Unemployed earning more than working households

What is your problem with unemployed? I paid in a fortune and am no longer able to w*rk due to ill health. You object to me claiming on my insurance?

I don't think he is objecting to honest reasons why some people can not work (like in your case) but rather to the people who haven't done a days (legal) work in their lives. It does get on my wick when you see people clearly abusing the system, getting all sorts of benefits (free rent/mortagae paid, free dental work, free optical work etc) and there's nothing really wrong with them.

What the article suggests is getting £20k in various benefits does not allow the people to go back to work as they will have to earn more that the average wage just to be financially equal.

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As ever, sensationalism sells papers - if more accurate reporting was in place, it simply wouldn't be 'newsworthy'. All my 'income' is classed as benefits, because it is claimed from the local authority and/or central government funding, but it is in *reality* my 'wages' - local authority regulations mean I'm not allowed a conventional job as well. I receive considerably more than double the amount mentioned as a 'claimant', but the expenses of doing what I do are so high that I dont pay any PAYE or NI - in fact, my P60 each year shows zero.

Overall, though, I actually earned more disposable income when I *was* employed, even though I only earned about the national average. There are literally thousands of people doing what I do, all of them contributing to the statistics in the article, and doing work that used to cost several orders of magnitude more than it does now out of the public purse. But, of course, reporting that doesn't sell papers...

_ posted

Wages for doing what?

As well as what?

What *do* you do? You sound like a very exceptional case to me.

What work?

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Care to explain what you are talking about?

Unemployed* or unfit for work?

Which is it?

How do you know there is nothing wrong with them? Are you the doctor employed by the DWP to examine them before they get their IB authorised? If you are and are passing people as sick when they are fit for work you should be imprisoned for fraud.

What the report also says is that most of the households in the category have benefits paid for disabilities. Usually this amounts to a few thousand a year for transport.

One wonders why the press did not ask employers why they are not willing to employ someone who has been on long term incapacity benefit

Or unfit for most types of work but could possibly hit a keyboard

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I'm sorry, I hadn't realised this was a crosspost to groups where I'm not known! I'm a foster carer for difficult children, technically self-employed but (since we are not 'paid' but instead allowed to claim expenses) unwaged.

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Good for you! How many children do you care for?

To say the poverty trap was created by Labour is just ridiculous. It existed all through the 80s, and probably further back than that. The solution would be to increase working dole so that people aren't worse off working. Then give people who get working dole the same sort of benefits they would get if they weren't working -- free school dinners, help with rent, etc.

"Ariadne" wrote

Good for you! How many children do you care for?

You looking out for another job besides being a Jooooish mouthpiece? :-))

Irrelevant. DWP "doctors" are biased and target-driven. I know a few people who were turned down for IB, including one in a wheelchair because it was the "wrong time of the month to apply". They'd already filled that months' quota. On appeal, and with *independent* medical expert submissions, they all got the decisions reversed, and rightly so.

Just because a DWP "doctor" says someone is fit enough for work, it doesn't make it so.

(Up to) four at a time. The point I was trying to make is I'm only one of a large group of people doing 'work' but unable to appear on the official statistics of the workforce. Each authority has their own interpretation of rules, but mine is one which specifically doesn't allow us to have another job, and which also has no 'reward' element of allowances. In theory, then, we do the work 'free', but of course the things we pay for from our allowances also benefit us personally, like mortgage, food, car insurance, etc.

Yeah, probably, but how do they get there, public transport is late, over crowded and is not friendly to those less mobile, lets face it, less than

For a wheelchair user to use the overground trains, they have to book in advance at both boarding and disembarking stations and be able to be on the train they are booked for, thats assming that they can get on the platform in the first place.

Simon

Then they ought to be reported to the GMC.

It makes it more likely to be so, but they can make an error so there is an appeals process.

Oppressed Subject wrote: [SNIP]

Slightly misleading to compare the income of households on benefits (which probably consists of several people) with the average wage of an individual. A comparison of working vs non-working household income would be fairer but, presumably, wouldn't make such an interesting headline.

There are about 25,000,000 households in the UK so 140,000 is only 0.56 percent, which is NOT an awful lot.

I suggest you read all the post

Politically, it was convenient in the 1980s for the Tories to massage the unemployment statistics by transferring as many as possible from Unemployment Benefit to Incapacity Benefit. They also sponsored the neoliberal approach (aka Thatcherism) that has led to the recession.

So it's a bit rich of the Tory press now to wail that there are so many on welfare, when they and their cronies have been responsible for it all.

Perhaps we should hear from them how they and their fat cat cronies are going to pay back their ill gotten gains, and meanwhile bashing the poor should be put on hold.