sometimes you have to question what they are for?
I'm no politician, but to the biggest problem is not that there are so many benefits out there, nor that 'all the foreigners' claim them. (Which is actually a racist urban myth) Non English residents are as entitled to receive benefits as much as you or me, it just so happens that immigrants are often at the bottom of the pile, so are more likely to have no work, or be in the poorest paid jobs. And it's actually notp ossible for asylum seekers to sign on.
My only gripe with the system isn't that money is available, but that once on the benefits money-go-round it's hard to jump off. Take a job & you lose your welfare payments, which is to be expected. BUT you also lose your housing benefit, & things like that, so you have to be in a decently paid job to be able to afford to live and pay the rent/mortgage as well as have a minimum basic lifestyle. A total benefits trap, which I don't have the answer to.
So while I'm one hundred per cent behind the welfare state I'm also supportive of the campaigns for people to shop benefit cheats. Those who sign on, but work in the 'hidden economy'. Not that I'd grass anyone up myself, but there are enough people who will. And if you fiddle your benefits you deserve to get done! The irony being many of those who do cheat are poor white working class, who moan about immigrants taking 'our jobs and houses'! A generalisation from me, but it's true!
As I said I don't know what the answer is, but one deterrent would be to bang people up when they are caught. I have no idea how many cheat are discovered & punished year by year, I'm sure the stats are out there, but it's the stories that make the papers that are the ones that will put people off.
Or give them the green light to go ahead & chance their luck if this story from the 'Croydon Advertiser' is anything to go by.
Tracy Gowlett, a 47 year old mother of three was spared jail after magistrates were reported to have taken pity on her. She had fiddled over ten grand worth of benefits. A combination of income support, housing benefits & council tax benefits, after she failed to tell the authorities that her husband had moved back in with here. He'd apparently moved out in 2001 because of 'extreme financial hardship'. Maybe if they'd been on the fiddle earlier he wouldn't have had to bugger off in the first place...
Because she sobbed in court, & pleaded if she had gone to prison her old man would have had to give up his job to care for their children, she was 'punished' with forty hours community service! That's a whole working week to do! Hardly aa sentence to put you off is it?
She has already paid back £750 of what she bogusly claimed, having got a job in a supermarket. Which sounds all well & good, until you read that before that she hadn't had a job since since she was 24-yes you read that right. A 'mere' twenty three years. Presumably milking the benefits system dry. Suddenly she gets rumbled for being on the fiddle &, hey presto, a convenient job before she's up before a gullible beak!
What odds she stops working, & her repayments go out of the window at the same time, before the year is out?
I have no idea what this woman & her family are like, but I'd bet my last fiver that she would fit in perfectly as a guest on the Jeremy Kyle show!
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Can't disagree whith a word in your post, Rodders. We need a welfare state to protect the vulnerable in our society and we shouldn't let people abuse it.
ReplyDeleteAs i understand it, the current Tax Credit and Family Tax Credit schemes are supposed to make it easier for people on benefits to take work without losing out than used to be the case. But i dinnae really ken the full details so wouldnae argue too strongly about it.
One thing that gets on ma diddies far more than benefit fraud is income tax avoidance. Seems far too easy for the super rich to avoid paying income tax by having remuneration paid "offshore". That really makes me spew.