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

Low Income?

posted: 15/12/2009

Over the next few days a new section of the George House Trust website will help people with low incomes. It will have sections on

• Increasing your income
• Cutting Spending
• Dealing with Debt
• and the help George House Trust offers.

Many people living with HIV have low incomes, some migrants with HIV even have no income whatsoever, and long term conditions usually add to people’s living costs. At the very least there are hospital appointments and often prescription charges to pay.
 

The Low Income pages will point you to where you can find the information you need to help yourself, and explain the support George House Trust can offer.
 

You will find Low Income  advice and information here. On the website front page it is under All About Our Services 

Dying with Food Problems

posted: 14/10/2009

Researchers in Canada have found that people taking HIV treatment who experience 'food insecurity' have an increased risk of death. The many destitute people refused asylum or leave to remain in the UK, as well as people on limited benefits and low incomes here, could face the same risk.

Food insecurity means not having enough nutritious food, or having uncertainty about obtaining food. Earlier research amongst injecting drug users taking HIV treatment in San Francisco showed that food-insecure patients were less likely to have an undetectable viral load.

Skinny and Hungry

Now researchers have found that current or former drug users in Vancouver, Canada, who are taking HIV treatment have a 50% increase in the risk of death if they experience food insecurity. The risk was especially high for people who were food insecure and underweight.
They recommend that poor patients in richer countries should receive food supplementation, and that there should be wider efforts to alleviate poverty.
 

More money or a Dietician?

Many HIV clinics in the UK have a specialist dietician who can provide information about diet. Specialist HIV social workers can also help you make sure that you have enough to eat. However the problem is largely one of poverty.
 

The government has just cut the weekly rate for a single asylum seeker over 25 who is destitute and from £42.16 to £35.13 a week from early October. At the same time, benefits for asylum seekers who are lone parents with one child are frozen at £42.16 instead of rising in line with consumer price inflation, leaving them £2 a week worse off.

Diary of an Asylum Seeker with her child scraping by on weekly asylum support from NASS.

There is more information on nutrition in NAM’s information booklet Nutrition. You can download it here.

Provident Financial Charges 545% Interest

posted: 29/07/2009

People in poverty, as many living with HIV are, who take out loans from door-step lender Provident Financial are charged "extortionate" interest rates, say Barnardo's, the children's charity who work closely with George House Trust.

Provident Financial reported a rise in profits despite the credit crunch squeeze on household budgets. The company, known as "the Provvy" to many, agreed some of its customers were being charged annualised interest rates of up to 545%, but said it played a valuable role in improving people's living standards – and keeping some of them out of the clutches of loan sharks. Its business practices have certainly impressed some City analysts. Numis Securities today hailed it as "probably the most profitable bank in the world".

Provident Financial, whose consumer credit arm sells small loans door to door, said pre-tax profits rose 3.5% to £53.1m in the six months to 30 June. It has more than 2.1 million customers, 400,000 of whom hold its credit cards. Peter Crook, chief executive, said that despite the challenging environment, the company expected to deliver "continuing quality growth" during the next few months.

His firm has seen a big rise in loan applications since the high street banks began to tighten lending criteria. The home credit industry is where rejected applicants from the high street lenders – some with poor credit histories – can turn for loans.

Call for consumer investigation

Barnardo's today called on the Office of Fair Trading to investigate the practices of lenders that "prey on the poor". It was concerned about the pressure on people to take out "punitively high-interest" loans. The charity said the firm's "extortionate" interest rates "are typical of many doorstep lenders which will continue to flourish unless the government steps in".

Barnardo's chief executive, Martin Narey, said many low-income families were forced to "take what they can get" because banks did not want their custom. The charity cited examples of Provident loan calculations, claiming that, for a £500 loan over 31 weeks, the total repaid would be £775, an interest rate of 365% APR. For a £500 loan over 23 weeks, the total would be £747.50 – an interest rate of 545% APR.

Crook acknowledged Provident Financial was "not the cheapest lender in town", though this partly reflected the fact that an agent called at the customer's home every week to collect their repayments.

The credit crunch means these fringe lenders thrive, as people find it even more difficult to borrow from traditional high street lenders. Crook said customer demand was "a little bit weaker than you might think. People are unsure about whether they will still be in work in three months' time". Many of those wanting to borrow from his company already had too much debt. Its home credit division was turning down about two-thirds of applicants.
 

Money problems?

Provident Financial and similar doorstep lenders offer people in poverty a very bad deal, but one that is hard to resist when there seems to be no alternative.

An experienced former Citizens Advice Bureau money adviser reports that once people are in their clutches it is very difficult to extract yourself without help - the weekly doorstep collector works hard to be your "friend," but turns on the pressure to collect the weekly payments, and tries to "help" by offering a new loan, so you always owe them money and can rarely escape. They work on commission. Of course they are friendly and keen to help - they are making a good living off you and others.

George House Trust can provide considerable support with money problems - our welfare fund, access to other funds such as Crusaid - financial help. People living with HIV in NW England wanting advice and assistance should contact our services team for our specialist debt and money advice.

George House Trust Debt and Money advice
Help with dealing with your debts and managing your money, from a specialist adviser from Manchester Advice.

Thursdays 10.00am - 12.00 midday

Mondays 2pm - 4pm.

Please call to book an appointment - 0161 274 4499.

Source

Useful Pre-Pay Visa Cards

posted: 28/07/2009

Many people with HIV find getting debit and credit cards almost impossible, including migrants with HIV, and the gap could now be filled by pre-pay cards. These allow you to buy things and pay bills by plastic, including on the web, but you don't need a good credit score, or have enough regular income. You simply pay for credit to be added to the card as you can afford this.

O2 has launched a pre-pay Visa card for adults, called Cash Manager, which may finally make these products a viable choice for millions.

The chief attraction of Cash Manager is that it's free of charges. Until now, pre-pay cards have tended to levy an "issuing fee" (usually £10), monthly fees (up to £5 at some providers) and "reload" fees. They have largely been used as an alternative to travellers' cheques when overseas.

Good option for migrants

But now Britain's unbanked – especially recent migrants, but all those refused by banks – can obtain a Visa card for free. They'll be able to load it with cash at thousands of Paypoint and ePay terminals around the country, which will then allow them to buy goods over the net or over the phone.

The catch is that you have to have an O2 mobile. The cheapest deal the network offers right now is its Sim-only Pay & Go deal, although you have keep it active by topping up £10 every three months.

If you don't want to sign up with O2, there are plenty of other pre-pay deals, although all come with some level of charging.

Try the website what-prepaid-card to compare deals.

• Virgin has a MasterCard, which does not charge a monthly fee but has a start-up fee of £9.95.
• The Post Office offers its Travel Card, which has no issuing fee or monthly fee, but charges a 1.5% fee when re-loading money. Its big attraction is that it is an Electron card – so you can avoid the £5 that Ryanair charges on each leg of a flight.