OK, so how would YOU change the welfare system?

[MathsMadMummy]

just wondering following on from various threads lately. sorry it's probably been done before.

I guess it's more a question of how you'd change the culture really, where people feel it's their entitlement to never work etc.

I have no idea what the answer is, please tell me your bright ideas

I would feel ashamed that the cashier in the shop / klady next to me in the queue / etc would think I had chosen dependancy.

YesK I get that I am oft ridicules for caring what other people think: still do though.

Fibilou I'm definately with your line of thinking. It's logical to create a better system whereby children are more likely to get proper food to eat rather than being left hungry.

"I'd certainly rather not eat (orr at the very elast would send DH out shopping) ratherr than use them:"

I doubt that somehow.

And should we allow a situation where hundreds of children go hungry just so that other people can save face ?

"The Govt could also create travel vouchers to get to and from the supermarket to spend the vouchers for those who need to use public transport"

Or give them a bus pass - if you think creatively there are lots of ways of giving people what they need to function without having to resort to cash

But SMA, with my New and Improved Genuine Welfare State nobody would look at you and think "sponger" if you paid with a voucher - because you would only be able to get benefits if you were truly in need.

Sorry FIb but I am actually that shy / easily ashamed!
Took me ten eyars to accept respite for summer for my boys becuase I thought I should be able to cope, even though I was getting injured.

A serious issue with vouchers though:

OK so with milk tokens you go to clinic or or a major supermarket yes?

Now, if me or my friend in a similar boat walk past the fruit man in the market and he has lots of fruit or veg, we buy it, make jams or whatever and pass half to the other.

Markets are the fresh food saviour of the poor. Most traders would not topuch vouchers forr teh admin, so you would effectively limit the good diets of those kids whose parents do care by limiting choice of shopping venue.

WRT to the new welfare state that won't happen becuase

A) The Government relies on shame as a way of keeping people in employment, probably quite rightly

B) There will always be someone thinking everyone else is doing better than them off their backs and will hate anyone with a voucher.

C) The changes thata re being put in place to ensure the limitation of fraudulent claims are worrying. We already know that the OB testing is missing genuine claims (will find a link wrt to ASD in a mo) and there is sever and real concern that the new DLA tests will do the same: i've written loads on MN before about this so sorry if you've been on thsoe threads (there's a petition someone else started on SN atm) but basically someone with no medical quals comes to your house for 30 minutes and assesses you with a quota to meet. So they say things like 'can you pick up that ball'

DS1 would pick up that ball; he may even seem very non ASD

Until the tester leaves when I get a beating for admitting some stranger into the house, and ds1 refuses to eat for three days 9no overstatement: repeat appt with eating disorder specialist.

Outside the world of ASD MS patients etc are also worried as someome conditions fluctuate, they just do.

I am told that DLA is the least fruadulently claimed benefit yet it is talked up to be the worst along with IB. At the momenty the system properly applied works well- it takes a raft of proper reports and medical opinions plus a forrm of huge length and difficulty to get a claim made. Someone willing to forge that would easily fool an unqualified med assessor, but someone not willing to lie but having a more complex disorer will fall through the gaps.

anyway, this is backed by those more knowledgeable than I ( and mentions the IB too so 2 birds and all that....)

Tbh saying you would prefer not to buy food rather than use vouchers, out of some misguided snobbery, is not much different to spending money on fags rather than food. They are both examples of prioritising your own misguided wants/feelings over your children's needs.

Even something as ostensibly simple as the bus pass isn?t that simple. If it?s an unlimited use bus pass then you?ll get people saying, why should the unemployed get a free unlimited bus pass when I work and have to buy my bus pass. If you make it a limited-use or credit-based bus pass as a proportion of total benefit entitlement, then you have to account for all regional variations in bus fares and bus fare increases, and you have to have a national or regional policy for how often it is reasonable for somebody to expect to use the bus and what can be considered a reasonable distance to walk so that the credit limit can be applied on that basis. I know it sounds pedantic, but this is the reality and I just don?t see it happening.

I should be working, and here I am analyzing the intricacies of free bus passes!

I still think we need to concentrate on evidence-based methods of reducing welfare-dependency and increasing aspiration for work. Why do other countries with more generous welfare systems and no policy of vouchers instead of cash benefits (Denmark, Sweden) not have the same problems to the same extent as the UK? Why do countries with less generous welfare systems who do issue food stamps to the poor rather than full cash benefits (the USA) still have problems? What?s different? What?s the same? What works? What doesn?t? There?s no evidence that food stamps in the USA has led to children of welfare-claiming parents receiving better diets. If there?s no evidence for something, should it be a national policy?

If we scrapped child benefit for all school aged children and used that money to fund free good healthy breakfast clubs and proper, well cooked school lunches for all state educated children, there would be no need to give out vouchers.

Children would be getting two good meals a day, regardless of their home circumstances and there would be no shame/distinction between those who have and those who have not.

Problem solved.

No VH becuase it wouldn't affect me 9(s I said- no IB / JSA)

I wouldn't buy food for me if that were the case: i'd go on the game today if it were the only way to feed the boys (although mind don't think i'd get much trade these days!)

But the shame I would experience would IMO disassociate me from mainstream society, something that IMO is already a huge problem wrt to why the underclass / feckless exists at all. Would it really be wise to make those people feel labelled and identified into a group whcih you would patently label as too feckless to trust to feed their kids and needing control? Because most people do feed their kids, often as you see on here (sadly again often in SN section) at risk of not feeding themselves, and if you shift the emphasis onto those who don't the rest feel pretty shitty about it- either angry, hurt or resentful.

Wubbly

Agree but problem ALMOST solved

Soemthing we were aware of when i worked for a surestart was that the kids getting a good emal in school in termtime would suddenly not get them for the summer hols, and parents wouldn't have any mroe money over to cater.

Abck tehn (this was years ago) we were campaigning to increase child related aspect of what was then IS (now its via CTC IIRC?) to cover the summer alone, but we can't do that now, no money available I know.

I do agree though, up to the point of A) pre schoolers (CB for under 5's?) and the fact that summer will be an issue.

Not sure its one that can be helped, mind.

(homeschoolers will also say what about us but am going to stick my neck out and say it would have to become a factor you take into account making the decision to HS)

Oh another criterai I would set is tyhta school meals would ahve to start being less than useless wrt to special diets- I know Riven's DD can't get her special diet on school meals, and whilst ds3's school meals service is excellent with his dairy intol, ds1's is worse than useless 9even eysterday at playscheme he was given, or rather allowed to access, 28 jaffa cakes and chocolate spread amongst other items: he has both ASD and dairy intolerance)

I would completely agree with you wubbly but for the fact that a) Jamie Olivers school dinners campaign has led to the numbers having a school meal dropping, so unless turkey twizzlers are back on the menu the children don't want them and b) you are holding people to randsom, why should home educated or privately schooled children get CB ?
The deserving and undeserving poor issue goes back centuries as somebody else pointed out, it'll never be solved.

Sorry why shouldn't privately educated or home educated children get CB, unless the state is actually going to provide a proper education I am not going to be bribed or forced to use it.

I don't quite get the logic here, because a) there would be no need for vouchers to be named, there would be a specified value and no shopkeeper would know nor care whether the vegetables you were buying would be to make a tasty soup for you, your kids, or indeed both - would make sense to cook up the same food for everyone anyway
And b) a parent has a responsibility to keep themseld healthy for their children's sake anyway. A mum half starving herself is as bad as mum smoking - you're not going to be much good to your kids when you're struggling to stay healthy.

That was in reply to sancti

'The deserving and undeserving poor issue goes back centuries as somebody else pointed out, it'll never be solved.

true

which comes down to:

are you willing for teh deserving to suffer in order to make cuts, or the non deserving to get a bit extra in order to prevent scenario 1?

That will alwys be ideology led.

OK some cuts have to be amde now but a lot of that is being done to the most vulnerable becuase society thinks like that- disability affects otehrs, right? All IB claimants are con artists, yeah? mayeb if single mothers used a condom tehy'd be OK....

Whereas any of us with a brain knows that none of these scenarious pan out very far at all, because every group is really quite variable: labels don't really work. We all know that single mums include DV escappes, and the abandoned; that anyuone can be disabled in a second; that many IB claims are genuine but it's not cool to think like that.

So yes cuts have to be made, but universal first: taking HB from the needy whilst giving fuel allowance to expats / the well off becuase they are over pensionable age? nah. Child benefit for all? Well, there's a big worry wrt to cost of means testing but stick the equivalent on benefits for non working, up the tax allowances a little to cover and drop it- job done.

Won't happen though- not cool.

We ahd milk vouchers for a shirt while (2 weeks?) before ds3 arrived (Dh was out of work for that long)- I did feel ashamed.

If it were me and the kids I would use them I guess, though I hated using the milk tokens so much I used to cry- if it were me alone I wouldn't. Or at the very elast i'd buy bulk orders of chips or whatever and live off them tom minimise the cost.

And you know surely than unnamed food vouchers would be sold on for cash by the very most feckless? Addicts etc? they'd ahve to be named to work. Huge amrket in people wanting to give an addict a tenner for a £20 food voucher, and the kids still wouldn't be fed

Not minimise cost, minimise amount of times I had to use the things.

Sorry for being unclear.

As it happens, we buy from a grocers (that sells milk and doesnt take milk vouchers) and we get far more for our cash than in a supermarket: we also get a discount of 20% a week as we buy so much so far from neglectful food provision.

if something happened, say DH got ill and couldn't work, where would be the logic of making us stop shopping where good food is cheap and send us where it costs more?

That would happen, absolutely.

You can't ever totally eradicate people who want to screw up the system though. Never. If people choose to sell vouchers for drugs, then they're going to do it anyway. It's not a reason to not have a system in the first place, just because a feckless minority will always exploit it for their own misguided aims.

I feel sad that any genuine claimant should feel ashamed by using milk tokens, or indeed any voucher, but ultimately we all have a duty to overcome our own personal feelings for the sake of doing the best by our kids.

These things aren?t going to make people with few work-ready skills or qualifications more employable. Having limited purchasing power and lifestyle restrictions might make some of them more desperate to find a job, but it doesn?t make them more attractive as potential employees. In fact, it may make them less attractive. Inventing a system of bells and whistles to try and stop people on benefit from buying fags and booze and being feckless parents doesn?t get to the heart of the problem of why some people are out of work for years, whether it?s by choice or circumstance, or why some people aren?t very good at parenting.

There?s also the very real risk that excluding people from mainstream society by pushing them into an entirely different lifestyle economy makes them less likely to seek work. The attitude that you should work for a living because it?s bad to let other people pay for your lifestyle (especially if working for a living isn?t always much more financially rewarding) requires an enormous sense of social inclusion and an ethic that you have a duty to other people and your society to take responsibility for yourself. If you feel disenfranchised from society because you are treated differently because you don?t have a job, you aren?t likely to be cultivating a sense of moral duty to ?give back? by becoming a tax-payer, nor feel particularly inclined towards social responsibility. Plus a cashless economy breeds financial exclusion and by extension welfare dependency. I think vouchers would become part of the problem, as they have in the USA.

Anyway. Unless I want to be first in line for the new vouchers, I'd better start going about my job in an earning-a-living kind of a way.

I've had healthy start vouchers in the past to buy fruit and veg with they just come off the total bill whether you have 40 apples or 40 packets of hobnobs it's still valid so what's the point in complicating things further, you either trust people or you take their kids off them.

True you cant legislate against them VH: but we must be aware of them and not assume that any voucher system would solve it.

adn back to the OP but from a more personal angle:

'OK, so how would YOU change the welfare system?

I;d employ a carer's and disability advisor who actually did something (becuase there may be one but not one I ever encountered) and if that person couldn't be me (the ideal) they might actually be able to help find decent childcare for the boys, and help me find voluntary work to get my CV back together where not being able to do evenings and needing appts off doesn't make me too unattractive to bother.

That's get me off welfare anyway.

Which'd be back to the start.

Then i could use my own money to buy fruit and not want a plasma screen or smoke, which'd be no change in reality but an ego boost for me.

becuase actually, when you'#re sat at home not knowing where to turn, and all teh sdupport services are being made redundant, it's actually quite to know where to go for help or how to make any changes. AFAIK there could be a CM two doors down 9well no, only pensioners here) wanting a particularly aggressive asd kid to mind but how would I know without that link?

Know what else would help? Less legislation for tenants: ours prevents me working from home. Shame, i;d love to be an SN CM myself, or could just sell the jams and baking I love doing at famer's markets. not allowed though.

Maybe as well as penalising etc we could look at ways to help those who actually want to work? Not every solution has to be a cut does it? And then the cuts can be less coz more people are working anyway.

I agree with much of your last post Santi.

My point about systems is just logic really. I mean, at the moment there are a minority of people who abuse the welfare system, and claim fraudulently etc. But we don't use this as an excuse to banish all benefits do we. The argument has to be that you act in the interests of the majority, and accept the fact that there will always be a small minority that will buck the system. Well, not accept it, because I think steps should be taken always to encourage people to buy into the system and use it fairly, but you have to acknowledge ultimately that in civilised societies, people have a fair amount of freedom of choice, and that most will use this wisely but some people won't.

Having read some of the posts from people in the front line, and seeing the lengths some people will go to to purchase fags, alcohol, plasma TV etc while feeding their children crap, or letting them wear ill fitting shoes etc... it's horrible, but tbh that is ultimately their choice. The state cannot intervene unless there is clear evidence of serious neglect, or abuse.