Across Great Britain, there are around two million people living with a sight loss condition or degenerative eye conditions. Some 57,180 working age adults under 65 are receiving extra financial support through Personal Independence Payment (PIP) or Adult Disability Payment (ADP) while 44,614 people over State Pension age are getting weekly help through Attendance Allowance.
If you, or someone you know, under State Pension age has a sight condition, you should consider making a new claim for PIP or ADP – find out more here.
If you, or someone you know, is over State Pension age and living with a sight condition, even really high myopia, you should consider making a claim for Attendance Allowance.
New claimants of Attendance Allowance could also qualify for the £150 Disability Cost of Living Payment due to be made this summer by the UK Government to help households with the increased cost of living. No qualifying period has been announced yet, so the sooner a new claim is submitted the greater the likelihood that it will meet the eligibility requirements.
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Akshata Murty and her husband, UK prime minister Rishi Sunak: has she been using her connection with a leading UK politician to gain advantages for her firms? Is she now losing support after Sunak fell under investigation for a possible conflict of interest? Or is it all just coincidental?
A firm connected to Rishi Sunak’s wife Akshata Murty has lost a fortune on the stock exchange.
The losses are being reported on the day an investigation was launched into whether Sunak failed to correctly report a conflict of interest; Ms Murty is a shareholder in a firm that will profit from a Budget incentive to recruit childminders.
It seems another of her investments that made the headlines because of government policy has taken a major loss on the stock market.
Remember Infosys, the company that carried on trading in Russia after the government sanctioned such firms?
Infosys claimed in April last year that it was closing its office in Russia – providing a lucky escape for the then-Chancellor, who had refused to take any action about the company’s continued commercial interest in a country that the UK should have been shunning.
Then – exactly a month ago – we discovered that Infosys was still operating in Russia, eight months after it said it would withdraw, and had been given a £1.8 million government contract in spite of this.
So her shares, which were worth £400 million this morning, are now worth £351 million – in a company for which, like Koru Kids, Sunak broke – or at least seriously bent – government rules.
Had she been using her connection with a leading UK politician to gain advantages for her firms? Is she now losing support after Sunak fell under investigation for a possible conflict of interest?
Or is it a coincidence? It will be interesting to find out.
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The campaigning group Women Against State Pension Inequality (WASPI) has won an out-of-court victory in its battle to get compensation for women born in the 1950s whose pension age has been raised by government decision.
WASPI is not arguing that the pension age should not have been raised, stating that this was done by democratic government decision – but that the way the Department for Work and Pensions provided information about it meant that women were unable to make appropriate choices that they would have made if they had known earlier that their State Pension age would increase, and that this has had emotional and financial impacts on their lives.
The group is arguing for fair, fast and straightforward compensation for the emotional and financial losses – both direct losses and lost opportunities – that women have suffered.
The Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman has been charged with producing three reports. The first was to establish whether there was maladministration by the DWP in failing to inform affected women that they would not receive their pension when they expected to do so, and that they should make appropriate financial plans.
That report has been published and has stated that there was maladministration.
The second report was to establish whether six sample complainants had suffered any direct financial loss because of DWP maladministration, or any loss of opportunities to make different financial choices.
That report was published and stated that none of them had suffered any such losses.
WASPI argued that the Ombudsman’s reasoning was legally flawed and this would impact on decisions affecting all 1950s born women who were victims of the DWP’s maladministration and said it would bring a judicial review if he would not withdraw the Stage 2 report and think again.
A decision last week means the Ombudsman will indeed withdraw that report.
It is now considered to be legally flawed, and a court will be asked to make a quashing order (because the Ombudsman has no power to withdraw a report that has been sent to complainants and MPs).
The Ombudsman will then reconsider the question of injustice in a re-written second report that must be changed to accommodate the agreement that the original report was flawed.
When a new second report is accepted, the process will move on to a third report which will consider what remedies are necessary for the injustices done to 3.6 million women.
It must also consider whether such remedies should be given to the estates of women who have died in the time since the change to their state pension age was announced.
This Writer’s view is that this is not a total victory; the Ombudsman may merely seek – and find – another excuse to deny women born in the 1950s any compensation for the injustice they have suffered and campaigners need to be aware of that.
And WASPI accepts that it doesn’t speak for all women who have been disadvantaged by the pension age change. Some are campaigning for full compensation – payment of the amount of pension they would have received if the age change had not happened. WASPI does not think the government will accept such demands.
It is a step forward – but the battle for compensation is a long way from being over.
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He’s got your back: Ed Miliband is pictured behind Jeremy Corbyn – presumably working out where to put his knife.
Ed Miliband, whose father was defended by Jeremy Corbyn when the Daily Mail said he “hated Britain”, has shown his true colours by stabbing Mr Corbyn in the back.
In October 2013, after the Mail ran an attack piece against the then-Labour leader (Ed Miliband) by accusing his father, Mr Corbyn appeared on BBC News to defend him – as you can see:
This is Jeremy Corbyn defending Ralph Miliband a few years ago.
We won’t see another leading U.K. politician with this much integrity and backbone for a long time pic.twitter.com/xDUcxtZphL
Note also that Mr Corbyn was the only Labour MP to defend Miliband’s father publicly.
Today (March 28, 2023), as Labour’s NEC considers a motion by current Labour leader Keir Starmer to ban Mr Corbyn from ever again standing for election as a candidate for that party, Miliband also made an appearance on the BBC – to trot out yet again his leader’s tired and ridiculous whinge about anti-Semitism.
It’s about one thing, which is about Jeremy Corbyn’s reaction to the EHRC report on antisemitism and his refusal to apologise for that reaction. That is the background of this. I don’t think there’s any mystery about that.
There’s one problem with that: Keir Starmer’s motion does not mention anti-Semitism at all.
It is, therefore, entirely inappropriate for Miliband to trot it out as a reason for denying the members of Islington North’s Constituency Labour Party their democratic right to choose their candidate for Parliament.
Remember: Keir Starmer is on the record as saying he wanted to end NEC interference in local selections of Parliamentary candidates:
In 2020, when Starmer wanted socialist Labour Party members to vote for him as leader, he claimed Corbyn was a "friend". That was a lie.
— Frank Owen's Legendary Paintbrush🥀🇵🇸🇾🇪 (@OwenPaintbrush) March 27, 2023
The move to bar Mr Corbyn is a clear betrayal of that promise.
So we see an honourable man – Mr Corbyn – backstabbed by not just one but two betrayers who are members of the Labour Party leadership. Doesn’t that tell us that Keir Starmer’s Labour Party is not worth your time? That it should be shunned, avoided, and vilified wherever possible?
Ironically, Miliband’s ill-intended comment about Mr Corbyn came the morning after his victim was outside Parliament, speaking at a rally against racism:
Typical of Jeremy Corbyn that right now, on a day where Starmer has tried to destroy him, Jeremy is outside parliament standing with ordinary people & giving a speech in defence of the oppressed.
Finally: the reason that is actually given by Keir Starmer’s motion, for wanting Mr Corbyn’s candidacy to be blocked, is the fact that Labour lost an election under his leadership.
By that standard, Ed Miliband should also be barred. He was the leader in 2015 when Labour won a much smaller share of the national vote than in 2017 or 2019, when Mr Corbyn was in charge.
But he is a member of the Shadow Cabinet.
The double-standard could not be clearer.
Miliband’s treachery has certainly provoked a strong reaction from the public. I provide a selection below, for those of you who would appreciate further depth:
Labour MPs are lying about the motion being put forward to block Jeremy Corbyn from standing as a Labour candidate.
There’s no mention of antisemitism, that’s because it’s yet another establishment stitch up.
If it was anti-Semitism, why is that not mentioned in the motion and why does the mention state that Jeremy can “remain” a @UKLabour member? https://t.co/ySae49Apku
Terrific from @AyoCaesar here. The absence of the word 'antisemitism' from Starmer's NEC motion is the most striking thing here. Where's it gone? #ItWasAScamhttps://t.co/YEPZsJp6xc
Nov ‘22 @Keir_starmer said Corbyn couldn’t stand as Labour candidate in 2024 GE, he said “Labour would never again be brought to its knees by racism or bigotry.”
Today he claims Corbyn cannot stand because he lost in 2019, very different to what he said in November. #ItWasAScam
The facts are clear – and they mitigate against Keir Starmer, Ed Miliband, and all the other fetid liars infesting the corpse of a once-great political organisation.
I don’t think the NEC’s decision will even matter now. The damage has been done.
Starmer, Miliband and the others have shown that Labour will betray anybody.
If that party – in its current form – gets into government, that is exactly what it will do to you.
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The problem with fighting the government to protect the vulnerable is that the government can keep attacking relentlessly.
Years ago, I ran a successful campaign that showed that thousands of people had died because the Department for Work and Pensions had denied them sickness benefits for no apparent reason.
It raised awareness that DWP decisions could be wrong and could be challenged, and I hope it saved a few lives.
Now, it seems the DWP has been quietly running a new scam – denying claims for the disability benefit Personal Independence Payment (PIP) by claiming to have lost the forms, or falsely recording that they have arrived after the deadline for returning them has passed:
Up to 42,000 claimants had their Personal Independence Payment (PIP) award stopped in 2021, an increase of almost 300% in just two years. 25,400 claims were disallowed in 2020. The figures were revealed by Tom Pursglove, DWP minister for disabled people, in response to a written parliamentary question.
The figures refer to people who allegedly failed to return their AR1 PIP review form but it is not known whether non-return includes forms that were returned late. It is also not clear how many people challenged the decision that they had failed to return their form on time.
Mr Pursglove’s response shows that the number of claims disallowed each year for non-return of the AR1 review form have increased steadily year on year since 2017, when there were 7,500 claims disallowed.
The DWP has come out with its usual flannel about helping millions of people every year – as though that is some kind of huge achievement and not its job.
It says only a small proportion of claimants are penalised for non-return of forms, as though 67,400 people in two years is a small number and not more people than live in entire towns the size of Taunton or Hereford.
I tend to agree with the website Benefits and Work, which has stated:
The number of claimants allegedly failing to return their forms seems to be far outstripping any rises in awards that had taken place at the time. We know that the DWP’s post handling and call management is dire and getting ever worse. It seems very possible that many disallowed claimants are returning their forms on time, but the DWP is either losing them or taking far too long before recording that they have been received.
“We have no way of knowing how many of the 42,000 claimants appealed or how many simply gave up in despair, even though they knew they had returned their form on time. Other claimants may have failed to return the review form because of the effects of a physical or mental health condition.”
The DWP reckons it ‘watermarks’ files on claimants with serious mental health or cognitive conditions who have difficulty communicating or engaging with the process as Additional Support (AS) – meaning they will be asked to attend a PIP assessment even if they fail to return their form.
And claimants who are identified or deemed as vulnerable – due to their circumstances, not just their condition – are watermarked ‘Additional Customer Support (ACS)’.
But I can’t help remember how Mrs Mike was ‘watermarked’ when she appealed against a decision to put her in the work-related activity group for Employment and Support Allowance. Her file was marked ‘Do Not Contact’, and we knew nothing about it until we were notified that her year on the benefit had expired and she was no longer entitled to it.
As is well-documented in previous articles on this site, I went through the roof and the government department backtracked rapidly. Mrs Mike is now in the support group, where she belongs.
So I have doubts about DWP ‘watermarking’ claims.
As far as lost or delayed forms are concerned, I recommend that anybody claiming benefits from the DWP make a copy of any forms they send, and post the forms using a system that requires a DWP representative to sign for them. This evidence can then be copied from the Royal Mail and used to show exactly when the DWP receives the forms.
Alternatively, if the DWP doesn’t receive the forms, claimants can get in touch, say their forms have been lost by the Royal Mail, and request a new set of forms and an extension to their deadline. The forms can then be duplicated, using the copies of the original that have already been made.
Does that seem fair? Does anybody with experience of the current system have any other ideas?
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Apparently the latest polls are predicting a huge loss for the Conservatives at the next general election, that may make them only the third largest party – behind the SNP.
But are they really likely to lose 300 seats?
Well…
Here’s an interesting analysis by A Different Bias:
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Well, we know about the money (allegedly) connected to Michelle Mone, along with sundry others.
But that still leaves billions of pounds of lost cash that needs to be fully explained. Doesn’t it?
Read:
The Department of Health and Social Care’s annual accounts for 2021-22 have revealed a further £6 billion write down in connection with PPE and other inventory. This follows a staggering £8.9bn write down in 2020-21.
The total – almost £14.9bn – exceeds by almost £2bn the aggregate sum spent on PPE. The National Audit Office reported in March 2022 that “DHSC has so far spent £12.6bn of the total £13.1bn it expects to spend on almost 38 billion items of PPE.”
The further write down is made up of:
£2.5 billion write-down of items procured in 2021-22 which relates to items the Department no longer expects to use or due to falling market prices;
£3.5 billion for onerous costs relating to PPE, vaccines and medicines for items it had agreed to purchase before 31 March 2022, but which it now does not expect to use.
The annual accounts also reveal that storage costs were running at approximately £24m per month. Good Law Project has previously revealed that PPE storage costs exceed £1bn in total and hundreds of millions of pounds were going to Uniserve, a ‘VIP’ that had also supplied substantial quantities of PPE.
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One of the strangenesses of running a political website as a commercial endeavour is that one is reliant on the articles to pull in advertising revenue, and this means more popular items take priority.
More meaningful items then take a back seat until such time as they can be funded by the other material – but fortunately, today, lots of people are enjoying the Suella De Vil song, so I have an opportunity to look at why the Bank of England is hiking interest rates and worsening the UK recession.
I’m taking the information from Professor Simon Wren-Lewis’s Mainly Macro article (link below), which suggests the most likely reason I’ve seen so far – and it isn’t to stop energy price inflation, nor is it to stop food price inflation.
No – it’s to stop wage inflation. The aim is to impoverish you by increasing the difference between what things cost and what you can afford.
Here’s Prof Wren-Lewis:
A UK recession will do almost nothing to bring energy and food prices down. Instead what has worried the Bank for some time is that the UK labour market appears pretty tight, with low unemployment and high vacancies, and that this tight labour market is leading to wage settlements that are inconsistent with the Bank’s inflation target.
You can see the reasoning behind this, just with the forthcoming strike by the Royal College of Nursing, that is calling for a 17 per cent pay increase. The Bank’s inflation target is just two per cent, and has been for many years.
The article continues:
Earnings growth is around 7.5% in the wholesale, retail, hotels and restaurants sector, about around 6% in finance and business services and the private sector as a whole.
Domestic firms are under no obligation to compensate their employees for high energy and food prices, over which they have little control and which are not raising their profits. As a result, if firms were free to choose and there was abundant availability of labour, they would offer pay increases no higher than the increases we saw during 2019.
Average private sector earnings running at around 6% are not a problem for the Bank because it is anti-labour, but because it believes wage growth at that level is inconsistent with its inflation target of 2%… Earnings growth will slow as the UK recession bites.
What this means in layperson’s terms is that, by increasing interest rates, the Bank intends to make it harder for many firms to survive in the hope that they will lay off staff, forcing more people back onto the labour market.
Then, firms would be able to offer whatever wages they wanted (above the minimum, of course) on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, and if you couldn’t make ends meet, then that would be your problem.
It is a premeditated, deliberate attempt to worsen poverty for millions upon millions of UK residents.
I wonder whether this is another unintended consequence of Brexit? When the UK was obligated to accept workers from the European Union, employers benefited from exactly the kind of loose labour market that allowed them to offer subsistence, or lower-than-subsistence, wages.
Now those workers have gone and employers are forced to take on native workers, the pendulum has swung the other way. It’s a thought, isn’t it?
Prof Wren-Lewis goes on to explain that developments in economic thinking mean that the tight labour market should not require an interest rate hike to “correct” it (his word).
nowadays macroeconomists believe it is possible to end a boom [in this case an over tight labour market] and bring inflation down without creating a downturn or recession, because once the boom is brought to an end a credible inflation target will ensure wage inflation and profit margins adapt to be consistent with that target.
The lags in the economic system mean a central bank should stop raising rates while inflation is still increasing. If a central bank believes it will lose credibility by doing this, and feels it has to continue raising rates until inflation starts falling, this will lead to substantial monetary policy overkill and an unnecessary recession.
If that is why central banks in the UK and the Euro area keep raising interest rates as the economy enters a recession, then the truth is central banks are throwing away a key advantage of a credible inflation target. Credibility is not something you constantly have to affirm by being seen to do something, but something you can use to produce better outcomes. Furthermore central banks are more likely to lose rather than gain credibility by causing an unnecessary recession.
Of course raising interest rates to 3% is not enough on its own to cause a prolonged recession. Probably more important is the cut to real incomes generated by higher energy and food prices, which is enough on its own to generate a recession. On top of that we have a restrictive fiscal policy involving tax increases and failing public services. Both together should be more than enough to correct a tight labour market. To have higher interest rates adding to these already large deflationary pressures seems at best very risky, and at worst extremely foolish.
This will affect you all.
Sadly, as I indicated at the top of the article, only a few of you are likely even to have read any of the information here – certainly not to the end. So very few of you are likely to make any preparations for it.
For the rest, the next few years are going to be very difficult indeed.
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Caught by the ballots: if Boris Johnson continues to show the lack of contrition over Partygate that we have seen so far, his own backbenchers will probably backstab him, fearing that losses of local councillors will endanger their own Parliamentary salaries and expense accounts.
Boris Johnson will make this worse because he simply doesn’t care.
He has been told that the Conservative Party – of which he is the leader – will lose huge numbers of council seats in the May local elections because he attended illegal parties in Downing Street while the rest of us obeyed his lockdown laws.
The losses are likely to be worsened if he receives any more fixed penalty notices for attending parties other than the birthday event for himself, for which he has already been fined – and police are said to be investigating five.
The Metropolitan Police have said they will not announce whether Johnson receives further fines during the pre-election “purdah” period (as it may be construed as an attempt to influence the way people vote) but Downing Street has said that it will make a statement if the prime minister receives any.
Johnson is facing an inquiry into whether he deliberately misled Parliament with multiple claims that there were no rule breaches before he received his first fine for breaching his own rules.
He apologised to Parliament on April 19 but Conservative MP Steve Baker has denounced Johnson’s words as insincere: “The contrition didn’t last much longer than it took to get out of the headmaster’s study. By the time we got to the 1922 Committee meeting that evening it was the usual festival of bombast and orgy of adulation.
“It took me about 90 seconds to realise he wasn’t really remorseful.”
That is what’s going to turn voters away from the Conservatives on May 5.
Johnson doesn’t care because he thinks the loss of local councillors won’t affect his position as prime minister.
But his attitude fails to take into account the fact that Tory backbenchers will be in danger of losing their seats if he continues to show the indifference that we are seeing now.
And like Johnson himself, the Tory MPs’ first loyalty is to their own income stream. If his continuation as PM puts their Parliamentary jobs in jeopardy, they’ll take action to prevent it.
Expect more letters of ‘no confidence’ in his leadership to flood in to Graham Brady, chair of the backbench 1922 Committee, pronto.
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Employment in the UK is a “remarkable success” says Raab – as his government makes 1,300 DWP jobs redundant in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis.
Yes, some of the most hated civil servants in the UK are likely to lose their jobs in a back-office shake-up of the Department for Work and Pensions.
Offices are being closed across the country, meaning 12,000 DWP employees will be moved to different sites. A further 1,300 people will not be moved as there are no suitable sites near them; they will lose their jobs.
But these jobs are said to be going from offices in areas of high economic deprivation, making a mockery of the Tory government’s “levelling-up” agenda.
The PCS union said the offices closing with no alternative site being offered to staff are in: Aberdeen, Barrow in Furness, Bishop Auckland, Blackburn, Bury St Edmunds, Chippenham, Exeter, Gravesend, Kirkcaldy, Milton Keynes, Peterborough, Southampton, and Hanley in Stoke-on-Trent.
Labour’s shadow secretary for work and pensions, Jonathan Ashworth, said: “In closing DWP offices and cutting jobs in areas including Stoke, Burnley, Bishop Auckland, Doncaster, Southampton and Kirkcaldy, Therese Coffey has exposed the Tories’ rhetoric on levelling up to be utterly hollow.
“Ministers are today cutting quality public sector jobs from communities who need them in the middle of a devastating cost of living crisis.”
The decision seems to be motivated by a calculation that the DWP has more real estate than it needs – so this is about selling off land for money, Weren’t we all led to believe the government is making cash hand-over-fist due to increased fuel (and other) prices?
In all, 13 processing sites are set to close by June 2023, but more job losses are feared over the closure and relocation of 29 other sites.
Announcing the closures on March 17, Work and Pensions minister David Rutley said no “front-of-house Jobcentre Plus” services would be affected because “the services we are talking about are primarily telephony and digital”.
Reading between the lines, this suggests that it will take even longer than the hours it already does to contact the DWP about a claim by phone or online,
And the PCS union’s Mark Serwotka seems to be implying that this is the payoff for DWP staff who were taken on to handle the extra work caused by the Covid-19 lockdowns.
With the government winding down its Covid restrictions – despite a new surge in infections, hospitalisations and deaths – these “work units” (as the Tories describe people like you and me and especially benefit claimants) are now surplus to requirements.
“The government was quick to clap civil servants at the start of the pandemic – they’re even quicker to scrap them now they’ve declared the pandemic over.
“Our members have worked tirelessly behind the scenes, keeping the country running, paying out benefits to almost two-and-a-half million families, helping them to put food on their table and keep a roof over their head.
“But now, as food and fuel prices rise faster than ever, they’re being abandoned by the government and left to fend for themselves.”
I fear this is the truth of the Tory DWP slim-down: former employees transformed into claimants in the most deprived areas, at the worst possible time, receiving an inferior service from the organisation they used to represent,
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