AIBU to be angry about the benefits system

People can spend their money on what they want.

That's irrelevant to the misuse of public funds.

Tho martin says check if under £60k and pay rent and childcare

www.thesun.co.uk/money/27438488/martin-lewis-mse-warning-universal-credit-check/

Do you know how much debt they're in?

Whatever the circumstances are, if someone has enough for luxuries then they should not be on benefits...

Problem is, unless you know every single detail of these peoples’ claims, what other income they have and whether their benefits are contribution based or means tested, you’re not really in a position to comment.

For some yeah but I actually know people on benefits that somehow have the luxury of holidays, takeaways and constant beauty treatments, nail, hair extensions, yet they claim everything under the sun, so how is this possible? I know not all benefit claimants do that but I know personally a few that do....so how do you explain that? I am saying the system has a lot of loopholes, same way the Uber rich enjoy loopholes to not lay tax, yet the average folk have no loopholes and taxed to the hills. Sorry but I don't buy the " everyone in benefits is struggling to feed themselves"

l was one of the posters who said that l worked hard for my own home, but having worked as a benefit adviser for many years l definitely don’t subscribe to the pissing benefits up the wall viewpoint. I’ve seen how the unfairness and disparity in the system affects real people - especially when it comes to means testing, where thresholds are frequently set so low as to screen out real need for the sake of a pound or two. And l think on forums like these it’s easy to be outraged that claimants can be earning what most would see as a very decent wage and still be claiming benefits. But it’s important to consider circumstances and OP has explained that most of their entitlement would be via child care costs, which are extortionate. And in the case of homeowners v renters l think the stereotyping comes not from the proportion of renters and homeowners actually on benefits, but from the fact that most renters on benefits will receive help with their rent, whereas home owners will not - at best they will be offered a repayable loan to help with mortgage interest.

lf we’re going to talk about stereotyping l think it’s important to point out that most people not familiar with the benefit system rely on government rhetoric, and this government will happily stereotype benefit claimants any which way, regardless of facts, to get the public on their side when it comes to reforming welfare. You only have to look at the announcement by Rishi Sunak yesterday regarding yet more reforms to sickness and disability benefits to realise that his words were designed to give the impression that most people claiming these benefits are somehow not entitled to them. And a lot of MN posters will take every word he said as gospel truth and will be egging him on to ‘weed out those scroungers’ !!

Except that most of the people who will suffer as a result are the most severely sick snd disabled - they’re the ones the cuts are aimed at, because they cost the most to support. Hence the surprise announcement of the review of PIP - with the intention of narrowing eligibility yet again and providing ‘alternative forms of support to cash transfers’ for some claimants - particularly those with mental health problems. This government were the ones who proudly announced in 2013 that as a new disability benefit, PIP would extend to those with MH conditions. Just over ten years later they’ve realised that the uptake has massively exceeded their expectations and over extended the budget, so now, predictably, comes the assault on the veracity of their benefit claims, to pave the way for cuts that will affect both those with physical disabilities and MH conditions.

So what we have, in my opinion, is a government perfectly happy to spend billions supporting parents with extortionate childcare costs in addition to child benefit, billions picking up the wage bills of companies who won’t pay a living wage to their employees and yet more billions to subsidise landlords charging unaffordable rents. But not happy to support disabled people with the significant extra cost of living with disability, and resorting to stereotyping to achieve savings with the tacit agreement of a public who are either ignorant of, or just don’t care about, the fact that when it comes to the safety net of the welfare system, the rug is about to be pulled from under them.

No one with a net income of £4000 should be entitled to any kind of government benefit/hand out.

If you manage to have a good job/career, land on your feet and get a mortgage etc, then you are living your rewards.
Benefits are not a "reward" for people who could not be bothered to save, or train for a career... they are a safety net to make sure people do not starve and find themselves homeless. And sadly, many working people now claim because nowadays, NMW is not enough to live on.

@Rosscameasdoody
It was a general observation, not directed to you and in fact I thought you might be in agreement. Several posters have said they have worked hard and sacrificed to buy a property and the benefits system disincentivises this as benefits claimants piss money up the wall because they know their rent is covered (paraphrasing here but this has been a theme). There seemed to me to be a stereotyping going on that homeowners are the strivers who work hard and are not claiming any benefits whereas renters are the skivers who all claim benefits because they can’t be arsed to sacrifice and save- otherwise they’d be homeowners.

The reality is that many on universal credit are homeowners and many not on universal credit are renters. The stereotyping is harmful.

I don’t see your point.

Plenty of home owners are on benefits while plenty of renters are not too. It isn’t like there is this social divide where all renters are on benefits while all homeowners are not.

I agree with you re: companies making record profits yet giving minimal salary increases. Our spending power is lowering every year as we experience high levels of inflation and salaries that do not increase to the level of inflation. My own salary has had small increases, way below the reported inflation (never mind REAL inflation levels), in fact, salary increases have been way below NMW ,pension AND benefits increases.

The current system also benefits landlords who happily raise their rents to extortionate levels knowing that the tax payer will foot the bill for many through. UC. Same with employers. They happily pay out large dividends for shareholders and substantial bonuses to their execs, but the staff at the lower end can’t make ends meet on the wages they’re paid, so the tax payer picks up a large part of their wages bill through UC.

It baffles me why benefit claimants are all written off as workshy scroungers. The benefits system was designed to take into account that not all people are born with the same access to life opportunities, or the ability to take advantage of them. I own my own home, and worked hard for it. I would much rather that than be open to all the problems encountered by those renting - especially nowadays. But I recognise that not everyone has the same opportunity as I have had. And it makes me laugh when posters refer to the tax payer ‘bailing out’ benefit claimants, when a great many of those claiming benefit are tax payers themselves.

Means testing is a race to the bottom. Wherever you set the thresholds someone will lose out - currently many people lose out on much needed means tested benefits by a few pence. It doesn’t guarantee more funding within DWP for other benefits, or anywhere else. All that happens is the benefit budget reduces as money is saved.

I think healthcare has a lot to do with it. When PIP was introduced in 2013 to replace DLA, there was also a pledge from the then coalition government to make sure that if people fell ill while in work every effort would be made to support them being retained in their current employment. This was supposed to reduce the numbers claiming sickness benefits and becoming long term unemployed after ill health. I can tell you from personal experience that there was zero help available.

My late husband worked in IT and developed cataracts in both eyes, and because minor NHS surgery for cataracts was contracted out to private healthcare, the cost of both surgeries was claimed by the provider at the start. The first surgery was carried out really quickly and he was back in work a few days later. Trying to get the second surgery turned out to be a nightmare. An appointment would arrive in the post and the cancellation would arrived the following day. After weeks of this, he was deteriorating and despite trying to get our MP to intervene (MP was the then minister for the disabled) nothing was done. He ended up losing his job because he simply couldn’t cope any more and couldn’t be accommodated elsewhere within the company. Two weeks after he finished work he got a phone cancellation for the surgery and it was done within a few days.

He found work under his own steam within a few weeks after visiting the jobcentre thinking they would help. Absolutely useless. If we’re expecting people to work longer before retirement, something needs to be done about healthcare so that people actually have a better chance of staying in work. All we have so far are empty promises, as usual.

Rishi Sunak is making an announcement later today about yet another round of tinkering at the edges of the sickness benefit system. This time with an eye on getting the more severely disabled people into work. These are people that have so far been deemed too severely affected by their condition to be compelled to engage in job search.

Now there is to be an element of compulsion introduced for even these people. One of the proposals will be to offer working from home as an alternative to someone so severely disabled they can’t be expected to go out to work. No mention of where these jobs are going to come from, and no mention of how clearly severe levels of disability are going to be managed. No liaison with healthcare and no mention of early intervention to avoid job loss.

The Tory’s have an appalling track record in their treatment of disabled people and now they’re talking about pitching very severely disabled people into a system which is already broken and regularly fails the people it’s supposed to support. Instead of fixing that as a starting point, yet again we’ll get more compulsion dressed up as ‘support’ - a harsh, badly designed assessment system weighted against the claimant, and trained assessors working as ‘disability experts’ when in reality they have little to no actual experience of the conditions they’re supposed to assess. In short a reworking of old ideas that didn’t work in the first place.

Some of the opinions of benefit claimants expressed on this thread - and indeed all over MN when the subject of benefits is introduced - are appallingly ignorant. If you’ve never experienced the benefits system - in particular sickness/disability/carers benefit assessment - you won’t have any idea of how badly our present system fails the people we should be supporting the most. And the double whammy for them, is the fact that if they do manage to get some level of benefit award they’re viewed as scroungers and cheats by judgmental friends, neighbours and even family. Very often because they don’t look ‘disabled enough’.

I can't quite get my head around this. I'm a widow, with a small pension and a part time job (£1000 a month). I qualify for an extra £2.15 a week. How can you be entitled to so much on £4000?

Op, this is all over the place, you are totally confused. You didn’t even know what a loan was ie a loan is a sum that is repaid. And you got all angry and indignant whilst putting your hand out. Why didn’t you simply say this seems very unusual,can someone clarify what it is and I don’t know what a loan is?

Morally it is so wrong that any household netting £4k a month is entitled to any benefits. Same with child benefit for high income families, free tv licence and winter payments for wealthy OAPs and free prescriptions for many.

If these were better means tested, those who were really in need would benefit more greatly and there could be much more funding for all sorts of needs.

Anything payable for mortgage costs is in the form of a loan It’s called support for mortgage interest payments (SMI) and has to be paid back at some point.

Yet other european countries pay out far more in benefits, both sick and unemployment and still have much better levels of % in work and higher productivity than the UK.

We have a specific issue of huge numbers of young adults with MH issues and over 50s not in work, the number of early retirees are actually in line with long term averages, so why are so many not in work or looking for work?

Lack of healthcare & ageism.

I also think a real problem is many workers just don't feel valued and do the minimum, they see their employers making huge profit but they do not get a share of these profits.... looking at you Tesco, who are along with all other SM's just robbing us and their employees.

Privilege as KestrelMoon would appear to define it, would seem to be the good fortune to be born of two parents who stayed together during their kids' childhood who also had the innate genetic benefit of intelligence (an inherited trait) to see and pursue opportunities by pursuing education or training.

Incapacitation through disability, illness or trauma put aside here as a separate subject, a huge amount of "failure" can be attributed to family breakdown, leaving (usually) the mum to sink or survive alone with the kids, dealing with two adults' burdens solo: financially, socially and practically, with the emotional health and resilience to keep 110 balls in the air during the wayward teenage years. It's a huge ask/expectation from any single person to get a person ready to study and qualify for a complex, demanding career that will give them a secure future and there's the incapacitation risks mentioned above that can wreck the best laid plans. Social democracy demands that society should cushion those crashes, and provide a breather to recover. Some (a few) will be too catastrophic to salvage even with long term support, but most able people will get through to the better side again.

Marriage for life is not easy and can be derailed by any number of issues but it has been the tried and tested route for raising the next generation since forever. MN's cavalier recommendation to LTB at the first obstacle or ick moment is so flippant because it atomises society. Instead of doing what's best for children, which may be to grit your teeth and soldier on for a few more years, the view is L'Oreal's "you're worth it and deserve it now". You do, definitely, but perhaps not quite yet, and you need to work for it too.

Some men are bastards, some women are flighty, some kind, some clever/educated/charming or beautiful , some not. Humans are diverse, and it's incredibly difficult to frame fair rules to deliver equity. Here endeth the lesson. Apologies for the sermon!

Sorry, but I do not know any doctors or engineers that live even remotely same lifestyle as a person dependent on Universal credit. Many doctors or engineers didn’t strive to better themselves, but rather gravitated towards the more complicated, well paid professions because they had a more privileged childhood and home life that gave them the support and opportunities to do so. You are assuming that everyone has extra money that can be saved. The opportunity to save and buy a property is a privilege that you can squander, but when you have no extra money and properties are unaffordable no amount of diligence will get you into being a home owner.

There are several flaws in your argument.

Firstly, you assume that the only motivation for people to study hard or work hard is to get more money. Some people want challenging and interesting jobs for the job's sake, and some people are motivated by service (if not we would have no teachers or social workers).

Secondly, the ones who put in the effort won't have "the same lifestyle", they would be better off. Benefits/tax system would benefit the poorest half, but a well-paid engineer will always be in the top half and be better off.

Thirdly, people actually like owning, so will always make sacrifices to get a mortgage, so that they can redecorate, do building works, re-model the garden, etc. Plus if they are lucky and avoid care fees they can pass on an asset, or take equity release in old age.

It is just not human nature that people won't 'better themselves' just because they could rent and claim benefits. Some lazy people might, but not everyone.