Feel this country has become rotten - benefits

there is very little effective "professional help" for depression. Medication may take the edge off, may enable you to get out of bed. But it doesn't give you motivation, energy, ambition, hope or positivity. Imagine trying to compete against other candidates at an interview, to sparkle and impress, when you are permanently on the verge of tears and feel sick to your core with hopelessness.
Im depressed. I've been on sertraline for a year, fluoxetine before that. I've had 40 sessions of counselling. I'm still depressed.
If living costs were lower, that would remove a large part of the struggle, the hopelessness and the grind of my daily life. If there was some help for my adult son with his multiple mental health diagnoses- including anxiety, depression, Personality disorder and psychosis, then I think I would feel a lot better too.
NhS mental health care is very, very, very poor but the DWP are refusing/unable to deal with the consequences.

My son teaches in London and some of his fellow teachers are in their 40s and still living in a room in a house share because that's all they can afford in London.

Full time teachers.

QE and related monetary policies have detached house prices completely from salaries. It is a very big problem. I believe it's one of the key reasons why we are seeing an uptick in Gen Z and Gen A embracing far left and far right ideologies.

Because if liberal free market capitalism will visibly not work for you, why espouse it?

A lot of people are claiming benefits while working because they couldn't afford their extortionate rents otherwise. Not really their fault, is it? 🤷‍♀️

Ok. Are people no longer house/flat sharing? I did that until I was 34 and I was on about £30k then (this was 12 years ago).

I don't think 'rotten' is very helpful language.

I think we have a real and long-standing problem with productivity in this country and unless it's solved, we'll never get out of the economic doldrums.

I think the % of people who go on benefits just to 'work the system' is miniscule. I think being reliant on the state for your income, and therefore your freedom, is a horrible and stressful way to live.

I think there are certain mental illnesses which could actually be alleviated rather than worsened by being in productive work, with the right support.

I believe working enhances self-esteem and one's sense of independence and freedom.

I think being <25 and on benefits is a sad situation because that person will likely never get off it. Because they don't develop a skill set. So, Starmer is absolutely right to focus on that age cohort. Because they deserve to have a nice life, with the freedom and self-respect that working brings.

I think the vast majority of disabled people would love to work if they had the right support and access.

So I think the government should be offering a carrot as well as a stick approach to get as many people into work as possible.

It has always been incredibly expensive to live on your own.

However, I do think the fear mongering, government-led, mind games around covid had the effect of inducing a sense of helplessness that has tipped a significant portion of those who were vulnerable and just-coping, over the edge into complete hopelessness and apathy.

Exactly right.

Either way you won’t have much money, but if some is not working, at least their time is their own to manage in their own way. It’s a way to take a little control back.

It's the selling off of council housing in the 80s that's led to this.

And wages that need to be higher. The majority of people claiming benefits are in work, which is a nonsense.

One wage should be able to provide a decent home and enable a family to live, in my opinion. Big companies are getting away with paying minimum wage while tax payers top up the employees' wages. How is that right?

Really? So you want millions of people to work to fund the insane incomes of the owners of HMOs while essentially living in a bedroom relying on strangers to pool food money? These are people working full time! Why are they not worthy of a place of their own?

I also think that people disregard the effects of the stigma of benefits. Hearing themselves called shirkers and scum all the time does nothing to help people move into work. Giving someone a character assassination and then expecting them to pass an interview is frankly, stupid.

So often lack of confidence and fear of failure is mistaken for laziness, which perpetuates a cycle of people who, underneath the bravado, genuinely don't believe they're of any use to anyone and don't want to put themselves out there to be proved correct.

Absolutely. For my first 5 years working I shared houses with 2-3 friends. Much more affordable, and better for mental health.

Yes, the real scandal is that people who have worked hard for many years are still struggling to afford the basics, whilst receiving mediocre at best public services

It does feel utterly depressing. DH and I worked really hard at school, reasonably bright, went to uni, both work full time (despite both having a disability) in mid level jobs with what used to feel like a fairly decent salary. The cost of living increase has hammered so many people. Our council tax bill alone is 3.5k this year, on a fairly average 3 bed house in an average town. We used to be reasonably comfortable - we drive oldish cars and don't go on foreign holidays, we don't buy clothes etc for ourselves, only clothes and shoes for our oldest, and youngest gets hand me downs. But when a standard bill comes in - this month it's our car Insurance of £600 for both cars, which we need to get to work- we are stressing about how to pay it as both of us are spending our full pay on just the basics, plus a few bits for our girls.

I can see several posts saying "well the idea is to work harder and get a decent paid job", we did this, and still quite stretched, paying lots in tax whilst waiting a year + for essential surgery, our girls state primary is struggling due to reduced funding under this government, road is full of potholes etc. I can see why many middle earners are considering leaving the UK, we work our butts off for little gain.

That’s ridiculous.

1 in 7 16-24 year olds are NEET.

No one with any sense starts their first minimum wage job imagining that that will be their wage forever. They see it as a stepping stone.

No young person needs their own ‘studio flat’, house shares are available and what most of us started with

I really sympathise with people who cannot work, but not working because ‘you might as well be in benefits’ is very very shortsighted.

And it’s something I see a lot on here. Women who give up work for f/t childcare because if the childcare costs or ‘benefits’ argument… and forgetting the potential for promotion, wage rises, pension payments, professional development/ training etc, never mind the burden on the tax payer.

FFS, people lived through the Jarrow marches, 2 world wars, the massive unemployment of the 70s and didn’t flop about like this.

I will fight and campaign for our while welfare state to pick up those in need but not the needlessly pathetic.

I don't think a single person on a minimum wage job necessarily should be having enough for solo occupancy of a studio flat plus comfortable lifestyle. Minimum wage should be enough to pay for a single room in an HMO, where sharing the burden of bills and utilities is much cheaper than for a single-occupancy home, and in some cases there's also potential to save on the food budget too as it's much cheaper for 6 people in an HMO to each take turns to cook for 6 on one day per week than it is for 6 people to cook 6 individual meals each night.

National Insurance contributions from all employers are then rightly used to top up the minimum wage to something enough for a flat rather than HMO if the minimum wage earner is responsible for a child

The scandal is that so many non-minimum-wage jobs are barely a few pence above. It should be easier to get a better lifestyle with increased hard work and responsibility.

I know i'm going to get flamed for this, but surely the point is to build a career of some kind and not be on minimum wage forever? I know that's easier said than done, for many reasons, for a lot of people.

I do understand that that house prices need to stabilise and salaries to catch up in order to make housing more affordable. But the fact remains that if you earn the minimum amount of money, then that will only ever afford you the minimum kid of lifestyle.

Someone has to do the minimum wage jobs.

Not everyone has the soft skills to progress.

Some jobs that require quite a lot of education, experiencd and skills and are still 'low paid' if not minimum wage.

This.

14 years is a long time. So much was left to rot in thst time

If that’s minimum wage going forward then no healthy adult should be on benefits exceeding that in my opinion. It shouldn’t pay to sit on benefits.

Oh, and if you are lifelong unemployed and have young adult children living with you, if they do get a job, well that messes up your claim as well. Unlike my kids who are lucky enough that if they get a job, all the money they earn is their own. If I was on benefits, they'd have to use a massive great chunk to pay my rent.
And so it continues.

How does that solve anything? Even if the person did train more or get a better job somebody else has to do that (probably absolutely bloody essential) job and get only poverty in return. Plus, some people can only realistically do these minimum wage jobs, stop blaming working people for their own poverty. It's no wonder they get depression/anxiety and opt out onto benefits, they're very, very often better off on benefits anyway.
We also need to stop looking down on jobs. I was saying on another thread that my teenage kids are going to be getting up off their arses and getting a job in the summer, no way are they just lying in bed. A couple of other posters started slagging off the jobs they'll likely be doing. In another thread a single mum asked for advice how to manage getting a job. Loads of sensible suggestions from posters put forward. Another group of posters made it their mission to shoot down every single suggestion, even claims single mothers can't get up as early as others! This idea I've hear from many lifelong benefits claimants (I know a lot in my family) that they'd live to work if they could get a 'good' job if nothing but a lie. Some of them talk as if they're just waiting for the right C Suite job to come along and then they'd consider, it is delusion and self agrandising after their 20 years on benefits. But we are all sold this lie of 'success' and a fancy job for everyone and so failure isn't a life on benefits, it's a shit job.
Low paid work (and increasingly middle income) has to benefit people doing it and give them a better life homes/money than not working and at the moment it just doesn't. This is the root problem.

Well I think the argument against you is that you should be aiming to earn more than the minimum wage. Education is free in the UK until university - why did you not take advantage of that, or learn a trade, apprentice yourself etc?

There are many ways to earn above the minimum wage and live a comfortable life. Even if they are more difficult than slotting into a low paid job and sticking there forever.

Minimum wage is £1500 a month but in many cases a mid-level professional graduate job which requires travel and extra work on evenings to meet deadlines and which comes with a lot of stress might only pay £2000 a month.

That what happens when millions are sitting around doing nothing, then we import millions more who are doing nothing or are net takers from the system. All putting pressure on infrastructure rather than contributing to building more. Those left to pay for it are screwed even more.

And? What do you think would happen to you partner if he was one of the vast majority of people in the world right now who live in a country without a benefit system, or the vast majority of people over human history anywhere. Yes the UK had a purple patch where there was more money than there is now but it was never going to last and a world where a government can support masses of unproductive people indefinitely is a fantasy land.

I'd love to but i can't. I'm disabled and live with a parent who is my carer in their home and they have said no to partner moving in.
My parent cannot afford for me to move out and lose my disability benefits being part of the household income, and both being disabled to the point we can't work me and partner couldn't afford to private rent, even if we could scrape it many landlords would turn us down for being on benefits. Neither of us have a working person who could be guarantor. As a couple with no dependents we would never be priority for council or social housing, and neither could cope in shared or emergency "temporary" accomodation with shared kitchens or bathrooms due to specifics of our OCD.
Everything was ticking along fine til last August when his housing situation living with a parent fell through as they couldn't afford their outright owned house anymore thanks to COL. They sold up and bought a one bed they can manage til state pension age and made him homeless.

Agree
Too many of our essential resources are no longer UK owned
Its time to produce our own
So it’s worthwhile supporting all renewable energy and our farmers. Including producing as much as we can personally ie solar panels, heat pumps etc and preventing our farmland from being concreted over to produce large detached houses on farmland that no one can afford anyway.

Meanwhile we should support our own businesses and producers