John Hills provides a much needed objective analysis (The Tablet, 22 November) to counter the false perceptions about welfare spending ardently encouraged by those politicians imposing austerity with tax cuts for the wealthy and benefit cuts for the poorest. The explosion of numbers having their benefits cut off with "sanctions", the bedroom tax and the taxation of benefits with a proportion of the council tax by local authorities since April 2013, are all worsened by the draconian enforcement of council tax arrears against shredded benefit incomes, with threats of bailiffs, bankruptcy and prison.
The Supreme Court provided another gust of fresh air in a judgement declaring unlawful Haringey Council's 2012 consultation of benefit claimants about the introduction of a new council tax benefit scheme in 2013. Haringey consulted them about council decision to take 20 per cent of the council tax from their state benefits without mentioning any alternative. Lord Wilson wrote, on behalf of his four colleagues: "Those whom Haringey was primarily consulting were the most economically disadvantaged of its residents. Their income was already at a basic level and the effect of Haringey's proposed scheme would be to reduce it even below that level and thus in all likelihood to cause real hardship, while sparing its more prosperous residents from making any contribution to the shortfall in government funding. Fairness demanded that in the consultation document brief reference should be made to other ways of absorbing the shortfall "
John Hills is right; the popular belief that so much spending goes to the unemployed leads to increasingly hard measures by national and local government to save any significant amount. It also lulls the more prosperous citizens of the UK into a false sense of security that the NHS, Social Services, education, the police and the armed forces can be funded by imposing even greater financial hardship on their poorest fellow citizens.
Revd Paul Nicolson, Taxpayers Against Poverty
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