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 John McMullan on
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Bravo for posting this. Let battle commence. Come on the left. I want this explained to me too and the arguments of fairness and humanity apply both ways.
PS Dumping the unemployed in cheap places is definitely not the solution though. They need to be sprinkled around us and we need to accept that, although I appreciate that gets hard to do in your situation.
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Permalink Reply by Old-Age-Emporium(OAE) on
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Time to ship out dead wood
Maybe those people who make the economy turn will need it to fuel the gas ovens when the gas runs out.
Ryan, as you seem to be a kindly soul, won't you have to spend a lot on frequent trips to Leeds, or whichever outlandish place your "friend" moves to?
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Permalink Reply by Alan Stanton on
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"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."
And what was her answer, Ryan?
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Permalink Reply by Liz on
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This is a difficult one. I'm not clear what your circumstances are apart from that you both work full time.
I'm not sure if you rent or have a mortgage but if you rent and are struggling to pay it, have you applied for housing benefit? This is not an out of work benefit but one for anyone on a low income. The issue of high rents in the capital is one that affects both those out of work and those in low to middle income jobs.
Furthermore there are issues around low wages and underemployment. Again, I don't know your circumstances but are you eligible for working tax credits and/or child tax credits?
By effectively setting lower waged people against those in receipt of benefits, the issues around low wages and high rents are obscured.
The problem with the 'I know someone' anecdote is that it is not data and does not give the full picture. People often have large debts which are not immediately obvious and make extremely bad choices when it comes to servicing those debts.
The answer? Higher wages and lower rents so that the state does not subsidise big business and landlords and the money that people get from work is not immediately swallowed up by housing costs.
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The 'I know someone' anecdote only needs to occur a small number of times (and it has!) to allow the right to justify what they want to do and are doing. Kill this anecdote, don't deny its power and attractiveness.
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Permalink Reply by Michael Anderson on
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Most people of working age who get housing benefit actually work. They are the people who do the jobs like cleaning our hospitals, providing home care to our parents and grandparents, stand behind the till at Sainsburys or sweep your street. The exodus of lower paid workers from London would have this city grinding to a halt. And when they all arrive in Leeds and can't find a job (as so many have arrived in competition) they end up having to claim unemployment benefit so the tax bill goes up. It simply doesn't make economic sense.
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Right, so the argument that people who need benefits to live in London should move out to somewhere cheaper holds not water whatsoever because there is no work there and there is definitely work here (just not that well paid any more). It is dead in both economic and humanitarian terms.
So is Ryan entitled to working benefits that he's not realised or is unemployment benefit 'too high'? I would remind you that even the most right wing of economists do not think that the UK unemployment benefit is too high, if anything it is too low. They just think too many people are claiming it.
Is this ALL about housing benefit? If we all had to pay a fortune to our landlords (and mortgages are cheap at the moment if you have one so forget that) would London be 'fairer'? Would Ryan feel less 'sick to the point of rage' if everyone was paying "market" rent.
Something is wrong with the rental market in London... it's not a market. Supply is carefully constricted, the new tower at Woodberry Park is being slowly bled onto the North London rental market for fear that if it was all done at once then rents might go down.
So hey it's not this person with the iPad at fault but her well moneyed landlord. Right? He has an asset that increases in value and is VERY safe compared to anything else in the world at the moment and he has an income getting close to double digits at a time when the FTSE 100 average yield is around 3.5%. And even worse, he probably does not spend more than 180 days in the UK each year and so pays no tax on that income.
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Indeed John. And that's the point isnt it? Its not private sector tenants' fault that rents are so high.
Let's remember that we're in this position because the stock of social housing was sold off without replenishment and now have an acute crisis of supply. In that situation rent contols are the only effective regulator of housing costs to those renting. But find me a politician of any persuasion who will argue for that
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We've been here before under Thatcher. In 1989 the war photographer Don McCullin made this Newsnight documentary on the BBC website, where he talked to homeless people. As we've learned in the past few weeks, Thatcher wanted to take things even further - to where the Coalition is headed now.
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Surely the problem is that the "average family" only gets £400 a week? Or that the cost of living as increased so much that it's almost impossible to survive on that amount?
What if you or your wife lose your jobs Ryan and you have to claim benefits? Will you be happy to uproot and move to Leeds?
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No Billie, that doesn't work. Despite 17 years of paying my not unsubstantial taxes to the British Government for the privilege of living in this wonderful city I am ineligible to claim income support of any kind and if I lose my job and run out of savings I am in big trouble and fully accept that I would have to leave London. We've already established that it does not make economic or humanitarian sense to force people out of London because they claim benefits so let's leave this as settled. Please.
As for the problem of the average earnings... I wonder if talking about averages is over simplifying things. I bet the minimum and the median would be more illustrative for a start.
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The only real recipients of benefits to the low-paid workers are the landlords who can charge a rate high above what the unassisted economy of the area could support, and the employers who can pay less than a living wage.
I can understand that there may be a wider benefit to artificially depressing costs to businesses and services so that they can continue to operate in an area where they wouldn't otherwise be because of the knock-on benefits to the area as a whole but I dont think giving handouts to landlords and tying workers into controls and red tape of benefits is a very fair way to do it. I would much rather mandate a higher minimum wage (or even better, by the withdrawal of topup benefits make it impossible for companies to pay less than a living wage), create subsidies that companies providing essential / socially desireable services can apply for, and make it the employers' problem to claim whatever subsidy they need to continue to be viable.
So that's the working but low paid.
But what I really don't understand is why, when the council is too budget-strapped to keep our streets and public buildings clean, our rubbish and recycling collected and our services staffed, we aren't asking able but non-working benefit recipients to do these things. It's one thing to oppose the creation of "jobs" no one needs for the sake of making benefit recipients "work", but to not ask the people on whom public money is being spent to provide something the public genuinely needs seems perverse.
It wouldn't even have to be full time - just imagine the difference it would make to Haringey if every unemployed benefit recipient gave just one day of labour a week to the community.
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