Record Numbers Not Working Due To Ill Health

Yes, it must be awful, and there needs to be a much fairer system of sick pay.

Can you imagine how soul-destroying for someone with a genuine need for state support who gets lumped in with so-called scroungers in the eyes of society?

It's not a good thing for people to have to go to work when they are ill. Not at all. It isn't going to help them to get better, and they may infect people, depending on the illness. I would never want to see people forced to soldier on because they can't afford to take time off.

But at the same time, there are those like my colleagues who just don't care about the impact of their sick leave on others, and see it as a right to get full pay for months when others are doing their job for no extra pay.

How the latter group can be dealt with without disadvantaging the former is for greater minds than mine to work out.

Why do you think that is a good thing? My dad was self employed I remember him being diagnosed with pneumonia and pleurisy, he had 2 days off. There was nothing positive about that.

I feel truly sorry for people who are not well enough to work but there are a lot of illnesses or complaints that it is impossible to prove.

My old schoolfriend was a qualified nurse and when her two girls were about 5 and 6 she found it very tiring working and looking after them even though her husband and her mother did a lot of the dropping off, picking up, cooking etc.

I could not believe it when she said she was going to pretend she had injured her back so she could get some time off. I said “but you haven’t” and she just laughed and said “but they can’t prove I haven’t”. She took nearly a year off with a completely fictitious injury.

I understand a lot of people are now claiming they have long covid which is also very hard to confirm.

My husband says everybody should be self employed then they wouldn’t bunk off so easily. I honestly cannot remember him having even a day off off in his whole life due to illness. He worked right through the pandemic. He has had a very bad back all his working life and I have seen him literally crawl up the stairs at night because he is in agony. Most self employed people start early, finish late, never take a lunch break, don’t get paid holidays and often spend their evenings after working all day, ordering parts, doing invoices, paying bills, returning phone calls, sending emails etc.

I know someone who died of MND. He only managed to get benefits round about the time he died and he only got those because he had computer literate family members who helped him. I’d just watched I Daniel Blake and thought to myself surely that couldn’t happen. Mentioned the film to a friend who was the man’s sister and she said she couldn’t watch the film as it was too close to home.

Aveline

One of the ladies I visit in hospital used to work in a benefits department. Her job was to come in if arguments had arisen and staff were being threatened. She's quite a wee thing but obviously took no nonsense. She said that often foreign people (unspecified) came with family members who they said were lawyers and threatened her with court action. She encouraged them to go ahead but no one ever sued.

When I was 20 I worked in the Unemployment Benefit office.
A female claimant about the same age didn't want to wait
6 weeks (as it was then)for benefits so hit me over the head with a magazine she was carrying. I didn't stay in that career .

Germanshepherdsmum

Nobody is blaming those who are genuinely too ill to work.

Indeed. But plenty on here are suggesting that many are not "really ill" and are milking the system for the riches which can be claimed. I do believe there are some who claim to be mentally ill or depressed, can you believe it?

Nobody is blaming those who are genuinely too ill to work.

GagaJo

My poor brother (younger than me) has had his health decimated by long covid. Heart failure. He's very lucky to be senior in his company so they have done everything they can to enable him to continue working. Working from home. Provided everything he needed to be able to do that. Given him flexible hours. Working part-time. But still, he's being forced to give up work very early due to it. But of course, Long Covid is a big skive, isn't it? Just a way to get out of working.

As for those on here talking about generations of families that haven't worked...

I taught in Northumberland for 10 years. Whole communities decimated by Thatcher and the Tories. So yes, generations of families out of work. And it's tragic to watch. Bright, sharp, clever students in my class. Destined to either leave their families/homes/culture or end up unemployed because there is no work here. And then on top of it, the wealthy of the country call those families scroungers, playing the system.

If you're going to b*tch about the unemployed from the comfort of your detached home, your warm house, with a full stomach and a glass of wine in hand while you browse the net looking for your next foreign holiday or for your new car, perhaps you could look at who you vote for and blame them, rather than their victims.

Well said, Gagajo. This thread has been largely a very depressing read for me. DH and I were on benefits for about 3 years when the DC were small because of devastating illness affecting us both. A range of support from the Welfare State, which still existed under Mrs Thatcher before she started dismantling it, eventually enabled me train in a health and care profession and return to work as the breadwinner while DH ran the home. Nevertheless, despite genuine illness, I used to feel guilty if someone saw me buying a packet of biscuits and I worried people might say we shouldn't have the family cat while we were ill. Since we have both been ill for over a year with Covid followed by the constantly coughing and debilitating virus, I find I have lost my confidence completely and have met up with none of my friends socially during since February last year and everyone in our small extended family of 10 has been seriously ill over the past 4 years. In my youth I worked hard developing and supporting voluntary services locally whilst unemployed but have offered my community no help at all during the pandemic. I have felt utterly overwhelmed by the state of the world in general and am only now beginning to move forward slowly again. None of us know what others are going through.....

HousePlantQueen

Bingo! Unspecified foreigners claiming benefits. This country is doomed I tell you, doomed.

Bingo! Unspecified foreigners claiming benefits. This country is doomed I tell you, doomed.

One of the ladies I visit in hospital used to work in a benefits department. Her job was to come in if arguments had arisen and staff were being threatened. She's quite a wee thing but obviously took no nonsense. She said that often foreign people (unspecified) came with family members who they said were lawyers and threatened her with court action. She encouraged them to go ahead but no one ever sued.

Reading this thread I wonder did anyone watch the film "I am Daniel Blake" if they did a lot of people seem to have forgotten what happened to the main character.

NorthFace

ISAs are NOT tax avoidance. They are legitimate tax planning - the minimization of one’s tax liability through the best use of all available allowances, deductions, reliefs, exclusions and exemptions.

Here. 2:1 makes is very clear that ISAs are not tax avoidance.

www.gov.uk/government/publications/use-of-marketed-tax-avoidance-schemes-in-the-uk/use-of-marketed-tax-avoidance-schemes-in-the-uk

I agree. I only mentioned them as there is always someone who uses them as an example of how 'everyone' avoids tax one way or another.

IMO having offshore funds or paying salaries to relatives or any of the things that are ways of reducing your tax bill are immoral, if not illegal, as they are not in the spirit of the law, even if, technically, they are within the letter of it.

How safe is it to say on here? I don't want to identify him.
He is a sports physio. His speciality or interest is rehabilitation of hands and backs. He has no proper training in MH which is where he says it all falls apart in his assessments.
He offers some people exercises to do, but they don't want to. They want instant money.
It's a lonely job. A bit like a gp behind the closed door. Someone has to do it.

ISAs are a perfectly legitimate way of avoiding paying as much tax as you otherwise would.

ISAs are NOT tax avoidance. They are legitimate tax planning - the minimization of one’s tax liability through the best use of all available allowances, deductions, reliefs, exclusions and exemptions.

Here. 2:1 makes is very clear that ISAs are not tax avoidance.

www.gov.uk/government/publications/use-of-marketed-tax-avoidance-schemes-in-the-uk/use-of-marketed-tax-avoidance-schemes-in-the-uk

Monigran

My son who is ex army, and medically trained, asesses sickness claims in a northern city. When claimants visit to discuss he has a panic button under the desk because it can get nasty very quickly if he disputes their claim that they are unfit. Some really do know how to work the system.
I worry about his mental health too and don't think he will put up with the job much longer.

My sympathies for him. Its an awful job, dealing with often desperate people, quite a few with illnesses which mean they can be aggressive, they are usually short staffed and so on.

But its not just there - in surgeries and chemists and other "help" spaces all over the country there are notices that aggressive behaviour/rudeness to staff will not be tolerated.

And often (thinking of my waits in the chemist which is in a mixed area socially, normally quiet people desperate because of mess ups or misunderstandings and being told to "go back to the doctor" and so on.

If the matter in hand is whether you'll get your basic benefits through on time - and this has been aired in "You and Yours" on R4 - delays of a week or more - well, result is predictable.

Monigran

My son who is ex army, and medically trained, asesses sickness claims in a northern city. When claimants visit to discuss he has a panic button under the desk because it can get nasty very quickly if he disputes their claim that they are unfit. Some really do know how to work the system.
I worry about his mental health too and don't think he will put up with the job much longer.

what kind of 'medically trained' is your son Madigran? What kind of 'sickness claims'? is he dealing with?

Avoidance and Evasion are entirely different, one to the other.

Evasion is illegal.

Indeed tax evasion is illegal, tax avoidance is legal. HMRC investigation branch recovers huge sums of money from tax evaders - it’s not publicised enough so people think tax evasion is ignored. It isn’t.

Well, I read that backwards. Sorry, I disagree with myself.

Germanshepherdsmum

Tax avoidance is legal. How is it connected to people not claiming benefits they are entitled to? Will stopping all tax avoidance suddenly make everyone claim what they are entitled to?

Tax evasion is illegal, and there is billions of pounds lost to that every year.

Let’s tackle that and make those living on the backs of U.K. workers pay what is due.

NorthFace

No. Putting money into an ISA isn’t tax avoidance because Parliament introduced them as a way to encouraging savings.

Tax avoidance is bending the rules of the tax system to try to gain a tax advantage that Parliament never intended. It involves operating within the letter, but not the spirit, of the law.

THIS ^