Universal credit & domestic abuse

[QuarksandLeptons]

Good article in the Financial Times

www.ft.com/content/aaaaf2fa-4c63-11e8-8a8e-22951a2d8493

Brief summary:
10% of the households receiving the benefit are couples. The new system puts it all into one account which means that in the event of it going into the account of a controlling & abusive partner, the abusive partners can end up not sharing the money, leaving women and children vulnerable. There are cases documented of women and children going hungry and not having money for nappies or sanitary items.
Worse, women & children end up being forced to stay in dangerous circumstances because they don’t have the money to leave.

How can changes like these be made to the system without thinking through the real life consequences to huge numbers of women & children? Surely, this would have been flagged up if relevant women’s groups had been asked to comment on proposed changes

Smeddum ashamedofthis2

ashamed of this Some social housing providers are evicting as fast as the private landlords due to UC

Joe Halewood mentions it on his blog.

Is there any question as to the human rights law aspect of UC? Could it be challenged in court?

This has been done by Rebekah Carrier, and they failed.

That’s awful! I just can’t see how such an ill thought out, badly managed and executed and discriminatory policy can be allowed to stand legally.

If the scottish government can do automatic split payments, and also automatic 2-weekly payments, then why can't UC as a whole?? This would go some way to protecting those affected by Domestic Violence and Control, it wouldn't cost any more to implement, so why is it being rejected by Teresa May??

The childcare payments could be paid by uc upon proof of childcare being received. This again would not cost any more, and would help to ensure women are able to begin work, which may help them escape abusive situations.

The debt deductions could be SET at an automatic lower and more affordable level, so that women could actually afford to live without resorting to dangerous activities or facing poverty for themselves and their children. I am reminded of a woman I spoke to facing similar deductions to myself, she at 22 weeks pregnant upon leaving an abusive relationship had her payments reduced from the normal £317 personal allowance to £190 personal allowance. because of her arrears/ 3rd party debts. This is an entirely new situation and exclusive to the new universal credit system, previously debts were taken from social security at £3.70 maximum per week. How can a pregnant woman live on less than £40 a week, including food, for herself and her unborn, fuel, travel etc ..

Barbaric.

The Scottish government just voted to ask for welfare powers to be devolved. Unfortunately it can’t be forced and given the Tories are about to attempt a post Brexit power grab (allegedly “temporary”) I’m not convinced.

Yesterday in Parliament I raised an important local issue. The Tories' Universal Credit system is rife with problems. A notable one is how it views under-18s as both undeserving of state support by denying them access to Universal Credit, yet their income is somehow taken into account when calculating their partner's UC claim.

Andrea Leadsom's response is not good enough. It is not fair to expect all under-18s to attend further and higher education. This is not a path everyone wishes to follow. It is not fair to expect under-18s to support themselves on an apprentice wage and a minimum wage. Especially when their minimum wage is legally much lower than those older than them and working poverty is through the roof. People should not have to wait to earn a "decent income". People deserve it now.

This is a Government that is wilfully deaf to the struggles of ordinary people and would happily allow them to struggle and suffer in the name of saving money. We can do better.

This was posted by my local SNP MP today. She raised this in Parliament yesterday.

I had no family ties (he’d ruined that) and no friends

That's exactly the problem. Most situations are like this, as without friends or family, you're stuck.

Smeddum I'm so glad you're alive. I am really worried for women at the moment, more than usual with UC coming in.

ashamedofthis I'm so sorry

@gluteustothemaximus thank you. Life is a lot different now and I’m very grateful. I have my family and friends and DP is a good man.

But I’ll never forget, and I’ll never stop advocating for women who aren’t free yet.

rememberthetime This is a relevant Buzzfeed article with the stories of some women who have been taken to court and ended up thousands of pounds in debt because of Universal Credit incompetence.

www.buzzfeed.com/emilydugan/these-women-were-taken-to-court-for-eviction-because-of?utm_term=.goBaYXN52#.vu1DNdMmL

And its the article where Clarion Housing have been v. eager and quick to evict..............a housing association.............social housing.

@ashamedofthis2, there is a vaccine for HPV, but it's pricey. If you typoed and meant HIV, if you are in Scotland you might be able to get PrEP on the NHS if you can persuade a clinician to assess you as at high-risk of transmission (which you very arguably are, if you are having sex with men for money). Join your local credit union, they do the cheapest loans you'll find anywhere and help you save a crisis fund. Some police forces (Merseyside IIRC) treat violence against sex workers as hate crime, if yours does it might make reporting more viable if/when you get beaten by ~~a client~~ scum.

I'm now out of ideas. I want to help. Fuck the govt for doing this to you.

Smeddum and ashamed

That’s awful! I just can’t see how such an ill thought out, badly managed and executed and discriminatory policy can be allowed to stand legally.

No. I have actually been arguing with people about the potential of UC for years (not on this site) When it was first announced these things were raised by a few people and most people said there would be safety nets, that of course children wouldn't suffer or women would lose custody of children as a result. I'm not happy to be proved right in my "scaremongering".

I have actually been arguing with people about the potential of UC for years (not on this site)

Also me. The main reason I'm late to the trans shenanigans, which I had thought was basically confined to campus madness.

I am convinced that a large proportion of the increase in care applications is due to cuts in women's services and social security since 2010 - including, but not limited to, UC.

I remember unpacking the Orwellian language they were using around "conditionality" which may have served to wake me up more to other Orwellian language use!

That people would be "incentivised" rather than coerced or disadvantaged.

I honestly didn't think extending "conditionality" to 1 in 5 of the working population (tax credits claimants) would ever fly. But then I realised that the vast majority of the 1 in 5 were women and so nobody would give a shit. Even the bloody 2017 Labour manifesto gave 4x the money to middle class students than it put into social security. When it's mostly women suffering, nobody gives a shit. And I'm sorry to say that is the truth.

Even the bloody 2017 Labour manifesto gave 4x the money to middle class students than it put into social security. When it's mostly women suffering, nobody gives a shit. And I'm sorry to say that is the truth.

Absolutely. I originally thought Corbyn or at least a new socialist focus on the most vulnerable might change things, which is why I joined the party at the time of the leadership battle to vote him in. But no.

Incentivised is a horrible euphemism. Horrible.

This is not a new idea, as PP have pointed out, it was the idea with child benefit being paid to the mother.

So, this is entirely deliberate, they know what the result is.

Men are the important people in society, women are to do what they are told. When we are needed to work, we must go out to work, when we are not needed to work, we must go home. When budgets are tight, we (and our children) must shoulder the pain. And so on and so on.

The govt has refused to release impact assessments around austerity because of what it shows about the utter inequality of who bore the brunt.

The kind of sentence construction they tended to use it in when first framing UC (haven't seen it so much recently but I admit I haven't really looked) was really sinister NLP.

And they used the word "worklessness" which subtly shifts the responsibility like it's a personal failing or a natural state, rather than a lack of employment.

And it is deliberate -

If you are poor and hungry and desperate and doing everything you can to feed your kids

You are less likely to cause any trouble (agitating for change etc).

Unfortunately, as proven by many many threads, there are plenty of people who agree with UC and are happy to see the people claiming it starve and be abused.

Yes. Political and social consensus - a majority agree. I find it shocking how little solidarity people have.

And the sad thing is that it saves no money. It just creates crisis and the crisis costs far more than the cuts ever saved. Family courts cost money to run. It costs order of magnitude more to foster a child than it does to provide its mother with tax credits. Anxious, depressed mothers spend a lot of time at the doctor. 200,000 hospital bed days due to malnutrition (a 300% increase since austerity) costs a lot of money. Etc ad infinitum.

Doesn't save money it's ideological. Same as the child ben thing, that made no sense, more expensive to administer non universal benefits.

That was a reversal of the principle of individual taxation as well, which was a very big change to how we approach stuff.

Essentially there is still quite a prevalent attitude that the feckless poor deserve to be punished.