to wonder what benefits will get the chop from the £12 billion of cuts?

[steiner8]

Just that really. I'm wondering which benefits are going to go or be significantly cut. Anyone have any idea?

YY Supermum I remember talking with you about this on another thread. The situation i mentioned upthread (four and a half months to put in a boiler and six radiators) was housing association not private landlord. A tenant was left without hot water and heating for weeks and weeks and was finally given a heater at the start of the 5th week. And the works flooded out her bedroom and it took them 8 hours to come out to the emergency they caused.

Corners are being cut re. gas safety as they try to do it cheaper and cheaper and cheaper.

One tenant had EIGHT no shows in a row from them. Another one ....4 no shows in a row. No phone call at the start of any of these days to explain or apologise.

And they INSIST that the tenant HAS to be there or they cant enter and it HAS to be an all day call.

How the fuck is a social housing tenant meant to hold down a job in these circumstances.

Because in this kind of situation just BEING a social housing tenant is a job in itself!!!!!

Some of the attitudes on this thread are absolutely sickening. People see the figure of £23k and automatically think that millions of people are sitting at home, doing fuck all, raking it in. That is bollocks and you'd do well to get off the Daily Mail website and educate yourselves.

Only 24k families are affected by the benefits cap atm. I would hazard a guess that the majority of them live in London, and the rest live in cities elsewhere. They won't be seeing most of that money, that will be going to the fat cat landlords. Until this is addressed the choice is help people with hound benefits or put them on the streets. I don't trust this bunch of Tories not to do the latter.

Cutting tax credits is going to hurt so many children. People get them because not all work pays. We're not talking about the workers in Tesco, MaccyDs and the local Spar. We're talking about nurses, soldiers, the police, the fire service, the teachers, teaching assistants, the dinners ladies, the bin men. Most of them will need housing benefit too. They are employed by the government, the same people who have just taken a 10% pay rise but frozen everyone else's pay for years. We need these people, we shouldn't be forcing them in to poverty and sending them off to foodbanks.

This Tory party and the right wing media have done a really good job of making people think that everyone on benefits is raking it in. Those nasty programmes on Ch4&5 don't help.

When you say "I voted Tory and I hope the cuts are deep" just remember the bankers caused the problems with the economy and the poor, sick and vulnerable are paying for it. Ask yourselves how that is right!

Any evidence for that then Viv? Or just a random idea?

I voted Tory
I think those of you Tory bashing are VERY naive that labour would have served you differently
Services would have still been under fire because there is NOT ENOUGH MONEY to find everything
There comes a point where people need to take responsibility for choices
I'm not talking about dla, I'm talking about people having more children than they can afford on their incomes
A child it a privilege not a right
I've waited 5 years before my next dc because I couldn't afford it until then- childcare etc I do believe too many people count heavily on credits for daily life, and assume they will always be there. As a country we need to ensure cash is there for those who need it who are sick who can't work, who have to care and support, but not those who select not to opt in because options out is easier.
And before you all jump in making assumptions about me I assure you I'm probably not what you expect a typical Tory to look like live like etc

"Brutal cuts ARE needed. Welfare state dependency is fast becoming the norm and it's having a devastating effect on those who actually need it. They will make cuts and my guess is that a % of all of us will suffer somehow. Apart from those lucky enough to live completely without state help, obviously. The problem is that for some people it has become a mentality, not something to be grateful for. The world does not owe you a living and neither does the government."

Spot on.

The system is bloated because the housing prices are. Housing benefit is the largest slice of the budget behind pensions. No one is 'tackling' high house prices.

indeed. in this country for some reason people think it makes sense for the government to pay people's rent instead of building or encouraging building homes.

it's our fault really. Not one party had even proposed massive house building.

keep could house 2 familys for what my rent is a month its madness

When they announce these cuts when will things take effect from? Is it a case of them announcing it all in July and a couple of weeks later the money stops?

Does anyone know what is likely to happen to housing benefit for people already claiming it?

What a stressful time!

"The vast majority of people who are poor are poor because they made terrible choices, not because they were destined for poverty."
Really? ?? The vast majority? What do you mean by poor ? Because the majority of people in the UK earn around 18k a year. These are ordinary, often reasonably educated people, working in schools, hospitals, hairdressers, farms, manufacturing, all over the North, the Midlands, Wales, the West Country.
These are the majority. And,as the wages they earn are poor, and the housing costs are high they are themselves , compared to the minority making the cuts, poor.
They apparently made the terrible choices to have ordinary jobs, many of them essential.
The fucking idiots .
Why didn't they just get Daddy to find them an internship in the media or in Parliament. Clearly the plebs deserve everything they (don't ) get.
I'm poor, but I'd rather be poor than thick TTWK

Well said Ifnotnowthenwhen!

Money breeds money.

Er no, because, you know, rich people don't rely on benefits

But plenty of formerly rich people do. 'Rich' isn't necessarily a permanent lifestyle. All it takes is a bad investment, a chronic illness, a severely disabled member of the family, an accident, or one of a hundred other things.

One of my neighbours on a council housing estate 10 years ago was an elderly lady whose life had been wrecked by one bad financial decision out of many. She and her husband had been Rich, capital r intended. They lost their houses, cars, everything. Her husband was working way past retirement, she had cancer and couldn't work and her only income was pin money from babysitting her grandchild. She couldn't believe what had happened to them. Very few people are totally bulletproof and could never be poor. And I expect a good percentage of them have friends on the front benches.

And I don't agree that the loss of child benefit would be harmless.

A lone parent on income support with a disabled child - if she loses child benefit, then (unless they change the current system) as it stands her carer's allowance will be taken out of her income support causing a loss of not £17ish a week, but nearer to £70.

I think this is kind of relevant www.buzzfeed.com/krishrach/we-asked-people-at-the-endausteritynow-march-how-government - comments from teachers, support workers, residential home workers, fire fighters, etc at the anti-austerity march yesterday.

Agree with a PP about choices - people rarely want to take responsibility !

I hope the disabled are left alone but I do think everything else needs to be tightened.

I can understand why they would say under 25s should lose their benefits ( I fall in this category) - at this age , the majority should be in further education or likewise. It's actually sad when I see some old school friends going to claim JSA - wasted potential. And that's why I think the welfare state should be tightened - don't give people the choice to not work or worker longer hours

textfan your first paragraph demonstrates the misogyny in the system as well as the classism

I voted Tory and I would do so again. The kind of attitudes displayed on this thread and the attempts to intimidate and swear at people with different views just make me more determined to do so.
We are all products of our experience and vote accordingly. I grew up in a council house raised by a single mum, went to grammar school (Tory policy), paid HR tax for 20 years and then (thanks to Labour fiscal incompetency!) became a nondom for tax purposes. My DH is still a UK tax resident, but if Labour had got in, this might well have changed.
Between us we pay and have paid hefty amounts of tax to support the less fortunate and yet we are no doubt "cunts" according to the people on this thread because we would actually prefer fiscal responsibility to ever-more tax. I have been poor (unlike, I suspect, many of the Guardianistas on this thread) and some of the well-meaning comments on here (eg about smoking and number of kids) are enormously patronizing. Self sufficiency (and independence from the state) is a good thing and should be encouraged, not derided.

In answer to a previous poster.

Yes, the UK does live beyond its means. No I don't get my information from the Tories. People like the IMF.

As a nation, our expenditure exceeds our income. Has done for some time. Therefore we live beyond our means.

I don't know what the answer is. I wouldn't be a politician for anything. I do know that in general most people want the cuts to fall on those they consider undeserving.

For some, that is benefit scroungers. For others, greedy bankers. Others say the evil btl landlords. Sometimes an undefined group such as the rich. Etc.

I don't pretend to have an answer. But its all pretty devisive.

I do think that blaming the Tory voters when labour led a piss poor election is wrong. There are huge areas where a vote for labour is worthless. I live in a Tory stronghold the labour candidate was invisible with one mail shot all about how crap the Tories are whilst nothing about labour. I voted lib dems even though I am fuming with them as well. My local school has 2% FSM in a wealthy area with a PTA raising thousands and infants get free school meals yet 10 miles away primary schools are failing. Voters can only choose what is on the ballot paper and labour need to address what and whom they stand for. Starting with no public servant employee should earn above the prime minister.

This thread would be hilarious if the cunty opinions expressed by the "being poor is your own fault and you must be punished" crew weren't actually hurting so many people.

A fucking tax dodging non-dom scrounger lecturing people about how the poor need to be "self sufficient"

You couldn't make this shit up.

All this crap about "self sufficiency" is so depressing.

The entire point of creating a welfare state was that being "self sufficient" when you are not rich is totally shit.

Creating a situation where you combine resources so that non-wealthy people can live a decent, secure, and fulfilling life, even if they get sick, even if they aren't exceptionally talented, even if they make some "poor choices" () was the mark of a decent society with a culture of kindness and caring for other people.

Tearing that down because people have had the flaming cheek to grow accustomed to living a life where they weren't terrified of starving or getting sick, and insisting that an insecure, unpleasant life is good for people is the mark of a sick, failing society that would rather harm itself through counter-productive "austerity" than behave decently towards other people.

But that's what the majority of English voters want - a niggardly, selfish, mean society where the poor have to rely on charity, rather than have any entitlement to enough to help them survive.

And then they call the removal of entitlements and their replacement with people having to go cap in hand looking for charitable handouts "self sufficiency".

Revolting, self-serving hypocrisy from sadists. Because that's what you are if you want to see people suffer, whatever economic bollocks you come up with to justify it.

Well said bathtime

There is nothing wrong with expecting healthy people to work for a living - but they need to actually make enough money in order for living to be possible, and in many areas of the UK lower-paid jobs (and this includes many "essential" jobs) do not pay enough for people to live on.

Yet it's clear that the cuts will have to come from in-work benefits, simply because there is no alternative given that pensions and child benefit appear to have been ring fenced.

Love the idea of a nondom lecturing others on doing their bit. That's made my day.

The other thing that's amusing about this is that the Tories promised cuts during the election they had no intention of delivering.

They were expecting to be "forced" to reduce them by a coalition partner they could blame for being too soft on poor people.

But now they have an overall majority and have promised a level of cuts that even they know is going to hurt people who can't be argued to deserve it, and that it will hurt our economy as a whole to take so much money out of it when our "recovery" is so faltering.

And STILL there are people cheering them on to do it - to hurt the poor and vulnerable, to hurt the economy, to hurt the country as a whole, to fuck over the young, to utterly marginalise the disabled, to do it NOW NOW NOW, to do it MOAR, BIGGER, BETTER, because they genuinely just enjoy seeing social catastrophe brought about by choice.

So weird. Kind of fascinating. But it's easy for me to say that from where I'm sitting.

When are people going to realise that having children is not a lifestyle choice?

You don't want immigrants, you don't want people having lots of children - the UK is rapidly aging too, who exactly is going to pay for your pension when you are old? And no, whatever you are paying into the pensions system now is not saved for your future pension, it is used right now for this generation of pensioners.