http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015 ... enefits-eu

The Guardian needs to get more of it's people on the TV. Or at least make a video and post a link to their journo colleagues elsewhere...

I assume the stats are correct (although you never know with the Graun), I'm not sure they're actually much use. Raw numbers of claimants are one thing, but the important stats are surely something like around total payout to non-native claimants as a proportion of total welfare budget. Or even non-native per 1000 of population or similar. I suspect in virtually all cases that would devolve down to 'pretty much feck all' as a proportion.

Saying 'there are more Brits claiming welfare in the Germany than there are German claimants in the UK' doesn't really mean anything - the two countries have massively different populations, massively different government finance mechanisms and different rules as to what and how long you can claim welfare for.

Jon

How much is unemployment benefit in the UK these days? Here you get 60% of your gross earnings, for the first year, then it drops to 399€ a month from the second year on (Hartz IV), + benefits.

The difference in population isn't that big, considering surface area, 64M in the UK and 80M in Germany.

The only accurate answer to that is 'it's complicated'. The UK benefit systems is labyrinthine, although the current government have been trying to bring in a much simplified 'universal benefits' system. And in the process wasting massive sums of money. And by 'wasting' I mean 'paying private companies massive fortunes to do stuff then finding it impossible to get the money back when they screw it up because the contracts they signed were idiotic'.

Average wage UK is, what, 22K or something? 60% of that would be say £13K, which works out to roughly 260 quid a week. VERY 'back of a beer mat' calculation but anyway. IIRC UK JSA is nowhere near £260 a week. IIRC it's nearer £130 a week, and there has been a massive controversy about 'sanctioning', which is effectively stopping people's benefits for a period as punishment for not appearing to be doing enough to get a job. There's stories that job centre staff have been given targets of number of sanctions per week or getting sacked themselves with some properly crazy reasoning - for example you can get sanctioned for missing a job search support meeting at the job centre even if you missed it because you were going for a job interview at the time...

Statistics suggest that the vast majority of people relying on food banks to stay alive in the UK are doing so because their benefit payments have been sanctioned and they literally have no money at all to buy food.

Sufficed to say, you'd probably much, much rather be unemployed in Germany than the UK right now.

Yes, the German system looks positively humane by contrast. Well done and don't go changing.

£72.40 a week (or £57.35 per week if under 25)...

... minus any part-time earnings.

Oh and if your father-in-law pays for you to go to Germany for 2 weeks, you have to sign off. When you get back you have to start again, re-register for JSA and then wait 4 weeks for any money to turn up - meanwhile you just stopped counting towards the long-term unemployed statistics so you get precisely zero help.

Thanks, Labour party

I think I'll stay here, i should get 8 to 10 times what I'd get in the UK.

And if you are "unemployed", you can suppliment your income with a "400€" job, although that is now 430€ or something due to inflation - that is the maximum you can earn in a month with that job, although you often have no guarantee that you will be work enough hours to get the full pay, E.g. shelf stacking in a supermarket, you might get 200€ on month and 400€ the next.

When did the UK get to be so uncivilised *sigh*.

In my 32 years, it seems to get worse with every Tory government, who are usually there as a result of Labour exposing themselves as 'just like all the rest of them'. They then all trot out a bunch of horror stories and the cycle starts again. Which is probably why Milibland is focusing on the NHS, though that one's likely true.

Also, the actual facilities available to claimants have been stripped right back since the 1980s to a point where people who used to get help with budgeting are now left entirely on their own to screw it up.