Feel this country has become rotten - benefits

[She11y]

A studio apartment in my area is about £800 per month.
A minim wage job is around £1500 per month net.
After you've worked in a hard and demanding job - most minimum wage jobs are demanding - you've got £700 to pay for food, travel, bills, clothes.
You might end up with £100 left over each month. Working hard all your life with no hope of owning your own home or having any sort of financial stability.
No wonder people don't want to work. Make owninf a house affordable and over night 1/3 the people claiming benefits will stop.

My point is that a lot of people are on benefits because they're depressed at the hopelessness of their futures, and try to avoid working.

I will get slated for this but there’s absolutely no point working if you do not have significant potential to increase your earning capacity over time. It’s k to start on minimum wage or close to it if you can triple or quadruple that in 10-25 years but you’ll max out at 35-45k there’s no point - you’ll never be able to buy a house, have a “standard” family with two kids, enjoy little extras and go on holiday. You’ll be lining hand to mouth. So, yes, social contract is broken and you are better off on benefits, especially if you have children and your alternative would be a minimum wage job. I say this as a high earner whose taxes pay for guide benefits. In the current broken society, being on benefits vs minimum wage is the right choice. People respond to incentives. Unfortunately, massive reforms are needed across multiple domains that no party wants to pursue. So yes, this country is fucked.

I can’t find anything I’m qualified for that will also fit with my health conditions so I’m stuck on just over min wage
I do have a degree. The ones that are paying more are longer hours (8-6) and not WFH and maybe 2k more than min wage

There shouldn’t also be the pressure to move on from min wage jobs because you have to earn more
People can’t moan about customer service then because all the staff will be new!

Min wage jobs can be the start for some people, and for others it is all they can do.
I loved my min wage job and could not move up from it anyway. I knew a few people in my role go up to supervisor and drop back down again as it was a tiny pay rise for a lot more stress.

Some people have attempted to explain to you that addiction is a complex issue. I'm afraid I don't have the patience to offer further information to someone so ill informed.
In any case you can't pick and choose who gets supported by your tax contributions. As a childfree pensioner who is still working and paying tax, if I were that way inclined I might not want to support families with large numbers of children. I have a wider and more holistic approach to supporting society than that though.

Your original post was ‘immigration is not going anywhere’ with a 30 year stat.

The statistic I posted was to highlight the changing demographics and why governments are pro immigration.

"Net migration into the UK hit a record 906,000 in the year to June 2023, and then fell to 728,000 in the year to June 2024.
The ONS projects that it will continue to decline until 2028, but after that will remain at 340,000 per year as a long term average."

The above is the only figures I have read on forecasted immigration & I don't expect them to be less than the below. As far as I am aware the current government has not put a cap on?

Over 30 years AI and automation will change things and I wouldn’t be surprised if immigration numbers go down due to that.

So when do you expect to see the reduction? How much reduction do you expect? 50%?

He'd probably die.

Thatcher also sold off our infrastructure - so high travel, water, Telecon and power costs too.

There is way too much short term thinking in this country. We should never have done this.

It’s k to start on minimum wage or close to it if you can triple or quadruple that in 10-25 years but you’ll max out at 35-45k there’s no point -

Also inflation matters

40k today is the equivalent to 32k 5 yrs ago & 26k in 2010.

Although Labours objective re their election manifesto is to
Make Work Pay

They've announced changes to benefits re disabilities as part of this
Just waiting to see what’s next now

Yes the UK had a purple patch where there was more money than there is now but it was never going to last and a world where a government can support masses of unproductive people indefinitely is a fantasy land

Based on the above logic would you scrap the state pension?

Don't say people earned it because most will not have paid anything close to the tax needed to cover it plus it's paid forward.

The Minimum Wage has made things worse because it is being used as a 'maximum' wage in many cases instead, thus preventing realistic wages being paid appropriate to the person's experience and ability.

Maybe you could retrain in something that would be more accommodating of your health condition?

I'm not directing this at you in particular but there have been a few of these threads with people on various benefits saying they can't possibly work because of x,y and z, some without ever at least trying.

I've seen some very negative and defeatist attitudes and I this needs to change as we simply cannot afford to continue paying benefits at the rate we are. Especially to young people some of whom seem to say they can't work for the rest of their lives

I've heard doctors will be signing fit notes saying what people can do, rather than sick notes saying what people can't do, which I think is a very good idea.

I have suffered from severe mental health issues including being suicidal, have impaired sight and hearing, plus other issues I don't want to go into but work full time. Working has been the absolute best thing for me and my recovery.

I have seen those threads too and I post on them.

Employers want the best candidate. They don't want someone who will be off sick lot, has lots of appointments, has lots of reasonable adjustments or adaptions. Or has challenging behaviour.
Yes a fair few disabled people on MN hasve said they have good and supportive bosses who pull out all the stops to make sure they can still do their job as they are valued.
I can guarantee that none of those people are on min wage entry level jobs. They are all corporate and WFH.

That’s already a pretty big drop. Does it say what’s causing that? Visa changes?

The next gov may well run with a cap but a drop that big may help take some heat out of the issue.

As for past that long term hard to say but I did hear a good speaker from Oxford Institute on aging and director talked about people being worried about immigration and other groups concerned about AI and she pointed out the groups were too siloed.

She said the solutions may well come from a merging of those two things. I agree with that take, Sarah Harper I think was her name.

I’m not on benefits? I work FT, 40hrs a week and I’ve worked since I was 13, all through college and university
i don’t have the energy to retrain while i am working full time, I’m already struggling working 40hrs
what helps my health condition is WFH which is what I have and dropping my hours would help but I can’t afford to do that being single

Well, a state objective is cheap and means nothing. From what they have announced now, nothing will make work pay. They are just making changes around the edges making eligibility for benefits trickier but they are not changing anything fundamentally. They should start by removing all the cliff edges for a start - both for benefits claimants going into work and for higher earners who are hoarding hours to avoid the said cliff edges. For example, make childcare tax deductible (thus incentivising work and earnings) instead of limiting it to x number of hours and taking it away completely from higher earners. Invest heavily (potentially through incentives) into productivity improvements and retraining (Denmark is a great example on retraining). These are just tiny examples that are relatively low pain. Business rates are a joke and are killing SMEs. Etc etc etc that’s before we start talking about pension reform and NHS reform which are not on the agenda.

Agree totally.
Government cannot make firms take people on, so they will choose for themselves the candidate they want.
It's nothing to do with the govt who somebody takes on...
What does this actually mean anyway, does it mean people who don't get pip will have to sign on for uc and visit the jobcentre.
Will they be sanctioned if they don't turn up?

I’m on a min wage job WFH with adjustments which is the reason I can still work FT (just, there’s a lot of catching up on sleep and skipping meals to go straight to bed!)
Currently waiting on an operation which should massively improve things but I have a lot of sickness

Yes and then sanctioned for not being able to get job at all. All this pressure on top of living on fuck all and being disabled at the same time.
It is no wonder some people are talking about suicide.

So, 30 years ago say, when we didn't have loads of people like your partner on disability benefits for mental health problems, were death rates a lot higher ? Or street homelessness ? I don't think we did (very willing to be proven wrong) so what did they do back then? I think the big institutions/asylums had closed by then so they weren't living there, where were they ?

Does it matter? That poster is worried to death about her partner due to stuff happening right now?
What wold be gained about wondering about the past?

I hope you get an op date soon.

But if you are classed as disabled you will get PIP.

or he'd find a way to deal with OCD and depression, esp given how advanced medication is

Well that doesn’t quite follow through according to this:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/03/17/more-than-one-million-foreigners-claim-benefits/

£7.5 billion in benefits a year to households comprising at least one foreign national.

The highest amount of disability claims from people aged 16+ are from Bangladeshi/Pakistani nationals - White British make up only 28% of claims.

researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-9602/CBP-9602.pdf

Still Starmer and his supporters will place the blame on lazy, workshy, native Brits because they are too cowardly to address the elephant in the room.