Relative almost proud to "have to" claim benefits

actually f-it its absolutely NOT my morality and makes my blood boil just as much as the "people on the dole are spongers" argument trotted out here.

I'm sure everyone would rather have limited income than earn pots of cash and be lovely and middle class.

actually f-it its absolutely NOT my morality and makes my blood boil just as much as the "people on the dole are spongers" argument trotted out here.

I'm sure everyone would rather have limited income than earn pots of cash and be lovely and middle class.

Madmummy you're vastly misinterpreting the deporting unmarried/single pregnant people in the Arab world.

Say you're a victim of rape as a single woman. You report the crime. You discover you are pregnant. Your rapist is likely to either be your employer and sponsor or a member of his family. 90% of the time they will hold your passport to stop you skipping jobs. The authorities want to deport you. You have no passport. You are stuck in jail. When you give birth your child is taken away. You are still in jail while the rape trial goes through. If really unlucky you get tried for immoral behaviour after that collapses.

Sound extreme? cases like that happen weekly here in a relatively liberalised Arab state.

If as a wealthy expat singleton and you give birth your child will be taken away at birth and you will be deported. If you're lucky your embassy will be able to intervene on your behalf.

But neither of these cases are about saving costs, there are no benefits in the majority of Gulf states (Bahrain is the exception) and what benefits there are are only for the citizens (and Gulf states don't give citizenship away to non-natives). These are morality-led judgements. Maybe not my morality but morality of a kind.

ps enjoyed that pint, peachy, it was well made>

you think life is great on the dole

so fine

get yourself into a mindblowingly awful depressive state, or split up from your partner and raise your kids alone, or spend your life caring for someone with profound disabilities, or scrabbling around trying to find a minimum wage job, and YOU TOO could be the proud recipient of- what is it now? £57 pw?

go for it, I say

but if you HAVEN'T experienced it, probably better not to pronounce on those who have

It is quite possible that she would not be better off working.
i have been on benefit twice after redundancy and i can tell you it was a bloody miserable existence.

problems i faced going back to work. well firstly the job itself. i needed hours between 9.30am and 3.30pm. this was my absolute limit with regard to childcare at the time, and this was with help. i dont drive and couldn't afford to learn. even the job i have now takes an hour to travel back from whether i walk or take two buses. there was nothing available any closer to my home. so say i didnt have help...two buses in a morning to get ds to his school (not very close to us but he was bullied at our local one). then another one back to take dd to nursery, then two more to work, arriving at approx. 10.30am.

then at 2.30pm, two more buses to pick ds up from school and another back to pick dd up from nursery, then a 20 minute walk back.

i dont suppose there are many jobs out there with hours like that and if there were, to make that kind of job worthwhile it would have to be every day and to do that it would cost 5 days worth of full day nursery sessions. (yes tc will pay 80% of that if they pay up) childminders are few and far between here and i did look into it but there were none who could pick up ds from school.

the tax credit situation is a whole different story. when i first applied i did not get any payments for three months. nursery do not accept none payment of tc as a reasonable excuse for being late with fees..miss a week and you're out, simple as that. im lucky i have credit cards as i used them to live on for a while, but not everyone can get a credit card, or a loan. not everyone has friends or family to help with childcare. tc are notoriously unreliable as are my local council who ballsed up my claim for part housing benefit every time they touched it.

its perhaps not that some people cant work because they will be worse off, but because they cant afford to be any worse off than they are already. getting off benefit is not as easy as simply changing your job. its not as easy as saying "the jobs are out there if you look hard enough". im not saying its the same for all but some peoples situations/circumstances make it virtually impossible. it takes a great deal of skilfull juggling to get it right.

and all that takes a long time to explain to someone who is clearly looking down their nose at you because you claim benefit, so it does become much easier to say "because i'll be worse off".

Ta fio maight just improve my typing

I think it's the way that it was worded. If she'd said "I have to claim benefits because I can't find a job that fits around x, y and z, or I'd really struggle to make ends meet & have a lot of issues with childcare" type thing, then it wouldn't seem like a boast.

Dh got JSA when he was off as Dr woudln't sign him off despite work sacking him 9and a suicide attempt- long time ago). Had he been made to go abck there to feed us, he would no longer be with us. That simple. He ahs been in steady employment for alomost 4 years now, had he not had the break and continued he'd be dead or in a mental health unit now and for evermore.

Mum and Dad will be on HB soon. Dad retires in a few yeras but he is without a pension because he fell victim of 2 compay copplases (not the famous ones so he wont get cash back sadly). He'll get a state pension and no more despite investing every spare penny since he was 15. Mum didnt work partly through their choice- Dad thought he ahd rpovided for htem- she did actually have a good job but her first babies all died and she ahd to give up work in order to have total bedrest with me. After rasing us she now looks after two of her grnadsons (and did mine for a bit) for free to help her daughters out. Without her we'd have been unable to work- certainly me when I used to have to catch a train at 4.30 to london once a week, and my sister who is a vet nurse and has to work 24 hr covers hifts, witha dh that works nights.

My pint? (if i can remember it) there are lots of ways to get caught in the benefit trap, not so many ways to escape it sadly)

madmumsy, re your post yesterday about pregnant foreigners without partners being deported. if you are referring to saudi arabia, then it's actually the kinder option. in saudi arabia premarital sex is a crime, and if they are pregnant, then according to the lawas of the land, they would need to do th etime. however premarital sex isnt a crime in most countries of the world, so it's simplekinder to return them to their own country where they did not do anything illegal.

as for the op, i think she is being reasonable. i remember being really upset that my pregnant 16 yr old student was getting a take home'pay' of almost the same that i was working my butt of for.

ack typo, sorry

meant to say:

you DON'T get income support if you are unemployed, you get income based jobseekers allowance, but it worked in bascially the same way-it "passports" you to lots of other stuff.

ok I will take happy's points one by one and then i will go and do summat constructive

1. There are very limited reasons for claiming income support. A big percentage of claimants ARE unable to work through sickness but can't get Incapacity Benefit because for whatever reason they don't have the stamps. Being a SAHM might be one reason. There are lots more honest ones.

2. You can claim if you are unemployed. You have to jump through a lot of hoops to do this for any length of time.

3. In the scenario you suggest, with a person on IS moving to low paid work, the governement would STILL be forking out in benefits. They would in all probability be STILL paying all the benefits that the kids were entitled to, and probably something towards HB and CTB also. In addition, in all probability the person would get a fair whack of working tax credit, and possibly money for childcare.

happy mum - income support is for those who are unable to work on health grounds, or who care for young children, or who can only work 16 hours a week or less.

Everyone else gets Job seekers, or incapacity. JSA claimants have to be looking for work, and as for incapacity - you have to send in sick certs, have medicals - I think the checks and balances are sufficient.

otherwise it's genuine claimants who are penalised.

I dont know who the benefit scroungers are either and why would someone be jealous of someone who has sought asylum froma war torn country (or similar) most probably seen half their family maimed and then has to live in some crumby hostel in margate and wait to be deported

the other thing i will say is that a LOT of people are very very about claiming.

I NEVER recognise the mail's portrait of "benefits scroungers" . but then I've met claimaints, the DM reporters probably haven't, except maybe sitting near them on a bus or something.

Do NOT get me started on asylum seekers and the crappy way in which THEY are treated, btw

I agree that its great we live in a country that has a good welfare policy to help those who need it.

I do think it needs updating or some reform to ensure its working and not just there as a lifestyle choice.

Disability and incapacity are totally separate in my eyes to income support - as there is a medical reason as to why the person cannot support themselves/their family.

Income support should be time restricted so that you cannot rely on it forever and have to look for employment - it should be a stop gap between jobs or change of circumstances and not given as a lifesytle choice. Some countries match it to the length of time you have paid tax which isnt a bad idea, some only pay for 3 years.

The money in the "pot" for benefits should be there for people who need it and not those who just dont want to work.

On income support if you get say £400 rent paid, council tax of £100 plus weekly income support, family allowance and tax credits you most definately are better off than people who work for a low wage and have to pay all their own bills.

I mean people do become 'trapped' on benefits because they often get more suitable housing and 'slightly' better incomes than say working for a chicken factory and not being able to afford childcare and everything else.

I agree filly. I would not claims carers allowance and dla for my dd unless I HAD to I am sick of people being jealous about benefits, what is wrong with you all?

There is a benefit trap, it does exist. I have friends who work their arse off and live in a one bed flat in outer London with two kids. they cannot get a housing association place because they work, yet they cannot afford anything suitable on their wages. If they were both made redundant and could not work they would most probably be eligible for suitable housing. Life is hard Im afraid and I guess its the same for many many others

I think we are really lucky to live in a society that tries to look after its vulnerable members, and that what benefits are for.

Whilst we have this system there will always be a teeny tiny minority who exploit this, but I'd much rather this than live in a society where there's no safety net for those who need it.

Agree Filly, thats pretty much what I used to see at work too- lots of those who would say 'Oh I dont want to work I get everything I need'- you could see they were at rock bottom. You have to be toa ccept thats all there is. And disabilities such as heart disease dont come with identifying amrks- just a ticking bomb. So you cant tell who is disabled and who is not.

DS1 for example looks bang on perfect- and gets care at the higher rate because he cannot be left unsupervised even upstairs (he's 7.5) without someone getting injured or whatever. But you cant tell that by looking.

brilliant post filly.

oh was typing in spirit reply along lines of workhouse but actually can't muster up desire to do so, this subject profoudning wees me off

i have spent my adult life helping people get the benefits they are entitled to. (incidently, this was mainly in government funded jobs though working for charities-THAT is how hard it is to negotiate the system-the governement FUNDS people to be on the side of claimants).

I have worked with probably something in the region of 1000 claimaints, many more if you count those I have just advised in quick interviews rather than taking on cases.

I would say, out of that, I met maybe 4 who were blantantly out to screw the system-and even they did actually have an entitlement.

I met maybe 50 more who had committed some sort of fraud. That is a. about 5 % and b. remember that I was a specialist dealing with situations LIKE this, people were referred to me to help sort out this sort of thing. And in MANY cases, the fraud allegations were dropped.

People DO often swagger about and claim to be doing all sorts in the benefits system. Becuase, believe it or not, a life on benefits is not an especially glamourous one. Its not one to build self-esteem. And you have all your mates judging whether you are REALLY entitled to what you are getting anyway. "oh x can walk to the car, why does he get "disability"." And x isn't about to say "well, although I like to put a brave face on it, I am in fact profoundly depressed and see a CPN and take a cocktail of ADs". or whatever.

The vast majority of claimants are genuine.

aaargh.