Displaying items by tag: British Isles

Price increases are making it tougher for households to make ends meet, and unlicensed lenders offer loans to the desperate at astronomical interest rates. Last year the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) researched 3,363 people. One in forty were borrowing from unlicensed lenders. CSJ thinks there are about a million people in England doing this. ‘Overwhelmingly, people borrow when they're desperate. For everyday costs of living, like a gas or electricity bill, or a pram, and then they get exploited by those seeking to extort them for as much money as they can get out of them, offering arbitrary terms, little to no paperwork and an extortionate repayment rate.’ ‘It's just endless,’ one victim said: 'I went from a £150 loan to owing £6,000 in months'. The CSJ report highlights separate data from 1,252 victims, questioned last year by the Illegal Money Lending Team, which prosecutes loan sharks in England. The figures suggest the borrowers are among the poorest in society.

Christians Against Poverty (CAP) is a Christian debt help charity which is calling on the Government to 'act now' and increase support for those on low incomes with everything at its disposal. They saw calls to their debt helpline rise by 47% this January compared to last year, and requests for emergency fuel vouchers have doubled. CAP said, ‘We, along with many other charities and think-tanks, say that the upgrading of Social Security (the amount benefits and pensions go up in April) needs to be more than planned. Also they could pause deductions to Universal Credit as they did at the beginning of the pandemic. The third thing needed is a cost of living review; the level of social security has not matched the actual cost of living, even for the barest of essentials, for many, many years.’

The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, and 200+ church leaders sent an open letter to Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak. They said a stronger commitment to renewable energy would help address the climate emergency and help people to weather the cost of living crisis. Letter signatories include fifty Anglican and Catholic bishops, including the lead environment bishops. Their call for financial and fiscal support for renewable energy and energy efficiency - solar and wind energy - was met in the spring statement, but retrofitting of homes and other buildings across the UK to reduce heating bills and decrease carbon emissions was not. They also proposed a windfall tax on fossil fuel companies to address the cost of living and no support for new oil and gas developments if we are to limit global heating to 1.5°C.

Scotland’s school curriculum should be scrapped and replaced with a ‘traditional’ system, the Scottish Tories have said, amid warnings that classroom discipline has almost completely broken down. Teachers are now routinely being attacked, spat on, and sworn at by children as young as four. Mike Corbett, of the NASUWT teaching union, said serious issues had been reported even at the best state schools. He accused the Government of turning a blind eye to the problem by refusing to commission research into poor behaviour; it was as if it didn't really want to know the scale of the problem. Scottish Tories have now called for a ‘national conversation’ about replacing the country’s Curriculum for Excellence, which was supposed to help develop ‘well-rounded’ and confident children. This ‘un-Scottish’ approach has failed and its introduction over a decade ago has coincided with the country plummeting down international education league tables.

800 P&O ferry staff were sacked over Zoom recently. The Government said it was told the night before but assumed a redundancy consultation was being announced. Three P&O ships were moored at Dover when the company suspended sailings ahead of a ‘major announcement’ but insisted it was ‘not going into liquidation’. Then the staff were sacked without warning, with the aim of replacing them with overseas agency staff from India on as little as £1.80 an hour - well below the UK's minimum wage. Frances O'Grady, head of the TUC, said the move was illegal and ‘one of the most shameful incidents in British industrial relations’. He called for them to have their jobs reinstated. The workers were 'forced to sign gagging orders in return for redundancy pay’.

Churches across the UK have marked the second anniversary of the first Covid-19 lockdown with walls of reflection and remembrance in cathedrals and churches as people brought photos, prayers and memories to honour those who have died. Cathedrals and other landmarks across the country have lighted up their buildings in yellow as a sign of support. The Bishop of London, chair of the UK Commission on Bereavement, said, ‘I recall how helpless so many people, including myself, felt in the early days of the pandemic, surrounded by constant reminders of the magnitude of loss being experienced across the country. Today is a day to reflect, pause and remember those we have lost over the past two years and pray for the millions bereaved during the pandemic.’

The Government is looking at using the properties of Russian oligarchs sanctioned by the UK for ‘humanitarian purposes’ to house Ukrainian refugees. However there is ‘quite a high legal bar’, and this measure would lapse as sanctions ended. A website to express an interest in being a sponsor was launched on 14 March, and over 120,000 offers were received in less than 24 hours. Households in the UK who open their homes to people fleeing the war will be given £350 a month. Housing secretary Michael Gove said tens of thousands of refugees could come to the UK under the scheme, and he himself may offer a room to a refugee. However, the Refugee Council is concerned about the level of support for those traumatised by war.

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Anoosheh Ashoori are now united with their families in the UK after years of detention in the notorious Evin Prison, which has a reputation for torture and abusing human rights. Over the years, Iranian converts to Christianity have been detained there as well as Iran’s political dissidents and critics of the government. In 2021 a medical assessment by a human rights charity found Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe had post-traumatic stress disorder resulting from her treatment in Evin. The foreign secretary said, ‘Nazanin is held unlawfully, and it amounts to torture the way she's being treated.’ While in Evin Nazanin has suffered deep depression, hair loss, and sickness. Torture is internationally prohibited. Anoosheh Ashoori said, ‘Like Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, I was locked in Evin jail. My struggle was trying to stay sane. We are continuously fighting against cockroaches, rats and bed bugs that attack all night. Extraction fans pump stinking air from bathrooms, toilets and three sewage manholes. The food is foul - only the needy eat it.’

Covid infections are increasing across the UK with about one in 25 people infected, according to the latest estimates from the Office for National Statistics (ONS). In Scotland, 300,000 people - one in 18 - have coronavirus, the highest level recorded during the pandemic. A sub-variant of Omicron, called BA2, is now thought to be the most common strain in most of the UK. Recent easing of restrictions and waning immunity from the vaccines could all be factors in the increase. Health secretary Sajid Javid said Omicron had been the last variant to be a concern, and the country had ‘successfully navigated’ it, but the Government continued to monitor the situation ‘very carefully’. The ONS infection survey tests thousands of people randomly in households across the UK and estimated 2.6 million people tested positive in the week ending 5 March. It was 2.4 million the week before.

A Joseph Rowntree Foundation report published on 16 March tells us that as Northern Ireland entered the pandemic, nearly one in five people lived in poverty, including over 100,000 children. 1 in 14 households are in food insecurity, and the recent spike in energy prices, and wider inflation. People in workless families, disabled people, carers, and people in ethnic minority households have much higher poverty rates. So people across Northern Ireland need the new Executive to focus on whether to reverse or partly mitigate the impact of the £20 per week cut to the basic rates of Universal Credit. It could also match benefit up-rating more effectively to the cost of living. A targeted payment, such as the Scottish child payment, would reduce child poverty. The Executive could also consider the role that DLA/PIP can have in helping disabled people into the labour market, including considering how the administration of payments could be redesigned with dignity and poverty reduction at their heart.