To ask if you have had any contact with benefit 'scroungers'

[JumpRope]

I utterly believe that we need to protect the poor, vulnerable and those unable to work and they should have help to live.

I grew up in a very rural area, fairly poor, very hard work for non land owners - workers werefarm labourers mainly. And there were many people leaving school in the 80s and 90s and then abusing the system - picking up the dole, laughing about it, straight to the pub until it ran out; I remember a dog called Giro. People just sold a bit of marijuana for extra work. After moving to a bigger town, I came across families like this, where the dad would start it off, and the children would just grow up and do the same.

There were jobs around. As students homes for holidays, we picked up work without trouble, and could have stayed on, got promotions etc.

How do you deal with these situations? How can we make sure we are not making cuts to those who desperately need it, whilst absolutely changing the mind sets of able bodied men (and women) who have grown up believing they are entitled to money for nothing.

Wyd - you should be annoyed that the system allows people to defraud the sick and disabled - a government that makes it hard to get jobs and those jobs to pay a living wage. Tax credits stunt peoples earning power because they are worse off if they earn more. Unemployed are worse off in they take a zero hour contract, carers are worse off doing basic care the health service should provide. Landlords taking over home ownership and screwing the gov out of thousands of pounds - They system is screwed but you cant blame those that play the system.

Apologies fiveacres

A lot of the stories on this thread aren't about 'benefits scroungers' at all - they're just about people on benefits, going about their lives and claiming the little they're entitled to.

In a week when most people are so worried about the vulnerable, this doesn't make very pleasant reading.

I don't know anyone personally but I don't doubt there all people like that out there and I also don't doubt they are a small minority. My view is that actually they may think they have a great life but really they don't and I wouldn't swap with them for anything. This is why I agree with assessments so that people who do defraud the system can be routed out. I think that this is a much better approach than reducing benefits, in fact I think DLA and carers allowance should be increased. I also think giving people a financial incentive to work (negative or positive) is a good thing assuming people are not starving as a result, sometimes people don't realise what they are missing out on.

Yes. I have been to Buckingham Palace.

Ah. The scroungers thread. Excellent

I get around £9,000 benefits, this covers rent and ESA. My health issues are psychological and mean that an employer would run a mile before employing me. That's my life. Good isn't it.

You have so missed the point of this thread.
We are talking about people who use the system to their advantage and are proud that they are screwing the system.

The benefits system (IMO) is to support people, like you who are struggling.

Loving your work Moustacheo

Yes my brother and his girlfriend. He's in and out of work and she works full time so they are not both unemployed but they state that they don't live together, he has never officially moved out of my Mums house. So she gets tax credits etc as a single mother and he gets working tax credits and JSA when he's out of work.

Technically not as bad as both not working and claiming loads, they probably fall under the radar, they are not on the unemployed list, not claiming housing benefit etc yet are still not 100% legal and I'm sure there are loads of people like them.

I too have personal experience of someone keeping income low to claim tax credits and of people who have never worked and don't intend to yet live at a higher standard than their working neighbours. There are so many of us that have come across people doing this, it makes you wonder who produces these figures telling us this type of fraud is almost non-existent and why.

Having said that we also know numerous working people claiming wages for partners who actually don't work for them, fiddling expenses and taxes, etc so those defrauding the system are not all on benefits

I guess. Although I don't think she set out to be one - she just makes bad decisions. (Short version - she an incurable romantic who loves children and every time she gets a new boyfriend she thinks that it is true love and will last forever and wants to make their family perfect by having a baby with him. And then is shocked and heartbroken to discover that blokes she's known for all of 6 months is not perfect partner and father to be material after all.)

She's now aged 30 and trapped with 5 (admittedly adorable) children, no partner, no qualifications and no work history.

She's a lovely girl and so so talented at so many different things and could have done so much with her life.

I still have hope because she's still very young and she could build a better life for herself and her children once The kids are a bit older. Dh (who is related to her and so has known her much longer than me) thinks I'm fooling myself. He reckons she has an inescapable need to self destruct.

Here is the actual Joseph Rowntree Foundation report:"ARE 'CULTURES OF WORKLESSNESS' PASSED DOWN THE GENERATIONS?" Summary here.

The JRF studies social issues, and politicians (many Labour) kept going on about families where no one had worked for three generations. So the JRF wanted to study them.

As PP's have said, they couldn't find any. And not for lack of looking.

What they did find is families like those unlucky83 describes at Sun 10-May-15 19:40:19.

Where the grandparents' generation had worked but no longer did (mills closing or injury/illness), the middle generation who might have worked but had been out of work for a long time, and a younger generation not long left school. Although the youngsters hadn't worked at time of snapshot, there was no evidence they wouldn't in the future (I don't think being clueless at 16 indicates very much).

Of course, if you saw them in the house on a given day, you would see three generations not currently in work.

But that's not the thrilling headline of "three generations never working" the politicians were claiming.

Because it couldn't find three generations who'd never worked anywhere, the JRF ended up doing a study on 20 families with long-term worklessness across two generations. Long-term being 5 years or more.

Those families were in deprived areas of Glasgow and Middlesborough.

senSen

You may not think it is fair but in the example you give they are not committing fraud, they are quite legal.
Some of us have lived this life for years because when we started out there was no choice. After a while you can become unemployable or not even want to work.
If the system is reformed and tc in this circumstance removed then these people will go on living the same as they did before tc.

As for areas where there are reported 3 generations of unemployed, yes they do exist but they are a very small percentage, I don't remember the figures.
Certainly not as many as is reported.

Pausing it was a comparatively short period but quite a bit longer than that. And there was nothing, nothing at all. Just keep going back to the doctor and getting another note with almost no questions asked.

What this has thrown up to me is that it's not clear there is a shared definition of 'benefit scrounger'.

I'd always thought it was someone who played the system to maximise benefits, with some implication of fraud.

The only real example I have was someone who (under the old system) claimed DLA for over 10 years for a bad back. She'd been coached by friends to answer all the questions about her ability to work based on her worst day. So although she went to the gym every day and was pretty physically active she legitimately received some fairly significant benefits based on the fact that when her back played up (every 3 months or so) she took to her bed for the day in agony. Under the new regime she backed off claiming as she didn't want to be assessed as fit and therefore look like she was claiming falsely.

Otherwise I know a couple of people who make a relatively understandable trade off of working more hours for virtually no extra money by the time benefits are taken into account. If you get paid less for working, or very little more, I can see why you might not. But this is because pay is too low and hours are too undependable.

Alot of these posts are about people just claiming benefits. With the added hints that they are not truly disabled. Vile thread. Its nice to know that most people think I'm a scrounger. I think I need to step back from mumsnet, the last few days has been awful.

Yes, I do know some people (via my work in mental health and just from living on a council estate) who might be termed 'scroungers'

I have listened in on some conversations that made me pretty uncomfortable about how to game the system (how many nights max can your partner stay over, how to throw job interviews so you won't get a job, what to put on forms to convince them to give you ESA)

OTOH I have been equally uncomfortable listening to middle class folk discussing how to reduce their tax bills

And here is the main point...

Are there really the jobs for these people to do anyway?

Most people I'm talking about are low/ unskilled. Many have not worked for ages or at all so have no skills and no confidence about it. People are genuinely puzzled over stuff that you take in your stride if you've always worked; arranging childcare, transport, having the right clothes.
They are not people that employers are falling over themselves to get. They need a lot of support to get a job and keep that job.
It will cost the state money to support them in work or out of work.

Ever since Maggie Thatcher in the 1980s governments have let people go onto incapacity benefits to make the unemployment figures look better. Since the decline of manufacturing there are far fewer low skilled jobs in factories etc out there. You need a fair degree of communication skills to work in a call centre and some people don't have that.

People on benefits are a convenient scapegoat but the reality is there are not suitable jobs for all and it may be just as costly to support long term unemployed back to work as it is to pay their benefits. It would probably be better for them in the long run but not necessarily cheaper for the state.

A lot of the Irish music scene of the 80s came out of people living on benefits and practicing their music. There was no work to speak of Ireland at the time.

The thing is OP, you're harking back at least two decades.

I can remember that in the mid 90s there were a smattering of these people around. Or at least, sometimes in pubs, people would tell you that they signed on and worked the odd day here and there too. Who knows how much was true and how much was some weird 'sock it to the man' bravado? It was the era of road protests and raves and the second summer of love and whatever. Student grants were recent history. The culture was different.

I've met far more people over the years who were keen to describe complicated tax fiddles to me TBH and urge me to join. Notably they haven't thinned out in recent years.

I am currently out of work (previously worked full time despite having had a stroke and a serious heart complaint). I 'live' on £53 a week. The stress from the bills building up honestly scares me incase it gives me another stroke.

I don't know where people get the impression it's a great life on benefits :(

From threads like this bouncing.

And the Daily Fail.

It really shouldn't take geniuses to work out that where an apparently unemployed family are living in comfortable style with luxury items, expensive holidays etc, then there is at least one type of criminality going on. (Undeclared income, at least, but often more than that.)

I'm sorry for your situation bouncing. I hope your health improves.

Thank you arsenic. I don't know how other families appear to do it either when I literally can't cope. I would love to work (4 days a week max due to health reasons unfortunately), have 2 degrees, loads of experience and I'm still struggling to get work. This is no life, to 'choose' this as a way of life must imply someone with very very low expectations of how life can be and that just makes me feel sorry for them.

No I haven't, I've known two people who claimed benefits because they were both in a really bad way at the time, they're both out of benefits now but when they were claiming they absolutely needed to and would have otherwise been on the streets with two young children.

I don't get this it's all the benefit scroungers thing, what, are people not meant to have a basic standard of living, should they all be suffering because they are in a stage in their lives which unfortunately means they're financially in a really bad way?

Both my friends are back in employment one actually re-trained as a mid-wife and works all hours and is amazing she also is mother of a child with severe autism.

The way some people go on about the problem all being benefits claimants you'd think they want to bring back the work houses, how dare anyone go thro a shitty time not of their own choosing and fall on hard times.

I've never been on benefits but I think the attitude is mean and nasty. The total amount of large companies avoiding paying tax easily eclipses the benefit claimants apparently all living it up!

I actually helped one of my friends and her DC who had to live in layers of jumpers and socks during one of the worst winters because she couldn't afford to have the heating on, we had to find ways to keep one room warm(ish) in which everyone stayed. Her brand spanking luxury home courtesy of the millions in benefits had water droplets on the ceiling it was that cold indoors and mould contantly growing in all corners which spread on her furniture (yes she had furniture, like beds and stuff, all on benefits)! It was truly horrendous watching her struggle her children always had nasty chest infections because of it.

So no I have never met anyone who actually lives it up on benefits.

I seriously worry that it is going to be harder and harder for women to leave abusive partners in the UK. I knew a woman in Dublin who was married for thirty years to an alcoholic, she was not smiling in any of her family photos, and only managed to leave him the year that "deserted wives allowance" came in, in the early seventies I believe.

I have family who have never worked abd to those that don't know them, would seem.to be 'scroungers'

But if you actually knew them, you would see how truly difficult their lives have been. They genuinely cannot work abd only claim what they are truly entitled to. They don't have big TVs, cars or holidays, they live a very modest lifestyle. In fact they have next to no luxuries.

Yes. Of my immediate relatives (parents and inlaws, siblings and inlaws, uncles aunts and cousins) we have around a dozen who are able bodied and mentally healthy and for 90% ish of their adult lives have chosen not to work, preferring to live off benefits and relatives. Fortunately the rest of us pay enough taxes that we cancel them out. So I can be absolutely certain they exist. The choice baffles me, but I don't resent them though. Looks like a pretty shit life by all accounts.