Budget Cuts Threat

posted: 26/08/2010

Amid the renewed criticism that the June budget affects the poor and people with disabilities such as HIV worst of all, despite government claims that it is ‘fair,’ and 'progressive,' Britain's equalities watchdog has now warned it could take action. If ministers have failed to carry out the legally required assessment of the impact on vulnerable people, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has now threatened action.
 

The Institute for Fiscal Studies described the budget yesterday as "clearly regressive". The respected and impartial think tank did a far more detailed study than it could just after the budget, and has now taken into account things like changes to Disability Living Allowance, Housing Benefit and Tax Credit, and has found that these and all the other changes mean people with incomes in the poorest tenth of the population are the biggest losers in the budget.
 

Equalities warning

Neil Kinghan, the EHRC's director general, issued his warning after Mark Hoban, the Treasury minister, stonewalled questions on the BBC Radio4 Today programme about whether the government had carried out a statutory assessment of the impact of the budget on women, ethnic minorities, disabled people and the elderly.
 

Kinghan said: "It is for the Treasury to demonstrate it has complied with legislation and assessed the impact of its decisions on vulnerable groups. If it cannot do so, then the commission will have to consider appropriate enforcement action."
 

Source

Report on Institute for Fiscal Studies analysis of the affect of the budget on different parts of the population
Institute for Fiscal Studies' own analysis of the budget

Budget Pain Worse With HIV

posted: 24/06/2010

Low income is a major problem already for many people living with HIV. The emergency budget and service cuts will now make a bad situation even worse.

Here we try to pick out how the budget that is claimed to be ‘tough but fair’ will affect people living with HIV in NW England. We find out how tough and unfair it will be on many people living with HIV.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies analysis shows that the poorest 10% of the population (typically people on benefits and workers on the minimum wage) will face the worst financial pain of the whole population. Excluding cuts in Disability Living Allowance, Housing Benefit and funding for important public services like social care, over the next five years they worked out that the spending power of the poorest 10% of the population will fall by 2.6%.

Add in the affect of changes in disability living allowance, housing benefit cuts and cuts to public services and the poorer part of the population will suffer even more than this.

The budget will cut the incomes of the richest 10% of the population by just 0.6% compared with over 2.6% for the lowest income tenth of the population. How fair is that?
 

What we have to tell you below makes for depressing reading.

We think people with HIV have a right to know how the planned changes over the next five years could affect them.

These changes are not all cast in stone. They have to go through Parliament and you can tell your MP what you think.
 

Disability Living Allowance
Many people with HIV receive Disability Living Allowance (DLA), a benefit paid at different rates to compensate for disability and mobility problems. The budget announced that people on DLA will have a strict new medical examination; these medical examinations will start in 2013. Some people will lose DLA, others will go onto a lower rate. The government aims to cut spending by £1.4 billion within two years of these medicals starting.

We do not know yet if people who have DLA ‘for life’ will have these medicals.
 

Housing Benefit
Housing Benefit / Housing Allowance will be cut after one year by 10% for people claiming Job Seekers Allowance. The amount of Housing Benefit will also be capped, depending on how many bedrooms you have.This and other changes will be cuts costing people on the benefit £1.8 billion a year.

People will either have to pay the extra for their rent from their other income, move somewhere cheaper or smaller, and if evicted for rent arrears are likely to be refused rehousing as a homeless person. Eviction for rent arrears is treated as making yourself intentionally homeless so people are not entitled to be rehoused.
 

Unemployment
There are around 2.5 million people unemployed and about 0.5 million job vacancies. Unemployment is higher in NW England than most other regions. The job vacancies are often low paid.

The budget alone will increase unemployment by another 100,000 and independent experts expect it to reach close to 3 million.

Job seeking prospects will worsen and it is already harder to find work with a condition like HIV.
 

Slow-burn cuts and taxes
Over the next five years people on benefits will slip further behind in what their benefits will be able to buy and with tax changes.

VAT rises at the beginning of January to 20% and VAT always hits people on low incomes hardest.

Most benefits will be uprated for inflation in a new way that will leave people increasingly worse off. This will cut £6 billion from benefits over the next five years.

Child Benefit is frozen for three years from next April – a £3billion cut. Parents who are working will be compensated by Tax Credits, but that doesn’t help parents who aren’t working.
 

Social Services
Local Government and other public services are most used by people who are on lower incomes. Social Services departments of local councils now face cuts of between 25-33%. Social Services provide essential services to people with HIV and they help fund HIV community services like George House Trust.

The AIDS Support Grant which is used to pay for extra support for people with HIV and community HIV services is no longer protected by a ‘ring-fence’. This means councils can now spend it on whatever they like.

We don’t know yet how cuts of between one quarter and one third will affect essential social services for people with HIV and community organisations but we should start to know more from October. We can expect some painful cuts and changes.
 

NHS cuts
The NHS in NW England has been told to save almost £1 billion within the next three years. We do not know whether this will affect people with HIV.
 

State Pension Age to rise sooner
Details are sparse but the government is planning to raise the age at which men and women will get a state pension sooner than was planned. Men who are now 59 will have to work one more year before they can claim a state pension. Pension age will be 66, not 65 as now, for men from 2016. It does not stop there.

They are consulting about raising the pesnion age to possibly 70. Pension ages for women and men could be raised by one year every five years until it reaches 70 for both sexes. If they start this in 2016 as they say they now plan to, men now aged 40 would not get a state pension until they reach 70. Three out of four people will have some disability by the age of 68. Many people with HIV (among many others) are not fit enough to work until the current pension age of 65, particularly in a region like NW England.

Benefit cuts and changes will make it harder for people with disabilities like HIV to live with a decent fair income before pension age.
 

Expect more pain
In October the government will publish its Public Expenditure Review. We can expect lots more cuts in government spending. The government is already saying that it will try to reduce cuts in education and some other public services (but it has not said that it wants to protect social services) by making even more cuts and changes to benefits.
 

Since the second world war, no government has managed to cut public spending for more than two years in a row. This government plans five years of cuts.
 

Some reputable economic commentators, and President Obama, are warning that European countries are behaving like a panicking herd, cutting spending harshly and that this has a high risk of plunging the world into recession once again. The harsh medicine of cuts could kill economic recovery and make the situation even worse.
 

Heath Inequality
The Marmot Review earlier this year was to help the government plan policies that will end harsh health inequalities. It showed that the poor die 7 years younger than the rich, and the poor become disabled 17 years sooner. Cuts to services and benefits in NW England will worsen the already bad record of ill-health, disabilities and early deaths in this region. More unemployment and low income harms people’s health and well-being.

Reductions in benefits, and those 25%+ public service cuts expected in the Autumn Spending Review are estimated to increase alcohol related deaths by about 2.8% and cardiovascular deaths by 1.2%. Both of these disproportionately affect people living with HIV. Every £80 cut in social welfare spending per person causes this, according to a Europe-wide analysis by Oxford University epidemiologist David Stuckler, reported in the Guardian on 25 June and in the British Medical Journal. There are likely to be between 6,500  and 38,000 more deaths in the next ten years. If the economy worsens, extra deaths rise steeply. Apart from benefits cuts, it is cuts to social services and health budgets especially that cause the most health harm. 

The Treasury is ending the public sector agreement with the NHS to raise the life expectancy of the poor. Marmot presented the government with a vision and plan to make sure everyone has a ‘healthy income’, enough money to live healthy lives and improve life expectancy.

The budget and cuts to come make it even more likely we will go backwards and poorer people and people with disabilities, like many people with HIV in NW England, will face worsening life expectancy and poorer health.

Sit back or act?
These changes are not all cast in stone. They have to be passed by Parliament and you can tell your MP what you think. With your postcode you can contact your own MP here.

Help for people on Low Incomes on our website

NHS £1.7bn Surplus v. Treatment Charges

posted: 21/05/2009

NHS bosses were urged to pump more money into frontline services after it was revealed that the NHS has amassed a record cash surplus of £1.7bn. The underspend, confirmed by the Commons public accounts committee yesterday, represents a rapid turnaround in health finances: three years ago, the organisation recorded a £500m deficit.

The exceptional figures delivered under the current health secretary, Alan Johnson, are in contrast to the experience of his predecessor, Patricia Hewitt, who was slow handclapped at a nurses' conference during a debate about NHS debt.

Large reserves, however, constitute a different form of political embarrassment. "It's not the case that the bigger a surplus the better," said Edward Leigh, chairman of the PAC. "Patients lose out if too much NHS funding is sitting unspent in bank accounts.

"The needs here and now of patients in parts of the country for drugs and better quality care must not be forgotten. [The surplus is] almost twice the amount planned and over £1bn more than the surplus generated in the previous year."

Janet Davies, of the Royal College of Nursing, said: "A £1.7bn surplus is £1.7bn which must be spent on improving patient care and the government must make clear how it plans to use this money. While we are encouraged that the NHS is on a firm financial footing, it is absolutely vital that this surplus goes straight to frontline services."

The £1.7bn represents almost 2% of annual NHS expenditure, the PAC report says. The cash came from a number of sources, including a fall in the price of generic medicines and the underuse of contingency funds. Savings were also made by changing the habit of trusts spending all of their budget at the end of each year "regardless of whether it [was] in the most appropriate fashion".

HIV treatment charges for migrants

Aside from using the money to help meet the costs of providing HIV treatment for all, following the minister's recent announcement of a review of the rules in the House Of Lords, more investment is sorely needed in HIV prevention.

Even more surplus expected this year

The NHS is forecasting that it will return a similar surplus in the year 2008-09. The Department of Health will return part of the unspent funds to the NHS at an annual rate of £400m for the next two years, providing cushioning for the economic downturn. The NHS is receiving above-average annual budget increases of 5.5% up to and including 2010–11.

One immediate threat looming over balance sheets is a change in accounting procedures which will add in £10.9bn of liabilities from the government's public finance initiatives (PFI). These were deliberately kept off government and NHS accounts, but cannot be hidden any longer.

"The Treasury has given a commitment that this will not adversely affect NHS funding in the period up to 31 March 2011," the PAC said. "There are, however, no guarantees beyond that point."

The NHS chief executive, David Nicholson, yesterday said the organisation would have to prepare for leaner times in the future.

The organisation is expected to deliver efficiency savings in the order of £15bn over the three years after 2011.
 

Source

Manchester Social Care Consultation

posted: 07/10/2008

Manchester city council is asking for your views on its plans to change the way social services manages care services for adults. The deadline for replies is 7 November.

There is a questionnaire to complete, some guidance notes and a social care guide You can download all of these from the links below.

They say:

Adult Social Care Service Consultation
We are currently making a number of improvements to the way we offer support to adults in Manchester.

Recent changes include:

• Introducing a reablement service focusing on helping people to regain their independence after an illness, accident or crisis. This service is provided free of charge.
• Offering individual budgets to all eligible customers increasing the choice and freedom in the way their care is provided.
• Introducing a new home care service to improve quality and customer focus.

We want to find out more about what people think about the services we offer and some of the changes we are considering. By filling in the consultation questionnaire, you can give us valuable feedback about our services and the way we charge for them.

You can also have the chance to win a £50 Marks and Spencer's Voucher in a free prize draw.
All responses will remain confidential and only summaries of the results will be published.

Please answer all questions in Sections 1 & 2. There are guidance notes to help you.

Filling in Section 3 is optional, but will help us to get a better understanding of the opinions of different groups of people. If you would like to be entered into the free prize draw for a chance of winning a £50 voucher, please also enter your name and contact details.

This questionnaire is available in other formats and languages on request. Please contact 0161 234 3880.

Please email your completed questionnaire by 7th November to: Promotionpublicity@manchester.gov.uk

Consultation questionnaire

Guidance Notes

Adult Social Care Guide (large file)

The direct link to the city council's adult social care consultation page is here.