People who won't work otherwise they lose benefits

[Alphavilla]

Came across BBC article recently quoting a 20 year old man saying he had cut out Netflix and booze to cut his costs in these difficult times. However apparently he could not work more than his 16 hours otherwise he would lose his benefits. My DH is a manager in large organisation and he finds it difficult to get shifts/jobs covered as the employees claim they can't add more hours to their part time shift because they would lose entitlement to benefits. So there is work to be had, but it seems it is more lucrative not to work. What has gone wrong?

I am a single mum. I work 4 days a week for
minimum wage, and since my husband left I’ve been claiming UC which, with my wages and modest child maintenance gives us just about enough to live on, but I haven’t paid the mortgage for months. Because we’re on UC we don’t have to pay any Council Tax - about £180 a month for our 2 bed flat. Even if I worked an extra day a week that wouldn’t bring in enough to pay the Council Tax, so for the moment I am stuck…until my child is old enough to get to and from school on her own, so that I can work longer hours and hopefully make enough in total to get us out of the poverty trap.

I am an educated, hard-working and resourceful woman who is struggling…not everyone on benefits is a feckless scrounger.

Surely it might be more efficient to burn the non-working poor to help keep the working poor warm?

If only 20 years old then he would be on Universal credit and expected to work 35 hours a week unless there are health conditions preventing him from doing so it doesn't make sense. Some people are still on the old tax credits system where lone parents can work just 16 hours a week until their kids leave education and still get working tax credits etc but even then there is no maximum hours to work just a minimum of 16 hours to keep the working tax credits.

We used to have this too. It was an absolute nightmare.

It would take them weeks to sort out each time. I was always terrified we wouldn’t be able to make the rent.

The final straw was when I was ill with pneumonia in hospital and could only get SSP - which my employer didn’t pay, the manager didn’t know what do apparently. HB didn’t know what to do with that.

We moved 200 miles away to somewhere we could afford on dh wage alone so we would never have to claim anything again. But we left everything behind, uprooted one child from A levels. We couldn’t carry on with top up benefits anymore, it was horrific.

i know that’s the usual advice of what to do - but it’s been awful leaving everything behind. And we could only consider doing it as dh job was moved to fully WFH so his boss didn’t care where he lived. Not everyone has that luxury or wants to leave all family and support networks. We couldn't have done it if it meant him finding a new job somewhere we could afford to live.

It is a complicated system, if there is no disincentive built into the system due to overlooking poor design then fine.

I don’t know enough about the system to say whether that’s the case or not

Housing costs have now skewed everything. So many people can't afford housing costs on their salaries, so propped up by housing benefit.

This seems to create a dependency trap where they're locked into almost permanent dependency on state benefits which are means tested.

If we had some sort of decent housing stsyem that wasn't based on propping up private landlords, we'd never have got into this mess.

It's not as simple as that. You may also be paying tax and national insurance plus if you need to pay for child care then 2 hours extra work could cost you more than you earn. Its easy enough to say the more you earn the better you are but it doesn't take all costs into account

This is where introducing in work benefits got us, a whole range of people be it young singletons or families who don't need to work as the government tops up their wage. Employers then have to be forced to pay a decent wage and the country is going to shit because rather than be able to tax someone's whole earned wage they are having to pay out what effectively should be earned income from less of a tax pot.

I wonder why so much of this tory propaganda gets traction when it's so easily debunked. People aren't lazy; they're clearly aware that the precarious nature of zero contract/bank hours mean they might end up on the bones of their arse. It's not a fault of the system imo - it's the system working as designed because the hope is that we will look upon these people as though they're workshy layabouts being propped up by 'hard working people'.

If a business can't pay it's employees a right that they can live on and it should not be able to consider itself a viable business, too many businesses are only a float because the government subsidises with taxpayer money.
The government has also kept on inflating property prices to keep its rich friends rich meaning that the rest of us can't ean enough to live on!

As is usual in these threads, the OP is misrepresenting the person in question - they're a care leaver in supported accommodation, who needs reliable employment in order to leave the accommodation and get a place/share/whatever.

The main issue is the poor remuneration in this country.
Min wage is poor, and even salaried work is poor. We've had an erosion of pay for 15 yrs. We also have micro-managers with very, very poor management skills that are employee focused.
Why would anyone leave a safe haven with guaranteed income behind for poor pay and abuse?

It's a fault of the system!!

It does not make sense at all!

this system encourages people not to work!!!

If only 20 years old then he would be on Universal credit and expected to work 35 hours a week unless there are health conditions preventing him from doing so it doesn't make sense.

Babyroobs

This young man is in supported living so his rent is paid by housing benefit not UC. His rent will be around £300 pw So if he works/earns too much his HB will reduce or stop and he would not be able to afford tbe rent.
He may be on UC for personal allowance but his housing costs are HB.

I've never been on benefits, but doesn't it totally screw up their benefits because they'll be frozen for weeks on end while being reassessed or something like that?

I think it works both ways with more and more employers offering zero hour contracts or fixed term for 22 months to avoid employer's responsibilities.

All I can say to anyone/everyone is to put in a claim. You might be pleasantly surprised.

the entire thing must be “by design” because there must be 100s of 1000s of us in the public sector making substantial claims.

so it’s not just a case of “Tesco getting the tax-payer to pay” - the government itself doesn’t pay (all) their workers a modern liveable wage.

It’s all costly. TV streaming needs the equipment which costs. It all adds up. Mobile phones too. Some people I know are thinking of going to basic phones but most things are on smartphones. Charging as well. I’ve got a battery pack so that I don’t take charging from others electricity.

Well you can't manage a universal credit account without the same equipment needed to stream Netflix. You'd be a bit stuck if you went to dumb phone only and basic tv (which btw the licence for is more than a years Netflix account)

Fucked up end stage capitalism is what has "gone wrong"

And isn't that it is "more lucrative" - suggestive of schemes and profits - to survive on benefits; its that it isn't affordable to live on the wages offered, and under terrible, unreliable terms by so many companies, in a cost of living crisis, in a land of buy-to-let, extractive ideology. etc

It's the Zero hours contracts trap.

That's why we need more people to do less work, and that's why while we have hundreds of thousands semi employed we keep needing to import more and more workers and we now have more than than half of the population not paying tax and the state/tax payers subsidising them and the companies employing them.

Increasing the minimum wage won't help until we have a zero hours employment culture.

That's unusual, I've always had to pay council tax while working and getting UC. It was a reduced amount while I was part time but I still had to pay some, and now I work full time I have to pay the whole amount.

"The system" does not encourage people not to work. It's low wages and high childcare costs that are the problem. Universal Credit is less than minumum wage.

The government says zero hours contracts can work for some people - well not for me. When I was on one, 8 hours 2 days pw, I went into work one day as usual only to be told no hours for you today. No notice given, and Id spent over £5 on a travel card. I asked if they could just give me an hour s work to cover the travelcard but they said no. It actually cost me money to go to work that day - then got stick at the jobcentre for not working my 'agreed hours'!

When Universal credit came in a few years ago it looked hopeful that people might be made to look for more work but doesn't really seem to have panned out like that. For example a couple with school aged children where one of them is the main earner, the main worker only has to earn something like £670 a month currently ( and this is the new revised earnings ! ) for the other of the couple to stay home if they wish and be put in the light touch group meaning they don't really have any work commitments. It is absolutely ludicrous that the level is so low and both are not expected to work when they could still be getting hundreds a month in benefits. I accept that it may be difficult for both to work full time and also don't personally think that is a good quality of life for a family with kids but for the other parent to have to not really look for work at all is crazy. It's just like going back to the old tax credits system where a couple only had to work 24 hours between them to get topped up with working tax credits ! Of course on Uc there is still the incentive to work as you get to keep 45p of Uc for each pound you earn but after taking into account travel costs, paying a bit towards childcare etc, many won't feel incentivized to look for work even when there is plenty around.

Yep, dh was working for a London LA while we were claiming top up housing benefit.

He doesn’t work in the HB department, but he had work colleagues who did and guess what, most of them were claiming HB too just to be able to afford to live a decent distance from where they worked.

The whole thing is backwards.

Zero hours contracts have their place but are only good for young people who need the flexibility, teens still living at home or students, who want to reduce or increase their hours around their studies. They should never be allowed for people who need to work to pay their rent and bills.