700 riot victims still waiting for compensation

After last year’s riots Prime Minister David Cameron promised businesses to “get up and running quickly.” However, there are still over 700 London victims waiting for their claims for compensation to be looked at. David Lammy, MP for Tottenham in which much of the rioting took place, claims that not much has been done since March. During a debate in the House of Commons next Monday he will call on the government to act. Some people have not been paid at all; people who did get financial compensation often received half the amount they claimed.
In London 707 of 3,427 payments have been passed, but on a national level half of the claimants are still waiting for compensation.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/700-riot-victims-still-waiting-for-compensation-7734774.html

Reaction:
David Cameron promised to help the victims of last year’s riots quickly and because of this promise he should have. In my opinion politicians promise too much and act too little. Cameron should have found out what the costs would and if he was able to get that amount of money on short notice before he promised to get businesses running quickly. Because of his promise people trusted in the government and waited for their help. If Cameron had not expressed this promise, business owners might have searched for other solutions. In the meantime valuable time has passed by and some businesses turned out not to be able to survive both the rioting and the waiting for compensation.

UK's poorest families face tightest squeeze on income, figures show

An analysis conducted by the Trade Union Conference (TUC) showed that he 10% poorest families in the UK face an income squeeze. They will have lower wage increases and higher rates of inflation, compared to the richest UK families. Their wage will rise with only 0.7%, whereas the highest incomes will rise with 1.6%. Next to that these poor families are facing inflation rates of 4.1%, while that rate does not come higher than 3.3% for the richest. Altogether this means that the 10% poorest earners in the UK are 3.4% poorer than last year.
The numbers also showed that all wages had fallen since this coalition came to power. Since the coalition’s motto is: “All in it together” TUC calls for further action to support families.
The income squeeze for UK’s 10% bottom is striking, since before the lower incomes had to do with less inflation than higher incomes, because the price rise of food and utility costs was lower than the price rise of luxury goods. New research by the TUC showed that poorer families spend a larger amount of their income on food and utilities than rich people do.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/may/11/poorest-families-tightest-squeeze-income

Reaction:
It is striking to read that the less wealthy families have to deal with a greater loss of wage than the richest residents in the UK, especially considering that poor people spend most part of their income on food and utilities. It is harder for them to cut on spending, because they do not buy a lot of luxury goods that the can omit in the future. In fact, this means that those people need to buy less or cheaper food than they used to. Nowadays it is already shown that poorer people have less healthy life styles and are overweight more often than rich people. The reason being that unhealthy food tends to be cheaper than healthy food. Therefore this fall in wage could eventually increase the number of obese people.