Profits from illness
A Unite union report has revealed that many of the big private healthcare companies aiming to get lucrative contracts from the NHS budget operate through offshore tax havens.
Tax expert Richard Murphy who was commissioned by Unite to examine these companies found that companies such as care UK, Circle, Virgin care, etc, all make use of tax havens.
Optum UK, a subsidiary of US health insurance giant United Health, is bidding for a £1.2 billion NHS contract. The Independent reported that hedge fund manager Martin Taylor – who has donated nearly £600,000 to Labour – works for Nevsky Capital, which has a large stake in United Health.
Sanctions kill
A work and pensions committee of MPs has said the government’s benefit sanctions regime is causing severe hardship for families and was contributing to food poverty.
Benefit claimants who are sanctioned – often for trivial reasons- are left without any financial support for at least 15 days before they become eligible for hardship payments.
The committee also noted that the Department for Work and Pensions had reviewed 49 cases involving the death of a benefit claimant, but could not say how many cases involved claimants subjected to a sanction.
Bedroom tax
The government’s iniquitous bedroom tax has pushed thousands of families into poverty and hardship by imposing housing benefit deductions of 14% or 25% from households deemed to have ‘spare bedrooms’.
Many affected social tenants are unable to ‘downsize’ because of an acute shortage of smaller-sized accommodation. Around 160,000 Londoners were on housing waiting lists for single-bedroom properties in 2013, the year the reform took effect.
Labour says it’ll abolish the tax, if elected. But Labour-run councils continue to persecute tenants who have been pushed into rent arrears by it.
