Benefit Levels

People keep citing these huge amounts that people get on benefits in the UK. Single men getting £12-14,000 per year and having no incentive to work was being cited by some Tory on BBC's Question Time on Friday. Fucking hell! I get £4,800 in Income Support including the top-up for being ill. I get about £4,400 in Housing Benefit - about £9,200 in total. I don't know what people do to get so much more! I really don't. As far as I can make out there is no way for me to fiddle the system even if I did lie my arse off, and risk prosecution. I give the relevant agencies my information, they tell me what I get and I have fuck-all to say about it. I guess my accommodation is pretty cheap - £320 per month - but all of that goes directly to my landlord, and it is cheap because I live with five other adults (four middle-aged bachelors). My standard of living is determined by the IS. Out of that comes all my bills, telephone, food, clothes, everything. It's not exactly the lap of luxury, I get by because I walk everywhere, don't own a car. I don't have holidays. I don't have an ipod or a flash computer. I have a PAYG mobile I put £5 on every couple of months and only use it for texts and incoming calls. My luxury is that I buy second books to read, mostly from charity shops.

So perhaps a review is in order if people are getting so much more than me, but why do I have this sinking feeling that I'm the one who's going to end up with LESS!?

GPs suddenly competent

The government, past and present, has never been confident that my GP is able to assess my fitness for work and has taken that responsibility out of their hands - so that the responsibility rests with a privately employed GP (salary?) who sees me once, for 45 minutes, prods me a few times and asks a couple of questions, and with no continuity or history, no x-rays or referrals to specialists or reports from psychologists (I repeated gave them the contact details for my psychologist and they have never contacted her) or any of that other broad base that my GP works from.

But now, now the GPs are competent to run the entire NHS!

NHS 'to undergo radical overhaul' (BBC)

Why not go the whole hog and let my physician make the decisions that so deeply affect my life rather than a stranger! They've been treating me for eight years now, they haven't always been able to help, but that very fact is an important part of the picture when it comes to my fitness to work. Give my GP the right to assess my benefit claim!

Could you live decently on £14,400 a year?

Head line from the BBC.

A salary of £14,400 is the minimum a single person needs for an acceptable standard of living, according to research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF).

I which case I'm about £5,000 short of an acceptable standard of living!

Now Show - 31.3 Benefits

>The Now Show last Friday opened with a segment on benefits claimants. As usual it mixed fact and funny. An mp3 of the segment is here...

They mention the two different forms for reporting tax evasion (to HMRC) and benefit theft to the DWP. Here's what they look like:

I'd like to try for a transcript at some point as well.

One gem: "tax fraud costs 15 times as much as benefit fraud."

The real cost of the Budget

So the Guardian scoops today:

Budget will cost 1.3m jobs - Treasury Exclusive:
Leaked government data concerning next five years shows hidden costs of austerity drive.

So where are those millions of jobs for those currently on incapacitated going to come from?

~

The BBC has picked up on it:

Forecast suggests 600,000 public sector jobs to go.
Some 600,000 jobs are expected to be lost in the public sector over the next five years, the Office for Budget Responsibility has said.

Leaked Treasury documents had suggested last week's Budget could increase unemployment by up to 1.3 million.

A laugh?

If you are in need of a laugh, and I know I do, then I recommend David Mitchell's Observer Column last week.

Whelk ice cream never meant we stopped being a Pot Noodle nation.

Our taste for fancy food that made us look like fine diners during the good times is now exposed as a canard.

It muses on the fact that being in a bust now, means we were in a boom before. Only none of us really noticed, did we? He pens this line wonderful:

We didn't really prioritise food. Like drunks at a urinal, we were splashing out because we were loaded.

Magic.

Millions of People Off Benefits?

Heard on the radio this morning that the aim of the government is "to get millions of people off benefits and into work". Let's look at some more official stats: (http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=12)

April 2010

employment : 28.86 million

unemployment : 2.47 million (7.9%)

claiming JSA : 1.48 million

unemployed 12 months+ : 772,000.

Inactive people : 8.19 million (i.e. working age, but not working)

That's relatively high unemployment - especially considering we've just had a boom. Has the bust affected us so much?

Now from the same page:

The number of vacancies for the three months to May 2010 was 492,000, up 7,000 over the quarter.

So for the 3 months to May there were roughly 500k jobs available when at any given time during that period there were roughly 1500k people seeking work, and another 1000k unemployed but not looking (bums like me). That's 3 people for every job going.

Now the government is pursuing a high unemployment strategy and expects (partially) incapacitated people to join the work force. My question is what the fuck are they talking about? Where are these millions of jobs coming from?

The government approach to benefits is to sweep it all under the carpet in a way that reduces welfare spending, but reduces welfare full-stop.