Skip to main content

Labour Manifesto 2010 and the housing benefit cap

On Page 20 of Labour's 2010 Manifesto it looks at welfare reform.

More people with disabilities and health conditions will be helped to move into work from Incapacity Benefit and Employment Support Allowance, as we extend the use of our tough-but-fair work capability test. This will help to reduce the benefit bill by £1.5 billion over the next four years. We will reassess the Incapacity Benefit claims of 1.5 million people by 2014, as we move those able to work back into jobs.

Our goal is to make responsibility the cornerstone of our welfare state. Housing
Benefit will be reformed to ensure that we do not subsidise people to live in the private sector on rents that other ordinary working families could not afford. And we will continue to crack down on those who try to cheat the benefit system.


on page 19

Our job guarantees will put an end to long-term unemployment and a life on benefits. No one fit for work should be abandoned to a life on benefit, so all those who can work will be required to do so. At the same time, we believe that people should be able to earn enough to live and be better off than on welfare.

on page 45
This will be paid for as savings accrue from housing benefit through our reforms.

What are they saying now on Housing Benefit?

here Chris Bryant is quoted as saying:
There is dark talk of how the poor will be driven from affluent areas. Labour's Chris Bryant has suggested they will be "sociologically cleansed out of London" while the mayor, Boris Johnson, warned he would resist "any kind of Kosovo-style social cleansing" in the capital.

So on the cap we have Labour campaigning against a policy which is clearly in their 2010 manifesto. It is also clear that many of the other Coalition welfare changes are not dissimilar to those proposed by Labour. With only a 10% cut in HB after one year that even looks less than Labour's "required to work".

Comments

labourparty said…
That would be the manifesto which was rejected in our second worse electoral defeat ever, right?
PoliticalHackUK said…
Does the manifesto mention the cuts to the LHA? Re-rating the index linking? Does it mention a 10% cut after a year unemployed?

The Liberal Democrats are the last party to insist on anyone being held to a manifesto commitment, given the number that you have over-turned in a matter of weeks.

Popular posts from this blog

Why are babies born young?

Why are babies born young? This sounds like an odd question. People would say "of course babies are born young". However, this goes to the core of the question of human (or animal) development. Why is it that as time passes people develop initially through puberty and then for women through menopause and more generally getting diseases such as sarcopenia, osteoporosis, diabetes and cancer, but most of the time babies start showing no signs of this. Lots of research into this has happened over the years and now I think it is clear why this is. It raises some interesting questions. Biological youth is about how well a cell functions. Cells that are old in a biological sense don't work that well. One of the ways in which cells stop working is they fail to produce the full range of proteins. Generally the proteins that are produced from longer genes stop being produced. The reason for this relates to how the Genes work (the Genome). Because the genome is not gettin