Benefitting the Tories

Mike, Brighton

The left talks constantly of fairness. What's fair about my wife being a deputy head in a private school, working her bottom off for £35,000 which you can earn from the "social" by doing nothing....
Fairness goes both ways.

LibertarianLou

Sadly these days not everyone dependent on housing benefit is someone who "doesn't work for a living." What about excluding those people from the cap too? Or better yet helping lower house prices/increase wages?

Russell

Even £20,000 per year is too much, when many people earn significantly less on minimum wage working 40hrs per week (approx £15,000 per year), and receive no benefits(in the case of single childless people).

David L

This is long overdue, not least because of the way it rewards people who fecklessly have children, expecting the state to pay for them.

Hardly surprising that the Labour party and the bench of bishops are against it - it's always a sign of good and necessary change, when those two august and outmoded bodies are united in opposition.

Nickle

Well, lets look at what Labour was handing out to claimants at the top end.

Housing benefit - 104,000
Child Tax Credit - 13,337.04
Income Support - 5,539.67
Council tax - 2,157.83
Child Benefit - 3,863.91
Free Schooling - 6000 * 5 = 30000
Free Health Care - 1800 * 7

Total 172,000

Not included

Free policing - Free Defense - Free Roads - Free.

Also they are getting free years for their pension as well, on top.

All for someone who is not disabled.

If you wanted to earn that you have to be on 340K a year, before tax.

LibertarianLou

Mike - the left agree with you I think, it's just that they blame the disparity between wages and living costs, not the people getting benefits to top up their crappy/non existent wages.

The position of the left might be, for example, to ask if your wife is in a union, ask if she's not being underpaid and if so, why, ask why so much of her salary (and so much of our benefits bill) has to go on housing costs, why can people get so rich just by owning property, etc etc etc?

I'm not saying I don't agree with the point your making or that I agree with "the left", just commenting that it would be a mistake to imagine the left don't agree with you that this is a big injustice - they just want to solve it in a different way.

Ian Walker

Grayling was outstanding on the radio last night, stating the case calmly and eloquently in the face of brickbats from the predictably lefty BBC stooges.

toco

Of course the benefits cap benefits the Tories and the LibDems.They are doing something about Labour's spending binge which ultimately impacted adversely of most of us hard working taxpayers.About time Red Ed's plenty something for nothing culture was stopped in its tracks.

Ian Walker

Mike, the left likes to call these people "poor" because they don't have much money.

What they fail to realise is that if you're being provided with a lifestyle that would require a £35,000 salary to maintain, then you are exactly as rich or poor as someone who earns that amount.

Sir Everard Digby

Milliband.....Leadership?

Tom Pride

Why should those on benefits be protected from the realities of life faced by those working to support themselves and their families? Can we expect assorted bishops, lib-dems and labour peers to offer their support to the likes of Andy Coulson’s children as he and his blameless family adjust their lifestyles to reflect their new financial circumstances?

http://order-order.com/2012/01/19/exclusive-look-inside-the-world-of-andy-coulson/

LibertarianLou

"Even £20,000 per year is too much, when many people earn significantly less on minimum wage working 40hrs per week (approx £15,000 per year), and receive no benefits(in the case of single childless people)."

Many of these people are the ones getting housing benefit!

John Bowman

People having to move out of rented accommodation.

Let's consider the real world outside what passes minds of the loonie Left.

1) Rent prices are de facto being kept artificially high by taxpayer subsidy of the renters.

2) If the supposed mass exodus of "poor" people from rental property occurs, there will be a glut of empty properties and thus a downward pressure on rent rates

3) Most land lords faced with losing their tenant (rent underwritten by the taxpayer), the resulting rental loss whilst trying to replace them and cost of eviction as most won't go willingly, would negotiate a lower rate.

4) There is a lot of lower price rental accommodation empty because "the poor" are very choosy when their rent is being paid by somebody else.

Poor dears will just have to move into cheaper, not to their liking, maybe not quite according to their needs - just like working people who have to pay their own way and live where and in what they can afford.

Mike, Brighton

@LibertarianLou, thank you for your measured response.
I take your point but I do believe that benefits should be no higher (and arguably less) that it is possible to earn on minimum wage. This would yield a before tax sum of some £12,650 (ignoring the age banding) which would be reduced by a small amount by tax withholding.
I want to achieve the same surely as the left and yourself, less poverty, less welfare dependency, mobility, the morality or working for a living, instilling values of work and thrift into children etc and the best mechanism is to reduce the benefits paid so that work pays. But still maintain a (albeit reduced) safety net.
How would you (or the left) propose this should be done? It cannot be moral to park people in sink estates on the scant gruel of welfare for them to rot so long as they keep voting Labour?

Holly ......

Do the people who vote for parties on the left,now think they are actually right,(on supporting benefit caps)and turn accordingly
so Britain will never have to endure a party of the left ever again?
The same party of the left appears to have form in the 'spent all the money' category.

A new generation are seeing the dangers to the whole population of the left leaning policies, and will be able to compare it to the advantages for the whole population, of the right facing parties.
Many will be better off/five years older come the next election.

Pettros

I am well behind the cap but don't understand that the longer it goes on the more it will benefit the Tories?!
Also public support doesn't matter anyway. These things are always a battle between expense-swerving MP's and blinkered minority vested interests. Joe bloggs doesn't get a look in.

Tom Pride

The CofE bishops and hierarchy have long since given up leading on moral issues such as personal responsibility, self-discipline, and an individual’s responsibility to family and neighbours and have become simple cheerleaders for the Statists. In taking this easy route they have hastened their own irrelevance. Do they really expect banker’s and senior executives to have regard to what they say when they preach Statist crap? Shame really as we’ve seen where the hole in moral guidance has left us.

Give them enough rope tonight to hang themselves.

Axstane

I have some difficulty in understanding why a family in which nobody works or ever has worked should be accommodated in central London where rents are enormous.

If they can't or won't work then why not somewhere in the North where they have oodles of empty properties? Or is that too harsh? Too simplistic?

David Ossitt

On the radio today Martha Kearney was bringing on air, a Lord, a Bishop, and some silly woman cross bencher from the Lords who all were going to appose the very sensible proposal of Iain Duncan Smith to limit benefit to £26,000 per household.

Martha was on cracking form; as usual she prompted the lefties when they went of message or were a little confused by asking each in turn, ‘so you want child benefit to be excluded from this limit?’ her tone said it all, IDS is a really nasty man.

She even had one of the men; I can’t remember which, justifying paying thousands a week to house immigrants in London, in houses so expensive, that you would need to be earning huge salaries in order to pay the rent.

What is £26,000 worth, well at the income tax and national insurance rates for 2011/12 a man earning £35,000 would pay £3,338.40p NH and £5,505.00p Income Tax, deduct these and he will be left with £26,156.60p.

Just £156.60p better off than the man on benefit, of course if he has children his wife will be entitled to child benefit.

I would place the cap at £18,000.

dorothy wilson

I gather there was a phone-in this lunch time on Radio Nottingham on this subject. Virtually all those contacting the programme were in favour of the cap. One guy pointed out he was working 50 hours a week and would just love to be in a position where he was taking home £500 a week.

The people complaining about this policy need to join the real world where people have to do hard graft to earn a living.

Halcyondaze

Well done, thank you and don't give up to IDS - we need more like you Sir!

You have the overwhelming support of all decent, hard-working people - which is exactly why Labour and the utterly useless C of E hierarchy are against you! Williams is an absolute disgrace.

Tom Pride

David Ossitt
January 23rd, 2012 3:32pm

Or, why not just increase that £35,000 by 21.4% to £42,476 and make these poverty afflicted persons as “rich” as higher rate tax payers and thus worthy of losing child benefits? Absurd?

Bickers

We're reaching the point of no return; UK tax payers have had enough of their taxes being squandered on unproductive public sector workers, vanity projects, PFI, the EU and a burgeoning welfare state. The money has run out & unless there are massive cut backs in public expenditure (spending is still going up regardless of useful idiots who say otherwise) we'll be in the same mess as Greece at some point within the next ten years.
The UK has to earn it way in the World and the hard working people of Asia are no longer going to lend the profligate West their savings to splurge on a socialist nirvana.

John

The unfairness of this cap is that the Government is taking no account of where you live, as the cost of housing is included in the cap. So a family of 3 living in the North will receive their full entitlement whilst a similar family living in the South East would lose £60 a week. Can someone tell me what's fair about that? For a family with four children it's even worse, in the South East they could end up with just over £100 a week after housing and council tax costs have been deducted. These include Government workers made redundant, not just the workshy which the Government say's it is targeting.

David Ossitt

Tom Pride
David Ossitt
January 23rd,

“Or, why not just increase that £35,000 by 21.4% to £42,476”

How?

How do we or anyone increase his earnings by 21.4%?

Or are you making some facetious tong-in-cheek comment?

Redneck

Mr Forsyth

Spot-on!

Time that all those who think it correct to throw away hard-earned tax money were grilled in the spotlight. Let them make their non-sequitur arguments but is it too much to ask that the BBC actually make them squirm?

Tom Pride

David Ossitt
“Or are you making some facetious tong-in-cheek comment?”

Yes. At £42,476 , the point when the higher rate 40% tax band kicks in, the Coalition deem you to be “rich” and remove child benefits. The earned income equivalent (£35,000) of the proposed cap is only £7,746 below that definition of “rich”. This is an absurdly low differential and if the object is that no one should be better off on benefits than at work then the cap is too high.

David Lindsay

I was just about able to believe that £26,000 might be the mean, certainly not the median, gross income. But net? So that the gross figure is around £35,000? Pull the other one.

William of London

Just a minute, chaps! The BBC is telling us that capping benefits at £26,000 is robbing and grinding the poor to give to the rich, especially bankers. You've all misunderstood and missed the point. The 'poverty line', surely, is only fractionally below the salary + expenses paid to senior and middle ranking BBC executives.

2trueblue

Why do they make it complicated? Certainly you can argue where to cap it. That has always been the problem with benefits. The man in the street working and paying tax, NI, fares, etc is worse off and that is wrong. It is not beyond the wit of these clever people who manipulated the expenses system to work out what is fair. Or is it?

Colin Cumner

You can argue about it all you like, but this Government largesse has to come to an end. With the economy on a roller-coaster ride and unemployment rising, it is high time that benefits are kept in proportion with what is in the national kitty.

David Lindsay

The root of the problem is the sale of council housing.

That policy compelled the State to make gifts of significant capital assets to people who were thus enabled to enter the property market ahead of private tenants who had saved for their deposits.

And, as part of Thatcher’s invention of mass benefit dependency, it created the Housing Benefit racket, which is vastly more expensive than the maintenance of a stock of council housing.

Colin Cumner

DAVID LINDSAY makes a valid point when it comes to the housing benefit scheme - council houses should never have been sold off on such a large scale. This may have helped some people get onto the property ladder but it also meant that those who were unable to afford to do so languised on the social housing list with no real prospect of ever securing affordable accommodatiion. In essence, though, in Britain it has always meant too many people chasing too few houses/flats. It's the old story of supply lagging behind demand. Too add to the problem was Labour's policy of allowing a mass immigration into a country already under population stress. Crazy and criminal.

Andy

I am totally in favour of a cap.

However, what I don't know, amid all the debate, is how many claimants currently draw more than the proposed £26k cap.

Does anyone know and, if so, how many are we talking about?

Cynic

@John "The unfairness of this cap is that the Government is taking no account of where you live, as the cost of housing is included in the cap." So if you're in a high rent area that you can't afford you move to an area where you can afford the rent. Those of us who have jobs make this effort, so why should those on benefits be feather-bedded? I was having a conversation about this with my barber this morning; we concluded it's crazy that people on benefits have more than those who are working and thus there is no incentive to work. With so many indigenous unemployed, it's also crazy to import workers to do their jobs.

David Ossitt

Colin Cumner

“This may have helped some people get onto the property ladder but it also meant that those who were unable to afford to do so languised [sic] on the social housing list with no real prospect of ever securing affordable accommodatiion.{sic]

Colin the council houses that were sold to sitting tenants, were sold at such a fair price, that the tenants (if in work) could secure a mortgage with monthly payments that were often well below the rent that they were paying.

I and my staff arranged hundreds and there were few where the mortgage repayment was higher than the rent.

I am of the opinion that letting these tenants buy their homes generated extra benefits not at first envisaged, whole streets improved their appearance, gardens were better kept, paths and verges became litter free, the people had a pride in their environment and though I can not prove it, I think that many conducted their finances with more care and attention than they had hitherto.