I agree.Originally Posted by Croydon Bob
So much of the complexity and complication in our welfare, tax and benefit system is caused by Governments trying to avoid doing the obvious, simple, sensible, fair thing; paying for things openly with the tax system.
So we're all agreed that the Duke of Westminster should get housing benefit then?
Why not, as long as he can be seen to be contributing more than he gets back?
Seems to me that avoidance of tax by people who should be paying it is more of a divisive issue than whether someone rich and paying large amounts of tax gets a non-means-tested benefit.
If someone on 100K/year or above paying taxes properly got child benefit or a winter fuel payment, I don't see that as being unfair, since they'd be paying tens of thousands in tax.
If someone was organising their finances so that they were paying less tax than someone with half their income, whether they were also getting benefits or not isn't the most important thing when it comes to fairness.
You raise an interesting question: how to define and identify such families. A wide definition would take in the family of Junior, aged 16 and unemployed ( or sick or caring for someone severely disabled), with parents aged 32+, neither of whom has ever worked, and grandparents aged 48+, none of whom has ever worked. A narrower definition would exclude Junior's family from worklessness if he has older siblings or aunts or uncles or great-aunts or great-uncles who have worked.
Other definitions are, of course, possible: we might, for example, wonder whether to count Junior's family as intergenerationally workless if he has an aunt and a great-uncle who are in fairly well-paid work but take nothing to do with Junior's immediate family, which they regard as feckless or at least as contagiously unfortunate.
If I were looking for intergenerationally workless families, I'd start in places such as mining villages that lost their work in the 1980s. The difficulty is that government departments such as the Department of Work and Pensions that might be expected to know about such things appear not to do so. If someone can extract from official statistics the prevalence of intergenerational worklessness among the workless, I'd be happy to hear of it.
It's not just the wealthy who are at fault. Benefit fraud is widespread and costs £billions a year. It's the unfortunate folks with salaried jobs who end up paying for the price for the dishonesty of both the rich and poor.
Here is a list of the main benefits available in the UK.
Jobseeker's Allowance (JSA)
Income Support
Disability Living Allowance (DLA)
Child Benefit
Working Tax Credit
Child Tax Credit
Council Tax Benefit
Housing Benefit
Attendance Allowance
Carer's Allowance
Would someone who is in favour of universal benefits please note down what is the amount of money for each benefit that everybody should get. I'm trying to work out by how much everybody in the UK's bank account will be credited each month.
Surely, in the context of benefits, 'universal' has an effective meaning of 'non-means-tested', not 'every single person gets it'
That is, things like winter fuel payments or child benefit don't take much to qualify for apart from membership of one or other simple category (old, parent, etc) which are fairly cheap/easy to check, and don't tend to change the way incomes and employment status do.
AA and DLA are not means-tested at all. CA has an earnings limit. CB has not been means-tested until now ( originally Family Allowance, it replaced the old tax allowance for children). JSA can be either an individual benefit, based on national insurance contributions and time-limited, or a means-tested benefit. The rest are means-tested.
The rates can be found here:
http://www.focusondisability.org.uk/brates-1.html
Never stated otherwise!
But if you have a 'salaried job' you are not as 'unfortunate' as certain others!
In addition;
http://www.insidegovernment.co.uk/ec...benefit-fraud/
18 bn lost through tax fraud. 3.1 bn estimated lost through benefit fraud and error combined.
This does not take into account over 1bn in underpaid Benefits through error.
It seems to me obvious where energies and resources should be prioritized.
Particularly as you probably have more chance of reclaiming N years of underpaid tax than overpaid benefits.
As always, the state tends to address issues it measures. Some things are difficult to measure, hence return on investment is difficult to assess. Here I suspect there is also an issue of not blaming the offspring for the sins of their forebearers, nevertheless it is clear that the enviornment one grows up in significantly influences your own choices.
Ideally one would provide additional support for those who have not grown up with the example of work, but it does not seem unreasonable to provide a clear message of expected behaviour.
As to measurement - comparing births/deaths register with NI identity and history should provide some insights, alternately surveys in various communities could give an overview. This may be more informative in a way, since certain religious groups have individuals rather than whole families where it is expected that the community will pay for their life of devotion. Such behaviour should be paid for by the specific religious community not the whole community.
As to definitions, what you really want to define is an individuals desire to find employment, that is of course subjective so in effect unmeasurable, hence a pragmatic measure informed by the findings on some preliminary work such as the above may be the way forward. Perhaps something like individuals whose parents were unemployed/not paying tax for most of their formative years as the first cut for identifying those at risk.
Something by way of measurement might be achieved, I suspect. Jobseeker's Allowance ( in force since 1996), like its predecessor benefits going back to the early years of the twentieth century, provides penalties for such things as failure to apply for a suitable job, failure to attend a job interview, or behaviour likely to ensure the applicant does not get the job. Records are kept of occasions on which sanctions are applied ( or considered but not applied).
Those records provide some measure, however imperfect, of claimants' indifference to or dislike of paid employment. And, if a reasonable definition of intergenerational worklessness can be found, we are some way to finding out what effect it may have. As far as I have been able to discover, however, no research has been done on this.
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