austerity

Wolverhampton City Council is to cut 2,000 jobs, it has revealed.

The number represents one in every five people it employs, but the local authority says it has to make this tough decision due to the coalition's cut to its grant.

Although local government can raise money directly through council tax, the central grant from Westminster forms the majority of its income.

Andrew Johnson, cabinet member for resources, said: "We have lost a huge proportion of the main source of our income, which is the grant from the government. That's why we have to make these job cuts.

The government has announced a reduction in the support available for those affected by its housing benefit cuts.

This follows on from reductions in previous years and is likely to mean more hardship for unemployed people.

In the year 2013-14, the coalition made £180 million available to councils through the Discretionary Housing Fund, which replaced the far bigger Social Fund.

The use of food banks has soared since the government came to power, but Minister for Work and Pensions Lord David Freud has rejected a link with the government's benefit cuts.

Speaking in the House of Lords yesterday Lord Freud said it was hard to make a "causal link" between the two.

Despite evidence that more and more people are being driven to use the facilities due to over-zealous sanctioning - removing benefits for often-small violations of benefit rules - and below-inflation benefit rises, the Minister said:

Unemployment in the UK rose by 70,000 to 2.56 million in the three months to the end of February, latest figures have revealed.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) also showed that, after a long period of rising employment, 2,000 fewer people were in work than in the previous three months.

There was better news in the number claiming Jobseeker's Allowance; this was down by 7,000 to 1.53 million.

The proportion of unemployed people is now 7.9%, up 0.2%.