Sad news from Durham Welfare Rights: Brian McGarr one of our former colleagues has passed away. A lot of people who are new to Welfare Rights won’t know of Brian. It’s probably only the ‘oldies’ who will remember Brian because he wasn’t active in Welfare Rights for many years due to ill health, but he was one of the pioneers of early Welfare Rights. He started as a community activist in Glasgow, then as a WRO with Strathclyde Regional Council, …
NAWRA has submitted a response to the ‘Self-sufficient local government: 100% business rates retention’ consultation voicing our concern at the proposal that Attendance Allowance would no longer be a cash benefit in England and Wales if responsibility for it transfers from the DWP to each local authority’s social care budget. Our submission is available here. Thanks to our North-East representative, Julie Henry (Durham County Council), for drafting it.
Tying in with a theme of our meeting in Glasgow tomorrow, we are reproducing part of a blog by Dr Simon Duffy of the Centre for Welfare Reform. (Reproduced with kind permission of the author.) “Although the idea of Basic Income has been around for at least two and a half thousand years, it is still unfamiliar to most people in modern Britain. However it is an idea whose time has come. Currently only the Green Party is officially championing …
Basic Income – the modern form of Social Security Read more »
Our next meeting will take place on Friday 2 September 2016 at the Renfield Centre, 260 Bath Street, Glasgow G2 4JP. Agenda Meetings are free to attend and there’s no need to book a place. However, you must be a member of NAWRA to attend the meeting. If you are not already a member, find out more about joining.
Our friend and colleague, Dr David Webster, writes: “I thought you would want to know about this important report from the United Nations, adopted on 24 June, which specifically condemns the current operation of the UK’s benefit sanctions regime. Below I have extracted the section on social security, with the comments on sanctions shown in bold. If Theresa May means what she says, perhaps she will ensure that it will be given more attention than the previous calls for a …
