My Life My Choice 

Monday 1 April

Bedroom tax introduced

The aim is to tackle overcrowding and encourage a more efficient use of social housing. Working age housing benefit and unemployment claimants deemed to have one spare bedroom in social housing will lose 14% of their housing benefit and those with two or more spare bedrooms will lose 25%. An estimated 1m households with extra bedrooms are paid housing benefit. Critics say it is an inefficient policy as in the north of England, families with a spare rooms outnumber overcrowded families by three to one, so thousands will be hit with the tax when there is no local need for them to move. Two-thirds of the people hit by the bedroom tax are disabled.

Savings: £465m a year. As many as 660,000 people in social housing will lose an average of £728 a year.

Monday 1 April

Thousands lose access to legal aid

Branded by Labour a “day of shame” for the legal aid system, the cutoff to claim legal aid will be a household income of £32,000, and those earning between £14,000 and £32,000 will have to take a means test. Family law cases including divorce, child custody, immigration and employment cases will be badly affected.

Savings: a minimum £350m from £2.2bn legal aid bill.

Monday 1 April

Council tax benefit passes into local control

Council tax benefit, currently a single system administered by the Department for Work and Pensions, is being transferred to local councils with a reduction in funding of 10%. Council tax benefit is claimed by 5.9 million low-income families in the UK. The new onus on councils has come at a time when local government funding, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, has fallen by 26.8% in two years in real terms. A Guardian survey of 81 councils last week found many claiming they face difficult cuts, with almost half saying they were reducing spending on care services for adults. This also comes at a time when 2.4m households will see a council tax rise.

Savings: up to £480m a year, but depends on decisions of local councils.

Monday 1 April

NHS commissioning changes for ever

An NHS commissioning board and a total of 240 local commissioning groups made up of doctors, nurses and other professionals will take control of budgets to buy services for patients. They will buy from any service providers, including private ones so long as they meet NHS standards and costs. Strategic health authorities and primary care trusts disappear.

Costs: £1.4bn, mainly in redundancies, followed by savings as high as £5bn in 2015 owing to fall in staff numbers.

Monday 1 April

Regulation of financial industry changes

The Financial Conduct Authority and Prudential Regulation Authority, housed in the Bank of England, replace the Financial Services Authority. The Bank promises these changes do not represent the death and Easter resurrection of the same body. A new, proactive supervisory approach towards the City is promised, focused on outcomes rather than a tick-box culture. It has powers to prosecute, throw people out of the industry and withdraw a bank’s licence. Above all it monitors risk to the financial system as a whole.

Saturday 6 April

50p tax rate scrapped for high earners

Announced in the 2012 budget. George Osborne said the 50p rate, introduced in April 2010, caused massive distortions in 2010-11 and raised only £1bn, rather than the £2.5bn forecast by Labour back in 2009. HMRC found £16bn was deliberately shifted into the previous tax year, largely by owner/directors of companies taking dividends in the previous year when the highest rate was still 40p. Labour claims 13,000 millionaires will get a £100,000 tax cut.

Monday 8 April

Disability living allowance scrapped

The personal independence payment (PIP) replaces the disability living allowance and, according to the DWP, is not based on your condition, but on how your condition affects you, so narrowing the gateway to the PIP.

It will contain two elements: a daily living component and a mobility component. If you score sufficient points, a claim can be made. Assessments will be face-to-face rather than based on written submissions, starting in Bootle benefits centre, handling claims across the north-west and north-east.

Monday 8 April

Benefit uprating begins

For the first time in history welfare benefits and tax credits will not rise in line with inflation and will instead for the next three years rise by 1%. Had there been no change benefits would have risen by 2.2%. Disability benefits will continue to rise in line with inflation.

Savings: £505m in the first year, rising to £2.3bn in 2015-16. Nearly 9.5 million families will be affected, including 7 million in work, by £165 a year.

Monday 15 April

Welfare benefit cap

The most popular of the welfare reforms will begin on 15 April in the London boroughs of Bromley, Croydon, Enfield and Haringey. The intention is that no welfare claimants will receive in total more than the average annual household income after tax and national insurance – estimated at £26,000. Other councils will start to introduce it from 15 July and it will be fully up and running by the end of September. Some estimate 80,000 households will be made homeless. The DWP says around 7,000 people who would have been affected by the cap have moved into work and a further 22,000 have accepted employment support to move into work. Households where someone is entitled to working tax credits will not be affected.

Savings: £51m over three years.

28 April

Universal credit introduced

The new in- and out-of-work credit, which integrates six of the main out-of-work benefits, will start to be implemented this April in one jobcentre in Ashton-under-Lyne, Greater Manchester. The aim is to increase incentives to work for the unemployed and to encourage longer hours for those working part-time. It had been intended that four jobcentres would start the trial in April, but this has been delayed until July, and a national programme will start in September for new claimants. They will test the new sanctions regime and a new fortnightly job search trial, which aims to ensure all jobseeker’s allowance and unemployment claimants are automatically signed onto Job Match, an internet-based job-search mechanism. Suspicion remains that the software is not ready.

HAVE YOUR SAY

The Guardian

From April families deemed to have too much living space by councils will receive a reduced payment.

Mr Miliband said this was a “bedroom tax” which would affect those with disabilities unfairly.

Mr Cameron said is was a “basic question of fairness” because those in private housing did not get benefits for unoccupied rooms.

The change affects council tenants, and those renting from housing associations, who receive housing benefit, but it does not affect claimants who rent in the private sector.

Under the government’s so-called “size criteria”, families will be assessed for the number of bedrooms they actually need.

‘Not a tax’

Tenants in social housing will have their benefit reduced by 14% if they have a spare bedroom or 25% if they have two or more extra rooms.

Mr Miliband said the policy was “not just unfair, it’s not going to work either” because of a shortage of smaller council properties for people to move into.

He accused the prime minister of misunderstanding the point of social housing, which was there to “protect the most vulnerable”, adding that two thirds of people who would be hit by the change were disabled.

He also said military families with relatives serving abroad in the armed forces might also receive less.

Mr Cameron said there was a £50m fund to help the most vulnerable tenants and it was necessary to reform welfare to bring the benefits bill down.

“This is not a tax, this is a benefit,” he said. “Let me also make the basic argument of fairness that you [Ed Miliband] seem to miss.

“If you are in private rented housing and receive no housing benefit, you don’t get money for an extra room. If you are in private housing and do get housing benefit you don’t get money for an extra room.

“So there’s a basic argument of fairness: why should we be doing more for people in social housing on housing benefit than people in private housing on housing benefit?”

He said his party was “on the side of people who work hard and want to do the right thing”.

By BBC News

But the prime minister said there was too much “bureaucratic nonsense” and policy-makers should use “judgement” rather than “tick boxes”.

Labour called his decision a “joke”.

Equality impact assessments, introduced in the 2010 Equality Act, involve assessing “the likely or actual effects of policies or services on people in respect of disability, gender and racial equality”.

Supporters say they are essential to improving fairness, while opponents argue they are ineffective, expensive and time-consuming.

‘Pointless’

In a speech, the prime minister told the CBI conference in London that he wanted to reduce constraints on the public sector to help reinvigorate the economy.

He said there were too many “pointless reports” being produced, adding: “Take the Equality Act. It’s not a bad piece of legislation.

“But in government we have taken the letter of this law and gone way beyond it, with equality impact assessments for every decision we make.

“Let me be very clear. I care about making sure that government policy never marginalises or discriminates. I care about making sure we treat people equally.

“But let’s have the courage to say it: caring about these things does not have to mean churning out reams of bureaucratic nonsense.

“We have smart people in Whitehall who consider equalities issues while they’re making the policy. We don’t need all this extra tick-box stuff.”

Mr Cameron added: “So I can tell you today we are calling time on equality impact assessments.

“You no longer have to do them if these issues have been properly considered.

“That way policy-makers are free to use their judgement and do the right thing to meet the equalities duty rather than wasting their own time and taxpayers’ money.”

But, for Labour, shadow equalities minister Yvette Cooper said: “Under David Cameron millions are paying more while millionaires are getting a massive tax cut – women are being hit much harder than men with low-income working families and disabled families losing out badly.

“Now the prime minister wants to remove any requirement for the public sector to even think about equality and he wants to destroy the evidence that his decisions are widening the gap.

“This is even more proof of David Cameron’s personal blind spot on women and his lack of concern about the unfair impact of his policies. The idea we can leave equality to the ‘judgement’ of this prime minister and his cabinet with so few women is just a joke.”

bbc

About 800,000 Britons are being treated for dementia.

Another 400,000 are thought to suffer from it but have not been diagnosed.

Mr Hunt said one reason diagnosis rates are so low is people ‘don’t want to come forward’ to see their GP.

He added: ‘The way we deal with it is as a society is shockingly bad. We need to sort out what we do inside the NHS as there’s some big work we are doing on that front. And we need to improve research.

‘Dementia is a bit of a taboo. It’s a bit like cancer in the 1960s where people don’t like to talk about it.’

He said: ‘The NHS is brilliant in so many ways, but I think even inside the NHS people realise we have to do a lot better.

‘Too many people with dementia feel cut off, lonely and fearful without the support and understanding they need.

‘We need to build a society where people can live well with dementia, enjoying the best possible quality of life for as long as possible. I want Britain to be one of the best places to be for dementia care.’

Pledging to make the issue a ‘personal priority’, David Cameron unveiled a package of initiatives, saying urgent action is needed to raise the ‘shockingly low’ awareness of the condition and improve diagnosis rates.

One million ‘dementia friends’ are to be trained to spot the symptoms of the condition and given advice on how to provide practical help to Britain’s estimated 700,000 sufferers.

Mr Cameron told ITV1’s This Morning: ‘Six months ago, I set up this challenge to say we’ve got to do better as a country in three vital regards.

‘First is how do we treat people with dementia in the health service, in care homes? In some cases it’s brilliant, in many cases it’s not good enough, and remember one in four hospital beds are occupied by someone with dementia.

‘What more can we do in society to show understanding for people with dementia and make sure we treat them properly?

‘Third, but I think almost the most vital, is putting more money into dementia research.

‘I think there a lot of people out there who think dementia is just part of ageing, part of getting old. It isn’t. It’s a disease of the brain. We’ve got about 670,000 people with dementia, but tragically only 40 per cent – less than half – know they’ve got it.

‘We are not diagnosing it fast enough, we are not treating it fast enough. But there’s a really big cultural change we need to make. We know cancer is a killer that we want to get on top of.

‘We need to think of dementia in the same way. This is a disease that we need to try and tackle with all our brains and brilliant scientists.’

Mr Cameron has described Dementia Friends as ‘a great initiative’ which would make Britain ‘a country that’s more friendly and more understanding’ to people with the illness.

Hailing the extra £10 million for dementia research, the PM added: “We can do amazing things in our world. We can crack killer diseases. We can save lives on the other side of the world. We should be doing more here at home on this subject.

‘I think there are signs that if you diagnose it earlier there are better chances of drugs working, and the tragedy at the moment is that, with almost three quarters of a million people with dementia, less than half of those have actually been diagnosed.

Get to them faster, research the drugs, and let’s try and crack this disease, which tragically is going to affect one million people soon in our country.’

‘Through the Dementia Friends project we will for the first time make sure a million people know how to spot those tell-tale signs and provide support.’

The Dementia Friends initiative, which will receive £2.4 million funding over the next three years, is based on a scheme in japan where three million members of the public have been recruited to help dementia sufferers.

It will be led by the Alzheimer’s Society, which is recruiting up to 8,000 volunteers to help train members of the public. Members of the public will then be offered one-hour training sessions in community centres, church halls and workplaces designed to help them understand the impact of the disease and offer them practical ways to help sufferers.

In one exercise they will be asked to write down all the steps involved in making a cup of tea, in order to demonstrate how complicated even simple tasks can be.

Those taking part will be encouraged to wear a specially-designed badge, based on a forget-me-not, identifying them as a Dementia Friend.

They will also be encouraged to help sufferers they know or who they see struggling to cope with everyday tasks. Dementia sufferers will be told to look out for people wearing the badges if they need help.

Some 17,000 bus drivers at the transport giant First Group will be among the first to take part in the scheme.

Jeremy Hughes, chief executive of the Alzheimer’s Society, said: ‘Day to day tasks such as going to the shop or catching a bus can become increasingly difficult for people with dementia. Without a helping hand, this can mean people are left feeling isolated, unable to be part of their community and in some cases even unable to continue living at home.

‘We want to rally a million people behind the cause of helping make a better life for people with dementia.

‘I am confident we will not only meet this target but beat it.’

Mr Cameron will also announce that the Government is providing almost £10 million for dementia research to study brain scans of people in middle age, and £50 million to make wards and care homes more comfortable for people with dementia.

He also announced other initiatives to boost early diagnosis and help the public to better understand the condition which is forecast to affect one in three people aged over 65. At present just 42 per cent of people with the condition are ever diagnosed.

GPs are being given new guidance on the need to refer people displaying symptoms of the condition for specialist diagnosis

Daily Mail by JASON GROVES, POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT and DAILY MAIL REPORTER

In the wake of David Cameron’s Conservative Party Conference speech and only five weeks on from the London Paralympics, a new survey of people with disabilities and carers has found that the Paralympic legacy may not be as far-reaching as hoped.

Even though 82% of the people with disabilities and carers surveyed felt that the public was more aware and open-minded towards them as a result of the Paralympics, 40% expressed worries that any positive change would not last.

And as the euphoria of the Games fades, the survey by national disability charity Vitalise has cast clear doubts on whether any profound change in the public’s perception of the reality of disability has occurred.

Despite the impact of the Paralympics, over half (54%) of the respondents thought that the public does not have a better understanding of the day to day lives of people with disabilities.

The survey was conducted in September and early October among the people with disabilities and carers who have taken much-needed respite breaks with Vitalise. Two thirds (65%) of the respondents were people with disabilities.

In the light of the findings, Vitalise is urging society as a whole to help sustain the Paralympic legacy by engaging with the day to day lives of people with disabilities and helping them play a much more significant role in society.

Vitalise Chief Executive, Chris Simmonds, said:

“Last week, in a moving reference to his son, David Cameron talked of how, thanks to the Paralympics, ‘more people would see the boy and not the wheelchair…’ We agree that the Paralympics has helped society view disability in a much more positive light.

“But the feel good factor may not last forever, and our survey has highlighted the concerns of people with disabilities that they will fade from public view and become invisible to society once again. We must not let that happen.  

“The real work to sustain the Paralympic legacy starts now. Unless we as a society permanently change the way we view and value the capabilities and aspirations of people with disabilities, the true potential of the UK’s disabled population may never be realised.”

Vitalise’s call is being backed by Team GB paralympian and 7/7 survivor Martine Wright, who was recently named the Vitalise Woman of Achievement 2012.

Martine said:

“As someone who only recently acquired the label ‘disabled’, I have experienced this issue from both sides. I consider myself lucky in the sense that since 2005 I have managed to achieve many of my dreams, but I’m keenly aware that the reality of life for the vast majority of people with disabilities is very different.

“People with disabilities have huge potential. They want to play a part in society, to make a contribution, but too often they are held back by the negative attitudes of others. The Games have done an enormous amount of good, but until we start thinking in terms of what people with disabilities can do, not what they can’t, I’m worried that little will change in the long run.”

Commenting on the high profile of people with disabilities in the wake of the Games, one respondent said:

“Para Olympics has made a lot more people realise what can be achieved, a lot of different people have told me they did not realise how much people like myself can do, so there is far greater awareness since the Olympics.”

However, many respondents doubted whether the Paralympic ‘feel good’ factor would have any long-term effects. One respondent commented:

“I would like to think that the understanding and empathy towards people with disabilities would last. Unfortunately I believe that unless you know someone personally or have a disability yourself, there are many people who choose not to engage or understand those who are different.”

www.vitalise.org.uk