The government has vowed to implement its Welfare Reform Bill in full despite a “stinging defeat” in the House of Lords, says Ruth Gledhill in The Times. The revolt was led by the Bishop of Ripon and Leeds, who tabled an amendment calling for child benefit to be excluded from the £26,000 benefits cap.
The amendment was backed by a majority of 15, including four other bishops and Lib Dem peers Lord Ashdown and Lord Kirkwood. In an “unprecedented breach of episcopal collegiality”, Lord Carey disagreed, arguing in the Daily Mail that the current system rewards “fecklessness and irresponsibility”.
The public side with Lord Carey, says The Daily Telegraph. Most grasp the “moral point” that paying people more than the average wage to remain on benefits is wrong.
A Sunday Times YouGov poll found that 76% agreed with the £26,000 cap (the average UK household income after tax), including 69% of Labour voters. And 36% thought it should be set lower. “Squirming uncomfortably on the fence” is Liam Byrne, Labour’s work and pensions spokesman, “who claims to support some kind of cap, just not this one”.
The government proposes “a change to the social geography of Britain, in which the poor are pushed out of richer enclaves”, says Mary Riddell, also in the Daily Telegraph.
Of the 67,000 families affected, many are poor households with several children, pushed over the limit by expensive London housing. Westminster alone could see 17% of its primary school children disappear. “Migration on that scale would be tantamount to economic cleansing.”
Come off it, says Richard Littlejohn in the Daily Mail. Working people live where they can afford to. Why should the unemployed be “better off than those whose taxes pay their benefits”? Plenty of people only dream of earning £26,000 a year. “But they knuckle down and get on with it.”