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.

For men and women?

Is most of it going on rent for a property they have no say to live in? If they leave that property will they be called intentionally homeless? Some temporary accommodation rents are £350+ a week and you can’t refuse. You will be seen as making yourself homeless and your children could be out in care.

@XenoBitch yes we need more social housing. I still don’t think we should pay housing benefits for someone living in their own house with a mortgage.

@ComtesseDeSpair I don’t think you can compare us to other countries tbh. We have a very unequal housing market & benefits aren’t linked to what you have paid in.

But the government is still providing money that pays someone’s mortgage.

It makes no sense for the government to be happy to pay money towards a landlord’s mortgage but not towards someone who lives in their own mortgaged home.

This is privileging landlords over owner-residents.

Yes of course it’s a lot.

If I lost my job and had to rely solely on benefits then I’d receive less than half of that as a single parent.

Unless a lot of this is childcare or disability payments then I never understand how people claim they receive so much.
I don’t know anyone in RL that receives this much benefit.

No it's not but I'll question who on benefits gets that ..on one I know... unless you live on benefits you no idea how hard it is...food or heating is literally the decision....

It really depends on how many people there is in the household and their level of health, plus where in the country.
But... does anyone really get £30000 per year on benefits? And how?

How on earth have you inferred that?

And you would prefer housing benefit to be available to all home owners with a mortgage? WOW, that’s one way to increase the benefits bill 😆

People on UC with their own mortgage do not get long term help and it is a loan for the interest only. It is literally keeping the wolves away from their door. Like I said, plenty of people lose their homes when they go on UC.

No one on UC is getting the capital on their house paid off.... apart from private landlords with benefit claimants as tenants.

Once a child turns 18 the benefits drop dramatically. The parents with disabled children who will never be able to work will still have to care for them. Perhaps even more as they will no longer be at school. They will however have considerably less money. Their Carers Allowance will be deducted from their benefits and the Carers Premium in UC does not cover that deduction.

A single parent would receive roughly £400 per month plus their rent which will probably not all be covered depending on the Local Housing Allowance so the shortfall will also be deducted from their UC. They will be getting nowhere near £30, 000.

I am so tired of these threads. So many people have no idea what life is actually like on benefits and believe all the rage bait headlines they read in the tabloids.

They used to back in the early 80s.

You could get money towards the interest element of your mortgage included in supplementary benefit, the forerunner to income support. Iirc, they calculated it at a standard rate, and you got your actual interest or what it would be at the standard rate, whichever was lower.

If it’s true as a pp said that an adult in the family is disabled and so are several children, then that family will be recieving way more than 30k. It sounds like PIP and DLA were not included in the amount. That family won’t be in poverty.

It’s why the US is an interesting and informative example: welfare in the US isn’t linked to your tax contributions in quite the same way as it is in e.g. Norway or Germany, and housing demand in HCOL areas is on a similar level to the U.K.; but their model of providing housing payments to owner-occupiers has shown successful outcomes.

It makes no sense for the government to be happy to pay money towards a landlord’s mortgage but not towards someone who lives in their own mortgaged home

It makes sense because they sold off a load of social housing & haven’t built enough. People still need to be housed or where do you think they should go? It’s just another element that has been outsourced.

I think they should have a modest amount of help to keep the show on the road because not helping will mean them losing their home and requiring more expensive help.

And what if there was a ton of equity in the property which they could release by selling?

This is the real question.
The children shouldn’t suffer, but whichever side you come down on, it will undoubtedly be the kids who suffer.

True

This kind of reply - deliberate misinterpretation, accusation and then an exclamation is so common on here.

It's either some kind of AI program churning out shite or posters using a hackneyed format to hammer home an agenda.

How likely is that? Most people won't own a property. If they are a young family, their mortgage is probably 70+% of the equity.

Oh god I heard that, seemed total rage bait tbh, she had 6 kids, all SEN, she didn’t work, partner also didn’t work as “disabled”. Whatever he had wrong didn’t stop his cock functioning clearly.

As for the money. Plenty of people take that home for working full time. It’s not a lot to raise that number of kids, but I’m not sure what else people expect for doing nothing.

This. People who work and get universal credit are not raking in loads of "extras".

You still do now, the issue is the interest is now generally a tiny part of the monthly payment and you’ll soon be in serious debt in with help paying the interest

How will they have less money? If the young person is disabled and unable to work they will get UC + LCWRA ( although LCWRA for new claimants is reducing from April ) + PIP themselves which will likely work out to way more than the parent got for them on UC. It's just a matter of working out what that young person pays their parents towards their keep and care. As a household they are not going to be worse off. The parents would only be significantly worse off if the young person moved into residential care for example.

The work allowances and taper rates seem very generous to me but then people have to be incentivized to work apparently.