You don't understand what life on NMW is like for a lot of people. For a lot, income equals expenditure and there's nothing spare, so it's not a question of learning to budget. They're already budgeting to make ends meet and there's nothing left over. Upskilling requires both the intelligence to be able to learn whatever-it-is and the money to pay for the course, which as I've just said isn't necessarily available. People can't help being born a bit thick and a lot of people are.
I'm glad the rules have changed and employers have to pay into the pension now.
To fix it all, I believe we need to look at the bigger picture.
I think it's housing that needs reform. No more sky high private rentals and people with no choice but to live in them, claiming benefits to help pay it. Anyone on NLW or below should have the opportunity to live in social housing, with it's much more affordable rents. At least then if benefits are paying it, it's a lower amount needed. Which means building more social housing. So it's not a quick fix solution and may even cost more in the short term than paying all the private rentals for all I know, but I think it needs to be done. With enough social housing there'd be far less temporary housing costs being paid out for the homeless too, they wouldn't be homeless for nearly as long and certainly not decades like happens in some areas, all the while hotel bills being paid by UC.
Debt and the ease of accessing it needs to be looked at too. The amount of debt students can run up isn't right. Sure, some is needed for living expenses and tuition fees, but they're able to run up much more than that.
Everyone else is able to run up too much as well. Some is needed, for things like when people's benefits glitch and they've nothing to live on that month etc. but there needs to be a move away from people on a low income making their lives harder by obtaining debt for treats like holidays or Christmas presents.
People on larger incomes who think it'll be fine because they can pay off the debt easily, then oops now they're redundant or divorced or bereaved and suddenly it's not so easy to make ends meet, that's a problem too.
Debt makes it unnecessarily harder for a lot of people to make ends meet, leading to further debt. So I'd like to see tighter controls on debt versus income and judgement on what the debt is for being a bigger part of the approval process. Necessary debt versus unnecessary debt, rather than just looking at people's ability to pay it off and charging higher interest rates for those with a more sketchy financial history.
There's no reason people should be putting everything on a credit card and paying it off at the end of the month. Or driving around in brand new cars on finance. If people used the money they actually had available already, there'd be no chance of finding themselves only able to make the minimum payment and accruing interest and just making a bad situation worse.
Judging people's ability to pay the rent or mortgage needs to done with common sense. It's ridiculous to deny someone a mortgage when they've been paying more than that in rent each month for the past two years. It's ridiculous to deny someone a rental because it takes two thirds of their salary, when they can prove with a budget that they can meet their living expenses and a look at their bank statements confirms they remain in the black each month and have been saving the equivalent rental amount. We need to stop expecting guarantors people just don't have. And we need to stop judging people on their credit scores (ability to pay back debt) and start judging them on their ability to stay out of debt in the first place. People with savings and who've never had debt being considered a bad prospect for mortgage/rent because they have a bad credit score (because they've never had credit) is just crazy.