Welfare spending to rise by £73.2bn to £406.2bn

[topicalaffair]

Over the next five years, the OBR is forecasting that UK welfare spending will rise by £73.2bn to £406.2bn.

How does everyone feel about this? I’m livid because I pay lots of tax. I don’t mind paying tax to maintain a civilised society - but this? This is surely taking the piss and will result in weaker and weaker services as the amount of £ available reduces day by day.

YANBU - it’s totally deranged. The every growing uk population can’t function effectively on such a benefits for all basis.

YABU - this welfare spending bill is truly representative of need.

If they were so easy to get, they'd get the first time around and not the third time, surely?

Well, from the way you were posting, you'd think it was the simplest thing in the world 🤷‍♀️

They'd be given training, along side qualified people. If they didn't have the aptitude for learning they'd be employed in lower level roles within the childcare system. Helpers, etc.

All these people on benefits would be employed as additional help (alongside qualified full time career people) maybe one of two days a week depending on how much benefit you were receiving. Clearly you're not going to expect anyone to work a full 35 hrs week for £75 or whatever unemployment benefit is. They might just work one or two days.

The idea of getting money to sit at home wouldn't exist.

Bang On

From personal experience (I was and am not the young person) your description there is correct.
Also, and not in all cases of course, there is the risk of them doing some dealing or holding and passing on packages etc . They would get money for that too.
I am 60 now and thought it was tough in the 1980s, workwise , but this is much worse than it was then

My brother is bipolar, and he has to have a monthly depot injection of a strong antipsychotic medication to keep it under control.

For the first couple of weeks after his shot, he's like a bloody zombie. His speech is slurred, his mental functions are really slow, his memory is shot and he sleeps about 16 hours a day. Then he has a week or so of being pretty normal, before his mood becomes extremely elevated and he starts having delusional thoughts. I can tell where in the cycle of medication he is just by talking to him on the phone for a couple of minutes.

It's bloody hard to think of a job he could do, or at least do safely. And he has Raynauds disease, so couldn't even take up basket weaving!

He's 60 now, and hasn't worked since he was about 28, when he had his 3rd manic episode.

Are you suggesting he is the only quadriplegic in the UK capable of working? What unique circumstances would cause that to be the case? If you are going to fly that argument, you need to be able to evidence it.

It is perfectly apparent that plenty of workplaces can accommodate employees with significant physical disabilities. Not all workplaces, but many can. Particularly given that recent building regs require provision for disability access, the rise of remote working, knowledge work, part time / condensed hours arrangements - these all facilitate a work environment suitable for people with physical disabilities.

So please could you detail the circumstances that would make this individual’s circumstances unique, rather than in fact being a workplace provision that could be offered to many physically disabled people across the UK?

And you don't suggest giving them a full time job with a proper wage because...?

You mean yearly increases, which others also get in their salaries and benefits?

Workers don’t always get annual salary increases, why would you think that? We have wage stagnation…

More social housing. Stop the huge amounts of housing benefit paid to private landlords.
What you gonna do with pensioners op?

This.

The vast majority of 'welfare' is spent on pensions for pensioners.

Better health outcomes for poorer people would go a long way towards cutting the need for benefits and support services - as a nation, we’re getting sicker younger and younger. The rapid acceleration of under 60s in my county accessing adult social care for conditions like diabetes, obesity and alcohol-related illness leading to mobility issues, respiratory diseases from smoking and environmental or workplace pollution as well as failing mobility generally is terrifying. I see case after case after case of poorly-educated people on low incomes sick from years of shit food, fags, booze, back-breaking, underpaid work that didn’t enable them to raise a pension pot, little awareness of self-care, no access to education or knowledge-building to actually help them take better care of themselves and no real inclination or incentive to improve their lot in life.

And, actually, I don’t fucking blame them for anything either. Poor people in deprived areas have been dealing with shit all their lives - they’re fucking exhausted and many are, quite literally, just waiting to die…. especially the more elderly among them sitting around in shitty ‘care’ homes at £1,500 a week where they have to languish in their urine-soaked clothes for hours before the overworked, poorly-paid staff get around to dealing with them… while the owners and private equity stakeholders of these places swan about in £200,000 cars and fuck off to the Caribbean for two months every summer.

Being poor and ill is essentially hanging onto your mere survival by your fingertips and no amount of successive Government hand-wringing or new initiatives will make a fucking snot of difference to that bald fact unless a major revolution takes place in the way public services are funded, managed and delivered and commercial/corporate profit is erased from the equation.

@Gall10
that’s right….blame pensioners again. No mention of child social services, broken families, family courts, SEN provision in schools, motability cars for young people (yes, I know I’ll get pilloried for this),

For god sake it’s not blaming pensioners to acknowledge that an ageing population leads to higher welfare spends.
Also why do you think mobility car eligibility is based on age? I think the average user is 50 something.

Who qualifies as 'the rich'?

I don’t care how many applications / appeals it takes. I care that we are picking up an ever increasing benefits bill, whilst our economy stagnates, for a number of claimants who, on closer examination, I expect would be perfectly able to work if benefits were not a lifestyle choice

Agree. Apparently some GP's refer to it as ' shit life syndrome'. I see it a lot in my job and agree it's a massive problem.

PIP is not an out of work benefit.
There is also not enough job vacancies for people who are actively looking, let alone throwing disabled off of benefits and expecting them to look to.

For balance, I’ll add our pensions bill also needs to be brought under control. We cannot maintain the triple lock, and I believe the state pension should be means tested (people like me should not be eligible, as I’m able to save for my own retirement)

Would this apply to fathers out of work too or just the mothers?

Why not train them and pay them properly instead?

To be clear - I expect a number of PIP claimants could work if they were put in a position where they had to

They would still be claiming PIP though, as it is not an out of work benefit.

I worked in welfare rights before I retired. The small team I worked on had never lost a PIP appeal - not a single one - out of around 250.

I suspect that the success rate of PIP appeals would be even higher if everyone had access to a specialist benefit adviser.

charl "Stay at home benefit mums should be organised to work in creches providing childcare for working parents." That's asking for massive trouble.

I only want people who are keen and qualified looking after my kids thank you very much.

In more than one way.

Only applying it to women who are out of work is also problematic.

It also just screams of "you are not capable of anything else - go and work with kids".
The same gets said of care work too.
No one should be forced to work with the most vulnerable.

If these jobs exist, why can't we just pay them for them rather than getting them to work for their benefits?