JSA

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In message , Trev writes

Why didnt you just google for that sentence? Or are you just lazy?

The message from john boyle contains these words:

Thanks John

The sentence was copied from the URL you quoted. I have googled and alta-vista-ed quite extensively but can not find out what "certain conditions regarding National Insurance contributions" means. How many weeks, months or years of contributions or amount of money contributed? This may be due to my inexperience in using search engines and failing to put the right words into the search. I was hoping that a more experienced user would be able to point me in the right direction.

Thanks for looking

Trev

I tried to find this out once too and I couldn't find details of the NI requirements on the net. Unless someone else can post a link then I'm afraid you'll need to find out directly from either your local job centre or citizen's advice bureau.

I did find out myself about 6 months ago but I'm afraid to say that I've forgotten the answer. I _think_ you needed to have paid a certain minimum level of NI payments for 2 years prior to the year in which you make the claim. I could be wrong on that. Hopefully if my answer is wrong it might antagonize someone into posting the correct answer here. I need to find out again myself because I never claimed at the time but might well do so now if I am still able to.

- Julian

There is marginally more (but not much) information here:

There used to be a benefits agency web site that IIRC contained this information but this doesn't seem to exist anymore (I cannot find a link to it from It seems that, much like the qualification rules for pensions that was discussed several months ago, the exact rules are hidden in the depths of the web only accessible to those that actually know where they are.

Tim

This Northern Ireland based site (i.e. NI *in* NI) might help:

Robin

there is very basically two rules, the two tax years used will be the last two complete tax years, ie for now its 01 and 02. Contributions paid during this time must be paid class 1 or credited @ 25x and 50x the LEL for that year. Thats the very basics of it.

On Sun, 28 Sep 2003 00:17:28 +0100, Trev wrote:

Here's how I approached it -

First I tried ' jobseekers allowance "contribution based" ' in google That gave further information which enabled me to refine the search to 'jobseekers allowance "contribution based" "national insurance" "tax year" ' I decided that, from the results, a link to a government department - the Inland Revenue was most likely to be of use, so selected it. It appeared to be interpretations to the relevant act of parliament, so selecting the menu hyperlink allowed me to view the menus and find the actual criteria as laid down by law -

The other method, which is better if you think it's likely to be a FAQ is to search the usenet archive via google by selecting the 'groups' tab. Searching on the first criteria gave |countryGB&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wg which includes posts answering your question for previous posters. You will notice that there's a group called uk.gov.social-security which would have been likely to answer the question, had you not found an answer. BTW it's useful to keep an eye on which search engines perform better than others, as the differences can be dramatic and can lead you to believe that there is no information on the subject, when the reverse is true. PC Magazine is good at authoritative reviews, but seems to have gone pay per view (not unreasonably imo), but a summary of the findings is here - hth

Daytona