Week 6 2013

Tendring Topics.......on line

April Fools!

 1^st April is traditionally the day on which we get surprises – many of them unpleasant ones.  Most will disappear though, as with a triumphant cry of ‘April Fool!’ the surprise is revealed to be a hoax.

            Sadly, there will be nothing good humoured or ephemeral about the unpleasant surprise that, for many of us, will be manifest from the first day of April this year*.  This is the day on which the government’s economic measures, designed – so they say – to reducing and ultimately eliminating that deficit about which we hear so much, begin to take effect.  The immediate effect will be to make the poorest and most vulnerable of our fellow countrymen and women even poorer and more disadvantaged than they are at present.

            From that day, there will be no Disability Living Allowance.  This will be replaced by a new allowance payable only to those who can demonstrate being capable of no work whatsoever.   Others will lose the £208 disability living allowance currently paid to them and go instead onto the £112 job seekers allowance payable only for as long as they are actively seeking any work of which they may be capable.

            Then there’s the ‘bedroom tax’ that will mean that families in social housing with a spare bedroom will have the choice of paying extra rent or of moving into smaller accommodation.  The poor are not permitted to have an unused bedroom for the occasional use of adult sons or daughters or other friends or relatives. They’re not really being offered much of a choice because there won’t be smaller accommodation available for them.

            And don’t let us forget that the government is withdrawing from local authorities the funding that made it possible for them to reduce or waive altogether Council Tax on properties occupied by the unemployed or the disabled.  I have just watched on tv an unemployed (but seeking employment) middle-aged woman in Cornwall in tears because she says that she is already living frugally to the very limit of her meagre income.  ‘How am I going to find the money for Council Tax;  by giving up heating….or eating?’

            But, of course, we don’t have to go to Cornwall to find examples of extreme hardship.   In Tendring, because benefits for the elderly have been ring-fenced and our district has a very high proportion of old people, the withdrawal of this funding will mean a loss to the Council of two million pounds!  The Clacton Gazette carries a report of a sixty-year old who has worked all his life but is now full-time carer to his stroke-stricken and disabled wife.  They have been exempt for Council Tax but have been told that they will now be expected to pay the full amount.  How are they to find it?   They are just one couple among thousands suffering similarly nationwide.

            In this instance the Government has been particularly clever/cunning (delete as preferred).  Local authorities don’t have to withdraw this subsidy on unemployed and disabled liability for Council Tax.  They needn’t do so if they can raise the money involved in other ways – by such means as cutting libraries or sports centre services, reducing the frequency of collection of refuse and recyclables, or postponing the repair of highways and footpaths.  This will cause antagonism between the working population and the unemployed and disabled, both of which groups will resent the exemption of us oldies from these austerity measures. And it will be local government, not national government that has to make the final decision.  Thus it will be ‘That lot in the Town Hall’ not ‘them in Westminster’ who will get the blame.

            Just to add insult to injury, 1^st April will also be the date on which the seriously wealthy – those with incomes in excess of £150,000 a year - will have their higher rate of income tax reduced!  We’re all in this together?  Now that is an April Fool hoax!

*I have just learned that our water and sewerage charges (from the privatised water companies) are to go up by an average of £13 per annum from April. This will mean nothing to the lucky minority who will be having their income tax reduced at the same time.  It won't mean very much to me.  But there are those for whom it will be the final straw that breaks the camel's back 

‘Making sick people sicker’

            A few weeks ago there was condemnation from both sides of the House of Commons of the way in which thousands of sick and disabled people had had their benefit axed after the private company Atos, that the government has employed to ‘weed out slackers and scroungers’, had wrongly found fit to work.   There had been a number of deaths, including suicides, by people who had been assessed as fit for work following what was described as ‘a demeaning process that was making sick people sicker’.

            Private Eye, a publication that probes deeply where others walk hastily by, has learned that, despite these revelations, the government has tabled amendments to the employment and support allowance legislation which academics and campaigners say will lead to even greater suffering by the genuinely ill. 

 Private Eye reports that:  ‘Plans include withdrawing benefit if an assessor decides that a claimant’s ability to work could be improved by aids, such as guide dogs, walking sticks or prosthetic limbs – whether or not the claimant has access to them or can use them. Atos assessors already have the power to carry out an ‘imaginary wheelchair test’ by which they decide that a person could work if they used a wheelchair – even if they do not have one.  Under the changes, due to take place without public debate, people will also lose benefit if the assessor decides that adjustments could be made for them in the workplace – whether or not those changes have been made.’

            MP Tom Greatrex is reported as saying, ‘The fact that people can be assessed as fit for work on the basis of an imaginary guide dog, without taking account of the availability of guide dogs and the time taken to train both dogs and users, highlights just how far the Department of Work and Pensions seems to be prepared to go to find people fit for work without the support they need to make work a reality’.

            All of the above reminds me that my blue ‘disabled parking’ badge (that I use infrequently and only when my sons or a friend give me a lift) expires in July.  I shall have to apply for it to be renewed. Previously they were prepared to take the word of my doctor that, to use today’s new-speak, my mobility was strictly limited. I understand that there are new, more stringent, eligibility criteria nowadays. I may have to appear before government employed assessors. I certainly don’t look forward to parading my disability before those who are employed to try to catch me out   I really can’t walk safely, even the shortest distance, without a stick – and I’m much happier when I have a companion to take my other arm, or there is some furniture or perhaps a railing, with which I can steady myself.  I hope that will satisfy the assessors.  If I have to be even worse than that to qualify for a blue badge there would really be no point in my having one – because there would be no way I could walk from the parked car to the shop, cinema or church that would have been my destination.

A Dubious Triumph

          Both my sons were pupils at Clacton County High School in the 1960s and early ‘70s.   One went on to Cambridge and graduated with a good degree.  The other decided not to seek university admission but to leave school at 16, take a job and study for a professional qualification in his spare time.  He did so very effectively, taking the two parts of the Institute of Housing’s examination for professional Housing Managers and passing both at his first attempt.  Both my sons have had satisfying and socially valuable working careers.

            Consequently I have always held Clacton County High School in warm regard and was delighted when, referring to the CCHS, the Clacton Gazette carried the headline Valuable triumph – School among the country’s top performers.

            Reading on however, I discovered that the CCHS wasn’t in the top flight of schools for its GCSE or ‘A’ level results but had achieved one of the highest ‘value added’ scores in the country.  Very creditable, of course, but it may say almost as much about the abysmal ignorance of some of the pupils when they came to the CCHS aged eleven as it does about the standard of education that they later achieved.

            The Gazette published ‘league tables’ showing the actual exam results of ten north-east Essex educational establishments.  No-one would expect Clacton’s Comprehensive Schools’ results to equal those of selective schools like Colchester Royal Grammar School and Colchester County High School for Girls – but it was disappointing to see them at the very bottom of the list!   Right at the bottom was Clacton Coastal Academy, formed by the amalgamation of Bishop’s Gate College and Colbayns High School.   Only 36 percent of their students taking GCSE’s achieved 5 A* to C Grades at GCSE or their equivalent, including English and Maths.  Next above them was the Clacton County High School with just 51 percent.

            Needless to say the Head-teachers of both schools cite the controversial changes in the marking of GCSE English exam papers during the year in explanation – but these changes surely affected Colne Community School, Brightlingsea (72 percent) and Tendring Technology College, Frinton (69 percent) as much as they did the Clacton Schools.

            It is certainly an achievement to have raised the standard of children of low achievement at primary school – but if this result was achieved by neglecting the encouragement and support of high flyers, and there must surely be some of these (as there were in 1970 when Clacton County High School sent no less than four of its sixth formers to Cambridge) it was a somewhat hollow triumph.