and I think we need to be really, really careful we don’t catch the wrong people in these big reforms?…?Let’s not harm the most vulnerable people in this country

Bit late for caution now.

Has Emma Harrison suddenly discovered some kind of a conscience since her cut of the Welfare to Work cartel was reduced? Let’s count out how much money she’s made from providing sub-par services, of little use to benefits claimants, but scooping in great wads of Govt money…
Reading between the lines, I’d say she’s less worried about the poor, and more worried that her agency might be less able to “cherry-pick” and might have to actually engage and deliver on those who are in the direst of straits

There are plenty of hardworking people with families on low salaries who don’t claim benefits. Such families will have little sympathy for other families which have no breadwinners and which are able to claim very generous welfare cheques.

If the families on handouts feel ‘trapped’ to be receiving merely the average wage as a handout, then perhaps they could liberate themselves by supporting themselves.

There’s something seriously wrong when you can do better by relying on state handouts than by standing on your own two feet. The Tories are saying no benefits should be more than the median wage. That’s still incredibly generous to the unemployed

3. Sandman

If the families on handouts feel ‘trapped’ to be receiving merely the average wage as a handout, then perhaps they could liberate themselves by supporting themselves.

They’re trapped, you idiot, because “supporting themselves” would result in lower pay and poverty level living standards.

@ 3 Sandman

“If the families on handouts feel ‘trapped’ to be receiving merely the average wage as a handout, then perhaps they could liberate themselves by supporting themselves. [...]
The Tories are saying no benefits should be more than the median wage. ”

No they’re not. You’re comparing median individual wage with household benefits. In other words, you seem to think that it makes no difference whether £26,000p.a. is enjoyed by one individual or spread across a household of eight (or whatever). It’s very disingenuous.

@ Sandman

“There are plenty of hardworking people with families on low salaries who don’t claim benefits.”

If there are, this is because they’re not claiming the child benefit, tax credits and (possibly) housing and council tax benefits they’re entitled to. No family with children is expected to support itself on a salary that might not even be adequate to support a single adult or a couple. (Just as an illustration: a couple on £12k and £6k, with two children, are entitled to around £5,500 in Child Tax Credit.)

“There’s something seriously wrong when you can do better by relying on state handouts than by standing on your own two feet.”

Yes, that’s why Labour introduced generous in-work benefits of the sort just referred to. If this is the situation some people are still finding themselves in, it’s because of loopholes or quirks in the system, not a systemic failure to ‘make work pay’.

“The Tories are saying no benefits should be more than the median wage. That’s still incredibly generous to the unemployed.”

Say you have two single-parent families of four, each claiming £150 a week to cover housing costs plus £200 a week in other benefits (including child benefit). Can we agree that figure – £350 a week, £150 less than the proposed cap – is not ‘incredibly generous’? More like ‘maybe just about enough to live on, for a while at least, outside London and the South East’? Good.

Then the parents get together (aah!) and you have one family where once you had two. Their joint income falls from £700 to £500, the level of the cap.

They can save a bit of money on housing costs, because one 4-bed house doesn’t cost twice as much to rent as two 3-bed houses. So say their housing costs go from £300 total to £200.

Fine. Now can somebody please explain to me why:

1 – the £700 these eight people used to receive was not ‘incredibly generous’, but the £500 they now receive is?

2 – a family of four can only just manage on £200 a week after housing costs, but a family of eight can live comfortably on £300?

3 – the government is financially incentivising large households to split into smaller units that are more expensive to support?

@BenM – supporting themselves would not result in “lower pay” – it would result in them receiving the same pay as other people in that chosen occupation. Are you suggesting that anybody who earns less than they could receive on benefits should pack the job in?

@G.O – I’d be very surprised if a benefits cap were to have the effect of increasing welfare spending overall. You may be right that a cap will incentivise the division of large families who work hard to maximise their welfare payments. But by the same token, you must accept that the current system has incentivised people to have massive families to be supported by the state – which has led to its own set of social problems.

Most people are fed up of paying a large portion of their own income to support others against their will, when they are struggling themselves.

@ Sandman

No answer, I see, to the fundamental question of how large families are actually supposed to live, even assuming they move out of London and the South East, on the sort of income the benefits cap is going to provide (after housing costs).

“by the same token, you must accept that the current system has incentivised people to have massive families to be supported by the state”

I’ve never been able to take this idea very seriously. How many people find pregnancy and raising children such a breeze, and are so naive about the costs involved, that they see having ten kids as an easy way to enrich themselves?

(On the other hand, once the benefit cap comes in, there’ll be a clear and genuine incentive to split your family between two houses – because your income after housing costs would rise while your cost of living remained about the same.)

When people grasp that the £26k figure does not go to the claimant, but to landlords mostly, then maybe people will stop this stupidity and regulate rents not the vulnerable and workless!

@G.O – For you to call it “enrichment” by having more kids is a mischaracterisation – it’s not about enrichment, but about whether the additional kids will be supported. It’s quite clear to me that people limit the number of children they have according to the means available to them. A couple with an average income might have 2 or 3 kids because, although they would love to have more, they don’t have the means to support them. A couple on handouts, however, doesn’t have this consideration. They know that their kids will be supported by other people.

This has gone on for generations now, and it has to stop. Not just because of the cost, but because it contributes to a whole culture of dependency. This is a Bad Thing.

You ask what should a large family (or any family on welfare do)? Let them work things out for themselves – go pick potatoes or tin fish in Lincolnshire if that’s what it takes. If people can travel half a continent to do those jobs then Londoners can certainly move 100 miles. The left appears to have forgotten all about the self-help / mutual-aid movement and instead sees the state as the only solution. If the needy banded together for mutual aid then perhaps they would develop their own solutions.

@ (10) People on benefits can’t just up and move: housing is, as I always say here, the unspoken problem. How do you guarantee they find another home at all? How do they pay to move? How do they find deposits (crisis loans being culled, and all).

@ Sandman:

“It’s quite clear to me that people limit the number of children they have according to the means available to them. A couple with an average income might have 2 or 3 kids because, although they would love to have more, they don’t have the means to support them. A couple on handouts, however, doesn’t have this consideration. They know that their kids will be supported by other people.”

You’re ignoring in-work benefits again, and so effectively trying to have it both ways. That “couple with an average income” know they’ll get additional child benefits and tax credits if they have more children, just as a “couple on handouts” do.

“You ask what should a large family (or any family on welfare do)? Let them work things out for themselves – go pick potatoes or tin fish in Lincolnshire if that’s what it takes.”

So there are plenty of jobs around for anyone who wants them, are there?

“The left appears to have forgotten all about the self-help / mutual-aid movement and instead sees the state as the only solution. If the needy banded together for mutual aid then perhaps they would develop their own solutions.”

The needy *did* band together and develop their own solutions based on mutual aid – they established a welfare state to ensure universal provision of education, healthcare, and income protection during old age and periods of sickness or unemployment, with everyone obliged to pay in when able and entitled to take out when needed. Is that solution somehow illegitimate? Would you rather rely on ‘self-help and mutual aid’ when you get old and/or sick, or know that the evil State is there to provide you with healthcare and a pension?

G.O – to describe the welfare state as mutual aid is a perversion worthy of inclusion in Orwell’s 1984. It relies on taxes, which are not voluntary; and there is nothing mutual about it: the recipients do not reciprocate anything.

@ 13 Sandman

“G.O – to describe the welfare state as mutual aid is a perversion worthy of inclusion in Orwell’s 1984. It relies on taxes, which are not voluntary; and there is nothing mutual about it: the recipients do not reciprocate anything.”

Nonsense. Most people pay in and most people take out. Perhaps there are people who have never drawn a benefit, never used state medical care, but they’re a minority. And pretty much everyone has paid tax in some form or another. You don’t always take out what you put in, but that’s the whole point.

Have you actully read 1984, BTW? The perversions listed therein include rewriting history, convincing yourself that the truth is a lie and lies the truth, an ongoing attempt to obliterate the self, and oppression for the sake of oppression. It goes a little beyond using a term that you consider euphemistic.

@ Sandman

“to describe the welfare state as mutual aid is a perversion worthy of inclusion in Orwell’s 1984″

Yes, how terribly ‘perverse’ to imagine that everyone pooling a proportion of their incomes and using that money to fund services everyone can access amounts to ‘mutual aid’ of any sort.

“the recipients do not reciprocate anything.”

What on earth are you talking about? Do you know what ‘the welfare state’ means? The recipients of state education, state healthcare, state pensions ‘do not reciprocate anything’?