High court battle over benefit reforms

The high court is due to hear a challenge to the governments housing benefit cuts on Thursday by the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG). The charity claims government reforms will mean "the social cleansing of parts of London" and will lead to families having to leave the city as housing benefit payments will fail to cover London rents. The hearing will be told that government plans will make large areas of central London inaccessible to those in receipt of benefit and that the policy unfairly targets black and minority ethnic groups. A spokesman for the Department of Work and Pensions said the government were not expecting large numbers of people to become homeless due to the changes and added: "We are making an additional £130m over the next four years available to local authorities through the discretionary housing payment scheme to support vulnerable households and help smooth the transition of the housing benefit changes." However Alison Garnham, chief executive of CPAG, raised concerns that the changes would cause the break-up of communities, she said: "The prime minister promised to prioritise poverty and said that the test of his policies would be how they help the most disadvantaged, not the rich, yet these measures will make the poor poorer and hurt and uproot only families relying on housing benefit to help pay the rent." Mr Justice Supperstone will hear the claims at the high court for the next two days. CLG faces £40m bill to lay off 650 workers The Department for Communities and Local Government has revealed in its annual accounts that it will spend around £40m on staff redundancies in the next year. One hundred and eighty-four staff are subject to compulsory redundancy, while 465 are expected to leave voluntarily. A further 88 will transfer to other government departments in staff-swap schemes. The department, which currently has 2,864 staff, expects the job losses to take place over the next year. The accounts also reveal that CLG has a deficit of £425m, up around £25m from last year but down on the figure from 2009 which was £689m. Eric Pickles's department has assets estimated at £1.18bn, an increase of almost £77m on last year.