Doubts cast on housing benefit claim
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The government argues that the changes will lead to fairer allocation of social housing
A senior Conservative has cast doubt on claims by David Cameron that severely disabled children are exempt from what critics have dubbed the “bedroom tax”.
The prime minister told MPs “anyone who needs help around the clock” would not be affected by curbs on benefits for underoccupied rooms in social housing.
Critics have said this is incorrect.
Ex-housing minister Grant Shapps said discretionary payments were available in certain circumstances, but families with disabled children were not exempt.
From next month, families deemed to have too much living space by their local authorities will receive a reduced payment towards their rent.
Ministers say those in social housing should not get support which is not available to those in the private sector and the housing benefit bill must be cut.
Mr Cameron and Labour leader Ed Miliband clashed over the issue at Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday, with the prime minister defending the decision to limit what he described as the “spare room subsidy”, but what the opposition have characterised as a tax on the vulnerable.
‘Discretionary’
Mr Miliband said an impact assessment suggested 420,000 disabled people faced losing £700 a year as a result of the changes – a total of £306m – while the hardship fund covering those affected had an allocation of just £25m for disabled people.
In response, Mr Cameron said “anyone with severely disabled children is exempt from the spare room subsidy”.
“Pensioners are exempt, people with disabled children are exempt, anyone who needs help round the clock is also exempt,” he told MPs.
Speaking to You and Yours on BBC Radio Four, Mr Shapps, who is now minister without portfolio and co-chair of the Conservative Party, was asked if Mr Cameron had been wrong to say disabled children were exempt.
“It’s discretionary.” he said. “Where people have special cases there is a housing discretionary fund. A local authority can look at a case. It’s a discretionary payment.”
The government, he added, would keep a very close eye on how the fund worked but it was important that cases were looked at on an individual basis.
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AP – President Barack Obama speaks during a town hall meeting Wednesday, April 29, 2009, at Fox Senior High …
Slideshow:President Obama’s First 100 Days Play Video Barack Obama Video:Obama: Remain vigilant against H1N1 flu AP Play Video Barack Obama Video:Beck’s Retrospective FOX News By CALVIN WOODWARD, Associated Press Writer Calvin Woodward, Associated Press Writer – 9 mins ago
WASHINGTON – “That wasn’t me,” President Barack Obama said on his 100th day in office, disclaiming responsibility for the huge budget deficit waiting for him on Day One.
It actually was partly him — and the other Democrats controlling Congress the previous two years — who shaped the latest in a string of precipitously out-of-balance budgets.
And as a presidential candidate and president-elect, he backed the twilight Bush-era stimulus plan that made the deficit deeper, all before he took over and promoted spending plans that have made it much deeper still.
Obama met citizens at an Arnold, Mo., high school Wednesday in advance of his prime-time news conference. Both forums were a platform to review his progress at the 100-day mark and look ahead.
At various times, he brought an air of certainty to ambitions that are far from cast in stone.
His assertion that his proposed budget “will cut the deficit in half by the end of my first term” is an eyeball-roller among many economists, given the uncharted terrain of trillion-dollar deficits and economic calamity that the government is negotiating.
He promised vast savings from increased spending on preventive health care in the face of doubts that such an effort, however laudable it might be for public welfare, can pay for itself, let alone yield huge savings.
A look at some of his claims Wednesday:
OBAMA: “We began by passing a Recovery Act that has already saved or created over 150,000 jobs.” — from news conference.
THE FACTS: This assertion is flawed on several levels. For starters, the U.S. has lost more than 1.2 million jobs since Obama took office, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Even if Obama’s stimulus bill saved or created as many jobs as he says, that number is dwarfed by the number of recent job losses.
But Obama’s number is murky, at best. The White House has not yet announced how it intends to count jobs created by the stimulus bill. Obama’s number is based on a job-counting formula that his economists have developed but have not made public. Until that formula is announced — probably in the coming week or so — there’s no way to assess its accuracy.
Whatever the formula, economists who study job creation say it will require some creative math. That’s because Obama has lumped “jobs saved” in with “jobs created.” Even economists for organizations that stand to benefit from the stimulus concede it probably is impossible to estimate saved jobs because that would require calculating a hypothetical: how many people would have lost their jobs without the stimulus.
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OBAMA: “We must lay a new foundation for growth, a foundation that will strengthen our economy and help us compete in the 21st century. And that’s exactly what this budget begins to do. It contains new investments in education that will equip our workers with the right skills and training; new investments in renewable energy that will create millions of jobs and new industries; new investments in health care that will cut costs for families and businesses; and new savings that will bring down our deficit.” — news conference.
THE FACTS: While the budget does set a roadmap for achieving the president’s goals, it says nothing about how to pay for his health plan, expected to cost more than $1 trillion over the next 10 years. And while the deficit, under the plan, would drop to $523 billion in 2014, it achieves it with unrealistic assumptions, such as projections that spending in Iraq and Afghanistan will amount to only $50 billion a year.
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OBAMA: “Number one, we inherited a $1.3 trillion deficit. … That wasn’t me. Number two, there is almost uniform consensus among economists that in the middle of the biggest crisis, financial crisis, since the Great Depression, we had to take extraordinary steps. So you’ve got a lot of Republican economists who agree that we had to do a stimulus package and we had to do something about the banks. Those are one-time charges, and they’re big, and they’ll make our deficits go up over the next two years.” — in Missouri.
THE FACTS:
Congress, under Democratic control in 2007 and 2008, controlled the purse strings that led to the deficit Obama inherited. A Republican president, George W. Bush, had a role, too: He signed the legislation.
Obama supported the emergency bailout package in Bush’s final months — a package Democratic leaders wanted to make bigger.
To be sure, Obama opposed the Iraq