

I criticize people who dramatize situations without suggesting a working solution......and here am I, sitting here and doing just the same.....I wish that I could come up with some answers.

 

Back in the 70's, Jane worked for the DLA attendance allowance section, Twice a week, a doctor attended for assessments and claimants were given a robe and went into a small cubicle to change before meeting the doctor. Never a day passed without at least one person who had changed walked out of the cubicle, then put his brain in gear and thought "Whoops".
When people came in trying to get an Oscar nomination for playing a man on crutches, the assessor pressed a silent button, requesting that he was followed after leaving.
Seeing a guy get around the corner and then put his crutches under his arm and run for a bus, was like something out of a Mel Brooks film.

You are correct. No one complains when you hand over the money and ask no questions.

 

PS, I need to mention that people were generally only assessed when their was a level of suspicion.
I am not saying that genuinely disabled people commit fraud.

 

No, assessments were done at fairly frequent intervals if your award was for a specific period, then at the completion of that period a further medical examination was required and a fresh departmental decision made on whether the benefit was to be continued.

For DLA examinations, some Doctors visited claimants at their home, carried out the examination and then wrote their assessments after coming away from that particular visit. I caught one Doctor, who having visited, then dictated his decision to his Office Manager who then wrote it up on the Departmental form. This was a clear breach of patient confidentiality, and since the report was not in the Doctor's handwriting could not even be said that the opinion was actually that of the Doctor per se. As a result of this incident and my complaint, it caused the Department to withdraw the instructions to Doctors, rewrite those instructions and impose a ban on anyone writing the report other than the Doctor themselves. This cost the Department many tens of thousands £ to do.

 

The center that Jane worked at in the early 90's was set up to reduce fraud in the big impersonal London area. As well as the medical considerations, disabled fraudsters (mainly from outside the UK) were sitting assessments for their perfectly healthy friends. Correctly identifying the claimant was often a nightmare.
In the process they discovered hat 3 brothers (from eastern Europe) were sharing a driving licence, by giving their name as the licence'd driver when they were stopped. The other 2 were made to take a test, but it was later discovered that the one with the licence took their tests for them. Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction, particularly when dealing with people who conveniently forget how to speak English. LOL

 

Sounds like what centrelink offers aussies who are on the dole a cashless card.
Nothing but terrible

 

Wil

What actual evidence is this based on?

 

According to a fullfacts report in 2013 -The level of fraud as a proportion of the size of the benefits bill had actually remained fairly constant between 0.6% and 0.8% in the past five years before 2013

Now of course there will be fraud in any system (it happens in the private sector as well) the problem is known and checks and balances are in place and 0.6% and 0.8% of the whole seems quite low.

What I think happens is that the right wing media and right winners are adept at spinning this minor problem as a MAJOR one, especially through anecdotal evidence or rumours.

 

Wil

How were these eastern Europeans in the country if they were from the EU they would have found it very difficult to get any benefits let alone disability benefits

EU law doesn’t require Member States to allow EU migrants unrestricted access to benefits. Broadly speaking, EU ‘treaty rights’ allow a person who moves between EEA states (and Switzerland) to access benefits in the host country if they are ‘economically active’ or ‘self-sufficient.’

The only figure I could find for the number of EU nationals that could claim disability allowance was 3,900 for 2010.

It is even harder for non-EU migrants to get benefits with most having "no recourse to public funds" in the initial years after they arrive. This means that they are not eligible for benefits such as jobseekers' allowance, disability allowance, tax credits, or housing benefit.

So can you please back up your claim that disabled fraudsters mainly come from outside the UK?

 

Thing is that it has been estimated that in 2017/18 there was a ‘tax gap’ (money that should have been collected in taxes but wasn’t) at around £35 billion (although other put it much higher at closer to 100 billion) per year, it is unsure how much of that it due to ‘aggressive tax avoidance’ and/or fraud, but some put it at least half.

Now benefit fraud is estimated to cost the country about £1.9 to £2.3 billion.

As I said the wealth owned right wing media and wealthy right wing pundits do a lot to highlight the cost of benefit fraud to the country - do they ever do the same for tax avoidance and evasion?