I was listening to Any Questions on radio 4, on saturday afternoon. One of 
the questions that came up was the housing benefit loophole, which currently 
enables claimants to hang on to any saving they can make in their housing 
benefit, by finding cheaper accommodation - around £10-£15 per week for 
most claimants. There was a cross section of panellists from all parties 
including Michael Heseltine and Tony Benn. To a man, they all agreed that the 
government proposals to close this loophole and claw back the extra cash, was 
reprehensible. The consensus was that it was a mean, penny pinching exercise 
and amounted to a cheap raid on the pockets of one of the poorest and most 
vulnerable sections of society. They all agreed that the proposals would 
never get through parliament. Has anyone thought of trying to publicise the 
similar, shameful proposed raid on DLA and AA via this type of programme. 
Surely if this is the opinion on this particular proposal for housing 
benefit, the proposed changes to DLA and AA would cause widespread outrage if 
it were brought into the public domain in the same way. I was reading an 
outline of the proposals for DLA and AA, and one of the stated reasons for 
the incorporation of these two benefits into the social care budget, was that 
it would provide more independance for the disabled, as they could decide 
what their individual care budget could buy. Surely, in reality, it would 
make one less independant. At the moment, DLA and AA can be spent on anything 
and is paid directly to the disabled person, in cash. This gives more 
independance than any other benefit. It is also more democratic, because 
there is a universal assessment in order to qualify - regardless of income.  
This is the government's stated aim for the disabled, so why are they 
proposing changing the only benefit which meets this committment ?!!!!  Once 
you make this connection, it's not hard to see the real reason for the change 
is it ?  Basically the government has allowed MP's to defraud taxpayers until 
they were caught (and also to avoid the prosecutions which would surely 
follow for ANY other section of society), rich bankers who have brought the 
financial sector to it's knees, to walk away with taxpayers money as bonuses 
and has done little to help the ordinary working man (who it's supposed to 
represent) get through the recession it helped to create. It now plans to 
claw back some of the vast amount of money it's wasted by punishing the sick, 
elderly and disabled under the guise of yet more "reform". I don't trust
anything ANY politician says any more. Remember the promises made when
incapacity benefit was reformed ? It would only affect new claimants, and
most disabled people would be better off. In reality, all disabled people are
now being assessed to see if they can be kicked off benefit before being
migrated to the new system - where in fact they will be worse off than they
ever were on incapacity benefit. The government also projected that maybe
10-20 percent would qualify for the support component of ESA, and would not
be expected to look for work. In reality, the last figures released, put this
at around 2 percent of claimants. Frankly I'm terrified for the future at
the hands of uncaring politicians who have little or no idea of the
consequences of living with a disability and are only interested in saving
money