Rishi Sunak: cost-of-living support schemes will end with March.
This is another ‘public service announcement’ (as one reader described them) for those of you who need to know.
Some ‘cost of living’ support schemes announced by the Tory government last May are set to close at the end of March. They are:
The Warm Home Discount is a one-off discount of £150 off electricity bills. It was automatically awarded to people in England and Wales on a low income with high energy costs, or who received the Guarantee Credit element of pension credit. In Scotland, the payment was made to the same groups – but those on a low income had to meet their energy supplier’s criteria for the scheme. It began in October 2022 and the scheme ends at the end of March, 2023.
The Cold Weather Payment is essentially a £25 benefit. It’s made for every seven consecutive days when the average temperature in your area is recorded or forecast to be 0°C or below. It ends on March 31 – but is expected to return next winter.
The Energy Bills Support Scheme (EBSS) gave around 29 million households £400 off their energy bills – that’s every home with a domestic electricity connection. From October 2022, a discount of £66 was applied to monthly energy bills, rising to £67 a month from December through to March 2023 – when the scheme ends.
The deadline to make a claim for this year’s (winter 2022-23) Winter Fuel Payment is March 31. It’s paid to people born before 26 September 1956, and the scheme will return in winter 2023. Most people on certain benefits (such as the state pension) will have already received the payment, which is up to £600.
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Do you qualify? Well, depending on when you receive any of the benefits and tax credits listed below – or a pension – you might. But all depends on when you’re receiving them.
The Conservative government has announced a new set of ‘cost of living’ payments for people on benefits and low incomes, for 2023-24.
People receiving certain benefits or tax credits will be able to receive up to five payments. These benefits include:
income-based Jobseeker’s Allowance
income-related Employment and Support Allowance
Income Support
Pension Credit
Universal Credit
Child Tax Credit
Working Tax Credit
Recipients will get payments of £301, £300 and £299 if they are claiming those benefits on certain dates.
You may be entitled to a Disability Cost of Living Payment of £150 if you get any of the following benefits on a certain date:
Attendance Allowance
Constant Attendance Allowance
Disability Living Allowance for adults
Disability Living Allowance for children
Personal Independence Payment
Adult Disability Payment (in Scotland)
Child Disability Payment (in Scotland)
Armed Forces Independence Payment
War Pension Mobility Supplement
It would be paid some time during the summer of 2023.
If you are a pensioner entitled to a Winter Fuel Payment for winter 2023 to 2024, you will get an extra £150 or £300 paid with your normal payment from November 2023.
The full amount of Winter Fuel Payment (including the Pensioner Cost of Living Payment) you will get for winter 2023 to 2024 depends on when you were born and your circumstances during the qualifying dates.
You can get a Winter Fuel Payment for winter 2023 to 2024 if you were born before September 24, 1957.
Qualification for the payments is automatic – you don’t have to apply, and if you receive any communications asking you to apply, the government urges you to report it in any of the appropriate ways described here.
The qualifying dates for each payment have not yet been announced – and will not be until they have passed. The government says this is in an effort to “minimise work disincentives and fraud risk”.
Despair: people with long-term illnesses and disabilities are being driven towards suicide because they can’t afford to live in Tory Britain.
You just know the Department for Work and Pensions is already considering this a “positive benefit outcome”:
More people are contemplating suicide as they “cannot cope” as a result of rising costs, charities have said.
Charities supporting those with chronic diseases or disabilities have called for an overhaul of the benefits system.
One woman who has multiple sclerosis (MS) said her costs had almost trebled.
MS Society Wales, said many who come to them were “at the end of their tether”, with the stress often affecting their condition and exacerbating their symptoms.
Disability Wales said it had also seen an increase in mental health issues resulting from the cost of living crisis.
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If you noticed that Luke Pollard asked if Coffey wanted to go down as the Secretary of State for Sewage, you may welcome this update on the pollution of our rivers:
All the fish dead because the Tory government couldn’t be bothered to properly regulate the water and sewage firms it created by privatising a national utility and asset.
It should be a criminal offence and these people should be locked up – and forced to eat and drink the produce their incompetence has polluted.*
*I know that’s a death sentence but it will never be carried out, even though it would be poetic justice.
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Spaffer: Boris Johnson splurged hundreds of billions of pounds during the Covid crisis and his successors have continued the trend. It all went to people who were already rich and has caused huge hardship to the poor, and nobody in government wants to re-balance the situation. Why?
It’s time to follow up on Gary Stevenson, the former City trader who became an economist and anti-inequality campaigner.
Last time, I shared Gary’s contributions to the BBC’s Politics Live via a YouTube clip that became extremely popular, with more than 140,000 views as I type this. Rest assured, there will be more content on YouTube in the future!
Now, Gary himself has shared what he himself took from his experience on the show, with which I’d like to couple his more recent clip, What is money? Together, I think they may explain why it’s so important that we find out who has the £700 billion that Boris Johnson’s government has splurged, and find a way to get them to spend it back into the economy or tax it off of them.
Here’s the first clip:
So: an enormous amount of money has been transferred from the government to the richest people in the UK, leading to a huge increase in government debt which triggers austerity, and a big increase in cash accumulation by the richest, leading to inflation and a cost-of-living crisis. The reasons for that are below.
Nobody in government seems to know where the money has gone – £14,000 for every adult in the UK. I don’t have 14 grand. Do you? Who’s got it, then? And what are they doing with it? They don’t want to say it has gone to the richest people in the country.
And they definitely don’t want to admit that their decision to hand over that money has forced you into extreme poverty!
That money could be put to good use, if the people who have it spend it back into the economy, one way or another. What did we get for it? Was it worth the cost? If not, something needs to be done.
Here’s the other clip:
Money is created by central banks and loaned out to others – so for every penny anybody has, there is a penny of debt somewhere; the total amount of money, minus the total amount of debt, always equals zero.
So if one group of people – like a government – goes heavily into debt, somebody else must be accumulating money or credit.
(The government then has to pay interest on the debt, and in a closed system, that means taxing more out of the economy than it put in; this is a way of regulating the money supply, of course. Commercial banks that borrow from the central bank would charge higher interest than it does when they make loans, in order to make their profit – meaning they rely on the system putting you into debt.)
We know that the government spent – splurged – £700 billion during and after Covid – £14,000 per UK adult. But every UK adult hasn’t had £14,000 from the government; somebody else had it.
People who are in debt – including governments – need to get money back from people who are in credit, otherwise they can’t balance their books. Until they can manage such a feat, that debt creates austerity – it harms public sector pay and public services don’t get the investment they need.
The problem is that only a small number of people are in credit, while the government – representing all of us – and a lot of others are in debt. There’s an imbalance between the large number of people owing money and the small number who have it, and (by the way) can lend it, and can therefore demand interest from the people to whom they lend it, in the same way a bank can.
So now, not only do we have a huge amount of government debt to pay off, but we may have private debt as well, because the cost of living has risen.
And why has the cost of living risen?
As Gary said, there has been a massive increase in asset prices: both gold and shares have hit (by now, I think) an all-time high, and that’s because rich people have been buying them up, with a view to profiting on them – because they have so much money, it won’t hurt them to invest much of it.
This creates scarcity, and that pushes up prices, meaning that ordinary people cannot afford to buy as much as they could before. The amount of resources available within the economy is the same, more or less, but fewer people can take advantage of it because the redistribution of money means they can’t afford it.
We have seen a resource run low – gas – and that has simply piled extra pressure on the poor.
We have a government that is not interested in resolving its £700 billion debt. Instead, it is planning to spend even more. So prices will continue to rise and living standards – for the majority – will continue to fall.
And that is why the current Conservative government has presided over the largest increase in inequality in UK history.
It occurs to This Writer that pushing huge debt onto the vast majority of the population may have been government policy all along.
Expect (probably) a video clip in the near future, explaining why.
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High energy costs have forced 6.7 million homes into fuel poverty – expected to rise to 8.4 million homes in April.
It means increasing numbers of households are checking their smart meters before doing anything that might cost money.
Campaigners are calling for the government to introduce a special “social energy tariff” to make it easier to afford heating:
And there has been a knock-on effect: shop sales over the Christmas period are down – by around 50 per cent in some cases:
It’s only to be expected.
If you starve working people of cash, as the government has by cutting real-terms wages, and then charge them a fortune for the basic necessities of life, then they won’t have any spare readies for non-essential items.
Shops are going to go out of business, worsening the current recession, and overbalancing the economy into collapse.
But the Tory government doesn’t seem to care.
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Money: the cost-of-living crisis means more cash is needed to cover the care of severely disabled people – but councils don’t have enough.
Here’s a little-known consequence of the cost-of-living crisis: disabled people are being evicted from charity-run care homes because local councils are refusing to pay increased costs.
These are people with severe disabilities whose care can cost anything between £85,000 and £150,000 per year.
The charity Leonard Cheshire said it had served 11 eviction notices on contracts with councils that had been under re-negotiation without agreement since February. Two were rescinded after councils agreed to pay uprated fees.
The fee increases reflect the rising costs of wages, energy and food due to the cost-of-living crisis that has been largely caused by the UK’s Conservative government, due to Brexit and energy privatisation that has led to failures to upgrade to cheap, locally-generated energy.
Leonard Cheshire has spent millions of pounds from its own reserves over the last few years, subsidising care services that councils have failed to fund adequately – but now says it can no longer afford to continue doing so.
Mencap has not evicted anybody because it generally doesn’t own the properties they occupy – but is subsidising one in five of the state-funded care packages it provides to 4,000 people – so that’s 800 of them. The cost to the charity is millions of pounds.
Evicted residents are unlikely to become homeless because their council or NHS funder has a duty to provide alternative care.
But the concern is that moving will disrupt the care that people get, and cheaper alternative arrangements will be of poorer quality or based far away from their family support network.
Ironically, the evictions are prompted by concerns that the level of council funding no longer guarantees basic safety and quality standards.
Inevitably, the government has claimed it provides plenty of money to support adult social care services – with the £7.5 billion available over two years constituting the biggest funding increase in UK history.
Conspicuously missing is any comment on whether this is enough money to cover the increased costs of care.
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Potential council tax rises could constitute the straw that breaks the camel’s back for UK residents struggling with the cost of living.
Here’s the team on Good Morning Britain, discussing whether people will end up living in prison – rather than their homes – serving sentences for non-payment:
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For once, this is not about the Department for Work and Pensions deliberately making our lives harder.
It seems to be a simple warning that it’s impossible to get the second instalment of the cost of living payment out to all households at the same time.
And, in fairness, while the payment starts to be dished out on Tuesday (November 8), the deadline isn’t until November 23 (November 30 for people on tax credits and legacy benefits).
Here’s the story from My London:
The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has issued an urgent warning to households who are expecting the second instalment of the cost of living payment next week. The government department has said that not everyone should expect the payment to arrive on Tuesday, November 8.
Around eight million families are set to receive the payment, which aims to support qualifying low-income households with the rise in the cost of living. The £324 payment is the second lump sum of a £650 payment.
The first payments of £326 were made from July 14 onwards. For the second instalment, the DWP has warned that “a small number” of households will receive payments on November 8, with “numbers increasing significantly” from November 9 onwards, reports Liverpool Echo. The deadline for most payments to be made is November 23.
It is thought that families in receipt of Tax Credits and other eligible legacy benefits will get their money from November 23-30.
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A while ago, This Site reported that wholesale gas prices had fallen by 45 per cent. Now they’re down to parity with where they were 18 months ago – before the various crises that pushed them up.
So, are we going to see matching reductions in our energy bills?
The jaded among you will not be surprised to learn that the answer, according to This Is Money, is no.
See what you make of the reasons:
Prices have started to fall back in recent weeks as a milder-than-expected autumn has reduced demand, and a flurry of cargoes arriving at ports across Europe has eased supply concerns.
Nathan Piper, head of oil and gas research at Investec said: “This is likely to be a temporary respite ahead of colder winter weather and associated increase in gas demand for heating.
“Although the spot price has declined to the ten year average, the forward curve continues to indicate high prices throughout the next two years leading to significant parts of European industry shutting down.”
That’s one reason. Here’s another:
Energy companies ‘hedge’ by buying gas and electricity well ahead of when it is needed. Suppliers will buy a certain amount of energy in advance to lock in the price and to reduce the risk of adverse price movements.
It means that our monthly bills don’t reflect today’s prices, but rather the wholesale cost from when the supplier first paid for the energy.
Currently our household energy bills are being kept artificially low by the energy price guarantee, and don’t represent the actual wholesale price being paid for by suppliers.
Had the £2,500 guarantee cap for the average household not been put in place, Ofgem would have increased its price cap [for an “average” household] to £3,549 per year in October 2022.
Should wholesale gas prices continue to fall, the Government is likely to be the beneficiary given [it is] footing the bill.
A prolonged and seemingly permanent drop could eventually lead to new fixed rate deals being offered below the price cap, but firms are likely to be very cautious on doing this.
So your only chance of getting lower fuel bills is if the climate change, that so many Tory MPs want to deny, continues to affect us until April.
In that event, it seems to me that we’ll have to accept we’ve gone past the point of no return as far as that calamity is concerned, and this one – energy prices – won’t be particularly relevant any more.
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