http://www.theguardian.com/politics/201 ... it-chinese

It is ridiculous the amount of social engineering the Tories seem to think they'll get away with.

Sorry but I fully agree with the Tories on this one. It's not the tax payers job to fund people having child after child after child, in a country (and planet) that's already over populated.
If you object to budget cuts for child allowance, feel free to increase it for the first child or two so the total paid out every year is the same.

It's the big picture for me - the Tories and the media rely on often unrepresentative stories and each other. Child benefit is far from cut and dry in thousands of cases, so would there be a guarantee those people wouldn't fall through the cracks*? It's all about the wider economy in the long run anyway.

* Just look at recent Team IDS fcuk-ups in the last six months

There are many reasons why this is wrong. The problem is that every policy is done with the objective of "balancing the books" but as these cuts hit they will also impact gross aggregate demand will suffer.

There are probably just as many reason why paying child benefit to every couple for every child, regardless of their own wealth, is wrong.

Means testing may only add significant costs to the system. If it did not then it might be worth considering. Though many means tested benefits can cost a lot in administration.

I agree. The world is already over populated. But there is a problem with the current financing of society in that they have essentially built a pyramid scheme to fund it and it requires ever more people coming into the system to keep it running.

+1
I hate means testing purely because so much money is wasted on paying pen pushers.

True but overall I am sure you would save money esp with some of the universal benefits like Child / winter fuel allowance etc

I just don't get why it's so hard to assess people's financial condition here. It seems most other countries manages to do it fine.
Might have to do with privatising and doing everything on the cheap.

It’s not - or it wasn’t in the 1980s when my work involved just that. People who claim for benefits are, on the whole, on their beam end and have little money to speak of. To speak in defence of the “pen pushers” - a lot of the delays we encountered was down to checks etc. that had to be done with outside bodies. For example, someone who had lost a job would need to provide verification of their final payment - if that wasn’t with the claim, then we’d have to check with the company. That was either a phone call or a form, depending on how easy it was to contact them. We’d also need verification of mortgages (if there was one) - again that would be a letter to the bank or a request to the claimant for statements. If that information was not included with the claim form, it slowed stuff down.

When you are dealing with the poorer end of the population, the questions boil down to “do you have a pot to piss in?”.

If you start dealing with more affluent people, then, yes, it started to get more complex as there is money stashed in more than one account, property etc.. Also you’ll start finding yourself talking too accountants who try to bend things around (this happened, especially for self employed people whose business had collapsed).

What took the time was the manly computer we had to use for new claims. Note that there was no benefit to using the computer - it was at that time a glorified adding machine which had no contact with the outside world. Data entered onto the system was never recalled from it. We always went to the paper copies, because it was a paper based system. It was faster to do the claims by hand with pen and paper.


There seem to have been a humber of IT projects to get the benefits system computerised, and they all seem to have failed in some fashion.

Possibly because the UK benefit system (much like the tax system) is massively more complex than it needs to be. Simplify the system then that makes automation much easier.

Crediting the tories is not something I do every day but the universal benefit system is actually a good idea. However IDS is such an utterly clueless idiot that his department are making an absolute pig's ear of it and he seems far too busy trying to make cheap political points in speeches to sort any of it out.

With the plan to introduce smart meters it might actually be simpler to get the energy companies to administer. For example if you live abroad during the winter like many pensioners you would not be using much energy so not qualify with smart monitoring. It would also stop those who live abroad all the time claiming. Then the energy companies could target the benefit to those energy use is within normal limits so excluding the big mansions, and with a list of customers on set benefits they could reduce the bill directly.

I tired to get a smart meter installed last year, but the mobile signal was too poor under my stairs for it to work.