AS part of our ongoing Yes Clackmannanshire against Universal Credit (UC) campaign, we have been endeavouring to highlight our concerns locally about the roll-out of UC and demonstrate how it is impacting upon our local communities. Empirical evidence and personal accounts shows how UC is contributing to the increase in absolute levels of poverty and exacerbating social isolation and the fragmentation of our community.

We have been speaking to local recipients of UC who have described five-week delays in processing and receiving an initial payment, concern with rising debt and rent arrears, reference being made to mental health problems and anxiety and in particular an acknowledgment of increased stress levels within the home affecting their children’s performance at school.

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This policy is being heaped upon those individuals and families who are already very vulnerable and living in the lowest indices of multiple deprivation.

Our group have been able to source the following unacceptable and very concerning data, namely: as at November 2018, 889 of the 987 Clackmannanshire Council tenants who are in receipt of UC are in rent arrears. That’s a phenomenal 90% of these tenants. This amounts to a figure of £659,000 of rent arrears, that equates to an average household debt of £741.The double whammy here is that these are funds that are denied to our local council to provide services to those most in need in our communities, and to amplify this problem this is at a time of ever-decreasing austerity-determined budgets.

This outrage is mitigated in some way by the Scottish Government’s welfare fund, which is ring-fenced for claimants in crisis. Applications to this fund have risen by 40% since the introduction of UC. When this is calculated on a Scotland-wide basis it amounts

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to £125 million per year. This is an enormous chunk of the Scottish budget and it is being spent to ensure our people are protected from the worst impacts of London austerity.

This local data is obviously of very serious concern, however in a wider context we have the recently published report from Professor Philip Alston, the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, who on his visit to the UK commented that UC “was fast falling into universal discredit”.

He describes a society suffering severe hardship, ill health and absolute poverty and this being driven by austerity politics which are an affront to human decency and infringe basic human rights. In short, the London government should be in court for crimes committed against the human race.

A delegation from our group went along to attend a recent meeting hosted by Luke Graham MP (Conservative and Unionist) held in Alloa. The agenda of the meeting was UC and its roll-out locally. Our delegation was refused entry to the meeting on the basis that is was a private stakeholders’ meeting and the general public were not welcome to attend. This was most frustrating, especially as a steady flow of suited paraprofessionals and council officers marched past us. We remain bamboozled as to what our MP understands to be a UC stakeholder and we question why there appears to be no transparency to these local discussions or any opportunity for the recipients of UC to participate in these discussions.

This is not acceptable! We therefore invite our MP and any other apologists for the poverty policy to meet with our group and other concerned individuals and families at a public meeting and for him to similarly publicly respond to the very serious allegations made about his British Government contained in the UN report.

John R Hosie
Yes Clackmannanshire