n/a

sanctions

  • March 24, 2015

    By publishing today’s

  • February 21, 2015

    For a few weeks I’ve been trying to write a general critique of welfare reform, addressing each policy point by point, looking at the assumptions on which it was based, what it aimed to achieve, an

  • February 4, 2015

    People often suspect that the purpose of recent welfare reforms was not to make the system more efficient or more fair, but to make the system so hostile, punitive and humiliating that people would be deterred from claiming. A decision by the DWP has just fuelled this suspicion.

  • January 24, 2015

    There is a new kind of poverty in Britain. It is made by politicians, and could easily be ended by politicians. The people enduring this government-enforced poverty are not on low incomes: they have no income whatsoever. They sit in dark cold homes with no money and no food. For them, budgeting and belt-tightening would be the luxury option.

  • October 24, 2014

    Thousands of people unable to work because of progressive conditions are being placed in a work-related activity group, even if assessors admit they are unlikely ever to recover, the UK government admitted.

  • September 27, 2014

    An event to be staged at the Conservative Party Conference manages to encapsulate all that is wrong with the way the public conversation on social security has been framed and managed.

  • September 12, 2014

    When I was young, my father often used to repeat a saying his mother had told him, “To whom much is given, of them much is expected.” It was long time before I realised that this early version of “check out your privilege” was in fact quoting Jesus in the Bible (Luke 12:48), but I have never forgotten it, and I always try to live by it.

  • April 16, 2014

    Leaders of the Methodist Church, Baptist Union of Great Britain and United Reformed Church have expressed concern about the latest Trussell Trust foodbank figures.

  • February 21, 2014

    Social security sanctions, in which people not in paid work have benefit payments cut or removed for up to three years, have reached record levels. 27 Anglican bishops and other church leaders have condemned UK government benefit cuts and failures which mean that many go hungry.

  • January 20, 2014

    The International Atomic Energy Agency has confirmed that Iran has begun curbing uranium enrichment a part of a deal which will see international sanction eased.