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Should it be harder to receive benefits?
Former Member
Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
Hey guys :wave:
I'm doing English coursework at the minute and it's an opinion piece. I've chosen to do about benefits and whether or not it should be harder to receive them. I just wondered if you wanted to have your input
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I'm doing English coursework at the minute and it's an opinion piece. I've chosen to do about benefits and whether or not it should be harder to receive them. I just wondered if you wanted to have your input
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Personally, I don't think it should be about making them harder or easier to receive. I think each household should be judged a bit deeper in to whether they qualify and maybe a more flexible look on the whole system. But, I know the government probably wouldn't think twice about that because of the extra time and therefore money it would cost. The one thing that is noteable is that benefits were never meant as a long term solution for people, only to get people through the hard times. But some households use them as exactly that - a long term fix. With that attitude towards finance some people then struggle to get the motivation to sort their finances out properly and find a more suitable solution. It's the lazy, do nothing, avoid getting a job at all costs, with no material excuse - attitude that bugs me. Especially when this money could be going to someone who genuinely needs it.
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It's really topical given what's in the news this week about benefits being cut for younger people: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-27918738 (e.g. JSA for under 21s etc) You might want to consider the age angle in your piece Becki?
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You are very unlikely to ever hear the good news.
I'd agree but not for the reasons most media outlets would suggest.
Reality of our welfare system is far from that portrayed and defies the perception of most of the public too. For example...
0.7% of spend is for fraudulent claims
60% of families are in receipt of some form of welfare payment
For half of those families, welfare is the majority of their income - this includes pensioners.
Unemployment is only 3% of welfare
Only 10% of claimants are on unemployment for over a year
So yes, system should be fairer. It should do what it is designed to do - prevent people becoming destitute though issues outside of their control - age, health, job loss. Society benefits from that.
Making it harder to claim only hits those who really need it. It should be easier to claim, the process should be much less bureaucratic and faster.
If you get some good advice, they should be able to help you put together a strong case. It's never quick, but don't avoid claiming what you're entitled to if you need it, it does feel really different if you have someone working with you on your case.
I occasionally hear statistics about how much of the budget is fraudulently claimed and it always strikes me as a figure that by definition is a nonsense: you can give statistics on the value of fraudulent claims you discovered as a total of your budget, but how one accounts for fraudulent claims one doesn't know about is beyond me.
I suspect I know why it's done though, as the only honest answer "we don't know" isn't politically safe.
I think it'll be pretty accurate as its a Gov Stat and the reason it's collected is less because saying 'I don't know' is politically unsafe and more because DWP need to have an idea of where the money is going, where the over/underpayments are and whether there systems are improving or getting worse so they could do something about it. You could argue that some of what the DWP class as error (about 1%) is fraud on balance of probabilities (against beyond reasonable doubt), but even so its unlikely to be of a different order of magnitude. (We shouldn't also forget official error or 0.4% of the total)
That said you're right to be sceptical of the figures. They include pensions, which has next to no fraud (its hard to cover up someone dying) and doesn't include Tax Credits, which is wide open to fraud. There's a wide discrepancy with the figures - about 5.8% of housing benefit is overpaid (fraud, claimant error and official error), 4% of income support and 5.7% of pension credit.
At least Slarti doesn't claim that only 3% of welfare goes to the unemployed, though it could be read that way (deliberately Slarti?). That's only Job's seekers allowance; if you're unemployed you'll also potentially be on another range of benefits, including Housing Benefit. The 3% is only on Welfare administered by the DWP as well; it doesn't include the fact between a third and the quarter of welfare is through the HMRC (mainly tax credits and child benefits)
It's worth noting of Slarti's figures of 60% on welfare (which I unfortunately can't source) around a third are pensioners, a large chunk of whom are wealthy and, if it does include the full Welfare Bill (ie HMRC as well) has another large chunk in people with children (albeit less than before as Child Benefit has been means tested)
However to go back to the original question, my view is that for unemployment we should give a more generous system for the first few months and then radically cut after a year (including associated benefits); which covers people who have short term shocks but doesn't make them want to stay on it too long.
Also if you want a working system that looks after those who genuinely can't work its very much in their interest that it weeds out those who can work and shouldn't be claiming (or who should be given support back into employment)
Personally I'd also do away with tax credits as its been a disastrous system, which is still failing to work. If you want to top up the low paid, its better done through normal welfare rather than the bureaucratic monstrosity Brown created (which seems deliberately designed to create as many mistakes as possible) and I'd also be happy for pensions to be means tested in the same way child benefit is, even if it makes me personally worse off the benefits in smaller state would be worth it.
If you handed out £100 to various people as welfare and at the end of the year had concrete evidence that 50p of it had been claimed fraudulently then you can state 0.5% of the welfare budget was known to have been fraudulently claimed. All you can say about the other 99.5% is that you don't know if any of it was claimed fraudulently.
Given the the DfWP is by far the biggest spending governmental department even fractions of a percent add up to huge amounts of money. If you take £150bn as the benefit spending in 2012-2013 then 1% if that is £1.5bn, which to me sounds like a fuck-ton of money. And that's only what the government knows about.
If you mean do they know with 100% certainty I'd agree (and so do the DWP), but there's an awful lot of work behind it. I haven't read it, but I've worked with enough Govt stats which are classed as official stats to be sure they have a methodology which is rigorous. If we can't be sure whether these are right we can't be sure GDP is or trade figures or even housing numbers; however we can say that they're not going to be out by an order of magnitude. It could well be that it's not 0.7% fraud but 0.9%, however it's very unlikely to be 7%, much less 77%
I also wouldn't disagree it's a fair bit of money, (though to be fair its peanuts in the grand scheme of things as the old Treasury saying goes, 'a hundred million here and hundred million there and you're soon talking about real money'). And its because its a large bit of money DWP spend time and money in trying to find out what's happening, as if they don't have that information they can't manage their business. That's why I have confidence that the figures aren't inaccurate, because they're note collected so politicians can include them in a speech, but because they're useful to people in doing their job.
This would actually be very difficult. The fraudsters know how to play the system. There's also the issue of criteria for disability benefits. 2 of my disabilities don't meet any criteria for sickness benefit. Yet, they make working almost impossible. Not really helped by the constant need to change medication that stops working after a few months. And then there's all the people found fit for work who are told they don't meet the criteria for job seekers. Whilst you can claim JSA whilst disabled, you must be able to meet the criteria, which many of us won't.
With regards to the fraud figures - apparently, error (official and claimant error) is included in those figures too.
Surely its in your best interests if disabled that the system works properly and excludes people trying to game the system, as that means that a) you won't be labled a scrounger because the system will exclude them and b) there's more resources for those who do have disabilities and that can be used to helping you find appropriate work.
Just to be clear the 0/7% is fraud, it is separate from claimant error (0.9% overpaid and 0.6% underpaid) and official error (0.4% overpaid and 0.3% underpaid)