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
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