Review of Housing Benefit

As part of the Budget 2008, NL announced that they would review the Housing benefit system.

“Despite Housing Benefit being available both in and out of work, it is still seen by some as a disincentive to work”

The usual guff being reiterated and the politicised language used to prop up the lazy assumptions about why people are unemployed.

This review is being done jointly by the DWP and the treasury. It will be completed by the end of the year. It will examine how HB effects the willingness of people to work. Other aspects that will looked at will be the structure and deliverance of HB.

I don’t hold out for anything positive to come out of this “comprehensive” review except more attacks on the poor with further fanning the flames of blame. And now with the likes of David “the man with a plan” Cameron and yesterday at Tory party conference, Chris Grayling indulging in the we-can-be-even-worse screwers-of-the-poor-than-NL mentality:

“If people refuse reasonable job offers they’ll lose their benefits and if they refuse an offer three times, then they’ll be excluded from the benefits system for three years. And for those who don’t manage to find work and claim jobseeker’s allowance for more than two years, we’ll introduce a year-long community work programme to get them back into the work habit. No one benefits from sitting at home on benefits doing nothing.”

Something for nothing? Somehow that doesn’t seem to apply to corporate capitalists….

Private jails for kids top the league table of shame for restraining kids

This press release from the Howard League for Penal Reform makes very depressing and grim reading. They have revealed that 3 of the 4 privately run secure training centres (STCs) which hold children as young as 12 top the league table for using restraint. There have been campaigns to abolish physical restraint used on kids.

The degrading and violent assaults on children and young people in STCs is widespread. It is estimated that between April-December 2007,  physical restraint was used on almost 5,000 occasions in young offender institutions and secure training centres. This resulted in 154 injuries that included loss of consciousness and damage to internal organs.

And during the early part of this year, Anne Owers (HM Chief Inspector of Prisons) found physical force had been used at the G4S run Oakhill STC 757 times over the previous nine months, with 535 occasions involving the “highest level of restraint”. She stated that Oakhill has a,“staggeringly high level of use of force by staff”. And she called for its temporary closure.

This latest press release from Howard League, between Oct 2006 and June 2008, the top 3 institutions to use physical restraint on kids are: Oakhill STC with 1,493 restraint incidents, Medway with 1, 419 and Hassockfield with 843.

And the logic and spin used by by these private contractors, for example GSL, (they run Medway and Rainsbrook) state that their policies are “derived from the principles of childcare best practice and reflect the every child matters agenda” yet how come they come second in this league table of shame?

Many of these children and young people come to these places damaged, distressed and in a highly vulnerable state. They are subjected to abuse and violence once in these places that leads to systematic brutalisation. What kind of person will come out of the other side..?  Young people like Adam Rickwood committed suicide as a result of physical restraint (at Hassockfield where, incidentally, is it run by Serco!) and Gareth Myatt who died in the “care” of Rainsbrook after losing consciousness while being restrained by 3 members of staff.

Physical restraint is used as a punishment against children and teenagers. The whole ethos of containment lacks compassion and understanding. These young people are sometimes miles away from any support structure, their human rights breached. Physical restraint is nothing more than torture.

Rather like the numbers of adult deaths in state custody that go unheard, ignored and reduced to statistics, the number of children who have died in custody in the last 17 years is 29. Young, vulnerable and powerless people whose lives end in these hellholes.

As Frances Crook (Director of the Howard League) says: “Later this week the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child gives its verdict on the UK government’s treatment of our children. The issue of children in custody being physically restrained in English and Welsh jails will be of major concern. Our legal team are being told by children in custody that they are being provoked by staff into bad behaviour so that restraint can be used, since a Court of Appeal judgment in July limited the ways in which restraint can be legally deployed”.

Reclaim our rights: amendments to the Employment Bill

Just received the following press release:

Reclaim our Rights! Play your part! – Lobby Your MP for Amendments to the Employment Bill

The United Campaign has launched a postcard campaign in support of amendments to the Employment Bill. Please download a model letter from our website at www.unitedcampaign.org.uk, or contact us at info@unitedcampaign.org.uk for copies of the postcard. We are hoping to reach as many of our supporters as possible in the short space of time that we have.

The card is for your MP. The Employment Bill will be back before the Commons soon after Parliament resumes on 6 October. We need to fill MPs postbags with as many cards and letters as possible to raise the profile of the amendments. They are a step forward to reclaiming the fundamental trade union rights recognised in every significant human rights treaty and constitution put in place since World War II.

The rights for everyone to form effective trade unions, with the ability to engage in collective bargaining and to withdraw labour, have been recognised as fundamental in international law – including Treaties ratified by the UK and binding on it. But these have been seriously eroded particularly in the UK to such an extent that unions are almost powerless to prevent the growth of poverty and inequality. Pay and pensions do not keep pace with inflation and are falling in value. Dignity and equality in the workplace are under pressure. Democracy suffers.

Yet the fundamental legitimacy of collective rights cannot be denied. The Canadian Supreme Court, only last year said: “Recognizing that workers have the right to bargain collectively as part of their freedom to associate reaffirms the values of dignity, personal autonomy, equality and democracy that are inherent in the Canadian [Constitution].”   
The European Court of Human Rights (also last year), in deciding that the UK law that forbade unions from expelling fascists was in breach of the European Convention, held that the Convention protects “the right of trade unions to draw up their own rules and to administer their own affairs.”
The United Campaign continues to promote the issues contained in the TUC backed Trade Union Rights and Freedoms Bill which the government failed to support last year. The trade union movement now has the opportunity for positive amendments to the Employment Bill, currently in Parliament. Everyone can help by spreading our postcard campaign encouraging MPs to support amendments and following the Campaign as events unfold.

We understand that there may be three areas of the Employment Bill which can be amended to strengthen trade union rights. These would provide for:
1.    Better protection against dismissal or victimisation of workers taking part in lawful industrial action.
2.    Filling loopholes in the law to prevent the use of agency workers replacing striking workers
3.    Fairer balloting procedures cutting the ‘red tape’ that unions face when balloting members for industrial action by placing a duty on employers to supply information that trade unions need to comply with notice and balloting requirements.

There may be more. The three listed are moderate in the extreme. Whilst we all appreciate that, if enacted, they would still not be enough for the UK to come into compliance with the international conventions on labour rights which it has ratified, the amendments would still be a significant step towards that goal.

Please support the campaign by sending a postcard or a letter to your MP or you can write to them via the website at www.writetothem.com. Order more postcards from info@unitedcampaign.org.uk or download a model letter www.unitedcampaign.org.uk on our website.