BREAKING NEWS :
McVey admits some people will be worse off on universal credit despite counter claim from No 10 - Politics live.
If somebody is telling the truth , somebody else must be lying ?
There again , in politics , both will be telling the same half truth ... or half lie ???
https://www.theguardian.com/society/201 ... e-poll-tax
Universal credit : welfare secretary admits some families will be worse off.
Esther McVey remark contradicts No 10’s and comes after John Major warned of poll tax-style backlash.
The work and pensions secretary, Esther McVey, has admitted some families will be “worse off” under universal credit, after a warning from Sir John Major that the controversial welfare overhaul could end up being as damaging as the poll tax.
Her comments contradict what Downing Street has said about universal credit this week, after it was reported that McVey told a cabinet meeting that half of lone parents and about two-thirds of working-age couples with children would lose the equivalent of £2,400 a year. The prime minister’s spokesman has since said no one would lose out as they moved on to universal credit.
However, on Thursday McVey admitted it was possible some families would lose out. “I’ve said we made tough decisions. Some people will be worse off,” she told the BBC. “Under the old system, 700,000 people didn’t get £285 a month, so they didn’t get the money they were owed. Under the old system the most vulnerable in society weren’t getting as much money as we are now going to give them.”
Labour hopes to expose Conservative disquiet about the system in an opposition debate in parliament on universal credit planned for next week. The Tory MP Johnny Mercer, an outspoken backbencher, said on Thursday he had grave concerns about the system.“Universal credit was designed so that no one would be worse off,” Mercer tweeted. “Stop the tax-free allowance rise and reinvest into UC, or I can’t support it. Not politically deliverable in Plymouth I’m afraid.”
On Thursday, Major became the latest grandee to launch a fierce attack on the flagship benefits scheme, saying it could do as much damage to the Conservative party as the 1980s poll tax backlash among voters.
While Major said he supported the logic behind the welfare changes, which are to be introduced for 3.95 million more people from July, he questioned whether they were workable in practice.
The former Labour prime minister Gordon Brown urged the government on Wednesday to abandon the full national rollout, suggesting Britain was otherwise on course for a summer of discontent and poll tax-style chaos.
Major told the BBC: “I don’t oppose the principle of universal credit, [but] I think there is a real danger that it will be introduced too soon and in the wrong circumstances.
“So I do think we need to look very carefully at how it is introduced and when it is introduced and what the circumstances are and the resources there are available to assist its introduction.The argument that it is to encourage people to get into work isn’t an argument that runs, to me, on something of that sort.”
He added: “In order to introduce something like universal credit, you need to look at those people who in the short term are going to lose, and protect them, or you will run into the sort of problems the Conservative party ran into in the late 1980s.”
The former prime minister, who entered Downing Street in November 1990, nine months after rioting broke out in London over Margaret Thatcher’s doomed poll tax, denied he was predicting civil unrest.
But he said: “If you have people who face that degree of loss, that is not something the majority of the British population would think of as fair, and if people think you have removed yourself from fairness then you are in deep political trouble.”
The Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, whose party advocates scrapping the policy in its entirety, said the “experience of universal credit has been that the majority of people are considerably worse-off”.
Speaking on a visit to Bristol, Corbyn said the system “has to change dramatically” and that Labour would lay out plans for a comprehensive overhaul. “But essentially, our benchmarks will be that nobody should be worse-off and nobody should have their homes put at risk because of universal credit.”
The shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, and the archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, have also called for the scheme, the most radical changes to welfare since the second world war, to be scrapped.
Iain Duncan Smith, the former work and pensions secretary and the architect of the scheme, claimed it was working well and that thousands of people would find themselves better off in work.
He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “Universal credit … is functioning very well and there are tens of thousands of people out there who find this a better benefit.”
However, he admitted there was an issue with the policy as a result of £2bn taken out by the government in 2016, a move which prompted his resignation from the cabinet.
“We should direct the money back into universal credit exactly as it was originally planned to be rolled out,” he said. “The reality is that £2bn was taken out.”
If readers HAVE been paying attention , most will already know that many will be worse off under UC.
More than one posting earlier in this thread reveals precisely that.