[Ben Reeve
Lewis considers the problem of benefit scroungers – what should we do with them? …]
I work for a local authority. Things are tough. Like many local authorities we have another £30 million to find in cuts over the next year. Do we cut services or do we cut jobs? There’s the rub.
You just can’t win …
If you try to maintain services and jobs, then council tax goes up. Local residents kick off and so do government, saying the council is being inefficient.
If you cut jobs and services to make ends meet then again local residents kick off and so do government, this time saying the council is mis-managing.
So its basically un-winnable (Microsoft Word dictionary tells me that isn’t a word, but what the hell, lets enjoy ourselves).
But wait until 2013 …
Councils have long been stuck in this particular philosophical Moebius strip but come 2013 when Universal Credit is introduced everyone on benefits is going to be forced to make the same kinds of lose/lose decisions.
Who to pay first? Who shouts the loudest? Who threatens the most? Who among their creditors will be putting them on the street if they don’t pay them?
Of course the introduction of Universal Credit was made easier by the slow but persistent demonization of people on benefits that has taken place in the past few years.
‘Benefit scroungers’
Every newspaper and TV documentary trotting out their own stories of “Benefit scrounger with 10 children who says “I will never work”’ – “Woman too fat to sign-on” and “Foreigner claims sick benefit while world war 2 hero starves”.
Making it seem that everyone on benefits is like these extreme examples.
What people think
This week I came across the informative website “British Social Attitudes” who have been surveying the nation’s collective views in 2012
- Apparently 37% of Brits think people on the dole are fiddling
- 35% of Brits don’t think people on benefits deserve any help
- A huge proportion of the population believe that unemployed people could find jobs if they wanted to.
Now I’m not going to argue with those figures but I will flag up is how those perceptions are feeding government plans to deal with an unprecedented national deficit, caused by uncontrolled banking practices on people at the bottom end of everything, who had little to do with creating the crisis in the first place.
When reports talk in the billions of pounds it is obviously affecting, but beware of scapegoating (Another word that doesn’t get passed Bill Gates’s dictionary)
There are far more worthwhile targets draining the economy when it comes to wasting money than people surviving on £65 a week job seekers allowance whilst working cash in hand in a pub.
Shaking it all up
Universal Credit is the biggest shake up to benefit payments since they were introduced in 1948. Nobody would argue that benefits aren’t unnecessarily complex, or that there aren’t people scamming it out there, or that benefit culture doesn’t inculcate a certain air of dependency but its important to step back and see where these ideas are taking us.
Ask yourself this; if you want to inculcate financial self-responsibility in someone, the stated aim of Universal Credit, would you achieve it by simply dumping a monthly sum in their bank account to bring them into parity with most working people?
Frazzles and I are two of those bench-mark monthly paid working people and we struggle. Fortunately she gets her money on a different day to me so we are able to offset our joint incomes and leap frog each other through to our individual pay-days, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to survive.
Payment in arrears
Bear in mind that UC is going to be paid in arrears, when landlords reading this want rent in advance, so benefit claimants straight away are going to be in 1 month’s arrears. Rent arrears means landlord has trouble with the mortgage, so Universal Credit is going to affect you too, even though you aren’t on benefits.
Writing on this subject on Inside Housing the perceptive Jules Birch points out that since housing benefit caps were introduced last year homelessness applications have risen 44%
You see you can’t divorce these things. Housing benefit claimants? Bad eggs, all of them, scroungers, ne’er do wells, why not cut their benefits? Well because regardless of what you think of them, they have to go somewhere, and the only place they can go if landlords wont let to them is the homelessness unit.
We are all paying
Oh but wait a minute. If the hated, lazy and incompetent council have to pick them up, which by law they have to, doesn’t the debt get pushed on as well?
So we are all paying for it in more council tax, so lets not do it, lets just have more people sleeping on the street and then complain to our MPs that they aren’t doing their jobs because we have to see scag-heads weeing in doorways while we hop over the warm streams to buy some new shoes in Office or grab an ethically MSC fished Blue fin tuna sandwich in Pret.
Or buy the latest DVD of Glee or Desperate Housewives, to kid ourselves we live in a hyper-real world of bottoxed beauty so we can ignore the bloke in front of us with “Eat shit” hand-tattooed on his forehead.
An investment opportunity?
Maybe we are missing a point here though. What about turning people on benefits into a commodity? An investment opportunity? An idea picked up by Professor Alex Marsh on his excellent blog “Alex’s archives” who was a lone voice last week in noticing a comment made by Lord Fraud…..damn this sticky keyboard (Dontcha just love old jokes?) who said:
“We are anticipating the call for new financial products may open up a new market place, where competition is strong. And we are looking for a range of diverse providers to step forward to express an interest, as we work towards the introduction of Universal Credit in October 2013.”
So not only are benefits to be cut, they are also to be privatised? Turn the poor into a commodity like wheat. Sheer genius.
What it means for you
Yes I am ranting on behalf of the poor but before you turn off, just think of where this is going to lead for you?
Landlords, both private and social, need rents in order to maintain investment and develop. If Universal Credit is going to affect the poor, it is going to impact on landlords and others who they pay money to, such as phone companies or Tesco’s.
If PRS Landlords decide to wash their hands of benefit tenants (Why wouldn’t they, it’s a business after all) who is going to be picking those people up? The council that’s who, and how are they going to pay for it?
Another solution …
There is one solution of course. A solution that will solve all of the above conundrums……..Kill them. Kill every poor person who is deemed to be a drain on society.
Of course I jest, and I don’t expect a single reader to agree. In which case, take on board that when it comes to the poor, the mentally ill, the terminally bewildered, hell, even the lazy and the feckless, we shouldn’t be cutting them loose, disenfranchising them or blaming them for the failure of a bunch of arrogant coked-up 26 year old futures traders.
We are all in this together. If their finances go haywire, we will be paying for it in other ways.
We can’t really push one deficit elsewhere and make it go away. It’s a whole system that we need to keep in play, like one of those old variety act plate spinners.
The main difference between policy makers and real people is compassion. All I see in plans for UC is numbers and graphs, not one jot of empathy to be found.
Ben Reeve Lewis
Or your friend Barry Quirk the CEO of Lewisham could take a cut in his £192,000 per annum salary, which I bet you anything is going up this year.
What Universal Credit has to do, in my view, is to simplify the benefits system. At present it’s so byzantine that you half expect them to go to war with the Sassanid Persians. It shouldn’t need legal advice to straighten out benefit claims.
Oh I dont think anyone has a problem with the notion of simplifying benefits. Have you seen Zebedee’s benefits handbook? It makes the housing Case Law Handbook look like 50 shades of grey.
Also many people, me included, do get annoyed at the mindset of many benefit claimants, especially when I work around 70 hours a week on different projects. I know….I have to deal with them all day long but to my mind its not a good idea to stereotype them all as extras from Shameless. Also I just dont buy into the idea that giving them a single monthly payment is suddenly going to make benefit claimants good at managing money and I’m concerned about what will happen to homelessness, evictions, housing associations etc when the effects of this Don Quixote-like policy starts to bite.
Its like the whole social/voluntary/frpntline world who deal with homelessness, debt advice, etc are jumping up and down and waving at government while it walks smiling towards the cliff edge. I couldnt give a toss if they go over but what I resent is seeing how many people they are pulling over with them in the process
Another solution would be for councils to become landlord friendly, or even just landlord neutral.
Councils treating all landlords like the capitalist scum spawn of satan is not helping the situation (there are exceptions).
At this time in the rental market and with the forthcoming UC, councils are going to need landlords a lot more than the other way round.
HBW I have been writing all over the place on this very solution.
It really is the only way forward as far as I can see, short of massive governmental policy changes and more than a little re-jigging of the law itself and based on the ‘Rush-job’ legal work that the Condems have been coming out with I dont hold hope that it would work.
However the main fly in the ointment is getting councils across the country to start thinking outside the lead-lined box. A more difficult prospect than you would think
A very thought-provoking article Ben.
To say that the unprecedented national debt is caused by uncontrolled banking practices is wholly misleading. Bank bailouts have certainly made things worse, but they are excluded from the usual methods of calculating national debt and the budget deficit. With a current budget deficit of over £30bn year to date (excluding bank bailouts), cuts need to be made everywhere including the £90bn welfare bill (which incidentally has doubled in the last 20 years!).
Im not sure I agree with your assumption of the effect that Universal Credit will have on the Private Rented Sector. LHA is usually paid in arrears already, so moving to UC doesn’t really change anything in this regard.
If the system is easier to administer with a single monthly payment then isn’t that what people should receive? Welfare should be a very last resort and the state should not have to provide for the vagaries of everyone’s personal situations.
Unfortunately, when you’re talking about cuts to welfare, you are inevitably talking about who you do not want to pay benefits to, so someone is going to lose out. But if the Universal Credit reduces fraud and administrative overhead (as is claimed) then it’s already a winner in my book.
Well I certainly wont argue economics with you Jamie. I don’t know how they work out figures in terms of calculating the national debt, but as I said in my article I doubt it was caused by a single mum working cash in hand in a pub to make ends meet. Look at the libor scandal. My perceptions and observations are more on a small-scale human level.
I don’t think anyone would argue that the investment banking industry, over pricing mortgage values to rig the game wasn’t a direct trigger for much of what is going on.
When you say “If the system is easier to administer with a single monthly payment then isn’t that what people should receive? “ That is entirely my point. It shouldn’t be about the system, it should be about people, and people’s lives don’t fit into neat tick boxes that keep the DWP happy.
I don’t go with your point that benefits shouldn’t provide for the vagaries of people’s situations. How could it not? Nobody lives a standard 2.4 children life
On Universal credit limiting fraud, that is a massive stretch to my mind. It remains to be seen whether that will have any impact whatsoever. I deal with fraudsters all day long, both landlords and tenants and it depresses the hell out of me but I have to admit they are bloody resilient.
UC will simply be a new system and fraudsters will inevitably find a way around it because no departments join up in their thinking.
I agree that you cant introduce a system that doesn’t hack someone off, it is inevitable that a re-jig will create winners and loser but why, in a recession caused by irresponsible banking practices, should people on benefits be the ones who are the scapegoat, while senior banking officials who completely F***ed up walk with a massive golden handshake?
How do you think the single mum stacking shelves in Sainsbury’s from 11pm to 7am feels about that when she is being painted by the press as being a scammer?
I don’t think that the shelf stacker in your example is being lambasted in the press. She would be upheld as an example of someone who’s working hard to improve their lot.
The problem is that there are many people out there who wouldn’t have taken that job in the first place because it means they’ll be working over 16 hours a week and their JSA benefit falls off a cliff.
As I understand it, the Universal Credit will taper off more gradually to encourage people in to work. There is some work available out there because I just did a search on the jobseekers.direct website for my local county town (300+ hits within a 2 mile radius). They may not be the most desirable jobs but the problem is that benefits have accumulated to such a level above low paid work that people can afford to be picky. Even if they did voluntary work it would be a good contribution to society and make them feel valued.
Having been a recipient of child tax credit and job seekers allowance for a short period in the past, I appreciate and understand that peoples’ lives are all very different, but it’s completely unreasonable to expect the state to be flexible enough to cope with them all. We’ll have to agree to disagree on this one.
Our household brings in a comfortable disposable income and yet I still receive over £1600 per annum in child benefit. The whole system clearly needs reform.
Actually, I think the 16 hour cut-off has risen in recent months, but you get the gist.
Thanks for your input JamieT. I have no problem disagreeing with a well articulated argument. We dont have to agree.
A single mum working cash in hand would be one of Osbourne/IDS/Cameron’s scroungers though and most of the people I deal with would fall into that camp, just people trying to survive, not playing the system – although I do acknowledge I see them too.
My argument has pretty much been kicked into touch by Osbourne’s announcement today of looking to the poor to cut a further £10 billion on a promise to the spineless Lib Dems that they will look at the rich next.
Rent arrears are up – homelessness applications are up – street homeless figures are up – councils are being threatened with legal action for not providing temporary accommodation for homeless applicants that is up to snuff and are pilloried for not being able to find Suitable (ie Affordable) properties in London and having to relocate people in the North.
The system is completely broken. Notions of fairness in the face of benefit claimants pall into insignificance under the sheer weight of numbers. It isnt about scroungers anymore, its about real people not being able to afford to cope. How that came about, viz benefits creating a dependancy culture is neither here nor there.
What does society do with a growing homelessness crisis that will be deepened even further by cutting housing assistance to the under 25s? This is getting really bad mate