Happy New Year?

It won't be, according to new research just published by Clarion, the UK’s largest housing association.

Its findings suggest its future residents will be older, lonelier, in worse health and financially poorer. Why do I not find that hard to believe? As a pensioner having already lost his winter fuel payment of £200 I'm disinclined to be optimistic about the future. While the government seeks to reassure me that my pension will increase in April due to the triple lock I still have to navigate possibly one of the coldest winters in recent times with a 1.2% energy price cap rise in place for this quarter.

Added to this, I have also recently been migrated from legacy benefits onto Universal Credit (UC) as one half of what the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) defines as a 'mixed-age couple'. At the same time as I am deemed ineligible for Pension Credit due to slightly exceeding the income threshold I have lost my NHS Credit for new glasses prescriptions and dental treatment. The bureaucracy attendant upon this 'migration' exercise has been, and continues to be, onerous and intrusive. 

What could presumably have been accomplished by the simple flick of a switch, given that all the agencies involved (Council, DWP and HMRC et al) share the same electronic personal data and now have a legal right to snoop into bank accounts, has instead necessitated stressful and time-consuming online ping pong, lengthy telephone calls and face-to-face appointments. 

On several occasions the information we have provided UC has been queried on the basis that it is at slight variance with that held by its partner organisations. This prompts the obvious response: 'if you already know the answer to the question, why ask us?' - a response we daren't make for fear of being sanctioned. It's a rhetorical question anyway - we know perfectly well what's going on here. None of it is happenstance, it's all done by design. 

In other words, it's a cynically punitive excerise aimed at the victims of an iniquitous and inequitable system, whereby the poor, sick and elderly are forced to jump through hoops. The oligarchs and kleptocrats meanwhile are exempt from any such intrusive and demeaning scrutiny, saving them millions. Why should the state bother about them when it is so much easier (and probably much more fun for those sadists administering the apparatus of the state) to go after the most vulnerable in society instead? Sadly, 'twas ever thus...

Part of my cheery seasonal reading included an original Guardian article of 1901 reporting on Christmas Day in the Crumpsall Workhouse in Manchester. What struck me was not so much the grimness of the regime, which was to be expected, but the surprising fact that a genuine effort seems to have been made by the overseers, if only on this one day of the year, to alleviate its rigidity with hearty festive food, entertainment, homemade decorations and a relaxation of the normally strict rules. 

It appears there was some scope for a modicum of humanity even in a system of institutionalised indoor relief where roughly one third of the three thousand inmates was elderly, a third sick and a third able-bodied unemployed, along with a small resident cohort of pauper children. Where is that flexibility today, a century and a quarter later, when "computer says 'no'" culture prevails? For all its austerity, at least inmates of the late-Victorian workhouse system were housed, fed (albeit frugally) and kept clothed, warm, clean and dry. 

With rough-sleeping and homelessness at an all-time high in 2024, including around 150,000 children living in temporary accommodation, the Labour government launched an inquiry last November. This is always easier than taking action, as witness today's announcement of yet another inquiry into the social care system, not expected to conclude until 2028. What more can there possibly be to be discovered when every Prime Minister since Tony Blair has made it an urgent priority? 

Florence Eshalomi MP, Chair of the Housing, Communities and Local Government (HCLG) Committee said: “The housing crisis means that families are increasingly being housed in sub-standard temporary accommodation, meaning children may spend years living in places which are not suitable or adequate to grow up in".

She wasn't wrong but should hardly comes as news to anyone, least of all politicians. It does, though, present a shameful indictment of the conduct of the world's sixth largest economy. And the fact that the UK recently dropped out of the top ten ranking for state pension payments, making it the eleventh, should be further cause for soul-searching in the corridors of power.

Children at one end of the age scale and the elderly at the other are being comprehensively failed by the state. Those in-between and working often do not earn a wage sufficient to live on, requiring their earnings to be topped-up out of the UC's £137.4 billion per annum budget for working age and children's welfare. Given the UKs flatlining economy I see little hope of any amelioration. There's realistic and then there's Pollyanna-ish.

So, no, I don't expect this new year to be a particularly happy one. 

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