"Don't you think some of these perks will be victims of the cuts soon?"
This was an uncomfortable question, but there is a valid point in the asking of it. The Coalition have started planning cuts already - and this is just the beginning. For ordinary people, there is a real risk that the Welfare State, which we have subsidised with our taxes all our working lives, is to be subjected to a severe reduction in staff and services. And this all because of the greed and opportunism of a bunch of avaricious bankers. As these cuts will have seriously adverse effects, perhaps we should be planning to resist them. So - how do we fight back? All ideas welcome!
We have to face the fact that there is not enough money to carry on with everything as it is. The difficult questions we have to face are what do we continue with and what do we stop or reduce. We will all have to face something we dont like. Is it better to stop you having free travel while you are still working, so that we can continue to give free travel to pensioners, or should we reduce the facility across the board? The bottom line is that there is no such thing as free travel - someone has to pay for it - probably most of your fellow travellers through higher ticket prices (and some of them will have lower income than you). Do you really need it, or is it just something you have looked forward to and are reluctant to give up?
ReplyDeleteThe Con-Dems are politicians who will choose their targets carefully to avoid electoral disaster ~ or (perhaps more immediately) prevent their coalition splitting at the seam.
ReplyDeleteThe only way to restrict benefits and concessions to those who are deemed to need them most is to extend the means test, which reminds me of a discussion I heard on Radio 4 recently about reducing our massive deficit. Several so-called ‘pundits’ stated that we should means test child benefit, winter fuel allowances and other benefits to save money. They clearly haven’t thought this through. In 2007/08 Child Benefit was paid for more than 13 million children in 7.5 million families in the UK, plus millions more qualify for winter fuel payments. The number of recipients involved is many times the number of unemployed, and means testing these benefits wouldn’t come cheap.
Why not? We'd need thousands of staff to apply the additional means tests, assess changes of circumstances as people either become entitled or cease to qualify, and investigators to pursue fraudulent claims. Means testing is a very labour intensive process. If you want to means test bus passes, then the costs will go much higher again.
After you’ve commissioned the development and purchase of new computer systems and obtained buildings for the extra staff, it becomes difficult to see much scope for savings. Plus the further costs of putting the IT systems right when they are found to be inadequate for the job, as so often happens with government procurement, and you’ll begin to wonder why you ever bothered with this means testing lark.
I expect self-styled experts to know all this, but it’s easy to spout ill-informed rubbish on TV and radio. I wonder why anyone takes them seriously. Still, on the plus side, it would have created lots more jobs, but I don't think that's what they had in mind. In the real world, the government has just announced a recruitment freeze in the civil service, so you can say goodbye to any significant expansion of means testing.
Cutting costs isn't as simple as it sounds. It's less a matter of having our pet projects cut, as Flyp suggests, and more of which essential services have to be axed. Previous cutbacks under the Tories resulted in an NHS in which you could sometimes wait for years for treatment. People actually died waiting for treatment for curable complaints. Social services are stretched now, but have a crucial role in child protection ~ everyone blames the social workers when a child is mistreated or killed, so what will be the impact of cutting local authority funding?
I don’t see any significant cuts in the defence budget, even though the war is swallowing huge amounts of our money, and replacing our nuclear weapons system is still planned to proceed at a cost of at least £100,000 million. Yet a majority of the public oppose both the war and Trident replacement.
Just pointing the finger at Geoff and his bus pass seems to be missing the point somewhat.
I'd just like to say that my concerns are wider than that of my Freedom Pass. Yesterday's cuts will put people out of work, whatever the ministers concerned might say. And these cuts are just the beginning...
ReplyDelete