Posted by Iain Duncan Smith has been talking today about his plans for reforming the welfare system. This is a system that in my opinion has needed to be overhauled for quite a while now. After spending 4 years recently living in an area with a very high unemployment rate it really makes you see how some people love and feed off the system and have no intention of working. This is totally wrong. Whilst I agree that people out of work need a helping hand to keep themselves going it should not get to a point where they are too comfortable living off the state that there is no incentive for them to work in the future. It is also shocking how the long term unemployed know every little loop hole to get the maximum value out of the Government in benefits.
Housing benefit is a nice little earner for some of the unemployed. Find out what the maximum amount is you can claim in your area and say you are paying that in rent even if you aren’t. Of course the remainder of the money goes towards buying a few more beers that week, lovely.
Disability benefits are being taken advantage off as well by many people, and with good reason. If you can manage to say you are just ill enough to get on them then you are set. As is anyone who can put their name down as being your carer. Your benefits shoot up and you’ll get a brand new car given to you so your carer can pick up your shopping. Of course a lot of these brand new cars go to people who could walk the 5 minutes to the local shop or supermarket to pick up your shopping anyway but that doesn’t matter, they may as well have a shiny new car to do it. I saw a lot of this and some mornings you wake up and drive to work down a narrow street littered with brand new cars and a sky dish on every house and think to yourself “why am I bothering?”.
For those that manage to get a job and start working the tax credit system often discourages people from working more than a certain number of hours (16 usually if my memory serves me right). Once they go over this number of hours then they lose a massive chunk of their tax credits and end up quite a bit worse off. At least they are out working but let’s encourage them to do as much as possible.
Of course let’s not forget the real reason the tax credit system was introduced in the first place. It has been a great way for the government to fiddle the figures so the general public think they have somehow been collecting less tax and managing to reduce the amount of benefits being paid out. Tax credits were named as such for a very good reason. Every pound paid out in the form of a tax credit gets subtracted from the figure the government releases for the amount of tax collected. Benefits paid out are shown as an expense. By off loading some benefits as tax credits the amount paid out in benefits reduces as does the amount collected in taxes (or at least that’s what the official figures show). Amazingly, over night the governments figures look a lot better and they are managing to do a lot more with less money.
There are many flaws with the way the welfare system works at the moment. It is highly exploitable by those in the know and this is one of the first things the new Government should look into. As well as trying to encourage people back into work we should be looking at exactly why it is they don’t want to work. The answer is simple, most of them have it great on benefits. They can afford to do all they want to do in life without the tedium of having to go out and earn it.