The excellent Joint Public Issues Team shared jointly by the Methodist Church, the United Reformed Church and the Baptist Union of Great Britain has produced a very good guide to why a generic benefit cap is a bad idea for people living at the sharp end of austerity.


The excellent Joint Public Issues Team shared jointly by the Methodist Church, the United Reformed Church and the Baptist Union of Great Britain has produced a very good guide to why a generic benefit cap is a bad idea for people living at the sharp end of austerity.

As the churches point out (going further than the Church of England bishops, and disproving the Daily Mail, Lord Carey and Iain Duncan Smith’s Centre for Social Justice):

* The cap is wrong because it doesn’t recognise that some families will have needs over £26,000.

* The cap is wrong because benefits should be based on a household’s needs rather than an arbitrary limit

* Any single family will not earn more money on out of work benefits than they could earn from working and claiming in work benefits.

* The cap will not cut the overall government budget and will cost local councils and communities more money.

* Reducing families’ benefits won’t help them get into work; providing additional support will.

Each of these points is elaborated in the full briefing, which can be downloaded (*.PDF Adobe Acrobat document) here: http://tinyurl.com/73thc8x

This is an essential read. It is worth adding that benefits covered by the proposed generic cap are already capped themselves.