IDS: "I could live on £53 pw" Daily Telegraph: "Oh, really?"

[Zaune]

Can't believe I'm even linking to this...

Life on £55 a week is no stunt for Debbie Garrity. It is laid out in painstaking detail in separate labelled compartments of a plastic box she keeps next to her armchair. Gas £5, Water £4, Bus Pass £12.50, Food £10. Inside a newly labelled section – Bedroom Tax – is a crisp £10 note, which means she has had to halve her shopping budget. In the Social Fund section, there is nothing at all.

“Sometimes I would like to saw a pound in half to make it go further,” says the 45-year-old, who has a 2:1 BSE degree in health and social care and worked full-time for decades before losing her job several months ago. Outside the window of her neat flat on the sprawling Newbiggin Hall estate on the edge of Newcastle, seagulls roll in the wind. The A1 roars faintly in the distance.

“I just feel stuck and I can’t go anywhere,” she says. “You would have thought that by my age you’d be able to have some luxuries, but sadly not. This is no quality of life at all.”

As of last night, more than 437,000 people had signed a petition calling for Iain Duncan Smith to live this way. Well, to be more precise, they would like the Work and Pensions Secretary to live on £53 a week. For Garrity, that £2 would mean a difference of two more meals. She says she can only afford to eat once a day. The petition follows a challenge on the Today programme that arose out of the Government’s sweeping changes to the benefits system that took effect on April 1.

Duncan Smith was asked if he could live on £53 a week, the amount one caller claimed he had left to live on following cuts to his housing benefit. “If I had to, I would,” came the reply. It was later revealed that the caller lived on £156 a week, but the gauntlet had been thrown down. And, as the Telegraph reports here, many do struggle to live on such meagre sums.

Later this week, in an interview with his local paper, the Wanstead and Woodford Guardian, Duncan Smith dismissed the petition as a “complete stunt”.

He is right. Two decades ago, Matthew Parris, then a Tory MP, came to the same conclusion in the nearby neighbourhood of Scotswood, just four miles from Newbiggin Hall. He’d agreed to live there on the dole for a week for a Granada documentary, despite an order from Margaret Thatcher not to. This week he wrote of the futility of the task.

Those in Garrity’s position agree. A week, even six months, spent this way does not accurately convey how crushing it is to be struggling constantly to scrape together enough money to live on. Or what it’s like to be trapped in a dehumanising system of welfare that punishes progress and makes it impossible to escape. The true face of poverty in modern Britain is as far removed from the sponger lifestyle of “shameless” Mick Philpott, who raked in £100,000 a year on state benefits and was jailed for life this week for killing six of his 17 children in a house fire, as it is from Duncan Smith’s comfortable Buckinghamshire home. Those, like Garrity, who know it best agree that the welfare system is in desperate need of an overhaul.

She has watched some of the debate raging this week on her small television. Although not much. In order to save on bills, she is careful with her use of electricity, switching off her fridge and hanging food items out of the window to keep them cold. Like other residents on the estate, she occasionally heads to the local swimming baths for a shower, to save herself the cost of hot water.

“I don’t put the heating on,” she says, “although I do give myself a small treat every now and then and put the electric fire on for a bit. It can get very cold here. You can ring up the electricity company to find out how much it costs for 10 minutes of hoovering – although I haven’t quite got to that stage yet.”

Garrity grew up in the Northumberland town of Rothbury and moved to Newcastle about 25 years ago for work.

“I’ve always worked,” she says. “My whole family has a strong work ethic. My dad was a bricklayer and my mum worked in lots of part‑time jobs. At first, I trained to be a chef and worked in the Lake District. I started washing dishes and worked my way up.”

After moving to Newcastle, she combined chef work with a job in the social-care sector and studying for a degree with the Open University. “When I was 32, I was working about 70 hours a week,” she says. “I did a BSE in health and social care and got a 2:1. My plan is to go and do a master’s and then work with people who have disabilities.”

She is reluctant to discuss personal details, but after her marriage ended a decade ago, she moved into a rented house. Two years ago, her landlord sold the house. No longer able to afford to rent privately, she moved into her current two-bedroom council flat, despite having asked for a one-bedroom home. After losing her full-time job in the health and social sector a few months ago, she was forced to contact the housing charity, Crisis. She currently receives an employment support allowance of £71 a week, which goes on council and now bedroom tax, as well as housing benefit of £61 a week, which goes straight on rent. “I’ve been waiting to hear back on a few voluntary posts,” she says. “But there are very few jobs out there.”

She continues: “The thing that I miss most is driving my car and being able to go where I want, when I choose. I last had a car two years ago, but I couldn’t afford one now. I’m fortunate that I know how to cook. I try to eat healthily, and have worked out how to cook a meal for 75p.

“I only eat one meal a day. I go to cheap shops and find the cheapest deals; I look for anything for 10p or 20p. I never buy vegetables unless they are reduced. I’ve just bought a packet of reduced parsnips, though, so it will be nice to do something with those. I don’t buy red meat – I would love a rare rump steak one of these days.”

Much of Garrity’s time is spent walking. She wanders through the rundown Sixties housing estate to use the public library and welfare office (which stands next to a derelict working men’s club) to study and look for jobs, or just to keep out of her flat. When she can afford it, she takes the bus into the city and uses the university library. “It can be very, very isolating,” she says. “You need to keep trying to have a purpose to your day.”

Duncan Smith and George Osborne, the Chancellor, have stressed this week that the Coalition’s reforms are “restoring the original values of the welfare state”. Key to their motives is tackling “idleness”, the fifth Giant Evil that Beveridge identified in 1942. But ,any of those in receipt of state benefits say they are trapped in an enforced idleness. They cannot afford to progress. Cases such as that of 23-year-old Abbigail Aziz are depressingly routine. The Scarborough shop worker tells me she was recently promoted, but has asked her boss to demote her again as it has meant her benefits have been reduced to the point where she cannot afford to live.

Mother-of-three Lorna Sculley is in a similar predicament. She works 16 hours a week as a school kitchen assistant in Tower Hamlets (the maximum permitted before her benefits become automatically reduced) from which she earns around £90 a week on top of benefits of £371. After paying bills and outstanding debts, she is left with £50 a week to feed and clothe her family. They have spent the past two Christmases in a nearby food bank – one of hundreds now established across the country. Her three boys, aged 12, eight and two, share a bedroom in their tiny flat in the shadow of Canary Wharf, with the two eldest sleep on mattresses on the floor.

“The weekends are the worst,” says 33‑year-old Sculley. “By then the money has been spent. I sit here and think about trying to take the kids swimming or something, and then I look at the budget and realise I can’t. Sometimes I can’t afford to put anything in the electric meter and know it will run out. We sit here with quilts around us.

“I look out of the window at Canary Wharf, and see all the lights on those buildings and all the heat coming off them at 11pm or midnight, and wonder who on earth is in them at that time of night. I can’t work any more than my 16 hours a week, it doesn’t matter what I earn. I’m a working mum trying to do better for myself and it’s really wrong.”

Sean, her eldest tells me at one point that his mother often goes hungry in order to feed them. She nods and falls silent.

As the Sculleys gaze up at the glittering wealth towering over them, so Debbie Garrity glimpses a better life in the Northumberland hills beyond her estate. One where they are not dependent on a welfare trap that reduces life to a weekly wait for the next handout.

“I stay in touch with my friends in the countryside and my dream is to move back,” she says. “But I’m pretty worried about the future.”

You've got to hand it to the man. It takes real talent to be too right-wing for the Daily Telegraph!

[fuzzymillipede]

Is the cost of living really that much higher in Britain? Here in the US, I've been living without difficulty in a major city on about $65 a week, not including rent. That's significantly less than what is quoted in the article. Granted, I'm a single, healthy, 22-year-old so I'm sure that helps.

[El Moose Monstero]

Amidst all this, MP Helen Goodman actually tried to live on a similar level. Transcript of her speech to the House of Commons below.

Link

I was so shocked when I read what my constituents wrote to me about the implications for them of the bedroom tax, and about how little they would have left to live on, that I decided during the week of the recent recess to see if I could survive on £18 a week, which is what they will be left with to buy their food after 1 April. That figure of £18 is entirely based on the experiences of my constituents, in particular women on employment and support allowance who are about the same age as me, but who had to stop working owing to chronic health conditions, perhaps after 20 years of working life. Out of their £71.70, they have to find £10 for electricity, £20 for heating—gas or coal—£6 for water rates, £4 for bus fares in the case of those who live in villages and have to get to the main town, and £10 for the bedroom tax, which left them with £23 for weekly living expenses.

That £23 has to cover more than food, of course. We did a calculation, and set aside £5 for all the non-food things everyone has to buy—soap, washing powder, washing-up liquid, toothpaste, loo paper—plus a small amount in order to save £50 a year for clothes or a pair of trainers, or in case the iron breaks. That leaves £18.

I therefore took up the challenge of trying to live on £18, and I want to tell Members what it is like. It is extremely unpleasant. I had porridge for breakfast every morning, as I usually do, but I make my porridge with milk; now I was making it with water. I had to eat the same food over and over and over again. Single people are hit particularly hard, because cheap food comes in big packs. I made a stew at the beginning of the week, and I ate the same food four nights a week. I had pasta twice a week. I had baked potatoes. I had eggs on six occasions. It was completely impossible to have meat or fish; that was out of the question. It was also impossible to have five portions of fruit and vegetables a week.

I therefore also have a message for the Under-Secretary of State for Health, Anna Soubry, who is responsible for public health. She was criticising people on low incomes for obesity. Of course people on low incomes are more likely to have that problem; they have to fill up on toast and biscuits. I found myself waking up in the middle of the night absolutely ravenous, having to make cups of tea and eat biscuits. I had a headache for five days in that week, and I was completely lethargic and exhausted by 4 pm. Some people are on jobseeker’s allowance and are looking for a job. Looking for a job is a job in itself; it takes time and energy. The people whom DWP Ministers want to do workfare are being expected to work 30 hours a week, yet they are not going to have enough to eat properly. Most shocking of all was the fact that come Sunday I ran out of food—there was literally nothing left to eat that night. If Ministers are happy with the notion that 660,000 of our fellow citizens are literally not going to have enough to eat by the end of the week, all I can say is that I pity them because they have no pity and no conception of what they are going to do to the people in our constituencies who will be faced with this bedroom tax. The Minister has been very free and easy in talking about all these wonderful alternatives, such as the fact that people can move. In my constituency more than 1,000 people will be affected by the bedroom tax, but there are fewer than 100 smaller properties to which they could move. In my constituency, it is not possible for all these people to increase the number of hours they work, as seven people are chasing every job; people are in part-time work because they cannot get full-time work. Government Members have shown their complete ignorance of the benefits system by saying, “You just have to work a couple of hours a week on the minimum wage.” Of course that is not true, because these people would get then into the tapers and the disregards, and their benefits would be cut or they might find themselves paying tax. The numbers simply do not add up. Of course some individuals or couples have properties that are larger than they need, but the so-called under-occupancy is in one part of the country and the overcrowding is in another. It simply is not credible to suggest that all the large, over-occupying families in London will move up to Durham, particularly given that the unemployment rate there is more than 9%. What would they be moving to? What would they be moving for?

I made a video diary of my week, so I got a lot of feedback from people affected by this policy. Interestingly, they said, “Yes, this is the reality of our lives. We are not able to survive properly now and things are going to get worse to the tune of £10 a week from 1 April.” In 2006, I did the same experiment under the previous Labour Government, living on benefits to see what life was like for young people on the lowest rate of income support. I found that difficult, but there was enough money to get through the whole week. I wish to point out to the Minister that we have reached a new low, because the £21 that people had in 2006 is equivalent to £28 now, and that should be compared with the £18 with which people are going to be expected to feed themselves. The Minister has made much, too, of the discretionary housing benefits, which many hon. Members have questioned. In County Durham, £5 million of income will be taken out of people’s pockets and out of the local economy. The size of the discretionary fund is half a million pounds, so once again there is a huge gap between actual need and the resources being given to people to deal with it. Many hon. Members have pointed out the unfairness of the policy for people who are disabled and need to sleep separately, be they adults or children; people who have children in the Army; foster carers; and separated parents. This policy is a fundamental attack on the poorest people in this country. People are going to lose between £500 and

£1,000 over the course of next year, through no fault of their own. But the really disgusting thing is that on the same day that the bedroom tax is being introduced millionaires are being given a tax cut that will be worth £1,000—not over the year as a whole, but every single week.

[Terralthra]

The idea that they'd have to turn down work because it would reduce their welfare benefits seems insane to me. Not that the US has a great system, but as far as I know (from experience as well as general knowledge), unemployment insurance and welfare are tuned so that if you are working while receiving either benefit, the benefit is never reduced by more than you receive in wages.

On UI in California, you send in a form every two weeks with any hours worked and wages received, and your next check is typically reduced by 75% of the wages received. No matter what, if you're working, it doesn't penalize you: you get benefit amount x or wage y + benefit x-(y*.75), which is always greater than x.

It seems ridiculous that the welfare system would, in effect, incentivize working less.

[Crazedwraith]

@Terralthra: Not an expert on our benefit system aside from having being on Jobseeker's Allowance (JSA )for about a year myself but...

Taken by itself JSA doesn't disincentivise you to work. You can get if you're not working and you get it various decreasing amount if you work part time up until you're working 16 or more hours a week. At which point at minimum wage you're getting more from work than you would from JSA anyway.

I think the problem is various other benefits the person would be losing access to with increased wages? Housing benefit and so on.

[NoXion]

Another problem is things like the cost of travel, which is non-trivial especially if the job is far from one's home or in some awkward location poorly served by the UK's crappily-managed and overpriced public transport networks (thanks privatisation!). Travel costs alone can render a potential job into a non-starter, especially if it's some crappy minimum wage job with few hours, which there seem to be all too many of these days...

[Lord Revan]

so it's basically that some benefits have too low income limits so that once you add your weekly income you end up with less even though your salary is techinically larger?

[aieeegrunt]

I wonder how long it will be before people huddled freezing in quilts because they can only have the electric heat on ten minutes a day stop looking at Canary Warf envious of an empty office building being heated and start thinking the only solution is to burn the fucker down with the richers in it.

[Minischoles]

IDS and his Tory chums can only be described by one word, because it perfectly fits.

Cunts.

The lot of them have absolutely zero idea what it's like to live on benefits. IDS himself doesn't even pay fucking rent or a mortgage - he lives rent free in a house his father in law gave him when he got married. His 'I could easily live on £53 a week' is complete nonsense and it's no wonder he's not prepared to do it, I doubt he'd know how to live on £530 a week, let alone a 10th of that.

Unfortunately him and other Tories only have to appeal to one demographic to win an election, Middle Englanders, who really do believe that all people on JSA are scrounging layabouts with plasma tvs and iphones, who are just waiting to rape their daughters and steal all their things.

The reality of it is in some areas, that you are better off on benefits rather than working more. Once you go past a certain number of hours of work, you encounter a whole host of problems - you can lose Housing Benefit, you can lose Council Tax assistance (even worse now since that's gone up) - it makes things much harder. That's if you can even find a stable job that will give you enough hours and isn't part time - my sister spent nearly 17 months on JSA before finding a part time job.

Of course there are plans to get around that by flat out denying Housing Benefit to anyone under 25 - apparently wanting to live on your own before that, for whatever reason, is not allowed and you should live with your parents.

[Zaune]

Oh, and most of the unskilled or semi-skilled manual work in this country is temporary agency-based stuff from which you can be -and frequently will be- laid off without notice or severance pay. The money can be significantly better if you can get a full forty hours a week, but that's not guaranteed even in relatively good times.

[madd0ct0r]

you do get other issues too. A friend who's a mother of two was recently hospitalized due to her legs suddenly not working (took a month for her to even start walking again).
Since she was no longer working, the benefits office stopped her childcare payments, since she obviously could look after them at home, while lying in hospital on a morhpine drip...

[LadyTevar]

what is this about a "Bedroom Tax"?

[HMS Sophia]

what is this about a "Bedroom Tax"?

Basically if you're on housing benefit and you have unnecessary bedrooms in your home, you will have your benefit cut by £10 per additional room.
However, a family of two adults, two under-16 teen girls (I think it's sixteen for same-sex siblings) and a baby would have too many bedrooms if they lived in anything bigger than a two bedroom house....

[Broomstick]

The idea that they'd have to turn down work because it would reduce their welfare benefits seems insane to me. Not that the US has a great system, but as far as I know (from experience as well as general knowledge), unemployment insurance and welfare are tuned so that if you are working while receiving either benefit, the benefit is never reduced by more than you receive in wages.

On UI in California, you send in a form every two weeks with any hours worked and wages received, and your next check is typically reduced by 75% of the wages received. No matter what, if you're working, it doesn't penalize you: you get benefit amount x or wage y + benefit x-(y*.75), which is always greater than x.

UI is unemployment insurance, correct? The would be somewhat analogous to the JSA, though there are differences in details. US UI does encourage people to take even temporary employment or day labor, you only get ahead by doing that.

As a comparison to the £18/week food allowance, in the US the weekly foodstamp allowance works out to about $50/week for the neediest individuals, which works out to about £32/week at the current exchange rate, or nearly twice what the UK neediest are expected to live on. That benefit is lowered if you income exceeds a certain level, but it's phased out gradually and not entirely until you're earning around $1200 a month for one person, or about £790. (when you have more than one person in a household it's not additive but I don't want to get too complicated there). That, in a country not know for a generous social safety net. Then again, the US may not provide housing or money for toilet paper, but it does have a weirdness about making sure people can eat.

As someone who has lived on US foodstamps, I have to say being able to have a large garden and a means to preserve food makes a huge difference. I grew most of our vegetables, so I was able to use my foodstamps for whole grains, quality protein sources, and a few items we simply couldn't grow in our area like citrus fruit. I was also able to afford spices and condiments, which make a huge difference if you're eating poor folks food or the same thing four nights in a row. But that sort of gardening is only for the able-bodied, it's too much work for the disabled and most elderly.

I was also occasionally able to barter for game meat from some of the local hunters - probably not as common an option in Britain, or any city in the US, as where I live.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Yes, if the UK had foodstamps like the US then most of these people would have an extra 40 pounds a week they could spend only on food items from a completely separate programme.

[Zaune]

Yes, if the UK had foodstamps like the US then most of these people would have an extra 40 pounds a week they could spend only on food items from a completely separate programme.

I wouldn't bet on it. We don't have a state system the way you do; if the Scottish or Welsh parliaments decided to introduce their own supplementary scheme along the lines of state unemployment insurance, it'd have to come out of the funding doled out by central government, because they can't levy sales or income tax.

[SAMAS]

The idea that they'd have to turn down work because it would reduce their welfare benefits seems insane to me. Not that the US has a great system, but as far as I know (from experience as well as general knowledge), unemployment insurance and welfare are tuned so that if you are working while receiving either benefit, the benefit is never reduced by more than you receive in wages.

On UI in California, you send in a form every two weeks with any hours worked and wages received, and your next check is typically reduced by 75% of the wages received. No matter what, if you're working, it doesn't penalize you: you get benefit amount x or wage y + benefit x-(y*.75), which is always greater than x.

It seems ridiculous that the welfare system would, in effect, incentivize working less.

In the theoretical (don't know if it's actual anywhere) case, it would be Right Hand vs. Left Hand.

Say, one lawmaker sets welfare at what they think is a minimum livable level, but another lawmaker sets minimum wage below that.

[Broomstick]

Yes, if the UK had foodstamps like the US then most of these people would have an extra 40 pounds a week they could spend only on food items from a completely separate programme.

I wouldn't bet on it. We don't have a state system the way you do; if the Scottish or Welsh parliaments decided to introduce their own supplementary scheme along the lines of state unemployment insurance, it'd have to come out of the funding doled out by central government, because they can't levy sales or income tax.

The US foodstamp program is a Federal program. The states administer it, but the Feds set most of the rules and provide the money.

Although, yes, both state and local governments can provide funding for programs above and beyond that.

[Irbis]

My take as an uneducated foreigner who merely lived in UK for 2 years - yes, it's technically possible to survive on 50 pounds a week. I did just that for half of the time (note it was in Scotland, which I understand is better in some respects than most of UK). However, there are two important caveats:

A) I did live in subsidized housing (as part of the education package deal) with flat bill rate. Unlike that woman, I didn't need to worry about electricity usage to vacuum floor, water to wash or drink, or any other of that stuff - if I did, I suppose things would be hard, yes.

B) I didn't worked full time - meaning, I could afford to take 30-45 minutes just walking to shop (see above, UK "public" bus transport is complete shit, and I wasn't able to afford bike) 2-3 times a week to restock on food. Notice she mentions reduced food? It's reduced about three times a day, and usually instantly snapped up by people. Now, if you work, you can about forget about having chance to go at first two times, and you can at best try late evening reduction - oh, and did I mention one of the most common money saving schemes by councils in UK is turning down street lightning? Imagine lone mother walking after dark with heavy shopping bags with little police patrols around - things can't possibly go wrong, can they?

Another wonderful way state shafts these lazy people on benefits is requirement to have a fucking landline for about anything. You want appointment to get work papers? Landline. Meeting with job assistant? Landline. Want to have NI number issued? Fucking landline. Not only it's 21st Century, if I were jobless and struggling with budget, wired telephone is about first thing I'd try to cut. I eventually managed to substitute university phone after much legwork, but the process was absolute pain in the ass and took months to complete. It also shafts disabled people - my friend with hearing problems had landline, unlike me, but the only allowed way someone like him could contact public office was by teletype. Seriously, are we back to 70s? These things can be still found outside museums? Nope, mail is no good, as isn't fax, it would be too convenient

Next, while yes, most of cheap food is fattening shit, I kind of wonder what she means by no vegetables. Guess either poor access to shops or too little money - I did try to buy vegetables in bulk in Farmfoods or Morrisons, and they were (usually) affordable enough. Thankfully, I didn't get to the stage of looking for 10-20p items, though...

And one final note, the article mentions her watching TV. Either she does it illegally, or does pay for entertainment after all - when envelope from HMR&C informing me of TV 'tax' Licence arrived I calculated for a second, sighed, and decided to stick to internet (from university and public library, so, free) as the sole entertainment for the duration of stay. I can't fathom how anyone on even minimum wage would decide to pay for both that and TV, but then again, I am from generation that mostly switched to computers...

[Sinewmire]

Taken by itself JSA doesn't disincentivise you to work. You can get if you're not working and you get it various decreasing amount if you work part time up until you're working 16 or more hours a week. At which point at minimum wage you're getting more from work than you would from JSA anyway.

I was on Job Seekers Allowance for about 2 years once I finished uni (I had NO idea what to do next), and basically, if you worked whilst on JSA whatever you earned was subtracted from your benefits, on a pound for pound basis, but you are allowed to keep £5 on top of that. Once you reach 16 hours of work a week, you recieve no JSA.

Thankfully, I had a supportive family with a big house, so I was OK, and didn't need/recieve Housing Support or anything like that.

[Admiral Valdemar]

I was on JSA while looking for work after graduating back in '05. I was on it long enough for the programme to kick me on to the one week course where you were obligated to come in every day from 9 till 5, to basically learn how to write a CV (kinda got told that at school...) and better ways to interview or look for jobs. It was all trivially basic stuff, and one guy was told not to turn up and get a doctor's note to state as much, because the previous two cycles he'd been through on this course, the police had wanted him. And it involved chair flinging one time, as they basically jumped him inside the college where I signed on, despite not having a warrant.

After that, a few more weeks pass and you're then tasked with taking either charity work or working for the county council in some form e.g. housing renovation, gardening and so on. I took the former and worked in a charity shop for the six weeks you're meant to be on it. Not long after that, I moved down to Cambs. and got a job. I was fortunate to be living at home when on JSA, so the £45 I got weekly was used mainly on the charity shop thing to get me there and get lunch, as I didn't drive then. I, personally, can't see how I could live where I am now on that amount. Not without a drastic change in lifestyle, and I'm fairly frugal for the most part.

I will say that the worst thing about that time, aside from some of the characters I met when signing on and the totally useless, apathetic Job Centre staff, was the idea I was a failure leeching off my parents as well as the state. I went to a dark place near the end of that, which is why I empathise more with people I have known who, say, are seriously depressed and unable to work only to face their benefits being cut because fucktards like Philpott add fuel to the "cut all welfare leechers loose" fire.

[Lost Soal]

I was on JSA while looking for work after graduating back in '05. I was on it long enough for the programme to kick me on to the one week course where you were obligated to come in every day from 9 till 5, to basically learn how to write a CV (kinda got told that at school...) and better ways to interview or look for jobs. It was all trivially basic stuff, and one guy was told not to turn up and get a doctor's note to state as much, because the previous two cycles he'd been through on this course, the police had wanted him. And it involved chair flinging one time, as they basically jumped him inside the college where I signed on, despite not having a warrant.

Don't forget the Basic Skills test. Went through A4E's 1 week course thing twice and had to take those tests both times.

Last time I went on jobseekers was after I lost my job in Aberdeen where I was living in a private rental flat, I didn't even attempt to go on benefits there. When a new job wasn't immediately forthcoming I packed what I could into my car over two trips and moved back in with my dad in Newcastle to keep bills to a minimum.

[Korto]

I was on Job Seekers Allowance for about 2 years once I finished uni (I had NO idea what to do next), and basically, if you worked whilst on JSA whatever you earned was subtracted from your benefits, on a pound for pound basis, but you are allowed to keep £5 on top of that. Once you reach 16 hours of work a week, you recieve no JSA.

100% claw-back after the first 5 pounds? You're fucking kidding. Here, you get to keep the first $62, then you lose 50% of the next $188, and 60% after that till all your payment's gone, and even that can hit problems of it not being worth working, due to other benefits being withdrawn at the same time creating a net loss.

With the "Bedroom Tax" I don't share all the objections. There's no reason why siblings of the same sex can't share a room. Bunk-beds were invented for a reason. But to expect people to leave a house they've lived in for years because someone's moved out (or died) is callous and unnecessary, and as there's apparently no requirement for there to actually be "acceptable" accommodation available, you get taxed whether or not there's anywhere for you to go, it's just a disguised money grab targeting those who can't afford it.

[Gandalf]

Here, you get to keep the first $62, then you lose 50% of the next $188, and 60% after that till all your payment's gone, and even that can hit problems of it not being worth working, due to other benefits being withdrawn at the same time creating a net loss.

Assuming you're talking about Newstart, at least we have the job bank thing to make it more appealing to go to work. When I started working, I had been unemployed/studenting for long enough that my first several months working saw no reduction in payments. By the time that ended, I was enjoying my work enough not to go on Centrelink again.

[xthetenth]

With the "Bedroom Tax" I don't share all the objections. There's no reason why siblings of the same sex can't share a room. Bunk-beds were invented for a reason. But to expect people to leave a house they've lived in for years because someone's moved out (or died) is callous and unnecessary, and as there's apparently no requirement for there to actually be "acceptable" accommodation available, you get taxed whether or not there's anywhere for you to go, it's just a disguised money grab targeting those who can't afford it.

From what I've been hearing apparently a lot of the problem is that the houses with those few buildings simply don't exist in the required numbers. So it's even worse than that.