Sunday 26 August 2012

“The Chief of Police Stepped On Me and Then He Charged Me With Rioting”: Activists Face Jail Time for Defending Homes

“The Chief of Police Stepped On Me and Then He Charged Me With Rioting”: Activists Face Jail Time for Defending Homes:
The police came at four in the morning with a battering ram to the Cruz home in Minneapolis, Minnesota. And that was only one of the five eviction attempts required to finally claim the home for the banks.
“After we had been peacefully occupying this house for over a month without any incidents, then they come in with a battering ram and blame us for disturbing the peace,” said Nick Espinosa, one of the organizers with Occupy Homes Minnesota, which has taken the lead in saving local families from being put out on the street.
The battering ram was just adding insult to injury—the Cruz family was being evicted through no fault of their own, because PNC bank had made a mistake in processing their payments. The Occupy Homes crew moved into the house to try and defend it while the sheriff's department came once and then twice to evict.
“We had people who were locking down to concrete barrels and other devices to prevent them from evicting the house and we were mobilizing people to come and defend the house,” Espinosa said. Over the course of the five eviction attempts there were 26 arrests. The last time Espinosa was arrested along with 14 others and charged with rioting in the third degree, defined as “Violence or the threat of violence to people or property when more than three are gathered.”
They face up to two years in prison. Espinosa noted, “There are 15 people now facing riot charges who were arrested doing nonviolent civil disobedience, basically sitting down and linking arms on the front steps of a house.”
“The chief of police was there the night I was arrested. Four other officers stepped over us as we were sitting in front of the door,” he continued. “He stepped directly on top of us, on our shoulders and necks, to come into the house.” The previous day police had grabbed protesters by the neck to move them out of the way, and women activists complained of feeling sexually assaulted, having been groped by the police. “Somebody's hand went up one of my friends' shirts,” Espinosa said. One of the Cruzes' neighbors was arrested while standing on the sidewalk outside her house holding up a sign in support of Occupy Homes.
The battle to save the Cruz home is just one of many being fought by organizers around the country to stop the epidemic of foreclosures, many rooted in fraud or bank error – foreclosures that continue to shake the economy four years after the housing bubble burst. No high-level bankers, of course, have been charged with any crime for the systemic fraud and misconduct that led to the economy's near collapse; but peaceful community activists standing up for their neighbors face serious jail time.
“The city has the option to use their discretion about how they react to situations like this,” Espinosa said. “There are plenty of other crimes that they could be pursuing. They don't have to come and respond to that issue of people being in this house, that's technically trespassing.”
Evicted by Bank Error
“We had made the sheriffs very aware of the situation and said don't get involved in this, just let it be, we're working out a solution,” Espinosa explained.
PNC Bank, the mortgage lender, failed to process an online payment made by the Cruz family—and then demanded two months' worth to make up for it. The family couldn't come up with the money, and the bank moved to foreclose.
“We began working with a local nonprofit that was supposed to be working out a loan modification,” Alejandra Cruz explained in a blog post that accompanied a Change.org petition to save her family's home. The bank told the family they would work on a solution, but the family was served with an eviction notice anyway.

Alejandra and David Cruz are college students and DREAM act organizers; their family is from Mexico City. “Until now,” Alejandra pointed out, “many families in the Latino community have been afraid to stand up when they are being mistreated by the banks that fraudulently foreclose on families across the country. The banks have used this fear and manipulation of a complicated legal system to profit from honest, hardworking people.”
“I believe what they were doing is saying they were negotiating and then with the other hand pushing forward with the eviction so they didn't have any responsibility to work with the family,” Espinosa said.
This process is so common that it has a name: dual tracking. It's also been called out by lawmakers and attorneys general as unfair and deceptive to homeowners. "We don't think that a homeowner who is making a good-faith effort to work through their troubled mortgage should have the roof ripped out from over them while they are negotiating, or trying to negotiate," Geoff Greenwood, a spokesman for Iowa Atty. Gen. Tom Miller, told the Los Angeles Times last year.
Yet the process continues, and families across the country struggle with it every day, often without the support of neighbors and organizers willing to put their bodies on the line and risk arrest to keep them in their homes.
Alejandra and David took a road trip across the country in June to PNC's headquarters, but the bank's executives refused to bend. (Last year, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency found PNC, one of the nation's largest banks, to have “unsafe and unsound” mortgage servicing and foreclosure practices, including robo-signing.)
For now, the Cruzes are living in an apartment and continue to pressure the bank to work out a solution to get them back in their home (which was bought by Freddie Mac at a sheriff's sale, and remains boarded up). They continue, as well, to organize with Occupy Homes in support of other families.
The system is stacked against families like these, though—banks have expensive lawyers and go through this regularly, while families struggling to pay the bills have little help. “The legal system is not the battleground for us to win against the banks,” Espinosa said. “The way we're going to do that is through popular pressure and people power.”
Keeping Up the Fight
Espinosa considers the arrests and riot charges an escalation by the city to try and stifle their organizing and direct action. “For them it's a political issue that exposes the fact that they're complicit in all these foreclosures and that if they weren't sending the police with our city resources to come and evict families who are being thrown out through no fault of their own, the banking system would not continue to profit off of tearing communities apart.”
“The city is trying to make an example out of people, especially core organizers, by using trumped-up charges to try to force us to take a worse plea deal,” he continued.
He and others have been offered plea deals, but they refuse to take the deals unless the riot charges are dropped against all of them. “We're using court solidarity to demand that everybody gets a fair deal,” he explained. “We're ultimately asking them to drop all the charges because we think it's ridiculous that they're going after peaceful protesters protecting their neighbors instead of the banks who crashed our economy through massive fraud.”
Minneapolis's mayor, R.T. Rybak, had released a statement before the arrests saying “The City is not in the foreclosure business,” and “The City plays a limited role to protect public safety.” Yet, Espinosa noted, the normally-progressive mayor's words didn't match his actions. “If you cared about people and cared about doing something about the foreclosure crisis, your priorities would not be trying to intimidate people with bogus riot charges.”
“He has the power to direct the police not to enforce the evictions, he has the power to publicly state that banks should be negotiating with people and we couldn't get him to do that,” Espinosa continued. “I'd much rather be going after the bank than going after the mayor, but when he puts himself between our ability to do the work and acts as a protector of the bank then he puts himself in the crossfire and becomes a political target.”
Occupy movements around the country have dealt with this problem: some argue that the movement should focus solely on the banks, while others note that it's impossible to do so when the political and legal systems enforce the banks' will and offer little recourse to everyday people.
However, Espinosa noted, there's an upside to the ridiculous charges and police brutality (not to mention wasted resources in keeping the home under guard and prosecuting peaceful protesters). Local support for their movement has grown, from neighbors up and down the Cruzes' block to local celebrity Brother Ali, a hip-hop artist who had been a supporter of Occupy Homes for a while but took his first arrest as part of the civil disobedience at the Cruz home. Because of canvassing the block for support, Espinosa said, Occupy Homes also found another homeowner fighting foreclosure and helped him get a mortgage modification. “A lot of new people have been galvanized by the outrageous nature of these charges,” he noted.
Occupy Homes Minnesota continues to fight for local families, having just celebrated Monique White's victory and the victory of Espinosa's own mother in keeping their homes. Despite the distraction that the ongoing struggle over criminal charges poses, they remain determined to win both the right for the Cruzes to return to their home and their legal battles.
“If they want to take people to trial and try to convince a jury that we were rioting by sitting down and linking arms,” Espinosa said, “we can do that.”
Tue, 08/21/2012 - 15:40

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5 Weird -- and Terrifying -- Consequences of Climate Change You May Not Know About

5 Weird -- and Terrifying -- Consequences of Climate Change You May Not Know About:
When you think about the terrible effects of climate change, I bet you picture droughts, hurricanes, tsunamis and earthquakes, which makes sense — climate change is causing weather patterns to go absolutely crazy. But the crazy weather leads to other consequences that we often don’t think about when we hear the globe is warming up. Here is a list of 5 frightening effects from climate change this summer.
1. Increased Suicide
Besides destroying crops and causing food prices to spike, droughts have recently been linked to an alarming consequence: suicide. In a new study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers found a link between droughts and suicides among men ages 30 to 49 living in rural areas in Australia. After evaluating 40 years of drought and suicide data for the state of New South Wales, droughts were linked to a 15 percent increase in suicide risk among these men. This link was also found in men under 30, though no link was found among women.
Though research for this study was completed in Australia, links between droughts and suicides have been made before, particularly in India where thousands of farmers kill themselves each year. In fact, a recent article states that one farmer in India commits suicide every 12 hours.
As the United States is seeing its largest drought since 1956, there are reasons to be concerned about the correlation. While the authors of the study note, “suicide is a complex phenomenon with many interacting social, environmental, and biological causal factors,” there are plenty of explanations for the correlation. The authors write that farmers and farming communities lose a lot of money when droughts destroy their crops. They also state that farmers experience mental distress when witnessing the devastation of their livestock and crops.
The authors remind us that if we don’t truly work to stop climate change, we will have to face the disturbing effects. They conclude in their abstract: “Elucidating the relationships between drought and mental health will help facilitate adaptation to climate change.”
2.  West Nile Virus
What do you get when you combine increasingly warm weather and thousands of mosquitoes? A huge outbreak of West Nile virus. As droughts are causing creek waters to stop flowing, mosquitoes are finding the perfect breeding spot in the standing water. Mosquitoes also mature and thus breed faster in the heat. Meanwhile, warm weather also decreases the virus’ incubation period. This all allows the virus to spread rapidly. In addition, earlier springs and milder winters lengthen breeding season.
According to the Center for Disease Control, West Nile virus has infected 1,118 people and killed 41 people across the nation. Human cases have been detected in 38 states, while human and animal cases have been detected in 47 states. Texas, especially Dallas County, has been hard hit, with 586 reported cases and 11 deaths.
3. River Obstruction
What’s the number-one thing you need to distribute goods along the Mississippi River? Water. But the drought has shortchanged the river this summer, as its water levels hit a record low.  For instance, the water level near Memphis is 12 feel lower than normal. As a result, 11 miles of the river was recently closed when a vessel ran aground. The river’s shutdown halted nearly 100 boats and barges from passing. Obstruction of riverways can have devastating effects on the economy. In 2010, more than $40 billion worth of cargo passes along the Mississippi River.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has responded with lots of dredging, a process of clearing out an area of water by scooping up sediment. However, as we often realize, trying to put a bandage on our environmental crisis rarely works. Dredging causes its own environmental impact, including harming marine ecosystems and spreading toxins near the site.
USACE is dredging in an attempt to make the river deep enough so heavy barges can pass. Shippers have had to lighten their barges, which is increasing their fuel and labor costs, and is, of course, not very sustainable.
The river has since opened, but several ports along the river have closed, and low water levels are expected to affect cargo until October.
The captain of one dredge, Frank Segree, said, "If we lose the river system it's just like losing the interstate highway system …Commerce is a vital part of our nation. This is a main artery for commerce."
4. Nuclear Plant Shutdown
Nuclear power plants often rely on cold waters to cool their reactors. But as hot weather is causing water temperatures to rise, nuclear plants have had to respond. In Connecticut, the Millstone nuclear plant was recently shut down as the waters surrounding it reached nearly 77 degrees, 2 degrees higher than the 75 degrees the reactor was designed to withstand.
In July, an Illinois nuclear plant, whose reactor was built to work in water below 98 degrees, asked for special permission to continue operation when the waters around it reached 102 degrees. Permission was granted partly because if a nuclear plant shuts down, cold water must be available to cool all equipment.
Craig Nesbit, the owner of the plant, told the New York Times, "Last thing in the world you’d ever want to do, if there was no safety implication, is shut down a 2,600-megawatt nuclear plant in the biggest heat wave in the last 30 years."
Other plants in the Midwest have faced similar problems with warm water temperatures as well as low water levels, which inhibit reactors’ pipes from drawing up water.
Although we should be focusing on creating more sustainable initiatives than nuclear energy, even greener energy projects are struggling to meet the supply of our large energy demand. For example, California’s hydroelectric power plants cannot produce as much electricity this summer due to the drought. Perhaps, the only truly sustainable approach we can take is to change our resource-consuming lifestyles.
Still, the worst-case scenario is not simply a reduction of energy, but a nuclear plant meltdown. Emergency officials in Connecticut even held a drill to deal with two fictitious accidents at the Millstone nuclear plant. They prepared for a release of large amounts of radioactivity from the reactor. The governor declared a general emergency, closing parks, moving schoolchildren to evacuation centers, evacuating residents within five miles of the plant and distributing potassium iodide pills to guard against absorption of radioactive iodine through people’s thyroids.
5. Cows Fed Candy
With corn nearly $9 a bushel due to the drought, Nick Smith, the co-owner of United Livestock Commodities in Kentucky, said his farm had to come up with a cheaper way to feed his cattle. The remedy? A concoction of candy rejected for human consumption, an ethanol byproduct and a mineral nutrient.
Joseph Watson, also a co-owner of the farm, said, "Just to be able to survive, we have to look for other sources of nutrition."
Watson claims the cows seem to be doing okay. But since cows are designed to eat grass — not corn, and certainly not an expired candy and ethanol mixture — the sweet mixture probably won’t be promising. And there are human side-effects, too: cows that don’t eat grass are more prone to developing E. coli, which can infect various types of food we eat.
Just this past week, a produce supplier in California recalled its romaine lettuce in fear of possible E.coli contamination. So vegetarians, don’t think we’re in the clear. Nobody is safe from these terrible climate change consequences that are affecting people -- and animals -- worldwide.
Thu, 08/23/2012 - 14:32

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Sunday 12 August 2012

Speaking Your Mind Has Consequences

Speaking Your Mind Has Consequences:

Food, Inc.
Food, Inc. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Perdue Farms
Perdue Farms (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Remember Carole Morison from the documentary “Food, Inc.“? She was the chicken farmer under contract with Perdue, the country’s third largest chicken processor, who offered a rare look at what an industrial chicken farm looks like. The chickens barely had room to move, and many died daily due to the conditions and their accelerated breeding. She was tired of it — by agreeing to take part in the film, Morison put her livelihood in jeopardy. Perdue terminated her contract in 2008 after she refused to entirely enclose her chicken houses.
Her eyes were opened to the truth and she now uses sustainable farming methods and has never been so happy and content!
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Thursday 9 August 2012

Family Courts Are They One Way To Stop Legal Aid

Family Courts Are They One Way To Stop Legal Aid:
Barnet Civil and Family Court Centre on Regent...
Barnet Civil and Family Court Centre on Regents Park Road, Finchley. It is a civil and family courts centre. The building’s address is St Mary’s Court, and the photographer believes that there used to be a school of the same name on this site. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
A move has been a foot for many a year whereby successive governments have tried to find a family friendly way to deal more effectively, with family disputes over children! Some cases have dragged out over many weeks and months and of course costs have spiraled out of control. So sooner rather than later something had to be done.
The news today provided an insight to the new system and its implementation and l have added an extract or flavour of what has been published!
Extract of published proposal:- 
Proposals to change the culture of family courts and speed up cases in England and Wales have been published. The plans include a single family court run by judges and magistrates to replace the current system where judges sit in multiple court buildings. Family courts often deal with child custody cases following divorce or separation. The “time-wasting” use of expert witnesses is to be cut substantially. There will be a time limit of 26 weeks for all but exceptional cases involving children’s futures. Last spring, the average case took 57 weeks, falling to 51 weeks in the last quarter. The Mail hopes that the issue of secrecy in family courts is addressed: “But would it be asking too much if he might address the veil of secrecy that hangs over family courts – all the more worrying, since the numbers of children in care have surged by 10,000 to 30,000 since the horrifying Baby P case in 2008? Yes, children’s identities must be protected. But transparency and publicity are always the strongest shields against miscarriages of justice.”
My Views:- 
The fact that we are looking at reducing time taken to process these cases seems on the face of it, an excellent way but by cutting the time in these types of cases, leads to problems! The wasted time as it has been called provides the judges with a broader picture of certain cases,as a number of key facts, do not always come to light until late into the case! This golden opportunity would be lost and mistakes on custody of vulnerable children, may well be awarded to the wrong person. This may lead to further court cases, causing further trauma for both the child and the other parties concerned.We are not simply dealing with cases of theft or even a simple divorce [ Not that these cannot be long drawn out] but in these cases a young, vulnerable child!
The second point is the issue relating to secrecy and to numbers of children in care, is it not better that a child is put into care, either short-term or long if the welfare of that child is threatened. Let us be honest with ourselves at this point, do we not live in a precarious world of bad if not in some cases evil people. Who prey on these types of children as a vent for some twisted ideas, laid upon them by their parents or lack of good parental control! When l was young we called this ” falling in with the wrong crowd” well it has got worst not better! So some veil of secrecy must be up held as protection against these types of people and much worse using cases like this to further their own ends! We all know how much money can be made with a good story, some unscrupulous journalists hang onto a story like a ” dog with a bone ” holding on to every bit of it, just to make their facts fit a story!
Finally and the reason for my heading for this story and what is behind it all! Whenever changes to policies in government take place they have a monetary aspect, as l said by the fact cases drag out over many months! The related costs of ” legal aid” can run into hundreds of thousands of pounds and it all has to be paid for by the good old taxpayer! Well in these austere days for some, our politicians can make us feel better with words like, WE CARE, WE WANT TO HELP and my favourite WE WANT TO SAVE THE TAXPAYER MONEY! So by proposing SWEEPING changes and a DRASTIC overhaul they will be able to save money, for WHO and at WHAT COST!
This could lead to SWEEPING AWAY THE LEGAL AID SYSTEM so if you can pay and remember the costs for private legal services are much higher for the legal eagles. Then with no system of help for the less well off, we will see a lot more miscarriages of justice in this country.
So l for one look for many more of these ” Sweeping Changes and Drastic Overhauls ” and will report as l see them occurring!

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Filed under: Ace Healthcare News, Ace News Desk, Ace Social News Tagged: Child, Child care, Child custody, current-events, England and Wales, Family, Family court, Government, Legal aid, Wales

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New Creative Commons License Chooser – Creative Commons

New Creative Commons License Chooser – Creative Commons:
English: Three “Layers” Of Creative Commons Li...
English: Three “Layers” Of Creative Commons Licenses Русский: Трия “слоя” лицензий Creative Commons (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Creative Commons
Creative Commons (Photo credit: jorgeandresem)
New Creative Commons License Chooser – Creative Commons
Latest news just made available for the changes to improve creative commons licenses and make it easier to understand.
Creative Commons is proud to announce the launch of our new license chooser tool. The license chooser has been completely redesigned for greater clarity and ease of use. While the original license chooser was successful at simplifying the act of selecting a license and applying it to one’s work, its linear workflow resembled a registration process. Furthermore, as the tool had been extended numerous times, its interface became more and more cluttered. While the redesign is a total user interface overhaul, feature-wise there isn’t anything new that wasn’t already somewhere in the license engine. This may come as a surprise to many users familiar with the old tool.
New Creative Commons License Chooser – Creative Commons.
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Reducing Council Tax Benefit Will Benefit Government

Reducing Council Tax Benefit Will Benefit Government:
Bill of Benefits
Bill of Benefits (Photo credit: judge_mental)
This was a snippet of  news picked up just a while ago, that interested me as to the ramifications! It seems that this was a joint decision by the coalition on the surface of it, but the full article on the this story, reveals a lot more!
Anyway here is the extract firstly courtesy of the IFS and Paul Johnson:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies has warned that poor families are set to have their council tax benefits cut due to the Coalition telling councils to cut their benefit bills by 10%. IFS chief Paul Johnson said: “They could decide to take 10% off the current cost of council tax benefit, which means some council tax recipients will be worse off. It’s quite hard to do this without affecting those who receive 100% council tax benefit – the very poorest.” Labour peer Baroness Hollis said the proposals were “deeply unfair”.
Under the present situation these rules apply and provide these guidelines:
Council Tax Benefit: key facts about the current system

Council Tax Benefit (CTB) provides means-tested help to people on a low income who have to pay Council Tax. For working age people there is a limit on savings of £16,000. If you claim means-tested out-of-work benefits (Income Support, Jobseeker’s Allowance and Employment and Support Allowance) you generally receive full assistance, so that you do not pay Council Tax at all. If you are in work or have other income you can still receive CTB but are likely to get less than the full amount, so that your Council Tax bill will be reduced but not eliminated.
A more generous system applies to pensioners. If you claim Pension Credit (guarantee element) there is no limit on the amount of savings you can have and you will normally not pay Council Tax at all. Pensioners with higher incomes can also qualify, even if they do not get Pension Credit, and depending on their circumstances can qualify with an income of £400 a week or more. Around 60% of pensioners are entitled to CTB, though many fail to claim.
Under the new system whereby the amount of benefit is cut by 10% these rules would be drastically amended:
The government’s reform proposals: 
The government’s consultation paper makes the following proposals:

 Help with Council Tax will be a local authority responsibility and will not become part of Universal Credit (as DWP and some commentators have urged)

 The amount provided to local authorities for the new system will be 10% less than current spending on CTB

 Support for pensioners will not be affected by this cut in spending and will remain at existing levels with existing rules

Local authorities will be free to establish whatever rules they choose for their schemes for working age people (and will administer the scheme for pensioners using national rules)

 Central government will provide a fixed amount of money to local authorities to operate their new schemes. Unlike current arrangements, this central government grant will not be ring-fenced and will not vary according to demand

 New local schemes to provide help with paying Council Tax must be in place by April 2013

The consultation paper only directly affects England and separate proposals are likely to be made in Wales and Scotland. However, the 10% spending reduction affects all parts of Great Britain and in the analysis below and in the Annex it is assumed that Wales and Scotland follow suit in protecting the position of pensioners.
Impact of the expenditure cut:
When the new system of local support for Council Tax is introduced in April 2013 the amount provided to local authorities will be reduced by 10% relative to current expenditure on CTB, saving around £480 million a year. However, characterising this as a 10% cut is disingenuous, as pensioners are in effect excluded from the new system. In terms of the population of working age claimants, who are the only ones that can be affected by new rules, the cut is much larger than 10%.

The national picture is shown in the table below. It shows the kinds of people who are currently claiming CTB and how this relates to the savings target of £480 million. Working age people are divided into those who are receiving full CTB, almost all of whom will be claiming claim means-tested out-of-work benefits (Income Support, Jobseeker’s Allowance and Employment and Support Allowance), low earners who are receiving some CTB but have to pay some Council Tax themselves, and other people who are receiving some CTB but are not in work.
Options for meeting the savings target: ‘equal pain’

As shown by the analysis above, local authorities have to make very large savings from working age claimants to meet the government’s savings target. One approach to this would be to impose an ‘equal pain’ rule and reduce all benefit payments by the same proportion (19% on average nationally). However, for those claimants currently getting full CTB this would mean starting to collect Council Tax from a group who currently pay nothing. Moreover, the reason they do not pay anything at the moment is because they qualify for means-tested benefits like Income Support, where by definition the amount of money they have to live on is at ‘safety net’ levels.

Local authorities have some experience of the difficulty of extracting small amounts of money from people living in poverty. The ill-fated Community Charge (or ‘Poll Tax’) of the early 1990s imposed a minimum 20% charge on all citizens, whatever their income or status, so that local authorities had to trace and collect money from everyone living in their locality. While the property base for Council Tax will make the task somewhat easier, that experience shows the difficulty with moving away from full rebates for the poorest. Administering the system is likely to be expensive, with many of the 2 million people now expected to pay likely to opt for weekly or monthly payments, and there is always the possibility of mass non-compliance, as occurred with the Poll Tax.
It may therefore make more sense to look at completely removing entitlement to help with Council Tax from some groups. As well as helping with the administrative problems outlined above, this approach has two advantages. First, it means that particularly vulnerable groups, such as people with disabilities or children, can be protected from the cuts. Second, it is the most effective way of increasing work incentives for particular groups, as it will make them poorer when unemployed and no worse-off when in employment.
Options for meeting the sales target – removing entitlement for some groups!
There are a number of groups who might be candidates for removing from entitlement altogether. For instance, one possibility would be to restrict eligibility for support to tenants, so that owner occupiers were expected to pay the full amount of Council Tax whatever their circumstances. In terms of collection it might be possible to treat unpaid Council Tax as a charge against the value of the property, so that people who could not pay would effectively find arrears added to their mortgage. And low earning owner-occupiers are one of the main groups to benefit from Universal Credit, enjoying help with mortgage payments where none is available currently, creating a further reason for treating this group less favourably. Around 1.5 million CTB claimants are owner-occupiers, and though the majority of these are likely to be pensioners it is likely that removing entitlement from this group would be just about sufficient to meet the savings target.

However, a criterion based on tenure-type would necessarily affect claimants with children or disabilities, two groups who local authorities would hope to protect (and, in the former case, which they have a statutory duty to protect under child poverty legislation). A more attractive route might therefore be to remove from Council Tax support all working age people who do not meet certain criteria, such as having dependent children, living in a household where someone is disabled, being pregnant or a full-time carer. Such conditions would largely mirror the conditions for claiming Income Support and Employment and Support Allowance, so that in effect claimants of Jobseeker’s Allowance would be excluded from the scheme. Nationally around 600,000 people receive full CTB because they are claiming income-based Jobseeker’s Allowance, though around 20% of these have dependent children. Subtracting claimants with children, the likely saving nationally from removing Jobseeker’s Allowance claimants would be around £420 million, and once savings on working non-disabled childless people are included it is likely that the saving target would be met.
The harshness of such an approach cannot be denied. A single unemployed person without children or disabilities currently receives £67.50 a week to live on, and forcing them to pay Council Tax would reduce this to closer to £50 a week. It is difficult to see how they will make ends meet, and collection of Council Tax from this group is likely to be a severe problem. Nevertheless, maintaining support for people with children or disabilities, and avoiding the potential administrative nightmare of imposing ‘equal pain’, will necessarily involve making difficult choices such as this!

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Slides from the DWP workshop on the changes in...
Slides from the DWP workshop on the changes in Housing Benefit (Photo credit: solobasssteve)
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Filed under: Ace Benefits News, Ace Finance News, Ace News Desk Tagged: Council Tax, CTB, Housing Benefit, Income Support, Institute for Fiscal Studies, Local government, Pension Credit, Universal Credit
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