to think that 20 grand on benefits a year is loads

[MrsBucketxx]

considering they dont pay any income tax.

just watching we pay your benefits program and worked out that this is over 30 grand if it was a normal tax paying salary.

why was this not mentioned.

At the moment people are penalised for working a normal working week (or sometimes even less than that) because there can be little incentive to work over the minimum hours required to get hand outs

It really does ram home that, according to this government, the crime is Being Poor. Rather than Not Working.

Mind you, the fixation on paid work is another problem all of its own.

Paid work is simply a fact of life, not a fixation!

Jessica

I was hr for aprox 5 years, I can't remember if it was 5 full tax years iyswim. Before this I was a br payer.

Parsing
I think under UC I am expected to work or seek work to meet the criteria. As my dh has a small business I'm not sure how he will meet the requirements tbh. If his business folds I daresay we will end up having to claim more benefit, unless we are able to find work.
Unfortunately, the ill advised on this thread seem to think people on benefit are undeserving, and jobs grow on trees, irrespective of if they choose to work or not.

But the fixation that waged work is work but unwaged work isn't...

Seriously, I thought we were past that, what with feminism and the realisation that domestic (formerly "women's") work is work with a real economic value that can be calculated. There's certainly a realisation on MN that "DH couldn't earn that much if he didn't have me doing the childcare."

parsing - but the Self-employed consultant would invoice their client and the invoice would say something like '5 days work' and be invoiced on 14 June.

whereas the claimant would have to say they worked say 1 hour per week every week.

on the basis of the paper trail, I doubt many people that do and those who did would be relatively easy to target and catch.

parsing - then that is a economic relationship between two people.

if person A runs the house for person B, person B needs to pay person A.

I was about to say that anyway, that's a different topic.

Then I remembered that, under Cameron, waged jobs like librarian and elderly support worker are now supposed to be unwaged jobs, carried out by people with time on their hands called the Big Society. Who will then be subject to sanctions for not being in waged work.

Not so much a policy, more a slow-motion national car crash.

FasterSTronger, no it's averaged over some period of time - might even be a month.

If a couple want one partner to be in paid employment and support the other, that's entirely up to them and I don't think anyone would have any argument against it. It becomes a different issue entirely when we're talking about public funds supporting people

I think the problem with Tax Credits is they base them on annual income rather than hourly wage/number of hours worked.

For instance someone could be on minumum wage and doing 40 hours per week and the other could be on a much higher hourly rate with a much better job but be working very part time hours yet both may still be taking the same annual income. So the latter person still gets "topped up" even though their circumstances are alot better and they get to choose part time work.

I am pretty sure when Tax Credits were introduced it was so people on a very low wage doing full time work could boost their income but over the years it has become a way of some people earning a good wage to choose very part time work and still be topped up.

Maybe they should look at making Tax Credits available to those under a certain hourly rate due to the kind of work they only have access to? These are the people who really need the help the most.

No, it's not just a relationship issue between two people.

It's an economic issue that affects the country. I don't have children, so I'm not blinded by this crap about "children are luxuries" that comes up way too often.

I understand that children are the nation's future economic wealth and citizens, but current cost. The country has N children. They will need to be cared for, educated and have healthcare. The country's wealth, whether centralised or individualised, will pay for this.

But whether the child is cared for by a family sacrificing a salary to do it themselves, or earning a second salary and paying it out again to a third party, it has still cost the economy to raise that child.

(The different methods have different impacts under different national conditions of employment levels, level of education of parents, etc.)

When we try to make economics a question of personal "moral fibre", we can lose sight of what is good for the nation.

Yes, the intention was never that people could choose to work just a couple of days a week (which is what 16 hours equates to) and then get top ups

A bad system. Open to abuse.

I am doing 48 hours between 2 jobs at the moment. Whats the big deal? Why cant other people do the same?

tax credits should just be scrapped and tax allowances increased to compensate. It's' ridiculous to tax people and then give some of it back and expect them to be grateful.

we don't need more people on a small island.

our population growth is something like 10% by 2030 even with zero immigration.

you think house prices are high now! what do you think they will be like in 2030?

and we don't grow enough food to feed our population. we need food and energy security. and we don't have either.

I don't think 35 hours is a long working week. I have done hard manual jobs in the past (working with hot metal) for 10 hours per day.

Sorry to sound deadbeat but over history i guess we have alsways had various wars which wiped out some of the population, people only lived short lives and alot dies in childbirth and through disease.

Now we all live longer, healthier lives.

Is full time work still considered to be 38 hours per week?

Tabitha- What about childcare?

I have no issue at all with subsidised childcare; indeed I think childcare should all be tax deductible when it is a direct cost of working. Having said that, the situation now is a vast improvement on past years, because free hours are available to all 3 year olds, plus the year long maternity leave available now means that the total number of months of really expensive childcare during the pre school years is vastly reduced compared to how it used to be. If a woman takes a year off work, and then starts to claim the free hours when the child is 3, the family are only paying full childcare costs for two years, as opposed to almost 5 years which used to be the case with 12 week ML and no free hours. However, as I say, I think all this is a move in the right direction, making childcare more affordable

Eh?

If the population were falling, children would still be the economic future.

We and many other countries tweak incentives to immigration and having children according to the perceived need at the time.

good point about rising population. we definitely don't need anymore people here. we need the population already here in work and not on benefit.

we don't need to pay people to have children. we have more than enough already.