Food parcel figures reveal 95% increase in five years across six districts of Kent
On 1 October 2010, one hundred and sixteen separate pieces of legislation were pulled together into one single Act, the Equality Act and passed into law. The Act provides a legal framework to protect the rights of individuals and advance equality of opportunity for all. However, that said the Act has not been fully implemented in its entirety.
Section 1 of the Equality Act 2010 asks public authorities to actively consider the way in which their policies and their most strategic decisions can increase or decrease inequalities. We are talking about the socio-economic duty. However, successive governments since 2010 have failed to commence it, to bring it to life in technical terms, which means that public authorities are not technically bound by Section 1 of the Act.
So when on the 9th March 2012 the Government of the day, the Tory – Lib Dem Govt introduced Universal Credit, via the Welfare Reform Act 2012 (WRA), there was no necessity to consider the socio-economic duty of the Equality Act with regards to the WRA.
Over time, Universal Credit has come to have a huge impact upon peoples lives. And given that since the beginning of the pandemic every district in Kent has seen a significant rise in those claiming universal credit it has caused more people into debt and into using food banks across the the county and across our district.
In May 2019 a leading United Nations poverty expert compared Conservative welfare policies to the creation of 19th-century workhouses and warned that unless austerity is ended, the UK’s poorest people face lives that are “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”.
Philip Alston, the UN rapporteur and New York-based lawyer said then
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The “endlessly repeated” mantra about rising employment overlooks that “close to 40% of children are predicted to be living in poverty two years from now, 16% of people over 65 live in relative poverty and millions of those who are in work are dependent upon various forms of charity to cope”, he said.
In his most barbed swipe at the minster in charge and their predecessors in charge of welfare, he said:
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“It might seem to some observers that the department of work and pensions has been tasked with designing a digital and sanitised version of the 19th-century workhouse, made infamous by Charles Dickens.”
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