Is receiving £30k pa on benefits “living in poverty”?!

[ChumpWizard]

Amol Rajan BBC R4 Today was in Colchester this week. Great interviews but one thing had me wondering.

Is receiving c£30,000 pa on benefits “living in poverty”? That’s the equivalent of a FT job earning c£40-£42k Pa.

how could you have minimum wage job with student loan?

I work full time and don’t earn 30k , I wish !

In my previous role (LA) most had degrees but the job is currently advertised with a salary of £26,000 - £29,000.

I support 99% of PIP claims. Especially for physical health issues. But I feel very occasionally the PIP given is not needed.

I know a recent graduate who received max maintenance loan (and for extra for being autistic), DSA and PIP for autism. The PIP is for "help socialising". And he has so much from sfe, he put loads into savings. Now he uses his pip to half pay for driving lessons and half give to his parents.

Another person I know another young adult on PIP just works part time at a desk job and uses PIP to go gallivanting around the UK and exploring lots of it. Good on him for having fun, but surely he can work FT and then travel?

With UC I know many families who have no ambition, don't care about school, don't push their kids at school and just claim whatever they can and have no real ambition to improve their situation.

Isn’t there a benefit cap? Either way, this family must have a lot of children, and disabilities to claim this much, so I’m not jealous of them.
also rents have risen dramatically, including social rents which is shocking really.

I’m sure there will be plenty more benefits bashing threads when COL increases again!

If you worked over 40hrs a week
plan 1 threshold is £26,065 so not masses over

No. Poverty is defined as a household income less than 60% median household income which google tells me is 36700. So around 22k household income is the poverty line.

Minimum wage is nearly 25k now. Repayment threshold is 21k. So yes you will be paying something if you are FT minimum wage.

I don't think it's benefits bashing to question a system in which people who can't work due to illness can have an additional three children, despite already having three, and be given money to do so.

Many people would love to have big families but accept they cannot afford to do so. Others sadly find themselves falling ill and unable to work after already having children. That isn't the case here.

Loads do. Not everyone goes to university to study hard, make useful connections, gain useful work experience and secure a good job at the end of the degree.

Plenty goes to uni when they shouldn't. Either due to lack of academic ability, wrong temperament for the environment (the ones that spend more time in the counsellor's office than the lecture room). Or those who go there for the student lifestyle or because it's expected by everyone around them that they'll go, often taking a largely useless degree with no practical elements for any specific job.

Either way, if any of these people pass, it's often gaining only a so-so level of qualification, meaning they're not sought after by employers but overqualified for many jobs. These are the ones who struggle to find work of any kind. They're possibly also not looking too hard because that's their mindset, having gone to university mainly to avoid getting a job for 3 years, in some cases. Or have a huge sense of entitlement about what job they ought to have, because they went to uni and think it makes them special. Eventually they'll end up in something minimum wage after being unemployed for a while and their parents getting pissed off with supporting them.

Edited to delete a bit because I cross posted with someone with more accurate information

Yes makes me cross when my own dds are bringing up dc, working and having small families

illness never seems to stop irresponsible procreation

I didn't agree with the 2 child cap being removed either

These is such a tedious, hackneyed response trotted out as a “gotcha” on these threads. Of course this individual family can’t send their children back; the point is that the case raises questions about a system which incentivises people like this couple to keep having more children when neither is working and they knew full well at the point that the younger ones were conceived that (1) the older ones had disabilities and therefore would need more care and (2) neither of them had any prospect of getting a job if they kept having more kids.

But did you go on to have three more once it became clear that neither you nor your husband could continue to work due to his condition and you child’s needs? That’s what the family in this case did.

Yes, although it depends on circumstances. If you're in a household with 6+ kids then 30k is probably going to be quite close to poverty. Our benefits system is way too generous in the vast majority of cases.

Ah no i didn't.

I agree in my situation my eldest is autistic but is fine working and independent my middle is also autistic and mild learning disability but that didn't really begin to become obvious until after my third was born he is the one that has the most difficulties i honestly feel if my third was first I would have stuck to one as sad as it sounds I think my middle child will struggle but ultimately he will get on with support my third may well need lifelong support

People's circumstances can change dramatically. If your husband/partner dies or ups and leaves, you can easily end up in that position. Where I live, the average (private) rent for a 3-bed place is £1,900 a month. If you can't move out of area for work or other reasons, you just have to suck it up while you look for somewhere cheaper.

If the state pension were to be uprated by earnings only instead of the triple lock per ONS / IFS data the annual savings would be:

2027-28 £6bn
2028-29 £11.1bn
2029-30 £15.5bn
2030-31 £18bn
2031-32 £21bn
2032-33 £24bn
2033-34 £27bn
2034-35 £30bn
2035-36 £33bn
2036-37 £36bn

If implemented from April 2029, this could fund:

• doubling of early-years funding
• removal of the worst marginal tax trap at £100k by making the personal allowance and childcare funding universal again
• make child benefit universal again
• significant lowering of the UC taper rate

This would significantly improve standards of living and remove perverse economic incentives and increase tax revenue and growth.

If the state pension were to be means-tested and tapered away so that those with household income over £40k after tax and housing costs (i.e. significantly more than most working families with children to support) then this would save £100bn per year which could almost double both our education and defence budgets. Nearly 30% of those in receipt of state pension welfare are millionnaires. It is the most wasteful public spending, by far, while everything else has been stripped to the bone at the expense of young people’s futures.

If this country is ever going to have rising living standards and prosperity again then a significant redirection of public spending must take place focusing on young people. 15% of the population is over 65 yet they consume over 50% of public spending - far more than they paid as a cohort in lifetime taxes in real terms. We cannot afford to continue this largesse to those in that cohort who do not need it.

Or maybe one parent works full time and earns £26k - 28k, and the other parent works part time and earns £2 - 4k annually... ...

Everyone who has worked full time since leaving school should be entitled to the state pension. They have paid for it. It is a pittance compared to pension rates paid elsewhere in Europe, and any other income over £12,570 is liable for income tax. It is expensive now because the post war generation of Boomers was enormous, but they will die. And the costs of pensions will decline.

Do you really want a million geriatrics wandering around on the streets in all weathers? The young and old are the most expensive bits of the population. We don't expect children or their parents to pay for education because the costs will be recovered once they begin work. But no society has ever had to deal with a huge number of geriatric people, until now and we are feeling our way to doing so.

In my lifetime, and I am nearly 70, most people died within a few years of finishing work. Now some do (Dame Jenny Murray was only 75) and some don't (my DF is 92 and lives with dementia, but his wife copes -- very very bravely). My DM died without any illness or trauma at 89. She worked, because she needed to earn money, until she was 78 years old, but not FT, as a carer in a MH team.

I really object to the casual denigration of older people as parasites.

I can def think of a few in that camp !

She says no small kids. Not sure if means no kids or older kids

So if have kids then at school meaning can and should work full time

The taper rate means that you effectively lose more than you keep of any extra earnings. Then maybe factor in the cost of actually doing the extra hours - travel, parking, childcare. In some cases you barely break even. For all the pontificating about incentives who would go and do extra work at the cost of time with their family to end up either no better off or only keeping a few pounds? Not the people who consider £80k to be struggling by I'll bet. UC keeps people in their place and prevents the less well off from progressing and building a future because most won't achieve the kind of pay needed to come off it altogether and will spend years tinkering round the edges with the odd fiver "better off" here and there and no real savings allowed anymore. Then it's an impoverished old age.