@AC 20:29

>immigrants are most defiantly not interested in benefits as they will not be entitled to them

Oh the irony, we are discussing people claiming benefits they are not entitled to and one of your arguments is that illegal immigrants are not entitled to benefits. They are not entitled to work neither yet you claim that is what they go for, you seem to be confused and negating your own arguments. If they are looking for work then why do they pass through at least two other countries on their way to the UK? What makes the UK so attractive? High paid menial jobs?

Whatever illegal immigrants are entitled to do or claim is totally irrelevant, what matters is what they believe they are going to find.

Me and my partner haven't had a decent holiday in 4 years

maybe you shold have worked harder at school and god a better job then!

I had a couple of great holidays last year.

People like you with a crappy poorly paid jobs whinging and whining about how life isn't fair cos better people than you have better lives really make me sick.

Not another one...

You REALLY think it's easier to live on housing benefit and JSA? REALLY? As opposed to minimum wage (~£200 after tax, PLUS ~$50 a week working tax credits)? Really? That's what you think? And your unemployed 'friends' would rather do that would they? If they were real people?

In some cases, yes

For a single person in my area

JSA - £67.50 per week (£3510 per year)

Council Tax Benefit for a band A property with single person discount (£750 per year)

Housing Benefit £150 per week (£7800)

Total benefits £12060. To take home that, you would need to earn £14261.24 plus the cost of getting to work plus the value of any healthcare benefits. That is at least £7.31 per hour for a 7.5 hour day, a bit more than the minimum wage.

A single mother with three children (all amounts £ per week, £ per year)

Job Seeker's Allowance 67.50, 3510

Child tax credit 157.22, 8175.44

Housing Benefit (3 bed house) 207.69, 10799.88

Council Tax Benefit (band D property, single person discount) 21.73, 1129.96

(plus child benefit which you get whether you work or not so not relevant)

Total relevant benefits £23,615.28 per year, plus health care benefits, free school meals and various other education related benefits.

To take home that, you would need to earn at least £31254.29 per year, which is quite a bit above the median wage, and considerably higher than minimum wage.

@Matt 89

Yes. There are people who don't want to work. The same people didn't want to work BEFORE the recession. Employers can ask for a lot more in a candidate than they could in 1999-2005 and still get a decent number to interview. Not surprisingly, they interview the ones who want to work, not the ones whose applications make it clear they are just applying "because the Job Centre told them to".

Sorting out the tax and benefit system would help: whatever your circumstances are, there should be a certain level of earnings where benefits and allowances are exactly cancelled out by tax. At the moment there is no step between the government paying you over £3000 a year not to work and you forking out NI and Council Tax from a low wage you have actually earned.

lmao

"thirty or forty people out for interviews for *every* job vacancy, the odds of them actually getting work are pretty bloody slim."

interview much?? any decent job is going to have at Least 40 applicants. stop with the EXCUSES. anyway, if you do 40 interviews you can expect to bag one job, on average... so do ten a week and within a month you have a job ??

@Jason Hall

Perhaps it is then time to simplify the system - more complex = more opportunities to avoid tax.

Getting tired of all this downvoting

ok ok, to all you lot that seem to think everyone on Benfits is , owed a living

Tell me, how would you Save £160,000,000,000 a year, and thats just how much we borrow from the bank, every year, all current taxes would need to remain the same or you would need to save even more than the 160 billion. So go for it, tell me how you are going to save the country, your all very keen on downvoting anyone who thinks stopping people claiming benifits who shouldnt get them is a good idea, your all probably the same folk who downvote people who suggest major changes in the biggest money sucker of them all, the public sector (inc the NHS)

so im curious, how are you going to pull back £160billion, once youve done that perhaps you can think about the other £4 Trillion including future pensions, of debt we are all ready in, any ideas?

everything in moderation

Time limited benefits is not the answer.... if you haven't noticed alot of areas aren't hiring, unless you count 10 hours a week as gainfully employed?

Toughen up on what counts as looking for work to maintain JSA (one application a fortnight is not searching for work). Redeploy some of these Council staff that are on the way out as "follow up advisors" to sort those that genuinely tried to get the job vs those that sit there and say "I won't work if you do hire me" (I know lots that do this). And you are keeping the system for those that are playing by the rules properly.

But ...

What are you going to do with those that do say "I won't work if you do hire me"? Let them starve, penniless on the streets - or, more accurately, encourage them into criminal behaviour? There is nothing effective that a truly humane society can do with people with that mind-set, so just accept it. Such people are in a very, very small minority, and are just noise in the system.

Unfortunate

It is unfortunate, but the massive expanse of the Public sector and the benefits under Labour were and are unsustainable. The ferryman now wants paying and so, as usual, those at the bottom of society will get screwed. The best choices are not necessarily being made but you can't keep borrowing on new sovereign credit cards to pay your current bill.

@AC

Please dispense with the bank bashing - it's another sideshow. We were living well beyond our means before they went arse up and, although they made matters worse, big cuts would still need to have been made as revenues were down and expenses kept rising.

nope

we're not in this situation because of the banking system, we are in this situation because Labour took one of the best balances this country has had and shafted it.

Borrowing has skyrocketed since they came in.

why?

because they said they would do this and that, that all costs money, where did you think it came from?

elections are now ironic, they compete with each other on how much more of our money they are going to spend... its really rather stupid when you think about it, they more they promise the more they have to take from us... or as in Labours case, the more they have to borrow from the bank

intrestingly, we will make quite a bit of money out of the banks now that we own a sizeable chunk of them, once that all plays out we will be in a slightly better place, but we wil still be sticking over £100 Billion every year on to a credit card!! Does nobody see this is stupid???

Radical reform required

The entire benefit and tax system is broken. We need to address it with a brainstorming approach. That is to say: all ideas on the table however crackpot. They are not there to be shot down. If anyone proposed the current system that would certainly be shot down as absurd, unfair on both the working and the claimants. The aim is to look for the positive aspects of all the crackpot ideas and look for a solution that will probably still be short of perfect but captures many of the positive aspects and minimises the negative.

An example might be something like this: everyone gets £X000 a year from Govt - enough for subsistence lifestyle BUT everyone pays tax at quite a high rate so there comes a point, maybe £20k where the £X000 has all been reclaimed in tax. The admin cost of taking with one hand and giving back with the other is high, the biggest beneficiaries of the current arrangements are the middlemen - public sector (tax admin) who cream off their generous slice in exchange for doing their job badly. Merge Tax and NI, NI is not insurance it is income tax. Running two separate tax gathering schemes is bonkers (costly). Brown got away with "no basic rate tax increase" by shoving the increase onto NI instead. NI is a sliding scale but there's a maximum so high paid pay proportionatley less. Yes I know you can see immediate problems - like multi-occupant households with shared expenses benefit disproportinately, how do we address the cost of having a kid but remember this is brainstorming.

Having said that our biggest problem is public sector. They've been on the gravy train for a decade. Not only do salaries now exceed private sector for equivalent jobs, they come with a generous and largely hidden benefit package. Now the hard times have arrived they'll not give an inch. Forget MP expenses, its a headline grabbing sideshow. It was a condoned fiddle to keep the MPs salaries looking low, a few fiddled rather more than had been intended at a cost of a few million a year. Our problem is about billions not millions. Private sector has mostly lost final salary pensions, over the last decade, teachers, having presided over the failure of the education system, are threatening strike over any change to their pensions. Bad at your job private sector, you'll lose it, public you don't. Private sector: to succeed you'll take work home, Public sector you'll succeed by making a name for yourself with a high profile over-interpretation of legislation, using it to spectacularly catch the small fry for minor infractions. Private sector: Forget the working hours directive, that only applies to hours in the workplace. Public sector: 9-5 with statutory coffee and lunch breaks. Even a McDonalds burger flipper on statutory minimum is expected to complete home study booklets - and gets no extra pay for working unsocial hours. Try that one on a public sector "worker"!

Shoesmith on £130k - as head of an organisation in chaos and failing to deliver what it's paid for, private sector she'd have "been given the opportunity to resign" even if she were a cabinet minister with responsibility for a failing department (about the same salary) she'd return to the back benches (half the salary). If she had any decency she'd have tendered her resignation in response to the death of "baby P" or else when Ofstead reported "insufficient strategic leadership and management oversight". If reports are correct that she's in line for £2.5m unfair dismissal compensation - well that would buy a lifetime annuity of £100k-£150k p.a. Better pay than if she was working.

@AC 10:12GMT

Your idea about a minimum amount given to each adult member of society is known as the "Citizen's Income", or variations on that theme. It is definitely an idea that needs serious consideration - if everyone gets enough to live on (just), then there is no question of fraud.* The down side is that it would almost certainly need identification tied to the person, and therefore identity cards would be back on the agenda. It would remain to be seen whether the Citizen's Income would be enough to answer the question "What is the benefit of the ID card to the individual".

* One of my first academic papers was written on this topic.