I echo the comments in Patrick Butler’s piece (Millions will not benefit from Sunak’s ‘tax cut for low paid’, say activists, 27 October). We need to look at inequality in terms of jobs, not just pay.
Work-related inequality for disabled people is an issue that runs deep. Disabled people are still shouldering more of the pandemic’s economic impact than their non-disabled peers.
Easing the drop in universal credit payments for low-earners in work is a step in the right direction, but doesn’t do enough to account for the extra costs of having a disability, or that disabled people are more likely to be out of work. The latter will still have faced a welfare cut with the end of the £20 universal credit uplift, to say nothing of rising inflation.
Gemma Hope
London
• In reducing the universal credit taper rate from 63% to 55%, the chancellor has recognised that the taper rate is in effect a tax. How then can he justify a marginal tax rate of 55% for the lowest paid, while those with an income of more than £150,000 only pay 45%?
Prof Rhys Jenkins
Norwich
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