WTF!!!
In the last hour an article has appeared on Inside Housing to say the DWP will sanction anyone who does not work full time.
Here is the article and reproduced here as IH is now a subscription only site and you really do have to read this to believe it. If you do not work full time you are an out and out lazy bastard who we will sanction is the DWP policy and it is YOUR fault if you do NOT work full time you scrounger. This is incredulous and quite frankly tyrannical.
The article
At present the benefit cap rules mean you have to work 30 hours per week to both claim tax credits and avoid the cap if you are part of a couple or 16 hours is you are a lone parent.
What that means in reality is one member of a couple works 30 hours per week at national minimum wage and so does NOT get welfare benefits capped AND receives tax credits AND is still likely to receive most or all of their Housing Benefit to pay the rent. This is all part of IDS’s oft-stated boast that work will always pay more.
However, since the May 2010 election the amount of Housing Benefit paid to in-work claimants has increased from £2.6 billion per year to a whopping £5.4 billion per year. it has almost doubled in cost and now we have 1.1 million in work HB claimants compared to just 650,000 at May 2010.
What is more is a detailed look at the HB data reveals that in-work HB claimants get on average more in HB than the average for all HB claimants.
In short, this means the in-work HB claimants gets full HB as the wages they are working for are not enough to live on and HB is paid in full.
It also means that Housing Benefit is a £5.4 billion per year subsidy to low wage paying employers.
It further means that the benefit cap policy is yet again proven to be ill thought through and IDS’s boast that work will always pay more means that the welfare system pays more too. The benefit cap is NOT a saving to the public purse at all yet it has an approval rating of over 70% with the general public as they believe any cut or cap must save money yet it actually costs MORE money and forces the taxpayer to pay MORE to pay for this back of a fag packet and overtly political policy – a policy of all fur coat and no knickers.
Yet let’s look at what this means for the tenant and for the landlords.
Tenants have been persuaded by social landlords EET programmes (let’s get our tenants into work to avoid arrears) and landlords have spent millions on these programmes – millions that are now all in vain as the advice they (naturally) gave was work 30 hours and you will be better off even at £6.50 per hour. Landlord welfare teams and job centre plus advisors did the same with the ‘better off calculations’ they ran to persuade tenants / benefit claimants to take up a 30 hour per week position. They too are all in vain as this sneaky back door policy mentioned above does mean:
WORK 35 HOURS OR WE WILL SANCTION YOU
It also heaps the blame onto the scrounger who works anywhere between 30 and 34 hours per week. They are just as much to blame as those who sit on their backside all day behind closed curtains watching Jeremy Kyle on their 50″ flat screen TVs. Those working 30 to 34 hours per week, formerly called the hard working family – that wonderful term all politicians love to quote – are now just lazy scrounging bastards!
How about a headline : – IDS welfare failure forces Cameron to abandon the hardworking family?
That is what this is as well as this coalitions Department of Work (sic) and Pensions abandoning any blame for not providing employment or the conditions to create employment. If you dont’ have a job mate its your fault and you are a lazy bastard so get off you arse and stop blaming us!
I wonder where those who work say 2 jobs at 17 hours per week are going to find the time to search for other work and find the time to go into the local job centre as part of their conditionality? Just how the hell can that work?
Who cares say DWP we will sanction you if you don’t turn up. They care not a jot as to you working 3 x 11 hour jobs all on zero hours contracts when you have to drop anything at the last minute to be called into work and if you do and miss an appointment or be 5 minutes late for it you will lose £29 per week – or about 5 hours pay at the NMW job you are now doing!!!
WTF!!!
Sorry reader no summary here. I have run out of words to say about this fucking outrage
UPDATE 20:00
Prior to this sneaky and new change the requirement was a minimum of 30 hours per week at NMW or £195pw. This apparent change to £12000 per annum is either 35 hours per week or 30 hours at 18% above the NMW at £7.69 per hour.
It is therefore an 18% increased burden on these ‘hardworking families’ to make up for the failure of the benefit cap and the failure of all the welfare reforms that has seen the in-work HB cost increase 93% from 2010 to £5.4 billion per year from £2.8 Billion per year.
SPeye Joe (Welfarewrites) 
Reblogged this on Britain Isn't Eating.
Reblogged this on L8in.
It’s getting closer to the election and IDS is getting more desperate and consequently even further removed from reality.
Reblogged this on sdbast.
This is off the subject,but it is doing my head in any thoughts would be appreciated. I was googling the net looking for travel expenses,I put in DWP A4E Expenses In the results it had a GOV,UK regarding DWP payments for May 2014 I scanned the payouts and noticed “JSA Sustainment payments” made out to the usual suspects,but payments are listed buy amount(stay with me) A pattern started to show,Ingeus in Scotland were paid the exact amount as East of England and on the same day,further down A4E were paid the same amount as Seetec but 2 weeks later,unless both companies just happened to have the same amounts of claimants in two totally separate locations this seems like double billing,if one was subcontracting from the other the DWP would not split the payment but would send it to the Prime,,,I may be way off but something stinks!
Just cannot believe this. Don’t those bigots realise that in some areas there aren’t jobs, you have to take what ever there is
This conditionality of in work benefits and the rolling of HB with other benefits (including child Allowance) was always one of the main objectives of UC. It now makes sanctioning benefits that were previously out of reach possible. They have softened up public opinion with sanctioning out of work benefits – even for those on ESA – by making most think that they somehow “deserved” to be sanctioned. Now they will use the same rhetoric to justify extending their savage attack on the poor. The use of 3 year sanctions etc is to actually remove the safety net. Plain and simple. We will sink or swim without state support whatever the economy, or unscrupulous employers, or bad landlords do. It is no longer a welfare state, and democracy is receding fast.
My only surprise was that they have rolled this out now. With the sanctions enquiry on-going this move shows their naked hatred of the recipients of the state benefit system, and I would have expected that they would try & keep this one under wraps until after May.
Something which has been discussed elsewhere but which you may not have realised, Joe, is that many of the DWP themselves only work part-time. It appears therefore they may at some stage find themselves being asked to sanction each other. One wonders how this will improve moral at the DWP where are I understand Decision Makers are already to be heard pleading tearfully with claimants who’ve failed mandatory reconsiderations not to exercise their right to appeal. Still, put IDS in charge and what do you expect?
Reblogged this on patricktsudlow and commented:
Instead of raising the minimum wage to a liveable wage and increase the number of council homes. The UK Government feels fit to punish those who are being paid a pittance.
where will it end, homelessness is up in the unemployed because of benefit sanctions, people are dying because atos and ids are wrongly saying they are fir for work, if they cut housing benefit for the working poor, how many children will suffer, how many children will go hungry because their parents are struggling to pay the rent, how many children will be made homeless when the family loses their home because they cant afford the rent,.ids and this government should be jailed for crimes against humanity.
Reblogged this on koenigal86 and commented:
Madness!
Reblogged this on markcatlin3695's Blog.
Reblogged this on hardergamer77.
I gather that this will also affect all the self employed who ARE doing enough hours but are not earning the equivalent of minimum wage 😦
Yes if they are claiming
Sure? I thought the deal with the selfers was it was assumed under UC they were earning 35 hrs a week at minimum and that would be taken into account before they got any other benefits. Notional income, I expect that’ll be called, just like they call other things notional capital when it suits them.
You are correct (well as far as the last set of “rules” were concerned, IDS keeps changing the feckin rules all the time, hence UC is trying to hit a moving target all the time) a notational earnings for SE’s is 35 hours at min wage. The biggest problem with this (well there are lots of problems generally, but…) is that then means a huge ranch of SE’s will stop being SE’s as their earnings are less than this figure, but topped up with tax credits etc.
As it is, a lot of SE’s are now starting to have HMRC on their backs demanding the money, tax credits, back as their low earnings mean HMRC have decided they are not really SE’s.
The poor sods, I have read so not sure how legit, pushed down this route by the DWP are also potentially liable for a criminal conviction for, I believe, fraud due to false representation of being SE’d.
Disgusting! We have to get this lot out in May, and then make sure that the next Government know that we mean business. We need to stand together and show that we will NOT let this continue.
But will the public get off their erses? I don’t think so…
Reblogged this on Jay's Journal and commented:
This came as a shock to me – anyone else feel shocked? Share this as much as you can. Please.
Why are there no riots in the streets, dragging these politicians out and stringing them up?
Because instead of engaging with reality, people prefer to live in a shadow-world of delusion, whether it’s the mainstream lies about poor people and immigrants being to blame for everything or the disturbing and increasingly hateful narrative provided by conspiracy theories and propaganda. That’s what makes up the media now (including the internet) – lies and delusions, wilfully swallowed by the gullible in what’s becoming a new dark age.
Reblogged this on nearlydead.
Reblogged this on loopeyange and commented:
Can’t work? Get screwed
Can’t find work? Get screwed
Can’t find ENOUGH work? Also get screwed
ALL get called Scroungers!
Why is this being delivered before the General Election?
My guess is, the Tories are hoping there’s a good majority who wint be voting….who are they to vote for?….
They probably think they’ve got the vote of the middle and upper class….with the utter bile that’s been spouted about immigration, they’re going to be looking at UKIP to go into coilition with IF they have to.
I think they think they’re pretty much ‘safe’
My opinion? They are fucking deluded – there’s only so much the MAJORITY can take. By effecting the working pockets so blatantly ( ‘we’ are already aware that low paid workers are having to use food banks ) they are going against what THEY spouted “we will make sure you are better off working” – when in reality? “We will make sure you are better off working UNDER OUR TERMS”
And meanwhile IDS plans to invite Housung Associatiin tenants to be able to buy their homes? …..he just wants the repos to start rolling in so he can get his landlord chums some more housing stock!
What an insane world we live in!
Well, that’s me and OH potentially in the sh1t in the future – I’m SE and the younger part of a mixed-age couple. With a 14 year age difference, OH will be in his mid 80s before he’s treated by the Government as the equal of ‘ordinary’ pensioners. In the meantime, who knows what the hell awaits him. Sanctions? Homelessness? Decried by the Government and the Daily Wail as a lazy scrounger? In limbo – beyond working age, but not worthy of pensioner status. A new social group has been created by this Government- the statusless pensioner.
I said a couple of years ago that I could imaging the so-called ‘reforms’ leading to divorce amongst mixed-age couples, particularly where the age difference is significant, with that looking like the only way that the older partner can protect his or her security. What has happened since seems to make it seem almost inevitable.
The ‘mixed-age’ pensioner couple has always been in UC legislation and has been known about for a few years – though of course this coalition has not been raising any awareness of that despite this potential affecting up to 90,000 households who are now exempt but wont be when UC comes in. Divorce? Is that any different to the benefit cap which forces families to split up in order to keep a roof over their head?
Reblogged this on elizapdushku's World.