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British FinMin announces further welfare cut

08 October 2012 18:42 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. British Finance Minister George Osborne on Monday announced an extra 10-billion-pound (16-billion-U.S. dollar) cut of welfare budget in a bid to keep the government’s deficit-cutting plans on track, APA reports quoting Xinhua.

The fresh round of welfare cut will be made on top of the 18 billion pounds announced in 2010.

It was unfair that people in work should earn less than those without jobs, Osborne said when delivering a speech at the Conservative Party’s annual conference, which opened in Birmingham on Sunday.

He put forward an idea to limit the number of children in a family that should be supported on benefits.

Osborne ruled out a so-called "mansion tax" on big houses, a move favored by the Liberal Democrats, the junior partner in Britain’s coalition government, though he insisted the wealthy would continue to bear the greatest burden.

According to his plan, young unemployed people were likely to see their housing benefit reduced. Britain now has about 380,000 people under 25 years old enjoying housing benefit from the government.

At the conference, Osborne said the country’s economy is now "healing" but that healing is taking longer than expected "because the damage was greater than we feared."

Britain’s 1.5 trillion-pound economy, the third-largest in the 27-country European Union, has been in recession for the last nine months.

For the fiscal year which began in April, the Office for National Statistics reported that the public-sector borrowing was 9.3 billion pounds higher than a year ago.

If that trend continues, borrowing for the full year would be about 160 billion pounds above the government target, an economist estimated. (1 pound = 1.61 U.S. dollars)