90 Years on Benefits

I was a student nurse many many moons ago and my net salary was £11 per MONTH yet I managed to dress well, have a very full social life and shared a flat with one other.
Yes, the pay is not the highest but you do the job because it's a vocation, like teaching.
If it's money you want then it's better to decide on another career.
I do agree that their pay could be much better but you know the pay structure from the outset.
What I do not agree with, is bank nurses and teachers getting triple the amount ph for doing the same job.

So NOT 90 years on benefits then. The title is misleading.

Actually, we have all been "on benefits" for the whole of our lives just as we would have the benefit of any insurance we could if we needed to, claim against. Weasel words do not change the fact that you are just the same as those who have to claim - you were just luckier it seems GabriellaG54.

So very, very much more is lost to the state by tax dodging. When will you start on those people? Perhaps you can tell us about the people you "know" who do this?

There was a programme on TV recently, can't remember which channel, following staff in their dealings with people claiming UC. What came out of it was they were vastly understaffed and were working under great stress. I believe that the rate paid to UC has been increased by £1000 to bring it up to the same amount as sick pay which is £94 pw.
What happens when all this over will they drop it back to what it was before or will they carryon with the increase.
Also I object very strongly to the word SCROUNGERS being used to describe people claiming benefits.

I didn't originally see it here (Mirror report) but in looking for it online am posting this meanwhile.

GagaJo
What has the man clapping got to do with my post?
No, I did not see it.

CherryCezzy
I will try to find it and post link on here. It was only a couple of days ago.

Although perhaps unintended, UC resulted in long delays in receiving money for claimants:

www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/blog/problems-universal-credit

There always will be scroungers, at any level of society, con men and scammers, blackmailers, anything not to earna living.

Similarly there are just as many people entitled to benefits who do not claim them, through ignorance or because they are too proud to. I worked for Age Concern, as it was known then, as a volunteer Home Advisor for 10 years and time and again I dealt with people who were living in desperate conditions who were not claiming the benefits they were entitled to, and unwilling to do so.

I also took to appeal cases where benefits had been refused. On appeal, well over 90% of claimants were granted the benfit they had applied for, but some just refused point blank to apply for either Attendance Allowance or Pension Credit.

For every cheat there is someone who should be receiving benfits and isn't.

If any one can devise a system that both catches all the cheats AND gives benefits to all those entitled to them. there is probably a knighthood, if not a Life Peerage awaiting you.

I was talking about your benefit cheat story!

Good grief GabriellaG54 you should have informed the benefits hotline. That is disgusting.

Where did you hear that GabriellaG. I was talking to a friend on the phone earlier today who is having to make a claim as she has lost her job because of this virus. She told me she would be receiving around £74 a week, sometimes every 4, sometimes every 5 weeks.

REALLY GabriellaG54? Do you remember the man who is currently in an NHS ICU clapping for the vote against increasing nurses wages?

Exactly Hetty58. FAR more money is lost to tax dodgers than benefit scroungers, because the sums are huge. But anyone with a reasonable amount of money has an accountant to save them as much tax as possible. It's not even regarded as being wrong, most of the time!

One rule for the elite and another for the poor.

I very much doubt that any government department deliberately instigates rules or designs benefits in such a way as to deliberately disadvantage the poorest in society.
That would mean the people instigating those changes are the worst kind of human being and enjoy knowing that that sector of society will feel the pain.
I certainly don't believe that to be the case.

We hear so much about benefit scroungers - yet so little about tax dodgers! How many are there of each, do you think?

5star. Freeview channel 30. Sky 128. Virgin 151.

quizqueen, 'anti welfare state'? Let's hope you and yours never need any support then!

Claiments of UC will now get higher benefits according to recent factual news statements. About £1k more pa.

I had a neighbour in the village we lived in, she was a 5 star scrounger in a house worth upwards of £750K a fleet of expensive cars and a place in Spain.

She claimed she lived in a terraced house in a nearby town and was a single parent.
The terraced house was hers, but her elderly parents lived in it.

She would tell people how and what to claim, she understood the system inside out, she had a couple of my friends go to her as she knew some loophole on student loan forms at the time.

I despised this woman for many reasons not just her fraudulent ways.
So I made the call.

I knew from the line of questioning from the fraud team that she was definitely claiming.

She was successfully prosecuted.

Unfortunately there are people who think the Benefits System is there to be exploited and know their way around the system. The majority of people only claim when necessary. Programmes like the one mentioned seek out extremes and don't give any sort of balanced view. That wouldn't make interesting TV would it.

Things are slightly different at the moment, so I have NO idea if it's possible or not to 'play' the system while systems are being changed to support people under lockdown.

But under usual conditions, there is NO WAY anyone can fake a Universal Credit claim. There are far, far more people turned away who are genuine than who ever manage to fraudulently get money out. People die from starvation / from lack of medication while their claims are being challenged now.

What I DO think is positive about it, is that it has forced those who would otherwise have used benefits at times rather than work to look for employment (I know a youngish person like this).

Generally though, UC is cruel and deliberately designed to make life even harder for the poor. The old Victorian elitist view of the 'undeserving poor', ironically enough by those that have a huge excess of wealth stashed away.

Where do you find a 5* channel ?
There will always be scrounges i m afraid but also there are many genuine people who get limited help and face really bad times
Most diabetics work as do people with COPD so really it s down to the authorities to be more scrupulous with checking people’s complaints and disabilities There are other people very ill or extremely disabled who are made to work, it just isn’t consistent enough
I used to work with the general public and have people tell me how they have got their doctor to believe this that or the other I had one young lady boasting about how she told her doctor she was depressed when I asked her where was her depression coming from she told me straight on that she wasn’t really but wanted to spend the summer on the beach not working

A few years ago we were both having to survive on JSA. (No fault of our own, and long term members might remember the lengths we went to, Mr P, a highly qualified engineer eventually got a temporary job packing dog food)

Having to walk around Lidl with a calculator to see if we could afford a jar of coffee, people abusing the system make me

Many years ago I was working in X and needed a place to stay for 2 weeks instead of the drive back home every day. I found a B&B which seemed to suit and the people who ran it were very hospitable and chatty.
When I left we kept in touch regularly and I would visit for an afternoon or take them out for dinner.
This went on for many years and I got to know them very well indeed.
Suffice to say they were receiving their pensions and not declaring their second income. Whenever the rare visitor from the DWP arrived, to all appearances, it looked like a large comfortable family home. The marque car had been put in the pub car park. The many many wines and spirits hidden and dining tables put down and removed to a shed.
The DHS visitor was made a fuss of with tea and home-made cake and when he went, it was all put back again.
Their grocery wine, spirits and cigarettes bill had to be seen to be believed. The amounts of cash (they only dealt in cash, no receipts) taken to the bank was in the middle hundreds, weekly, yet they were bankrupt...well, let's say, they had an arrangement to pay a nominal sum to their creditors of £1pm to each of the 8.
Besides their pension they received pension credit, plus of course, the usual extras.
The sad thing was that they laughed at being able to fool the DWP and their creditors and made no secret of living high on the hog courtesy of the government.
The bank never wondered how they were getting all the DWP payments plus another source of income but they'd been banking there for so long they were treated like family.
When I found all this out, I broke contact without telling them why.
I would never in a million years have thought they would be complicit in such goings on but you just never know how dishonest some people are, right under your nose.

Was the title of the programme called 90 years on Benefits like your thread title? I can't find the programme.