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Concern over plan to withdraw housing benefit from under-25s
‘Housing charities and campaign groups have been outraged by an idea floated by Downing Street to strip housing benefits from under-25s and make them move in with “mum and dad” as a way to “make work pay” and save the UK from growing welfare expenditure.’
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/apr/05/housing-benefit-cut-young-people
they don’t want under 25s to get on their bikes to find work then?
Yeah, they’ve just got to keep their bikes in their parents’ sheds.
I suspect that this might be a bit of hot air, blown in an attempt to appease the Party’s 1922 committee which hauled him in front of it recently to explain why he thought that he wasn’t moving away from the party’s core constituency.
Hmm. I did find a document, left on a train, about 10 days ago which shows the level of thinking. It was a draft for Atos of plans to extend PIP to children and the assessments which would be necessary. Although I wasn’t surprised to see them talking about work capability assessments, even for children, I was taken aback by the designs for mobile chimneys to be used for the capability tests and the descriptor which said ‘able to sit in the same space on the pavement for more than 4 hours but less than 12 hours while begging - 1 point’.
More seriously, the budget points to another £10.5bn a year (on top of the current £19bn) to be taken out of benefits by 2016 and that has to come from somewhere. I imagine there’s a lot of ‘thinking the unthinkable’ going on at the moment.