Ian Duncan Smith (Tory) has been put in charge of sorting out the benefits fiasco which affects an estimated 5.9 Million people in the UK including me, I suggest we all get our rotten eggs ready in case Mr Smith gets it wrong!
The important thing to realise here is that people on benefits are living on a knife edge, one miscalculation can ruin the family budget and leave you eating mush and smoking ‘dimps’ for a couple of weeks, or worse in hoc to a loan shark. Most people on benefits would like to work if it were financially practical to do so, unfortunately in most cases it’s simply NOT practical and taking what work is available would leave them even worse off. For example a person on Job seeker's allowance cannot take part time work for the simple reason that they are only allowed to keep £5 per week of earned income while claiming, this in most cases will not even pay their bus fares to their job. So its full time permanent employment for them or nothing.
A similar situation exists for those of us on Incapacity Benefit, we are allowed to keep £12 per week of what we can earn part time. However for the vast majority of Incapacity Benefit claimants full time permanent employment is physically impossible.
Clearly New Labours approach, i.e. bullying claimants into taking whatever work is offered even if it makes their situation worse rather than better is not acceptable, but considering the huge deficit which is New Labours legacy to the UK what can Mr Smith do that will not hurt claimants, the sick, disabled and impoverished?
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please do not spam comments onto my posts, all comments are moderated and only genuine 'on topic' comments will be published. Anyone repeatedly trying to spam the same off topic links into comments will be reported to Google/blogger .