HIV Money for Councils

posted: 21/12/2010

The Government have now said how much each council will receive for HIV social care in the next two years. This used to be paid as 'AIDS Support Grant'.  

Increased Grant

Remarkably the funding identified for ‘AIDS Support’ is increased from £25.5 million this year (2010/11) and will rise to £36.2 million by 2014/15.

HIV community organisations worked hard to keep the amount for HIV listed within the overall grant to councils. This will mean people can ask what this HIV funding is really being spent on.

psending Ring-Fence Gone

The bad news is that this HIV money is no longer 'ring-fenced'. This means the council could spend the HIV money on anything. We need local people to help be our eyes and ears and put pressure on councils to spend the cash on HIV and nothing else.
 

MPs welcome increase

“This is a huge achievement.” said Simon Kirby MP, Vice Chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group for HIV and AIDS, who pushed for this increase. “With many councils having to make savings of up to 10% this year, there is no doubt that there will be pressure on all services including HIV services. But if councils receive a specific named ‘AIDS Support Grant’ people living with HIV have a good case to argue that the money should be spent on them.”
The All Party Parliamentary Group policy adviser, Veronica Oakeshott, says that HIV campaigners will still have a fight on their hands to ensure the grant “does what it says on the tin.”
 

Cuts presssure

Because of the cuts to council spending the government announced last week (the maximum 8.9% cut hits Manchester and other councils) there are great financial pressures on local authorities. Councils will be tempted to spend this HIV money on other, more popular services.

We encourage people to tell their local authority to spend all its 'HIV/AIDS Support' allocation on social care for people with HIV.

Tell your councillors what they should be spending on HIV 

You can find details of your local councillors using your email address and then send an email at WriteToThem

NW England table showing HIV funding (April 2009 to April 2013) from central government to councils that provide social care services

HIV money for each council for the year April 2011 - April 2012
HIV money for each council for the year April 2012 - April 2013

More information on HIV social care on NAT's website 

Guidance on Cuts, Equality and Fairness

posted: 28/10/2010

In making cuts and changes to services, public bodies have to obey equality law. Equality law does not prevent public bodies from making difficult decisions about reorganisation, relocation, redundancies, and service cuts, nor does the law stop public authorities from making decisions that may affect one group more than another.

A Must: Equality Impact Assessments
But the public equality duties do enable public authorities to show they are making decisions in a fair, transparent and accountable way, considering the needs and the rights of different members of their community.

The law says public bodies have to carry out an assessment of the impact that changes to policies, procedures and practices could have on different equality groups. These assessments help public bodies make better decisions, based on robust evidence. Public bodies must then 'have regard to' the impact any changes and cuts would have on sections of the community protected by equality law.

The assessment does not have to be a document called an Equality Impact Assessment, although this is what the Equality and Human Rights Commission recommends, as it helps public authorities:

• ensure they have a written record of the equality considerations they have taken into account
• ensure that their decision includes a consideration of the actions that would help to avoid or mitigate any unfair impact on particular equality groups
• make their decisions based on robust evidence
• make the decision-making process more transparent
• comply with the law.

If an Equality Impact Assessment is not done, then the public body must use an another method to systematically assess any adverse impact of a change in policy, procedure or practice.

It is a legal obligation which should remain a top priority, even in times of economic difficulty. Failure may result in authorities facing costly, time-consuming and reputation-damaging legal challenges.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission has launched a short guide to help put fairness and transparency at the heart of the difficult financial decisions through meeting the legal obligation to assess equality impact. The guide covers:

• What the law requires now
• What the law requires from April 2011
• Guidance (for practitioners and decision-makers)
• Relevant case law
• Best practice examples
• FAQs Public authorities and service providers
• FAQs Service users and organisations

Short Guide

Full details

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

AIDS Support Grant Ending?

posted: 04/05/2010

AIDS Support Grant seems to be on its last legs - the Communities and Local Government "Smarter Government" plan shows that AIDS Support Grant (ASG) will no longer be ring fenced from April next year - 2011. Instead this money would be included in the central government area based grant to councils for providing Social Services. A copy of the Smarter Government paper is attached and ASG appears on page six.

After the general election we, NAT and other HIV organisations, will consider what we can do to keep ASG with its ring-fence.

As councils and HIV community organisations revealed in NAT's recent survey, there are serious concerns for HIV services, if the ring-fence is lifted, at a time when there are major public spending cuts on the horizon.

NAT carried out a detailed review of ASG in 2009 
 

Smarter Government proposal to abolish ASG - see page 6

Training for Councils - No Recourse to Public Funds

posted: 21/12/2009

A full day's training for councils on their legal duties to support people and families with ‘no recourse to public funds’ (NRPF) is provided by the NRPF Network along with London’s Islington Council. A significant number of migrants with HIV in NW England are subject to the No Recourse to Public Funds rules. Some NW England councils apply the rules very harshly or refuse to even accept they have any legal duty to assess people or help. Other councils do their duty well.

The training

• focuses on good practice in assessing and supporting people with NRPF
• provides an overview of relevant legislation and case-law and
• invites participants to explore other factors to be considered where immigration status impacts on entitlements to services in the UK.

Since April 2009, there have been 17 of these sessions for councils and voluntary sector organisations across the UK and the feedback is very positive.

The full details of the training days are on the NRPF microsite and any requests or enquiries can be made by email

In NW England councils vary widely in how well they perform meet their legal duties towards people with HIV under these rules.