Reeves’ controversial decision to restrict the WFP to the neediest is expected to save the Treasury £1.3bn this winter and £1.5bn in subsequent years. It does not take a genius to work out that this decision will impact the NHS as its hospital beds and corridors are filled with older people suffering from falls, heart attacks and strokes brought on by living in a cold home. Estimates suggest the cut will cost the NHS an additional £169m a year.

Last year, tens of thousands of carers were unjustly branded benefit cheats – while some were prosecuted for benefit fraud – simply for breaching an earnings rule that they were either unaware of or did not fully understand. As a result, more than 134,000 people are being driven deep into poverty as they struggle to repay thousands in overpaid Carer’s Allowance.

As a result of the under resourcing of the Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards (DoLS) scheme, there is now a backlog of 126,100 applications awaiting authorisation. This suggests that there are a great number of vulnerable, older people who are being unlawfully deprived of their liberty for long periods of time before the relevant checks are carried out to determine if the denial of liberty is in the “detained person’s best interests, is necessary to prevent harm to the person and is a proportionate response to the likelihood and seriousness of that harm”.

The cruelty of this administration knows no bounds. Just when you thought it could sink no lower with its beleaguered attempts to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda, a country notorious for its human rights abuses, it comes up with a new shocker – withdrawing up to £390 in essential financial support from some of the most vulnerable people in society.

The government’s response to the rising tide in homelessness has been to set up the Housing Loss Prevention Advice Service, providing tenants and homeowners with ‘timely’ advice to help stave off an eviction or repossession. The biggest flaw with this initiative is that it can only be accessed once a tenant or homeowner has received notice from their landlord or bank that it is about start possession proceedings. Another weakness is that there are not enough legal aid practitioners to do the work after years of legal aid cutbacks.

A decade or so of austerity has left the NHS in no position to fund the expensive imaging equipment or to hire the specialist staff required to deliver new drug donanemab, which was found to successfully slow down the progression of early Alzheimer’s disease by 35%. Despite the Herculean efforts of scientists to develop a promising treatment for this heartbreaking disease, it looks as though once donanemab receives regulatory approval, it may only be available to those who can afford to pay for it.

Given that Ofgem’s new Code of Practice fails to address the crisis in the domestic energy market, it is hard to see how the volume of forced prepayment meter installations will fall, especially now that the £400 Energy Bills Support scheme has ended, and some analysts are predicting that energy bills will remain high for a decade.

A report by the pensions consultancy Lane Clark & Peacock (LCP) shows that long-term ill health, and not early retirement, may account for a significant percentage of the UK’s 9 million missing workers. These are people who want to work but can’t because they are waiting for vital NHS treatment.

After countless consultations, two commissions, various white papers, new legislation enacted, suspended and then abandoned, it now transpires that the reforms to the social care charging system will not go ahead until October 2025, dashing the hopes of thousands of people in England and Wales who were waiting for October 2023.

The Energy Price Guarantee has been billed as a bold action. But bold action would have been capping energy bills at the level they were a year ago – £1,277. The various cost-ofliving payments and energy bill rebates could then have been used to offset the 12% rise in the cost of food and other essential items. As it stands, low-income households will be short by £800 once the new cap comes into force, and that’s after including all the support payments, an analysis by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has found.

Yet more broken promises from Boris Johnson, a man who, over the course of his three-year premiership, has proved that he is unsuited to high office. In July, a key feature of his flagship reform to social care was delayed by 18 months. Its implementation would have given all residential care self-funders the right to pay care home fees at the same rate as local authorities, which is about 41% cheaper than their current rate.

After almost a year of inaction, the chancellor Rishi Sunak has finally decided to help cash-strapped Britons pay their energy bills. As welcome as his cost-of-living support package is, it is insufficient to meet the financial tsunami engulfing much of the the UK. And it comes far too late.

The Homes for Ukraine refugee sponsorship scheme has much to recommend it. It is right that there are no limits to the numbers of Ukrainian nationals and permanent residents entering the UK. It is also fair that they have full access to public services, including benefits, and have been granted the right to work, albeit for a paltry three years only. But wouldn't it be wonderful if this policy were applied to all refugees fleeing countries like Afghanistan, Eritrea, Syria and Yemen, which, too, have been laid to waste by war?

The UK is facing the worst cost-of-living crisis in decades. Yet, the government’s focus is not where it should be, which is coming up with solutions to offset the impact of rising food and fuel prices on hard-pressed households. But it can’t because it is too busy putting out fires started by a prime minister enmeshed in allegations, intrigues and revelations.

As the Omicron variant spreads rapidly across the UK, there is now a palpable fear that it will take many years before life returns to normal. So it is puzzling, then, that the government remains resistant to calls from the scientific community to introduce more stringent Covid mitigation measures to slow down the transmission of this heavily-mutated new variant. Instead, we have ministers encouraging the public to celebrate Christmas as usual, without any limits on social gatherings.

Much disquiet has been expressed about the intergenerational unfairness of asking the working-age population to bear the brunt of a tax rise to pay for a service used by the old. But that’s a fallacious argument. Firstly, half of all local authorities’ adult social care budget is spent on working age adults. Secondly and more importantly, the average pensioner has paid tax over the entirety of their working life. In the 1950s, 60s and 70s, the average tax rate for people on low to middle incomes was over 40%, compared to today’s 20% basic tax rate.

Against warnings from scientific advisers and NHS bosses that new infections are rising exponentially, the government announced in July that it would press ahead with ‘Freedom Day’ as planned and ditch the remaining restrictions that have been effective in curbing the spread of the coronavirus. The most contentious has been the removal of the legal requirement for face coverings to be worn in enclosed, public spaces.

One could be forgiven for thinking that with almost five million people in England waiting for hospital treatment and a further 1.1 million men, women and children suffering with long Covid, that social care would merit more attention in the Queen’s speech. The subject was afforded one solitary line. The government’s lack of a detailed plan for reforming the broken social care system speaks volumes about where its priorities lie. And that is not with solving the funding crisis facing social care.

With the furlough scheme due to be wound down in July before closing in September, the New Economics Foundation estimates that 850,000 jobs could be at risk of redundancy, loss of hours or loss of pay when the scheme comes to an end. Other employment experts forecast that as many as 400,000 over 50s could be facing redundancy and an uphill battle to re-enter the workplace. As life-shattering as losing a job can be, it is worth noting that there are strategies available to everyone – from those of working age to the retired – to help allay their fears for the future.

The government seems incapable of acting sensibly or even rationally when it comes to protecting the public’s health. Not content with its catastrophic mismanagement of the epidemic, it now wants to take another gamble with our lives by administering the second dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine up to 12 weeks after the first