Cap on benefits to 26k- am I missing something?

[buggyRunner]

As far as I can gather it's the normal benefits ie housing/ cb and wtc. This seems like a large sum. Is it accross the board or does it include disability related benefits? Are the figures misleading?

BUT on all the benefit bashing threads, I DO make the point that Tax Credits are just a business subsidy that allows employers to pay LESS than a living wage, TheRhubarb. So someone IS yelling about this all over MN. ME. And I DON'T currently work. Doesn't mean that I can't see how hard it is for those that DO work and are just over the thresholds, because I can. And I AM trying to raise awareness on here that if you could get employers to pay a LIVING WAGE, then the Welfare bill would reduce DRAMATICALLY overnight. Because 80% of Housing Benefit claimants are employed. And Tax Credits wouldn't be necessary AT ALL if employers paid a LIVING WAGE.

And I have been yelling this to all and sundry on MN since BEFORE the election. So PLEASE don't tell me that no-one is concerned about this. I am. And so are the rest of the frothers.

Hunty, I don't think any of us are saying that you do not deserve the benefits you have. But at the risk of sounding unsympathetic, your financial plight really isn't that different to those who work.

You have around the same amount of money left each month as many working people do. Dh and I often go overdrawn at the end of each month.

So whilst I DO sympathise about them cutting benefits, I can see that wages have already been cut, WFTC is under scrutiny and we are all having to make sacrifices. No, you don't deserve it but neither does anyone else.

My sister has a child with Downs Syndrome. She gets the car and petrol paid for, a holiday income every year, money for a cleaner, free school meals for all the children, etc. So you are at one end of the spectrum and she is at the other. They are all going on holiday to Canada this year, they have a nice new car and quite a bit of expendable income.

Personally I think everyone's needs should be assessed every year but that costs time and money and it's cheaper for the government to just cap all benefits.

I don't think that's the right action and I don't think people like you deserve it. But your financial plight is no worse than mine.

And I appreciate your frothing on our behalf.
I've done a fair bit of public frothing myself but somehow it always ends up as a benefits debate rather than anything else.

I do fully sympathise with the unemployed. Those in employment have NO idea about the jobs situation. They see local jobs in their paper yet do not see the hundreds of applicants for those jobs. Unless they started applying themselves they cannot understand the situation.

Like I said further up, when I was out of work I was applying for jobs I was qualified to do and had experience in, but I didn't even get a letter of acknowledgement. Only then did I realise how bad the situation was. I'm registered with PeoplePerHour and sometimes they are in excess of 60 bids for one job. I've not yet had a single successful bid.

Yes, of course, TheRhubarb. I totally have the same amount of money left over at the end of the month. . I don't have any additional expenses to come out of that 'disposable income' than you do. And that's why I am struggling to buy school trousers for DS1. And why my DD got a detention because I couldn't afford the £1.50 she was told to take in for some bloke talking about WW1 - I couldn't afford it until the day AFTER the last day it had to be in by. Voluntary contribution my arse. And why she is getting marked down in her cookery lessons (which is,incidentally, a REALLY BAD THING, as she wants to do catering as a career) because I can't afford the expensive ingredients they keep asking for. Like vanilla EXTRACT rather than vanilla essence. Which costs £6 for a bottle she needed a TEASPOON from. She took in vanilla essence, and lost marks because she didn't have the correct ingredients, so she "wasn't following the exact recipe". Which could affect her chances of being placed in the top set for catering GCSE next year, and ultimately affect whether she is EVER going to be employable, due to her SN. If she can't get into the catering course she wants to do at college, then she will be virtually unemployable. As her SN leave her with a below-functional ability in mathematics, it is the ONE thing she can do, and do well.

I want her to be able to work when she leaves college. Not be reliant on a non-existant welfare system.

Yeah, I'm rolling in it.

Sorry, that sounded snippy. I apologise.

A new supermarket opened in my town. There were 300 FT and PT jobs available there. They ended up with over 6000 applicants. Separate applicants - NOT the same people applying for each job. So, doing the maths, 200 separate applicants for EVERY job.

I'd like to see those in employment apply for jobs using our local paper. They haven't had a SINGLE job in there for the last 17 weeks.

I didn't say you were rolling in it Hunty, but there is an assumption that working people have more disposable income than those on benefits.

For your info, my dd is also clothed in a second hand uniform that I had to buy from the lost property at the school (they sell it on). She's missed out on a school trip that we couldn't afford. She's also had to borrow cooking ingredients from friends because I'm damned if I'm buying a jar of honey just so she can take 2 tablespoons to school.
She also didn't get a gumshield or shin pads for her to participate in hockey and she is still waiting for us to buy her a German dictionary.

Neither of my children will go to Uni because they won't get the grant that is afforded to parents on benefits and unfortunately we cannot pay for their tuition fees.

This is not a competition about who has the most money, this is to say that whilst I sympathise that your benefits will be cut, I do think that some working families who are just above the threshold to get any state help are sometimes worse off.

That is the point I am trying to make. It was never aimed at you personally and I have full sympathy for your situation.

I think what people have to remember is that the ones who get over £26,000 in benefits are not actually "better off" than those getting less benefits. Most of this is about housing benefit and the only ones who are profiting from this are the land lords. It is not money in the pockets of the claimant. And the ones living in London are probably worse off over all because they have a higher cost of living. I'm guessing the posh places don't have as many pound shops :)

Is your DC3 over 1yo yet? And was he/she born before 31st January 2011? If so, it is because before that date you got an extra £545 a year added to your Tax Credits until your baby turns a year old. No-one whose baby was born AFTER 31st January 2011 gets that. MY DS3 was born a year ago yesterday, just squeaked in under the date, next week my Tax Credits that I currently get (as shown in the figures upthread) will drop by £10-ish a week.

Crap. I had forgotten that. Bugger.

spike you get more for a child under 1 it goes back down after first birthday.

Rhubarb I completely sympathise with your situation. I fell very strongly that benefits (eg free school meals) should be much more tapered than the all-or-nothing situation we often have.

But I don't understand your account of your sister's situation.

"My sister has a child with Downs Syndrome. She gets the car and petrol paid for"

Motability takes all of the DLA mobility payment in a straight swap for car hire, for 95% of users. There is no money left over for fuel. The other 5% of users pay a lump sum out of their own money and then car hire on top of that. For the cheapest models the car hire will be less than DLA, in which case the excess could be used on fuel.

"a holiday income every year"
Sorry? Do you mean she works during the holidays - because that's not a benefit.

"money for a cleaner"
Personal care element of DLA? Fair enough, cleaner does the house so your DSis can do the additional care for her DC.

"free school meals for all the children"
That's an income-related benefit so if she's eligible and you're not, she must have a lower family income than you (net of disability assistance) - unless her council have some very unusual rules.

"They are all going on holiday to Canada this year"
A bit difficult to understand, given the previous statement. But not odd for disabled people in general who may work and get DLA, or whose family may work.

I'm not asking you to justify all this - it was good of you to share. But I'm wondering if what you've shared is correct.

Nilgiri, I can only tell you what she has told me.
The car was partly paid for by the state and they get a fuel allowance because of her son's disability.
She also gets an allowance for holidays, so they have at least one paid holiday each year. This is because her family are known to social services, two of her children are adopted and apparently she gets some money given to her to take them all away every year, much as my mother gets money to take her foster kids on holiday (which she does, to Blackpool whilst later on in the year she swans off to Spain and Canada leaving them with other foster carers).

She works as an Avon seller and her dh does some accounting for other people. They have both publicly stated that they are very well off thanks to their son. I don't know much more about her personal income as I no longer speak to her due to the vile way in which she treats her children and other members of the family. But if anyone would take every single benefit going, it is she.

I made the point to illustrate how some play the system and give a bad name to those who claim and truly do deserve it.

My situation is that my dh moved down here to work for a well-known plant hire company as a digger driver. He was fairly well paid and only had to travel 5 miles. A year later they closed the depot and he was under threat of redundancy. He agreed to be relocated 30 miles away. That depot then announced that they had too many digger drivers for the work coming in, so he offered to be re-trained as a truck driver on a much lower wage.

That's where we are at now. He is travelling 60 miles a day to work with no travel allowance and at a wage much lower than he started out with.

I lost my job as a TA at the local school for kids with SN and after failing to find any other work, I started working from home. Some weeks I get £200 and other weeks, like this week, I'll get £50. Because my income is so varied there is no point in trying to claim benefits for the weeks I get hardly anything because I'd be forever filling in paperwork.

Unlike the public sector, we have no pension plans and if my dh went on strike over low pay he'd simply be laid off. No question about it.

We are all suffering big time, the only people who are doing well out of this recession are the private sector bosses who can get away with paying their workers sweet FA because they know that they've got them over a barrel.

Rhubarb I think I must say something about adoption our 4th child was in residential care when he was 5 (now 13) He is deafblind CP and epilepsy and was costing the taxpayer £5,000/week. He now gets just DLA and CTC (at highest rate) so we are saving the taxpayer money. Are you sure you have your facts right?

2old2beamum, I'm not going to delve into this too deeply because I know of her personal circumstances that can not be shared. However she has 4 kids, 2 are adopted (from birth) and are NT children who have behavioural issues at school that is entirely down to parenting. The adoptions were arranged by the catholic church without all the checks that would have rung alarm bells with any social worker. She then went on to have a natural son with Downs Syndrome and another boy my ds's age.

Far be it for me to slag off my own sister, but there are very good reasons why we no longer communicate. Her bragging about how much money she gets off the state and how her dh no longer needs to work because of all the benefits rolling in is just one of them.

Yes, I have my facts right. But that situation is, I hope, a rarity.
I'm not going to go into any more detail about my sister. Not every parent who has a child with SN is a saint. Not everyone who adopts should be allowed to do so. Not everyone who fosters does so with the best of intentions. I know this from personal experience and many many emotional scars.

Yep, thought there might be details like the car has a contribution from mobility benefits but isn't "free". And someone else paying for holidays, in this case for adopted and fostered DC.

Completely sympathise with your family situation - relocating and then having everything fall through is the nightmare scenario I think a lot of people are afraid of. You lose emergency childcare and other informal help, but don't get the job to make it worthwhile.

Re your varying income. Being self-employed is generally the devil's arse wrt benefits. However, it used to be possible to be work irregularly and still get top-ups (if appropriate), depending on average earnings and also on earnings in each fortnight. But it was so complicated even for a single person with no children that you could only contemplate it if the local benefits office were reliably competent. [bconfused]

2 adopted, none fostered nilgiri. She did say that the car was more or less paid for due to her son with SN. I presumed the hols were also because of this and not because they had adopted 2 kids?

It's my mother who does the fostering.

Here is why the benefits cap is the wrong way to solve the issue of benefits payments being too much for the taxpayer, and a LIVING WAGE, strict rent controls and a massive SOCIAL HOUSING building programme being the RIGHT way to reduce the Benefits Payments bill drastically:

IMO, the Welfare cap is unfair because the money mostly goes into the pockets of BTL LL's. BUT those BTL LL's that ARE renting to people on HB are making a PROFIT out of taxpayers money, while the TENANT will be left with not enough to live on.

OK, the profits from a BTL property may not be being realised NOW, but if they have bought them to gain additional income when they sell at retirement, to provide additional retirement income over and above the state pension, then they are GETTING A RETIREMENT INCOME DIRECTLY FROM THE TAXPAYER.

So the taxpayer will be paying their state pension and will ALSO have paid the mortgage on the property that will provide an ADDITIONAL retirement income, via tenants on HB. It is the equivalent of the taxpayer paying into a private pension fund for those BTL Landlords.

Meanwhile a lot of those tenants on HB won't even be ABLE to afford to pay into any sort of private pension BECAUSE of the horrific top-ups on HB due to the excessive rents.

The ONLY way to solve the homelessness crisis that is impending due to the benefits cap and lack of social housing is rent controls and a SOCIAL HOUSING building programme.

If that means that the pain is shared between some of those families on housing benefits (80% of whom work) in expensive houses having to move to a new house with cheaper rents, AND the BTL LL's that couldn't really afford to own and run a second home without the input of tenants on HB paying their mortgage costs for them having those houses repossessed, then it's all fair, isn't it, and the taxpayer is neither funding a 'wealthy' lifestyle (HA!) for housing benefit claimants (80% of whom WORK, remember) NOR funding a retirement income for BTL LL's.

We're all in this together, aren't we?

At least, David Cameron keeps telling us so?

There's no room for new housing estates, this green and pleasant land is fast becoming brown and polluted.

There are plenty of empty houses scattered around though that are owned by lazy councils or are hung onto by rich landlords. We shouldn't be building more but renovating the empty ones that we already have. And there needs to be tighter controls regarding landlords.

I'm also against holiday homes. I find it abhorrent that there are empty houses that are used as a summer retreat when many families are housed in B&Bs in the very same area because of a shortage of housing.

Beg pardon, Rhubarb, just picked that adoption/fostering as examples of reasons someone is offering holidays.

God knows who though. I only looked at this more closely because people can pick up what you say and run with it: "People with Down's Syndrome get free holidays!"

When that's not quite what you were saying.

Hunty, landlords are not getting a retirement income directly from the tax payer, that is crap.

They are providing a SERVICE mainly to people who rent PRIVATELY because many won't take HB. So the MAJORITY of landlords are getting NOTHING from the tax payer.

Those who do take HB are still providing a service, for which they have every right to make a profit on. They take a RISK. They make an INVESTMENT. Investments and risks do not always pay off.

You seem incredibly bitter and hellbent on assuming that BTL LL's are all milking it from HB tenants.

Even though on the other thread you accept that most LL's would rather not rent to HB tenants because it's lower than market rates and additional risk.

Do you understand that most landlords are not milking it. Any profit they make is exactly the same as when you buy any other goods/service from any other business. A profit they will pay taxes on to fund the very benefits system you are so vehemently trying to defend.

So do you have a problem with people making a profit at all or should they simply do it for the love of it?

I totally agree Rhubarb about too much building. In Bicester they are constantly building on green fields and making farmers sell up even when they don't want to and their business is viable.

What about flooding issues and having to import food.

I would like to see the councils taking a stand and actually looking at who is living in council properties and whether they are sub let which I think is something that is happening and re allocating such properties to waiting people.

I think some landlords have done well out of this but I think if I could afford another property i would probably do it. we are just too cautious.