That's a great principle (and one I agree with) but the bare fact is there are unemployment blackspots where job prospects are bordering on nil. Making people live below a notional poverty line on the basis of browbeating them into jobs that simply don't exist doesn't seem to me to be a very sane way to do things. We haven't had full employment in the UK for decades, nor are we likely to any time in the forseeable future.


Take me as a single person example. I'd say £100 a week for rent, £25 a week for food & other consumables, £10 a week for utilities, £10 a week for bus fares & etc when looking for work, £20 a week council tax (because our loverly government has removed the exemption), £10 a week for normal domestic expenditure (replacing a pair of shoes every so often etc) and maybe a £5 a week so they actually get to have a normal human life instead of just existing (i.e.they can go out and have some fun once a month say or buy a CD or DVD). That comes to, what £180 a week exactly?

National minimum wage is £6.19 an hour. Standard 35 hour week therefore : £217 a week. So working still makes you at least £100 a month better off thus say a night out a week or nicer food or a new dress or whatever.

Yes being on the dole shouldn't be 'an easy life' but you'd be a pitiless sod to say 'well, you're not paying anything back so you get to stay alive and nothing more'.

If the government really want to give people an incentive to work and to cut the welfare bill at the same time they need to raise wages to a living wage, so there is no need to subsidise wages with in work benefits. They are idiots if they think it is literally better to work 40 hours and only be £10 a week better off than on the dole. People might be uneducated but they can see that the alternatives are not always worth the extra effort. It is a shame that those at the top fail to recognise that fact.


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Many people that qualify for job seekers / unemployment benefit / the dole will also qualify for housing benefit to cover the full value of their rent. Bus fares can also be claimed back if specifically for an interview (or they could back in the 90s). Council tax reduction of up to 100% may also apply in some circumstances.

So that leaves £50 a week by your sums, which I'd agree is plenty to live on when many of your largest bills are covered. Provided you don't live in a big old house which exceeds £10pw to power, in which case you should consider moving or a lodger.

The fundamental fact the ConDems don't want people to remember is the unemployed are actually a minority of the expenditure of the welfare state. By far the biggest percentage is pensioners - between actual pensions, pastoral care and the winter fuel allowance (which even millionaire pensioners living in retirement homes in the Algarve get and if you think that's a good use of public money you need your bumps feeling) then followed by, as you say, the state subsidising private company profits by making up for poor wages.

Of course the government are absolutely categorically never going to touch a penny of the money that gets paid to pensioners because pensioners are overwhelmingly tory voters. So the 57% of the welfare budget they take up is staying exactly where it is thank you. And they can't en masse remove wage subsidy benefits because that would in effect publicly admit that they'd been subsidising low wages out of the public purse. So the people who get in the neck are the only people left, who get publicly branded 'shirkers' and 'layabouts'.

There are people who abuse the welfare state. As long as we have a welfare state, there always will be. But they're a vanishingly small percentage of the money spent. The current administration are using the spectre of the feckless idler as an excuse to kick the people they don't like. It's that simple. If they actually wanted to reduce the size of the welfare state significantly there are a couple of easy things they could do (means test the winter fuel allowance and set the minimum wage to 10 quid an hour) but they would be politically embarrassing and cost them votes. The current changes to the welfare state are not motivated by financial necessity or even dogma, they're motivated by political cowardice and simple malice.

The council tax exemption has gone in the latest changes - people claiming benefits now pay the same council tax as everyone else, although the local council can given them a discretionary exemption. Given the massive budget cuts most councils are facing, I personally don't expect that to happen very often.
I understand about housing benefits and claiming bus fare and what have you. My personal opinion is the cost of administering the latter is more than the money saved by making the payments an expense, for a fiver a week you might as well just give it to them. Housing benefit is possibly a more interesting case for being changed, although how you do so is an interesting question. There is a strong argument paying housing benefit direct to landlords leads to an increase in housing cost inflation and is actually not the best way to do it. Of course there is an equal argument giving it to the people themselves isn't the best policy either, as some people have no ability to manage their own finances properly. The old 'council house' model actually worked quite well but most council accommodation has gone, the councils have no money to build any more and the current administration is opposed to it on principle anyway.

In fact I was trying to come up with a vague figure of the total cost of a person living via the welfare state, rather than a specific accurate model of how someone currently unemployed is paid under the way we do things right now.

Another is raise the retirement age to 70 to account for longer life expectancy and introduce it tomorrow. It seems stupid to have the same retirement age that we had more than a century ago. Though once the antibiotics are no longer viable then the life expectancy might fall back below the retirement age and make it completely viable and practical.

Then make winter fuel payments collectable from the local council. So ending the Algarve issue. It could also be means tested, and linked to pension credits. This would cost them votes, until the lack of heating culled those that complained.

Free TV licences for over 75's is fine, but why not scrap the fee altogether and reduce personal allowances to cover the cost of the services that the BBC provides. The fact that the government can hold the licence fee negotiations hostage is no different from an annual transfer of tax to the BBC. As it stands it is a very regressive tax.

If minimum wages were increased to a living wage it makes it very easy to scrap in work benefits. Start with any company that has a government contract local or national and large companies. Gradually reduce the size limit till every company has to pay a living wage. Then the welfare bill will fall rapidly. If people will get a substantial increase of wages over benefits plus not interference in how they live (ie no bedroom tax), then it will be an extra incentive to look for work. Even so there are huge areas which are economic black spots and all that government policy does is depress those areas still further. If you are only £5 a week better off for a 40 hour week, why bother? If it is £60 a week more then it becomes much more sensible to take that job.

The government are claiming that a million extra jobs have been created but many of these are zero hour contracts which are great for the company but require benefits to cope, yet the recipients are having their benefits linked to the hours that they do. Then add in part time work and you get the numbers of jobs created. Though the wages are the same even though you might have two or three jobs. Hardly a springboard for a growing economy.

I agree that the welfare changes are about malice. Though the fact that people who work are doing so badly is the real problem, so they have to scapegoat those on benefits to make then feckless when it is nothing of the sort. The numbers of fraudulent cases are minor and yet the government treat everyone as a scumbag. Their attitude is that if you are on benefits then you are feckless, yet if the wages are so low that you have to get benefits to cope then it is hardly laziness.


Housing benefit is invariably paid to the landlord anyway even if it goes to the tenant first. There was a scheme to encourage tenants that they could get the reference rent for the area and they could keep difference if they could get a lower rent. What happened was that landlords raised even slum properties to the level of the reference rent so there was no gains for the tenant. In fact tenants, no matter whether they are unemployed or not, are price takers and have little scope to haggle down the rent. The landlord will have a take it or leave it attitude.

The problem with the governments current policy is that it will make lots of people homeless and they will cost a lot more in bed and breakfast accommodation. The only alternative is to build lots of one bed room homes and that will both create jobs and free up two bed properties for those on the waiting list. Though as has been pointed out that will not happen.

Dont forget that that £53 / week is AFTER housing costs and bills - its basically food, clothing,and other necessaties

See my response to JJ - I was doing a 'back of a beer mat' calculation as to how much someone being unemployed would actually cost the state to give a reasonable if mundane quality of life to. I know the money pays for things via various paths but it all comes out of the same pot at the start.

The government do not care if it is even mundane, they want it to be bordering on workhouse conditions, so it encourages people to work. That is why people sleep in, to get through it as painlessly as possible. Spending every hour up unable to afford to watch the TV can be soul destroying.


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