Category: Social exclusion

Cuts become cruel as Shropshire Council moves to reduce payments to needy adults

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Is this a necessary cut or just a cruel cut? Shropshire Council is scheming to reduce the minimum income guarantee for the neediest adults. Of course, budgets are tight. Other councils pay less to needy people than Shropshire. So as always, Shropshire Council is following the pack to the back rather than leading from the front.

We should support the most vulnerable and impoverished in our society, not pay council executives more.

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Shropshire Council is planning to raid the tills of Ludlow charities with business rate hikes – it’s an immoral tax on volunteers

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We have more from the Directorate of Very Bad News at Shropshire Council. The council is planning to cancel all discretionary business rate relief for charities, sports clubs, youth clubs and a lot of other social enterprises across the county. In Ludlow, and voluntary and social enterprises could face an annual bill of more than £20,000 from next April.

This is nothing other than a tax on our volunteer community. It is a disgusting raid on the funding of good causes.

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How to be cruel in one effective blow – fining the poor for being poor is Shropshire Council’s latest proposal (updated)

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That’s what Shropshire Council is planning to do. Unable to balance its budget, and that is the fault of the government as well as this Conservative led council, it plans to tax some of the poorest people in our county. Yesterday, 14 December, the council voted in favour of making some of the poorest and most vulnerable in Shropshire pay 20% of their council tax bill. One member argued: “It is only fair that everyone shares the burden.” I disagreed saying: “It is not fair that the poor share the burden.”

Surely our job as a council is to protect vulnerable people, not tax them?

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Social mobility in Shropshire is in free fall – we are failing young people

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It is not a surprise that the remaining members of the government’s Social Mobility Commission have resigned this weekend.[1] Anger has been growing for months that the government has been distracted from improving individual lives by the demands of Brexit.

Shropshire is one of the worst areas in England for young people to get out of the trap of struggling households and poor education. Last week, the county was ranked the 237th worst out of 324 local authorities for social mobility.[2] Just a year before, we were at rank 185. We have skidded downwards.

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