Kilburn Unemployed Workers Group — the Kwug Blog

VOTERS OF ALL PERSUASIONS WANT THE ISSUE OF ECONOMIC INEQUALITY ADDRESSED

Guest blog by Rev'd Paul Nicolson of Taxpayers Against Poverty

LETTERS IN THE OBSERVER 26TH January 2014

How does any government start to put growing inequality into reverse? One answer is to reverse the decisions in the 1980s to deregulate lending, abolish rent controls and allow the free flow of cash in and out of the UK. The result is a chaotic housing market sucking billions of personal income away from the shops, building and maintaining infrastructure and from investment in companies that create jobs. International speculation in UK land and homes is forcing house prices and rents upwards. Meanwhile, landlords, who treated housing benefit like a cash cow for decades, continue to profit from a housing market in short supply while the poorest tenants are punished with three caps on the housing benefit.

High rents, now unpaid by housing benefit, are enforced against the tenants’ incomes, which were entirely available for food, utilities, transport and clothes up to April 2013; since then, council tax, plus court and bailiff costs has begun to wreak havoc in the tenants’ lives.

Reversing inequality requires statutory minimum incomes in work and unemployment, after rent and council tax have been paid, to be enough to ensure a healthy life, and to diminish the billions paid by taxpayers to the NHS to treat poverty-related physical and mental ill health, and to the schools to cope with poverty-related educational underachievement.

The Reverend Paul Nicolson

Taxpayers Against Poverty

​PS ​

A worrying graph from an LSE blog

​

about​

inequality in land ownership.

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/archives/38973


Rev Paul Nicolson
Taxpayers Against Poverty