Spending review: Working families ‘will be hit hardest’
By Peter Wozniak
Working families stand to lose out far more than those which are unemployed from the impact of the spending review, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) has claimed.
The union unveiled a study which it claimed demonstrated that of the £15.9 billion welfare cuts announced in the Budget and the spending review, £9.4 billion will fall on working households.
Brendan Barber, the TUC general secretary, claimed the study, gave the lie to the coalition’s commitment to make the cuts package fair.
“Ministers say that their welfare and benefit cuts are fair and justified because they will make work pay,” he said.
“Polls show that they have already lost the fairness argument. Now we show that it is working families – both the poor and the squeezed middle – who are the big losers from welfare cuts, not the alleged workshy scroungers that the government claims to target.”
Welfare spending is set to be scaled back dramatically under the spending review measures.
Plans to change housing benefit have already led to vitriolic exchanges across the floor of the Commons, where Chris Bryant accused Nick Clegg last week of “sociologically cleansing” inner London.
The work and pensions secretary, Iain Duncan Smith has attempted to frame the cuts around the central theme of ‘making work pay’ for those currently on benefits.
Mr Barber dismissed the spending review measures as an ideological attack on the poor.
He added: “These deep rapid cuts – concentrated on families with children – weren’t in any election manifestos. The speed and scale of the cuts are not an economic necessity, but a political choice.
“No-one voted for these cuts to their living standards, more child poverty, mass job losses and a ‘get out of tax free’ card for the banks.”
Opinion polls suggest public discomfort with the reality of the cuts is on the rise, though the political implications are still very much up in the air.
