If you rely on state support , you should have a great quality of life, not the breadline

It's the largest welfare benefit in the UK, it constitutes the biggest single item of welfare spending. Those who work pay into it and are entitled to draw it when they're no longer able to work - and that's a universal entitlement, even if they have alternative income sources. It's not means tested.

Oh my. You do not know how ridiculously entitled you sound !

@AngelicKaty I don't know his out going. Although I do know it is less than the £1500 he receives a month. Pip is £737, uc £210 and lcwra £276 every 2nd Thursday.
I do know some friends that work are on less than my Dad with roughly £1200-1300 incoming a month.

So, your dad's too ill to work and you want him to live on less than £18k pa? And unless you tell us how that amount is made up, it's meaningless. Does he pay rent? If so, how much? Does that £1.5k pm include his housing allowance?

My Dad claims benefits due to ill health. He receives £1500 a month untaxed.
That is more than some on part time wage or full time national minimum wage and them working are paying tax.

@Commonsense22

I hate that benefits in the UK are reserved for people with no savings. It's the biggest slap in the face for those who work and save then can't for a period of time. Unemployment benefits should not be dependent on your savings.

I very strongly agree. It's a massive disincentive to make your own provisions.

We saw it a lot during covid with the 3 million excluded from covid support schemes. Those with little savings or a partner who was earning were also excluded from universal credit which was claimed to be the back-stop protection for the 3 million excluded. So, if you had savings or a working partner, you were just left to fend for yourself, but if you had no savings and no working partner, the door was opened to universal credit and all that goes with it. Complete slap in the face for people who'd saved money for a rainy day, and a travesty that people were forced to be supported by a working partner despite them normally be self-supporting but prevented to work by covid rules and not supported by the govt via the covid grants.

Same with old age planning. Unless you can afford to save a lot to provide a decent private pension for yourself, it's not worth bothering at all, because you'll get pension credit instead (plus rent allowance etc if you don't own your own home and are still paying rent in retirement, on nothing but basic state pension).

Instead of forever increasing taxes on workers, we should be going the other way, incentivising people to work and provide for themselves, and get the economy moving and growing.

They're not. Contribution-based benefits aren't affected by savings at all. Even means-tested benefits allow claimants to have up to £6k of savings without any loss of benefits and you only lose your eligibility to means-tested benefits when your savings exceed £16k (between £6k and £16k you lose a proportionate amount of benefit to the level of savings you have on a sliding scale).

I hate that benefits in the UK are reserved for people with no savings. It's the biggest slap in the face for those who work and save then can't for a period of time. Unemployment benefits should not be dependent on your savings.

That said I think the general quiet perception / belief in the UK is that people are overly self-indulgent and for every benefit claimant with no other option there are 3 who are faking / exaggerating. I'll put my neck on the line and admit I think the amount of benefit fraud is severely underplayed on mumsnet. It's actually endemic.
Financially the current system is unsustainable much less improvable...

@thepariscrimefiles

Ensuring that wages are higher than most benefits is what most governments do to ensure that there is always an incentive to work rather than claim benefits.

Unfortunately, that's not the case in numerous circumstances where there's a cliff edge loss of benefits at the same time as tax/nic/student loan payments on the wage. There are even cases where people are massively worse off when they lose a benefit and/or go into a high marginal tax band. And plenty of income points where an extra, say, £100 of earnings (say an extra shift) means you end up with maybe £20 if you're lucky because of the combination of loss of benefits at the same time as tax/nic/SL on the extra wage and then you lose a tenner of that for petrol or bus fares to get to/from work for the extra day! These cliff edges and thresholds are a massive disincentive for people to work longer/harder, etc.

Working should always give you a better quality of life than not working. There has to be an incentive for giving up your free time to work, even at minimum wage rates.

The only exception being genuine disabilities where there should be higher benefits to cover the extra costs you incur because of the disability (if any), and a level of "compensation" for what you could have been earning were you not disabled - maybe more akin with average/median earnings, but average/median earnings level has to be the maximum of any and all benefits, including rent allowances, free prescriptions, council tax discounts, regardless of numbers of dependants etc. No one living on benefits should receive more benefits (in total) than the average full time worker (i.e. median/average wages).

If people (who aren't genuinely disabled) don't want to work, then they should have nothing more than a very basic subsistence level standard of living.

Of course, to get there, we need to radically rethink the tax and benefits systems so that working ALWAYS pays, whether moving from unemployment to employment or moving from part time work to full time work, or taking an extra shift, taking a promotion etc. We need to get rid of the tax trips, cliff edges, etc., where you can actually be worse off by working or working a bit more, due to the combined loss of benefits and increase in tax/NIC/student loan repayments, etc.

I'd argue strongly for a maximum "loss" of 50% deductions at ALL income levels, so that doing an extra shift, taking a promotion, working an extra day, moving from unemployment to employment means you're GUARANTEED to keep 50% of your earnings, i.e. a combination of tax/NIC/student loan repayments and loss of benefits NEVER means you're worse off by any more than 50% of your extra earnings. That way there's a massive incentive for people to work, or work more/longer/harder as they're guaranteed to see at least half their extra wages in their pockets!

We need to grow the economy to get out of the financial mess we're in and the only way to do that is to get people working, not paying them to sit on their arses, and that is true at all stages, i.e. school leavers, middle aged, early retirees etc - incentivise them all to work, whether benefit claimants or not, by guaranteeing they keep at least 50% of their wages, and we'll see productivity, service standards, etc increase which will grow the economy!

I don't think you understand the Nordic benefits system, for a start.

Exactly this! 👆
👏👏👏

Question for the "if benefits are generous then there is no incentive to work" crew.

Why is unemployment low in countries such as the ones across the Nordics where there is a very generous benefit system (and high taxation to boot)? The rest of the EU, with lower benefits, has higher unemployment than the Nordic countries which have hefty safety nets. If generous benefits are a disincentive to work I'd expect to see much higher number of Finns, Norwegians and Swedes choosing to sit at home and relax in their saunas rather than go out to work.

I suspect part of the answer is that Nordic states invest in their citizens during their careers, work is well paid and jobs that are undervalued in this country are highly prized over their. Childcare workers for example are well paid and expected to have high levels of education (degree level in some childcare settings). Contrast with the pittance your average nursery worker earns here. I read an article that showed that even an 18 year old McDonalds worker in Sweden earned more than workers in other EU countries across industries like hospitality, care and admin.

The disincentive to work in this country is often linked to the poor pay, appalling conditions and few opportunities. Why would you work for £10 an hour or less, carrying out back breaking, undervalued work when there is an alternative? It's very easy to judge people who do not work but the reasons are usually a lot more complex than "they're lazy and just want to live on benefits"

I don't like your post because it's just about people on benefits. What about all the people working full time on minimum wage. They are often no better off, than those on benefits. Should they not have have a better standard of living too?

Of course there's a bread line (or poverty line as it's now known). Households are considered to be below the UK poverty line if their income is under 60% of the median household income after housing costs for that year.
For the year 2022-23, Poverty thresholds per household type were defined as follows:
Single, working-age - £8,632pa
Couple, working-age - £14,924pa
Single, pensioner - £8,632pa
Couple, pensioner - £14,924pa
Lone parent, one child (aged one) - £11,648pa
Couple with two children (aged three and seven) - £21,164pa

Destitution thresholds are also defined and for the same year were as follows:
Single, working-age - £4,940pa
Couple, working-age - £7,540pa
Single, pensioner - £4,940pa
Couple, pensioner - £7,540pa
Lone parent, one child (aged one) - £6,500pa
Couple with two children (aged three and seven) - £10,660pa

Households in destitution are defined by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation as those who have to go without two or more essentials in the past month because they couldn't afford them, or if their income is extremely low (less than £95 a week for a single adult). Essentials are defined as having a home, food, heating, lighting clothing, shoes and basic toiletries.

I think the standard of living you're wanting to be the norm funded by the state is ridiculous.

In an ideal world nobody would be on the breadline but many working families are, along with those in receipt of benefits. Would their standard of living be subsidised also? Roughly 22% of the UK population live in poverty. To bring the income level to all those people up to the level they can go on holiday, have savings is unfortunately unobtainable.

You've asked for reasonable discussion but your ideal is unreasonable and unrealistic from a practical standpoint so I don't think anything anyone says to you other than blind allegiance to an unobtainable expectation of standard would be received by you OP.

I don’t regard the state pension as a benefit, no. Do you? I think the triple lock should probably be looked at and the way the current govt are going I wouldn’t be surprised if it was scrapped next year.

Do you view the state pension as a benefit? Should the triple lock gravy train be stopped, too?

Well I do I’m afraid, especially if it goes on and on and taxes on working people keep increasing. Each to their own.

Some are able to, others not. Which is why this perpetual gravy train money tree narrative is disingenuous. I don't begrudge paying taxes to support those in more vulnerable positions.

Some are, some aren’t.

But you're not alone...you admitted in your other post pre not working there was 130k annually coming in..

I asked before does your DH not contribute any of his wage...to the household

I'm well aware that the taxes me and my husband have paid during our whole adult lives (never a day out of work) pay for our dd's DLA. And others. Lots on this thread forgetting that those in receipt of benefits have been/ still are taxpayers too.

What do you mean by the highest quality of life, though? I'm a socialist too, but the welfare state is supposed to be a safety net to try to ensure people are fed, housed and are warm enough to survive if they don't have the means themselves, for whatever reason. It's not to pay for luxuries that 'the highest quality of life' suggests. I don't think it's enough for many people to exist on (despite the popular narrative about benefits scroungers) and I don't think there is enough/ the right support to reduce the benefits burden on the public purse. But that is another matter entirely.