AIBU to be angry about the benefits system

[Daffodilsinfebruary]

I have recently discovered by using a free, independent benefits calculator called entitledto that had I applied for Universal Credit over 2 years ago, me and my family would be over £16,000 better off.

I had assumed that benefits were for either single-parent families or people unable to work due to disability.

The majority of our savings would have been from claiming 85% back in childcare costs. We also would have had a payout of over £200 each month in addition.

For context, we bring in just shy off £4,000 a month. I thought this was a very reasonable income and we would be entitled to nil.

I feel angry that we did not know about this. A friend of mine who I met through our children attending the same nursery told me she claims 85% back in childcare costs during a conversation in which I complained of my childcare going up £150.

I did further research and 19 billion pounds apparently goes unclaimed every year.

I’ve never claimed benefits in all my life and worked hard to get on the property ladder.

should I be angry that we didn’t claim, or take it in my stride.

I wonder how many other families who could have claimed but haven’t.

Stop being such a dick. Sincerely, a taxpayer with a full time job.

Even if that particular poster is a troll,
doesn’t mean there’s not plenty of people who genuinely believe that family carers aren’t just free-loaders akin to ‘on the ‘sicky dole’’ from years back. Plenty of ignorant posters on MN when a parent of a sen child is asking any financial advice ‘but why don’t you work when they’re at school??’. The level of bare ignorance about being a familial carer goes beyond the openly inflammatory comments from that poster.

Paid carers don’t come free. Most people have to pay and in most cases it’s a lot more than the weekly carers allowance. Carers come in at the most four times a day and only for short periods of time. What is the disabled person supposed to do for the rest of the time if they can’t be left alone ? Many areas have a shortage of places in residential care homes and social services will ALWAYS default to care in the persons’ own home simply because there are relatives there to look after them. In my own experience l look after my elderly mum - she lives with us. Has vascular dementia and cannot be left alone at any point. Cares come in twice a day to get her up and showered and again to put her to bed. She pays £150 a week and the care amounts to about half an hour a day. The rest of the time I’m left to look after and supervise her. How do you think we should solve this problem given that social services will not fund a place in residential care ? The ignorance you show for the people caught up in a broken care and benefits system is utterly breathtaking. And for your information, benefit claimants in the main are tax payers too, so stop with the sanctimonious shit.

My ex and I had a joint income of MUCH less than £4K a month… we filled out the benefit calculator and despite it saying we were entitled to financial benefits once we applied we earnt something like £10 too much!…..
So chances are the calculator might be wrong… we were struggling financially and weren’t entitled.

I do get your point because I’ve been on MN for a long time and I’ve seen some pretty disgusting things posted by people who genuinely believe what they’re saying.

But my problem with this particular poster was not so much the opinions expressed, because I don’t believe for a second that they believed the crap the were posting and most of the ‘factual’ information regarding benefits was massively incorrect. It was the intention behind the posts - to outrage and to offend, and most of all to get a reaction. They were feeding on it.

I don’t know whether anyone else experienced the same thing, but this poster trawled through every one of my replies calling them out, and gave thanks !! It was at that point I realised they weren’t a genuine poster and reported them. Thankfully MN has now deleted most of the offensive stuff. There are some posters here who have very difficult lives and are struggling within a broken system. I don’t see why they should put up with deliberately ableist, offensive and inflammatory crap just because some moron hasn’t got anything better to do that day.

Aren’t you a delight.

To confirm I said practically minimum wage

Which it really is considering most people on minimum wage do 40 hours (4 x 12 hour with an hour a shift taken off for lunch) as opposed office hours.

“Bottom line: nobody is going to the Bahamas based on their career as a family carer.”

Or even Brighton.

I less you pay rent I don't think you are entitled to anything. Husband and I make similar amounts and since making that amount we haven't been entitled to any help at all.

What? I am sure you won't get anything towards your mortgage....

Depressing. I am supposedly in £17.81 and hour (salaried but equivalent to that) and after taxes, insurance,and the minimum pension contribution, I end up with just over 2k a month

That's before tax though, it's not take home pay!

That is not take home pay for minimum wage workers, take home pay is around £1700 maximum and that's not including pension contributions.

Under that premise people will not strive to better themselves or study complicated subjects like medicine or engineering, what's the point of they will end up with the same lifestyle than someone that did not put much effort in? For example the current system benefits people that pay rent, over people that might have been more diligent and make sacrifices to buy a property, why should that end the case? Again, if you are diligent and save you don't get help, so might as well just piss it all up, because ....the tax payer will bail me out if I come into hard times....

there are thousands of people out there who are more than diligent in how they handled themselves in education, and later in the workplace, who will struggle to buy a house. This is particularly the case in the southern half of the country. Yet we still need people to do minimum wage jobs and the professional but increasingly poorly paid jobs like social work, social care, nursing, other allied health professionals and teachers. Why are you looking down on us?

There are several flaws in your argument.

Firstly, you assume that the only motivation for people to study hard or work hard is to get more money. Some people want challenging and interesting jobs for the job's sake, and some people are motivated by service (if not we would have no teachers or social workers).

Secondly, the ones who put in the effort won't have "the same lifestyle", they would be better off. Benefits/tax system would benefit the poorest half, but a well-paid engineer will always be in the top half and be better off.

Thirdly, people actually like owning, so will always make sacrifices to get a mortgage, so that they can redecorate, do building works, re-model the garden, etc. Plus if they are lucky and avoid care fees they can pass on an asset, or take equity release in old age.

It is just not human nature that people won't 'better themselves' just because they could rent and claim benefits. Some lazy people might, but not everyone.

Sorry, but I do not know any doctors or engineers that live even remotely same lifestyle as a person dependent on Universal credit. Many doctors or engineers didn’t strive to better themselves, but rather gravitated towards the more complicated, well paid professions because they had a more privileged childhood and home life that gave them the support and opportunities to do so. You are assuming that everyone has extra money that can be saved. The opportunity to save and buy a property is a privilege that you can squander, but when you have no extra money and properties are unaffordable no amount of diligence will get you into being a home owner.

Privilege as KestrelMoon would appear to define it, would seem to be the good fortune to be born of two parents who stayed together during their kids' childhood who also had the innate genetic benefit of intelligence (an inherited trait) to see and pursue opportunities by pursuing education or training.

Incapacitation through disability, illness or trauma put aside here as a separate subject, a huge amount of "failure" can be attributed to family breakdown, leaving (usually) the mum to sink or survive alone with the kids, dealing with two adults' burdens solo: financially, socially and practically, with the emotional health and resilience to keep 110 balls in the air during the wayward teenage years. It's a huge ask/expectation from any single person to get a person ready to study and qualify for a complex, demanding career that will give them a secure future and there's the incapacitation risks mentioned above that can wreck the best laid plans. Social democracy demands that society should cushion those crashes, and provide a breather to recover. Some (a few) will be too catastrophic to salvage even with long term support, but most able people will get through to the better side again.

Marriage for life is not easy and can be derailed by any number of issues but it has been the tried and tested route for raising the next generation since forever. MN's cavalier recommendation to LTB at the first obstacle or ick moment is so flippant because it atomises society. Instead of doing what's best for children, which may be to grit your teeth and soldier on for a few more years, the view is L'Oreal's "you're worth it and deserve it now". You do, definitely, but perhaps not quite yet, and you need to work for it too.

Some men are bastards, some women are flighty, some kind, some clever/educated/charming or beautiful , some not. Humans are diverse, and it's incredibly difficult to frame fair rules to deliver equity. Here endeth the lesson. Apologies for the sermon!

Yet other european countries pay out far more in benefits, both sick and unemployment and still have much better levels of % in work and higher productivity than the UK.

We have a specific issue of huge numbers of young adults with MH issues and over 50s not in work, the number of early retirees are actually in line with long term averages, so why are so many not in work or looking for work?

Lack of healthcare & ageism.

I also think a real problem is many workers just don't feel valued and do the minimum, they see their employers making huge profit but they do not get a share of these profits.... looking at you Tesco, who are along with all other SM's just robbing us and their employees.

Anything payable for mortgage costs is in the form of a loan It’s called support for mortgage interest payments (SMI) and has to be paid back at some point.

Morally it is so wrong that any household netting £4k a month is entitled to any benefits. Same with child benefit for high income families, free tv licence and winter payments for wealthy OAPs and free prescriptions for many.

If these were better means tested, those who were really in need would benefit more greatly and there could be much more funding for all sorts of needs.

Op, this is all over the place, you are totally confused. You didn’t even know what a loan was ie a loan is a sum that is repaid. And you got all angry and indignant whilst putting your hand out. Why didn’t you simply say this seems very unusual,can someone clarify what it is and I don’t know what a loan is?

I can't quite get my head around this. I'm a widow, with a small pension and a part time job (£1000 a month). I qualify for an extra £2.15 a week. How can you be entitled to so much on £4000?

I think healthcare has a lot to do with it. When PIP was introduced in 2013 to replace DLA, there was also a pledge from the then coalition government to make sure that if people fell ill while in work every effort would be made to support them being retained in their current employment. This was supposed to reduce the numbers claiming sickness benefits and becoming long term unemployed after ill health. I can tell you from personal experience that there was zero help available.

My late husband worked in IT and developed cataracts in both eyes, and because minor NHS surgery for cataracts was contracted out to private healthcare, the cost of both surgeries was claimed by the provider at the start. The first surgery was carried out really quickly and he was back in work a few days later. Trying to get the second surgery turned out to be a nightmare. An appointment would arrive in the post and the cancellation would arrived the following day. After weeks of this, he was deteriorating and despite trying to get our MP to intervene (MP was the then minister for the disabled) nothing was done. He ended up losing his job because he simply couldn’t cope any more and couldn’t be accommodated elsewhere within the company. Two weeks after he finished work he got a phone cancellation for the surgery and it was done within a few days.

He found work under his own steam within a few weeks after visiting the jobcentre thinking they would help. Absolutely useless. If we’re expecting people to work longer before retirement, something needs to be done about healthcare so that people actually have a better chance of staying in work. All we have so far are empty promises, as usual.

Rishi Sunak is making an announcement later today about yet another round of tinkering at the edges of the sickness benefit system. This time with an eye on getting the more severely disabled people into work. These are people that have so far been deemed too severely affected by their condition to be compelled to engage in job search.

Now there is to be an element of compulsion introduced for even these people. One of the proposals will be to offer working from home as an alternative to someone so severely disabled they can’t be expected to go out to work. No mention of where these jobs are going to come from, and no mention of how clearly severe levels of disability are going to be managed. No liaison with healthcare and no mention of early intervention to avoid job loss.

The Tory’s have an appalling track record in their treatment of disabled people and now they’re talking about pitching very severely disabled people into a system which is already broken and regularly fails the people it’s supposed to support. Instead of fixing that as a starting point, yet again we’ll get more compulsion dressed up as ‘support’ - a harsh, badly designed assessment system weighted against the claimant, and trained assessors working as ‘disability experts’ when in reality they have little to no actual experience of the conditions they’re supposed to assess. In short a reworking of old ideas that didn’t work in the first place.

Some of the opinions of benefit claimants expressed on this thread - and indeed all over MN when the subject of benefits is introduced - are appallingly ignorant. If you’ve never experienced the benefits system - in particular sickness/disability/carers benefit assessment - you won’t have any idea of how badly our present system fails the people we should be supporting the most. And the double whammy for them, is the fact that if they do manage to get some level of benefit award they’re viewed as scroungers and cheats by judgmental friends, neighbours and even family. Very often because they don’t look ‘disabled enough’.

Means testing is a race to the bottom. Wherever you set the thresholds someone will lose out - currently many people lose out on much needed means tested benefits by a few pence. It doesn’t guarantee more funding within DWP for other benefits, or anywhere else. All that happens is the benefit budget reduces as money is saved.