Gordon Brown and his Work and Pensions Secretary James Purnell were last night accused of behaving ‘like loan sharks’ over plans to slap punishingly high interest rates on vital loans to the poor.
In an astonishing move, rebel Labour MPs joined forces with David Cameron’s Tories to accuse the Government of penalising hundreds of thousands of families on benefits who get interest-free cash advances to cover the cost of unforeseen crises.
More than one million individual loans worth over £600million were paid out from the Government’s social fund last year to hard-up people – many of them disabled – who struggled to afford to repair a broken boiler or cope with some other domestic emergency.
No comments:
Post a Comment