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Benefits Uprating 2014

Posted: Sun 28 Sep, 2014 5:48 pm
by refitman
ephemerid wrote:George Osborne has - as we all know - put a cap on benefit uprating of 1%

DWP has now done its' calculations, with rises due in April, and this is what I have found.

JSA - now £71.70, to rise to £72.40 - an increase of 70 pence.
Normally, the figure would be rounded up - ie. 1% of £71.70 is 71.7 pence, so the rise should be 72 pence.
ESA basic (Assessment Phase) is the same as JSA.

That means that JSA and new ESA claimants are NOT getting a 1% rise.

With 2 million people on JSA (or whatever they call the allowance when on workfare) and another million on ESA basic, that's a saving for government of 2 pence per week per claimant - £60K/week, £3.12M/year.

That's more than 3 Million pounds that should be going to claimants.

ESA WRAG - This is currently basic ESA (£71.70) plus the WRAG component (£28.45) giving £100.15/week.
WRAG component is going up to £28.75, a rise of 30 pence - bringing the total to £101.15/week.
This is not quite 1% - but the difference is negligible, being just 0.0015 pence.

Support Group ESA - This is currently basic (£71.70) plus SG component (£34.80) giving £106.50/week.
SG component is going up to £35.75, that's 95 pence more - giving a total of £108.15/week.

So - Support Group claimants are the only people who get much of a rise, at a total increase of £1.65/week.
That's a rise of 1.5%.

BUT - Osborne said that people claiming the WRAG or SG components of ESA would get a rise in line with inflation.

What they're getting is less than 1% for WRAG and 1.5% for SG.

Inflation is 2.7%

SO HE LIED AGAIN.