Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
£500 still too much
Anyone else think £500 is too high still? Yes these people may be forced out of London and how is that a bad thing? Rents will decrease and as a knock on effect so will property prices allowing more people who make the economy turn get on the property ladder. I work full time as does my wife as with many of you this Christmas we had to struggle to buy gifts for our 6 year old son. A friend of our who is on full benefits and has never paid into our tax system in the 10 years she has lived in this country was able to buy her 8 year old daughter an £500 iPad mini. WOW. I am sick to the point of rage that people who work get less than those who don't. I asked my friend why she has to live in Haringey where the council pay her £1100 rent why can't she be unemployed somewhere cheaper like leeds for example.
£500 I wish I could have £500 a week free. Time to ship out dead wood it will be better for all of us and we know it, cap should be £400 a week and thats still being generous but I think that is the average amount a working family would have so why should those on benefits get more?
Tags for Forum Posts: benefits cap
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by DavidJ on
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These issues are incommensurate.
I agree it is not fair that people working long hours etc should be unable to afford to live in a property that someone else can live in purely through housing benefit.
However - I certainly do not want to live in a society that is ever increasingly divided. Things are already bad enough but will get worse as you are getting your wish for the poor to be herded out to live together in poorer areas with no work. This is bad for all of us - and will bite us all in the backside.
Interesting that you mention Leeds - remember where the 'London bombers' came from? A relatively poor area of Leeds, with high levels of cheap, transient housing. Just the kind of place you want to send your friend to. I think we are better off tolerating some unfairness for the sake of decency and maintaining some sense of solidarity with fellow human beings.
As others have said the real problem is that cost of housing in London has become hugely inflated. It is madness that it costs half a million pounds to buy a modest house around here - and maybe £2000 a month to rent a house? The reason for this is quite simple - property is an easy way to accumulate wealth in this country. Hence the recent upsurge in overseas money in London property - pushing our prices skywards.
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Permalink Reply by Liz on
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Can I urge you again that if your combined wage is £400 per week then you are entitled to all of the housing, children's benefits I have listed above to supplement your income. The state allows that a couple need £111.45p a week to live on before factoring in children or other costs.
Please claim them.
They will be worth a lot less than they were under Labour, following next Tuesday's vote which will cap the benefits to rise no more than 1% over the next three years, a move likely to hit families on child tax credits and working tax credits very hard.
Nevertheless, you are entitled to them and you should look into claiming. There are a number of useful factsheets on working tax credits and child tax credits here
Note: the cap for a single adult with no children is £350 per week. £500 pw applies to parents/lone parents regardless of the number of children they have.
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Permalink Reply by Seema Chandwani on
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Hi Christopher, not the council... the government, your HB rate is set by the government, its just administered by the council.
Sadly, the "cap" is coming to Haringey first before its rolled out across the country... as the gov thinks we're lab rats!
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Permalink Reply by LSquared on
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John McMullan, for some reason I can't reply directly to your post above.
You asked "what else do you think they could be doing that makes their £71 a week unjustified?"
Again you are either misunderstanding or misrepresenting me. I didn't say the £71 needs to be justified - I have no problem with supporting people when they need support. But i dont think it is in anyone's best interests that that support takes the current form of "here's some money, now please apply for non-existant jobs until you are thoroughly demotivated and demoralised", nor that we would chose to leave jobs undone in our community when there are people who could do them.
I think that people who are not currently able to find paid work have plenty to offer and that it is important that they are asked to play their part, especially in an area like ours which is cash-strapped and short of jobs, because the flip side of that is that we do have a lot of people with spare time. It is important for the community as a whole, but it is also important for those individuals themselves to be seen, and to see themselves, as contributing.
You have already pointed out the problem of the working and non-working poor being set against each other - cant you see that having the currently-unemployed making a visible contribution would start to break that down? It's a simple idea - while you are in paid employment you are contributing via the working economy, and while you aren't you are contributing by making some of your time available to the community.
(Incidentally, not really relevant to this discussion but I think it is a bit cheeky that you keep referring to £71 a week: as you know, that is £71 after housing costs are covered which in London is a not insignificant sum. I have no doubt that you would be extremely (and rightly) opposed to any suggestion that the total benefits available to the unemployed be set to £71 a week so I think it is a little sneaky to use that figure to prop up your argument.)
Why are you so against the idea that people who aren't currently working might have something concrete to offer the community that supports them, and that the community could ask them to do so?
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I understand what you are saying - if I were unemployed now I would want to be doing things. However, one major problem with the systematic implementation of your idea is that if 'the unemployed' are doing useful work then they are effectively undermining the labour market and keeping people out of paid employment.
If 'the unemployed' do 'useless work' then that is just punishment and nothing to do with making a contribution.
There are indeed many things that need doing all around us (cleaner streets, small class room sizes, shorter waiting lists for doctors, treatments, cleaner swimming pools . . . etc etc) - and we should be employing more people to do all this, but 'we' have to begin to agree to pay for all this.
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Permalink Reply by Abi on
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I agree - the prospect of being unemployed at the moment is unthinkable, and I'm sure I'm not the only person in full time decent-paid work who is regularly kept awake at night thinking of the 'punishments' that would be waiting for me if my company did happen to go belly-up or if like almost all companies in the UK, they decided to make redundancies.
'Putting the unemployed to work' in 'useful' roles may seem like a win-win on the face of it, but how the heck is one supposed to get back into their chosen profession if they're sweeping streets all day when they could be going to interviews? Even if there's enough time in the day to do both, I don't think many people could tolerate that situation psychologically.
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But why do we need to find extra money? We have people without work who we pay for so why not pay them the same money as a wage instead?
A simple hypothetical example, using extremely conservative estimates here to avoid accusations of Daily Mail hyperbole:
A is young, single and unemployed. They live in a shared house and pay £79 a week rent, which is very low even for our area. Their weekly income is therefore £150.
We ask them to work 1 7.5 hour day a week. That turns their £150 benefit into a wage of £20 an hour, which is far higher than the London living wage so no suggestion of slave labour. A is no worse off and the public benefits by a day's work on something we value.
This works because we are ensuring the people currently receiving money continue to get it. As you point out, if we need to find the money to create jobs on top of what is needed to support the unemployed, right now we don't have it so its not a viable alternative. As the old joke goes, "If I wanted to get there I wouldn't start from here"
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A has £71 pw income replacement (this is the minimum amount that the state reckons one person needs for food, clothing, heat and light) and his housing costs are paid by the state.
A does not have an income of £150. Anyone working on the minimum wage in London will also have their housing costs paid and the money they receive from their job is their income. The distinction is important. Housing Benefit is a benefit that is paid to anyone whose wages/income is low irrespective of whether they work or not.
The price of housing in London is so high that now we have more people in work claiming HB than those out of it. Demand far outstrips supply and I was told yesterday by a local estate agent that supply for the private rented sector is also drying up as no new properties are coming onto the market (may be due to landlord nervousness around the cap. Some are selling up and getting out. Others are giving notice to anyone as soon as they lose their jobs, fearing rent arrears/defaulting).
So, one possibility is that this body of unemployed people some of whom may have the skills to actually manage the projects could have real jobs if the state undertook to build more housing.
You stick by your contention that there is work to be done. Fair enough. However, what exactly is the work?
If its unskilled but heavy labour, money will need to be spent on ensuring the work is done properly and without danger to the worker. Their employer would need to spend money on extra insurance and possibly have to use a paid worker to supervise taking him/her away from their job. Questions around their rights at work re maternity, sickness etc would have to be settled. Small businesses simply would not be able to afford this so the taxpayer would foot the bill, that's where this extra money comes from.
If it is skilled work, then you either need to find someone with the necessary skill set or train someone up which again costs money. The idea that this might lead to work is somewhat undermined by the figures from the now toxic workfare programme which suggests that very few placements lead to jobs and in many cases the workers did not receive any kind of training or upskilling.
Encouraging people with volunteering may be a better solution as many smaller charities struggle to survive in the current climate. Currently as the rules stand, someone volunteering may be told to give it up and take a work placement at a supermarket to satisfy rules made by the DWP. Claimants are not exactly discouraged from volunteering but they are not actively encouraged either and charities have to be super flexible to accommodate them, not always possible if you are reliant on volunteers to run your service.
Interestingly, the Labour party have few ideas about real job creation either. This is their latest policy which isn't too dissimilar to your idea except that companies probably prefer one person everyday for 6 months to 7 people a week working one day a week. One presumes that their housing costs would still be met by the state:
The Jobs Guarantee policy, under which every adult aged over 25 and out of work for more than two years would be obliged to take up a government-sourced job for six months or lose benefits.
The jobs, provided by businesses but subsidised by the state, would be national minimum wage, Liam Byrne says, not living wage.
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Hi Liz, thank you for engaging with the spirit of my suggestion and coming up with reasoned responses rather than knee-jerk reactions.
I will make a few suggestions off the top of my head, but really the way I would see this working is not some top-down deployment of an unemployed army, but rather local people, residents associations, community groups, churches, charities and even small, locally owned businesses would go to the council (or whoever administers the scheme) with proposals for projects or requests for people. The proposal must, of course, provide proof that the request is socially valuable.
I agree that insurance, supervision and training are real concerns that limit the scheme. But then again plenty of the currently unemployed are not unskilled, so training and supervision could itself be delivered at least in part by people currently out of work. If insurance is required the proposal should explain how this will be covered, eg contributed by the requesting group, already in place, donated by the insurer under their own charity scheme. And I understand that CRB checks are free for volunteers - this scheme could be extended to cover the community workforce as well.
So yes, litter picking or park gardening might be an example, but so could be translation services for community groups, extending/reopening some of our libraries, working with HMO inhabitants and landlords to help them understand and meet the councils standards, joining in at elderly peoples social groups to chat to lonely people...and a thousand things I haven't thought of. In the case of the small business that might be something like "we've had a lot f complaints about how scruffy our shop front is but we are barely scraping by, if we provide materials can we use some people to tidy up our frontage and improve the streetscape", or "we'd like someone to survey our customers and collate the answers".
(I still can't agree with ignoring the not inconsiderable amount that hb adds to benefits...it is a benefit to the individual whether delivered as cash or accommodation. Yes it is also used to top up low wages for full time workers, but low pay is a separate issue as I said in my first post)
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Hmm, I think there's still too much of an element of forcing people into projects. No matter how worthy, this would certainly breed resentment.
I was thinking more in terms of people finding their own volunteer placements and then receiving sufficient support from the Job Centre to allow them to do them without the prospect of being forced into a work scheme. There would, of course, be nothing to stop charities from placing requests for help, but any suggestion of sanctions or forcing people would be no different from making people stack shelves (a worthy job, of course, which should be a paid one).
Any job that can and should be done by paid employees such as the ones you've listed, library work, street cleaning or park maintenance, would not be a good idea. Problems caused by central government cuts should not be papered over by using unskilled and unpaid labour ( I don't include the excellent work done by the Conservation Volunteers in that, often they are working on projects that would not be within a council remit and are a better example of how someone wishing to gain those kinds of skills could learn them).
As for businesses using labour paid for by the taxpayer to maintain their premises, I wonder how those small businesses who offer that kind of service would feel about that? I think that they might argue it is a threat to their livelihoods and feel mightly aggrieved.
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I wouldn't call it "forcing", rather fulfilling one's obligation to the community (though that's not quite the right word for what I mean...the concept is somewhere between community, society, economy and civilisation - it's the way every part of how we live is supported by thousands or even millions of people doing their (paid or unpaid) job, paying their tax, investing their savings etc - how reliant we are on each other). And yes, for that reason it should be compulsory in the same way that tax, while generally accepted to be a good thing or at least a civilised, necessary thing, is still compulsory. It too breeds resentment but we seem to cope :)
But certainly people could "volunteer" in the sense of choosing where they give their time, as long as they do give it. As long as it fits the criteria...you couldn't for example volunteer in your wife's shop (unless she made a very good case for the community benefit!)
I understand what you mean about not papering over the cracks, but I do worry there is an element of cutting off ones nose to spite ones ideological face. Some of these cracks have been unfilled longer than our younger claimants have been alive, so maybe a little paper isn't such a bad thing.
The library work is an interesting example. I chose it because it is a job I used to do, so I have first hand experience of how little demand there is for some libraries during the day. And that was in the days before Internet! But evenings and weekends were very busy. So if I were looking at how best to spend public money I would certainly consider funding the building, collection, and staffing for core hours, but would have to consider carefully whether opening for the tumbleweed hours was a sensible use of money that might do better elsewhere.
On the small business example, I intended to make it clear that the application would only be considered if it was of benefit beyond the business and something they could not otherwise afford to do. So in the shopfront example it's not taking paid business away from the shopfront painters because the business would never have been there - the "customer" couldn't afford it. It is, however, creating some business for the paint shop who supplies the paint :)
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"but low pay is a separate issue"
The problem is that low pay is directly relevant to this.
If you force/invite people who are unemployed to do useful work then that will very directly make the proper employment of someone to do that work less likely and you will suppress wages in that area of work. Many public or private employers will simply ask why should they pay someone a proper wage to do a job when they can get it for 'free'.
Of course - in many ways you are already getting what you wish for as our welfare state is increasingly used to meet the gap between high rents and low wages. It is shareholders and private landlords who are benefiting from this. Your scheme - by further driving down wages - would simply exacerbate this.
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