Working families £18k worse off than benefits claimants after budget

It's irony!!!! 'Are there no workhouses?' is a quote from A Christmas Carol spoken by Scrooge.

ANY statement from a body chaired by Ian Duncan Smith, reported in the Daily Mail, is automatically suspect.

I am very, very doubtful about this £18K figure (to put it politely).

YABU.

I don’t know the system you are correct.
But the £1800 per month my family member receives via UC each month is perfectly legal in response to the answers she has given them on her forms, tells me why the current benefits system is not fit for purpose.

They will be many people who are honest and do not get the necessary support.

I truly hope there will be significant benefits reform and those who really need support get more.

Interesting maths there. My best friend is a single mum solely on benefits with 4 kids, she gets £1200 a month UC + child benefit. That’s for rent, bills, food, clothes, everything.
So I don’t see how someone working can be 18k worse off - excluding child benefit which everyone gets unless earning silly money, her yearly ‘income’ is only £14,400.

I actually knew a family like this and the house was basically a mini nursing home. Kinder to the (adult) children to keep them all together and easier to get care coming in rather than find placements for them all with complex needs. At one point I believe they had 14 workers coming in a day so obviously this costs a fortune and rent would have been high owing to the need for space, level access, hoists etc. Obviously the benefits bill would be colossal but all going towards maintaining a basic level of existence for people with no other options. I don't begrudge them a penny.

I don't think I've seen anyone on MN say that there's no fraud in the system. Of course there is but at the same time, there is also ignorance as to how it works including DLA.

You said yourself that you don't know the ins and outs of how it works.

It's weird that workhouses are always brought up in these conversations when literally nobody has suggested that they are reintroduced. Once could almost think it's a massive red herring to divert away from the fact that lots of people currently doing nothing productive whatsoever could be doing more.

Are there no workhouses??

'Benefits claimants' aren't all claiming for the same reasons or awarded the same amounts.

I am amazed to hear this. I get it. I sent about 200 pages of medical evidence, such as doctors letters and letters of support from employers and others. I also had to spend hours over the course of several weeks filling out a form - I write several 1000 words - and then I had to attend a gruelling health assessment which took almost 2 hours. It is a very very thorough and lengthy process. Every claim you make has to be backed up by mountains of evidence. PIP is similar.

Well the real reason isn't Labour it was 15 years of mismanagement by the Tories and Brexit but let's not bring that up.
I'm not loving Labour but theh aren't as bad as the last lot.

Liz Truss’s own party got her out pretty sharpish!
Can’t see that here as RR has Kier Starmer over a barrel with her tears in the Commons and threats about being treated badly for being a woman.

I wish we did
I got made redundant, accepted a new job, they got rid of me and others after 8 weeks claiming they were over staffed
so 2 job losses in 6 months. I’ve worked since I was 13 and could get a work permit
thankfully I managed to get a job fairly quickly but I’m without pay until the first pay day

I don’t think it’s short term? The loan is paid when property is sold, it could be decades?

Boring!

My family member isn’t doing anything ‘illegal’ - they are just using the current system to their maximum advantage.

This is why the current benefits system needs a major overhaul.

People on MN often say there is no fraud in the system - but there is plenty of people gaming the system, and people really don’t like to accept that.

I think we need to be careful about casting landlords as the bad guys here. Housing is expensive. Contrary to popular belief, social housing is subsidised because the cost of capital is rarely accounted for. Basically if you have a mortgage or even if you own the property fully, there will be interest to be paid or you could utilise the money elsewhere and earn interest.

You have three types of landlords.

1. Those that own their properties outright. the average property is worth £270k. If you put £270k in the bank right now earning 4.5% then you could get £12k back for absolutely nothing. You would have no landlord commitments, no safety obligations, no wear and tear or maintenance to fund. There would be no concerns about having vacant periods or tenants trashing the house. In many areas being a landlord would be an objectively bad decision when you could get the same and sometimes more money from doing nothing.

1. Those on interest only mortgages. Literally use the rent payments to service the debts. The tenants aren't buying the landlord's house but covering the costs of ownership. The idea is that the house will eventually go up in value and the landlord will make money on its sale.

1. Landlords with repayment mortgages. Very few landlords in the current environment are going to be able to find a repayment BTL mortgage at any scale.

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/universal-credit-statistics-29-april-2013-to-12-june-2025/universal-credit-statistics-29-april-2013-to-12-june-2025#:~:text=Figure%205:%20People%20on%20Universal%20Credit%20in,34%25%20of%20all%20people%20on%20Universal%20Credit.

34% of people on UC work

So they are just buying landlords house instead, you obviously think that is ok, to pay for a landlords house

Why is it ok for landlords to get taxpayer money and not people with mortgages, why are we paying for people's assets. Probably the best thing to do is to rent a house to someone on lots of benefits and rake it in.

Why are you say Liz Truss did the budget, then saying RR didn't crash the market, surely it should be KS. Is it because LT is a woman. Why did you not say KK, he was chancellor.

Why doesn’t someone who has become redundant not get benefits they in some way reflect the salary that they have left, like they do in most of Europe? because here we chuck most of our money at people who can’t be bothered to ever work instead.

That's a good point, and I hate the situation that previous governments (Conservative and Labour) have left us in where basically the government is directly funding private landlords and subsidising employers.

Nice to see the right wing media are shitting bricks about the mansion tax, and getting kids out of poverty, how surprising.

Right wing newspapers and commercial media just serve their plutocratic owners who want a small ultra rich cabal of them and their mates and everyone as feudal peasants working to make them richer. The mega rich are laughing at us and are the real enemy and why the cost of living has gone up. They are more powerful than governments.

I disagree about it being hard

ex dh managed to get it as doesn’t have a pancreas due to his constant drinking

He takes tablets to digest food and is fine as long as does that and leads a normal life

he could get a job - he’s quite capable of working and was working till he decided to stop and go on uc - but won’t /doesn’t have to now as gets lcwra

i don’t know if they will reassess. I hope they do

which also means he gets his full rent paid for him and only has to give me £27.50 a month cms out of his £800 he gets on top of his rent

he could get a job and think work 16hrs a week and still get lcwra but he doesn’t want to

if he didn’t get lcwra he would have had to find a job /uc make him go for 2w interviews

maybe he got ‘lucky’ and some struggle to get it. He didn’t

I’m sure there are many who deserve it but don’t get it so it irks he did and due to his own fault