The Cuts - A response from your Sponsor

Well campers, the spending review has come and gone and frankly I did not think that this was as horrible as had been heretofore portrayed. Lete start with the areas which I know something about: welfare and taxation.

In terms of welfare, he's broadly trying to save between £20-£30BN over the 4 years if I dont miss my guess, so thats £7BN a year. To do this, he will raise the pension age to 66 in 2020, cut housing benefit costs by about 10%, say that higher rate tax payers cannot have child benefit, make alterations to tax credits and create a Universal Benefit to replace income support, housing benefit and sundry other benefits. He will cap the number of benefits one can claim at about £26,000 per year.

Now call me an old stick in the mud if you must but I cannot see this as a decimation of the welfare benefits systems as a whole. In fact those who will be worse off will be those people insisting on staying in Mayfair or Belgravia at the expense of the taxpayer and claiming welfare benefits of about £5,000 per week including housing benefit. They of course will have to move (cries of shame) whilst people like me who live in a studio flat in Southampton for £60.00 per week will remain totally forgotten and untouched.

The tax situation will be challenged because for a premium of £900M the Chancellor of the Exhequer hopes to recoup £7BN tax avoided and evaded over the period; this seems fair enough.

So for me, maybe a broadly neutral or non-event and certainly not one which I would have thought would cause all the hype that it has. Maybe I have missed something in the detail but I have made ten or so pages of notes in my bijou Asda note-book so one would have thought perhaps not.

I await with interest what the major pundits have to say; at the moment I am awash with Labour people saying its an outrage. This from a government which was thrown out 5 months ago and will never be missed. Its a funny old life.

Post scriptum

I have had time to consider my words above; there is bad news after all. That is to say, that if you are on Incapacity Benefit for more than 1 years (or Employment and Support Allowance equivalent) and you live with someone (partner) then you will have your allowance terminated and your partner will have to take up the slack.

There will be a concerted effort on the part of this government to try to get people off Incapacity Benefit; there will be a programme of reviews and presumably the horrible ATOS origin will be at the middle of them. Where will all the jobs come from?

Those in care homes will lose their mobility allowances.

Security of tenure will be taken away from new social housing tenants and they will be allocated 5-10 year short term tenancies.

So, not such good news after all. I will be picking all of this up in future posts.