Colchester has the dubious distinction of being home to the first victims of the new Tory government’s Benefit Cap, as reported by the Daily Mirror on 28 May.
Last week Lee and Katrina Parker and their seven children were evicted from their home as a result of the Benefit Cap. Fortunately the Parkers are not on the streets. They have been moved into two separate flats by Colchester Council.
The Benefit Cap is the Tory policy that no family on benefits – however many children there are in the family – should receive as much as the average wage of a single adult average earner, which is £500 a week or £26,000 a year. It’s a false comparison: why should the earnings of one single adult be compared to the income needed by two adults and their children? This is not like for like.
The Green Party opposes the Benefit Cap because it breaks up families. This was predicted when the Cap came in. It is a great irony that the Conservatives say that they support the institution of marriage and the family. But here, in the Parkers’ case, we have a married couple and their family who are having to live separately. (One of the ways that a family that needs more than £500 a week in benefits can avoid the Cap is by breaking into two families that need less than £500 a week each.)
The Cap is cruel because it affects children who have done nothing to deserve this punishment. It is also vindictive because it achieves very little in the grand scheme of so-called “welfare reform” (cuts). Although it causes huge misery to the families affected, the Cap only saves about half of one per cent of the whole annual DWP budget.
Yours sincerely
Robbie Spence, Colchester Green Party
See also earlier post: housing-crisis-in-colchester
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