Not the one The Guardian Leader meant to be making of course.
The government announced benefits would no longer be pegged to the overall cost of running a home, but merely the cost of shopping. Everyone knows that the cost of housing tends to rise faster than that of baked beans, so the exclusion of rent and mortgages from the calculation all but guarantees that benefits will be squeezed every year.
But \”benefits\” which are now to be pegged to the CPI rather than RPI aren\’t the benefits that pay for housing, are they?
Housing benefit, mortgage interest payments or social housing are the things which pay for housing. Benefits such as Jobseekers, Income Support and so on do not pay for housing because it\’s those others that do.
Thus it seems entirely logical that those benefits be tied to the inflation rate in the goods they\’re to pay for….and not the higher inflation rate for housing which they do not pay for.