Too Many Cuts...come join the #Frothers and have your say

(Hunty I haven't done the maths, too damned scary. Hiding under my cloak of anti depressants these days, only way I can cope with the news and the changes).

These figures don't seem to add up to a WELFARE SYSTEM, to someone 'fick like me. They seem to be a PUNITIVE SYSTEM for not earning more than NMW...

I weep for people up and down the country, and for us as society!

Hunty yes me, thanks for that info.

it's all bloody crap.

MmeLindor - for a blog post - which post are you thinking of? (they all look jumbled to me, with my head in figures etc). Just tell me the time of the post, and I will try to condense the information into something readable...

Oh, Hunty :(

Get it up on the blog. Just as it is, you don't have to write any more than that.

Write out the abbreviations so it is clear and post it as it is.

Nothing anyone could write, could make it clearer than those figures.

O.M.F.G.

That is all.

Did I REALLY want to know that? Did I really want to know the outcome of those maths?!

Right - More succint, for clarity.

A Lone Parent, with 4 dc, who is working 20 hours a week, at NMW:

Under current WTC

Gets £207.00 CTC
Gets £60.50 ChB
Gets £74.42 WTC
Gets £210.00 WTC (childcare element)
Gets £120.36 HB
Gets £121.60 earnings.

So a Total of £793.88/week.

Under New UC

Gets £121.60 Earnings p/wk
Gets £500.00 UC. This is reduced by £60.50 due to Chb.
Leaving £439.50 UC. This is reduced by 65% of any earnings over the disregard of £63.46. Which means I subtract £37.79.
Leaving £401.71.

So a total of £523.31/wk.

YES, they are saying that there will be 'transitional protection', but they expect this to stop at ANY change of circumstance - be it your youngest dc turning 1yo, turning 5yo, you moving house, your rent increasing, you taking a job, you earning 1p more an hour - basically ANYTHING they can think of to STOP the transitional protection.

Which means that after ANY change of circumstance, I will lose the transitional protection, and be £270.57 A WEEK WORSE OFF than under the current TC system, for doing the same job!!

And, I might add - my outgoings would be significantly MORE than I have coming in under the new system, what with between £88 - £108 a day childcare WITHOUT SN childcare for DD, and my Rent of £120.36/wk. For a bog-standard 2.5 bed mid-terrace shoebox...We would LITERALLY be homeless and starving!

A Lone Parent with 4 dc (my situation) has an earnings disregard of £HOLD ON - You only get an earnings disregard for the first 3 dc - after that you get no disregard. BUMS.

So, my maximum personal earnings disregard would be £9,000pa. Anything over that will cut my UC by 65p in every £1 I earn.

But that earnings disregard is lowered by 1.5 times the amount of housing support given within UC. So if I have £120.36 a week rent, that would be £6,258.72 pa. 1.5 times this is £9388.08.

Which would take me BELOW the minimum disregard limit - so my personal disregard would be the lowest possible level, the minimum disregard limit, which is £3,300pa for a lone parent with 3 or more dc. So anything I earn over £3,300pa will reduce my UC by 65p in every £1 I earn over that level. And it is done on Gross earnings, not Net. That works out as a disregard of 63.46 a week.

If I worked for 20hrs a week at NMW, I would earn £HOLD ON AGAIN. To earn the £212 a week after tax, or £228 before Tax & NI - A Lone Parent MUST work 37.5 hrs a week minimum?! Yet they are saying that a Lone parent can meet the amount earnt in 20 hrs?! That means that ANY Lone parent on NMW working for less than 37.5hrs will be subject to conditionality, surely? FFS.

I'll do it on 20hrs at min wage first...right, 20hrs at NMW is ON the tax & NI threshold, so I would assume that no Tax and NI is due. So earnings would be £121.60p/wk. Take away the first £63.46 which is my earnings disregard, and I am left with £58.14. 65% of this will be taken away from my UC, so my UC will be reduced by £37.79. Child Benefit IS included (i.e. the amount of Child benefit paid will be taken away from the £500/wk UC ceiling.), so my maximum entitlement to UC would be £439.50/wk after Chb is deducted.

£439.50 UC - £120.36 Rent (covered by HB presently)= £319.14 UC.
£319.14UC - £207.00 that I currently get from CTC/wk for 4 dc = £112.14UC
£112.14UC will be the MAXIMUM that I can get to cover what would have been both my WTC AND my childcare element of WTC.

Which, when you consider that right now, WTC for a lone parent working 20 hrs/wk is £74.42, that only leaves £37.72 . But THEN, before I take out childcare - I have to reduce my income by 65% for anything I earn over the disregard, which is £37.79. AAARggh! I will post this info in a clearer manner in a sec...

Hunty
Can you write that up as a blog post - the one where you so succinctly laid it all out.

That is what made me finally understand it all. I have been battling with all the figures that are being posted but that made it very clear.

If you could write that up as a post and add maybe one or two examples - perhaps yourself and one other poster?

gallic I tried to do this for my presentation at the conference, and ended up with a v simplified version that doesn't even cover the full horror. When I was a Health Adviser for the CAB 13 years ago it was fairly complicated, but nothing like now, and I could carry it in my head, except for very exceptional circs when I used CPAG or the other one - Disability Rights Guide or something.

These days I look at Benefits and Work website for a very comprehensive explication of ESA.

Thank you HuntyCat for that explanation.

Blimey so even if you are in receipt of DLA, and failed ESA you have to work 35hours a week, there will be no wtc for you! protecting the most vounerable eh?

Hunty - so basically, the changes to tax credits that brought the threshold for qualifying for small amounts, and childcare etc down from 40k to 24k, will be then reduced again to 17.5k.

Blimey. That's going to fuck up a lot of people!

Actually, does anyone know if there's an idiots guide to incapacity benefit/ESA?

been trying to work out something based on a person's circumstances and I can't remember the conditions for receipt.

Argh, just typed a long post and managed to lose it

But basically -

The UC changes are very, very scary indeed.

AvadventK - no, but maybe this should be a blog post

I think it deserves a whole blog post of it's own. Not an Idiot's Guide but a "Guide to the Idiot's benefit system".

Is there any way on MN to isolate one post - like on moneysavingexpert - and link to just that?

Hunty's post above explaining in laymans terms, I want to get it across to as many people as possible. I know there's a similar post on the blog but the way she has explained it above will actually get through to people, I agree that the government has been very busy ensuring that joe Public thinks the poor are scum and therefore they don't care about the changes upcoming.

Did you know that there will be NO UC for anyone earning over £365 a week. Even couples. Even for help with childcare.

I haven't darede to do the maths about how I will manage when I have to do 20hrs a week. The £500 UC cap a week might be fiiiiiine ooop North, where housing and childcare costs are much much lower - Nursery for £32 a day!! It's £52 a day here, but in the SE, £500 will NOT cover everything. Christ, right now, my childcare just for DS1, DS2 and DS3 would be...£88 a day Nursery for DS3 and after-schol for DS1 and DS2. If I needed Breakfast club too, it would be £108 a day. And that doesn't even ALLOW for the non-existant childcare for 13yo DD with SN....

I already can't get more than £210 a week childcare paid for by WTC - how the fuck can they expect £500 a week to cover food, utilities, rent AND childcare in the SE or London?!

That's why we're hear hunty making noise. I understand why people don't want to know because they want to believe they'll be safe. It's too scary to think of the rest.

I was trying to do the maths last night but I haven't got my paperwork here so can't check but I think DD and I would have been made homeless when DH was finishing his degree. Our only chance would've been the hardship fund at his Uni, and they are given out first come first served...

People won't complain because the Tories and the press have done a great job of convincing the public that the poor deserve to be poor and are all lazy benefit scroungers stealing their hard-earned taxes.

People just don't KNOW. Not many people on benefits HAVE the internet. I only do because my uncle pays for it for DD's homework. So they have NO CLUE of what is going to hit them - and the ones I have tried to talk to don't want to hear it. Nor do those I know on low incomes claiming WTC. .

They won't get angry until it is too late. It's not apathy - it's lack of knowledge. They don't buy newspapers, don't watch the news, don't look at the internet. They go by what they can see in the jobcentre, or what they are sent in letters by the DWP/HMRC.

I just can't understand how ANYONE, least of all Tory supporters, can think this is the right thing ot do? If people get their UC sanctioned, they will also lose their help with rent, as that will come under UC. So they will be homeless.

unMN hug to Hunty
surely people will be out on the streets in protest...won't they? otherwise they'll be thrown out on the street

Tianc - how can they take the dc into care when they are cutting SS budgets too? No, they will be left to starve, because it's their own fault, they aren't working hard enough, they haven't got a beter paid job, they're not working enough hours to earn enough.

They don't justwant to do away with Tax Credits, they want to do away with the safety net altogether.

And that's the state of play for me under the CURRENT benefits system. I only have winter boots that don't let in water because of a kind person giving them to me - I would rather buy the dc good shoes than myself.

What the fuck is my life going to look like under the new UC system? 20 hrs a week on LIGHT duties is the very maximum I will physically cope with with my epilepsy and possible fibro. Yet if I don't take a 20hr a week job in a factory (which, BTW - is barred to me by law, operating heavy machinery), they will stop my UC for 3 months. If I don't travel god knows how many miles to do a job, when I can't legally drive due to my disability, they will stop my UC for 6 months. If I then refuse to do Mandated Work Activity (their posh name for Workfare - which will be 40 hrs a week, that I'm not fit to do) then they will stop my UC for 3 years.

I'm SCREWED. My disability isn't a disability as far as the DWP is concerned now, despite me having on avergae a seizure a week.