The jobless are no shirking scroungers – you try living on £65.45 a week

Spartacus_Mills

Many unemployed people are struggling just to survive, but David Conn finds the parties keen to focus on claimant fraud instead

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'People get very depressed – that level of poverty has a bad effect on your mental health' Laurie Penny, 23. Photograph: Anna Gordon

Ask around among people comfortably off, agreeably in work, how much they imagine unemployment benefit is in these recession-bitten times, and, in my experience, they guess, generally, about £100 per week. Enough for a difficult life, not servicing any luxuries, but paying, just about, for necessities until the job market picks up.

These people are invariably as palpably shocked as the newly unemployed themselves are when they turn up to sign on, to discover that jobseeker's allowance pays £65.45 a week to a single person over 25. Those under 25, hardest hit in this recession, including thousands of graduates struggling to find work, must make do on just £51.85 a week.

This, the desperately meagre fare on which unemployed people are expected to survive through boom and bust of the modern economy, has been the great unspoken of political discussions about welfare. Since Labour came to power in that sunny dawn of 1997, talking of welfare reform, billions have been invested in the Jobcentre Plus service, and in programmes aimed at helping people move out of unemployment and into work.

But welfare reform has not addressed the poverty rate of jobseeker's allowance, nor softened the harsh edge to the system that Labour inherited. The unemployed, despite successive recessions and the rise in middle-class joblessness, are still treated as potential shirkers and scroungers, to be given the bare minimum and policed to make sure they are not working to earn a little on top.

It is impossible to argue that people can truly live on £65.45 or £51.85 a week – the price of a tank of petrol, a decent lunch for the well-off, a treat for the kids. It is cheap to point perpetually to the MPs' expenses scandal, but when no party contemplates benefit rates rising after the election, and the Conservatives have headlined policies on penalising benefit "cheats", it is important to remember how easy money was to them, the casual claims for wine glasses and sofas, and David Cameron's £680 claim (more than 10 weeks' jobseeker's allowance) for repairs to his Oxfordshire cottage, including the famous wisteria.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation commissions an annual report in which members of the public are asked how much they believe a single person in Britain needs to afford "a basic but acceptable standard of living". The latest report, last July, put the figure at £13,900 a year before tax. Very modest, around half the average (median) annual pay of £25,000, but way above the £3,403 total (plus housing benefit) a person over 25 will be paid in jobseeker's allowance in a year.

"Working-age people on benefits remain well below the minimum income standard," the report warns, adding that when people lose their jobs, "more find it hard to make ends meet. People who have taken for granted a standard of living suddenly have their expectations shattered."
The report's author, Donald Hirsch of the Centre for Research in Social Policy at Loughborough University, said: "Everybody knows you cannot survive on that level of benefit."

Gingerbread, the charity that campaigns for single-parent families, produced a Family Finances report in January which found that 60% of unemployed lone parents run out of money at some point before the next weekly or monthly benefit payment arrives, with 10% saying they always do. More than half the respondents told Gingerbread they cut back on food before the end of the month, 37% that they reduced the money they spent on their children; and more than 30% said they were forced to borrow money.

"Single-parent families out of work live considerably below the poverty line (as do couple families where nobody works)," the report says. "Debt and low income can have a serious impact on family life … there is a need to tackle this poverty."

Yet despite last week's official figures, which showed unemployment in the UK reached 2.5 million in February, the highest since 1994, the plight of the unemployed themselves has barely registered as an election issue.
The dominant policy commitment, in which all three parties are pledging to significantly cut public spending as a response to the recession, will without doubt increase unemployment and see public servants consigned to a life of £65.45 and £51.85 a week.

It is a little more surprising that so little attention is paid to the poverty of the jobless, as this recession has, more than any other, affected the middle classes and young graduates, whose votes the parties covet.

Laurie Penny, 23, never imagined she would find herself enmeshed in a world of poverty and the grip of the benefit system when she graduated with a 2:1 degree in English from Oxford University in 2008. Even with that name on her CV, she and her contemporaries have found it fiercely difficult to get work.
"It is hard to think of anybody who graduated with me in 2008 who has a job," she said. "People have tried and not been able to find anything, particularly when the recession hit, and you simply cannot live on £50-a-week jobseeker's allowance."

Penny and her friends found their dreams crumbling soon after graduation. Seven of them crammed into a house meant for three, able to go nowhere and buy nothing, living on cheap food which she says made them ill in the winters. Describing herself now as a welfare activist, she writes and blogs on the plight of the young unemployed, who she says have no voice.

"We were living like a scene from Withnail & I, except there was no space to move," she said. "It was very miserable. People get very depressed – that level of poverty has a bad effect on your mental health, it makes people feel that nothing will ever get better. I know that is the situation for a lot of people, but for young graduates, middle-class people, it is a real shock. It is not sufficiently recognised at all – how poor the rates are in the benefit system."
The system of threadbare benefit paid to people unemployed through economic decline, recession and no fault of their own, lays a pernicious trap for them, too. In its commitment since 1997 to help people into work but its determination not to be portrayed as soft on benefit claimants, Labour maintained punitive restrictions on claimants earning reasonable money at part-time jobs.
The single unemployed are permitted to earn just £5 a week on top of their jobseeker's allowance, before all additional earnings are taken off their benefits, pound for pound. Claimants with children can earn £20 a week extra.
That makes it difficult to battle back to work, according to James Whitaker, 28, an architect made redundant on 1 April 2009 after the recession bit. Whitaker harboured ambitions to become a photographer, so with the construction industry moribund he set himself up and won some commissions. He produced an exhibition featuring other jobless architects – at the time, a third of architects were out of work – titled After Redundancy, a picture of young professionals generally treating their redundancy as an opportunity rather than devastation.
"It has been tricky to manage on jobseeker's allowance," said Whitaker, sanguine. "After six years at university qualifying in architecture I was able to scale back to a frugal existence, living on Tesco Value stuff.

"But the biggest hindrance is that the system doesn't support you to get back on your feet; as soon as you earn any additional money, however short-term, you have to sign off."

Whitaker has £20,000 in student loans to repay. "Everybody I know is pretty much the same," he said.

On television, billboards and bus shelters in poorer areas, government adverts have been proclaiming a crackdown on benefit "fraud", most recently and unattractively encouraging people to shop to the authorities any neighbours signing on and working. Yet mostly, the "fraudsters" are the seriously struggling, who cannot survive on poverty level benefits and do some low-paid work to top it up, not declaring the extra earnings because it would be taken off them.
"The pressure is there to cheat the system because benefit levels are so low people cannot live on them," said Hirsch, the report author. "A system which cannot work for people is tempting people to cheat it."

Neil Bateman, a welfare rights specialist who acts regularly as an expert witness when claimants are prosecuted, contests the government's figure that benefit fraud costs £1.1bn a year, and argues that real, sophisticated fraud is rare.
"Most cases which come before the courts are people in difficult circumstances, often in multiple debt, working to make ends meet," he said. "The £5 a week they can earn on top does not even equate to one hour's work on the minimum wage, and may be swallowed up simply by the travel cost of getting to the job. So people are drawn into working while claiming benefit – the system almost invites people to do illicit work."

There is an almost surreal distinction between the stigma ladled on the unemployed caught earning a little extra cash to make ends meet, and the lack of opprobrium for tax exiles and UK-based tax fraudsters who cost the country far more: £15bn according to government figures.

Imran Hussain, head of policy at the Child Poverty Action Group, said: "There is a political imperative to be seen as tough, and it paints a misleading picture, as if benefit claimants are all supplicants and potential fraudsters. In fact, benefit fraud is at its lowest ever level and far more benefit, £16bn, goes unclaimed by the poorest households who do not know they are entitled to it but need it the most. At present, with benefits set so low, the children of families without work are condemned to poverty."

In the era of a super-rich financial elite, whose taxes have remained historically low, there is shock in a safety net that pays so little for weekly subsistence and claws back additional earnings above £5. The Rowntree report pleads for the poverty of those without work to be recognised: "Some people losing their jobs are having to survive on less than half of what members of the public think is acceptable," the report says, calling for "a vigorous pubic and political debate" about how to achieve an acceptable level of minimum income for all.

There is, though, little sign of that debate, even as the unemployment figures rise, with more job cuts in effect promised by all three parties. In this climate of public spending cuts, increasing unemployment benefit is on nobody's priority list. Whatever the election outcome, if nothing changes, unemployment will remain a passport to penury.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/apr/30/general-election-unemployment-poverty

Pity them all. Time to raise JSA to £100 a week.

I would love to know what The_White_Horse thinks

abaxas

Spartacus_Mills wrote: »

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/apr/30/general-election-unemployment-poverty

Pity them all. Time to raise JSA to £100 a week.

I would love to know what The_White_Horse thinks

I agree, infact make is £200 pw, but you can only claim a maximum of 3 months every 3 years.

That lazy !!!!!! should get s job, strart a business or do soemthing to get off her !!!!.

HappyMJ

You need to make it difficult to live to encourage people into work so £100 per week is much more survivable. I could live on that forever... Why people don't work even for a day or two is purely because of the benefits taking a pound for every pound they earn so there is no point. If it was set at something like 60% deduction rate then I'm sure many would happily do a day's work knowing that they could keep 40% of what they earnt. It would save the country money. It would get more people into part time work. Not ideal but it's something to start with.

silvercar

It is impossible to argue that people can truly live on £65.45 or £51.85 a week – the price of a tank of petrol, a decent lunch for the well-off, a treat for the kids.

You've got a pretty big car if a tank of petrol costs £65.

If you are on benefit you can't afford a decent lunch out.

"a treat for the kids" - if you had kids you would get more than £65 a week, which incidentally doesn't include LHA, free prescriptions, dentists, council tax benefit...

CLAPTON

it would be more informative to see a sample budget and so see where the money goes.

System

silvercar wrote: »

You've got a pretty big car if a tank of petrol costs £65.

not really, I got £65 into my old 306 this week

Batchy

Why should you have anymore than is necessary to get by.

Some people who work still haven't got that much left over after paying rent, fuel, energy bills, tax, travel and TV licence, running a car etc, I know when i was in training I didn't and never got a penny of help either.

Please dont make out its Bad, its shouldnt be great, its should just help. Its shouldn't be for prolonged periods. it should only be a last resort, not a viable long term alternative.

Blacklight

Get a job.

G51shopaholic

I don't understand is who decided that it costs MORE to support someone over 25 than someone under 25? What's that all about?

I agree that the level is low, given the continuing cost of food but I now have to live on less than 10% of my previous monthly income.

I receive NO help with my mortgage, no council tax rebate, no free NHS dental treatment, no free prescriptions (despite being a cancer sufferer, I live in Scotland so the free 5 years prescriptions for Cancer patients only covers England), no free school meals NOTHING NADDA NIL

There is work out there if people are prepared to look - my nephew got a 1st, but still worked in Asda (part-time while studing) fulltime, till he got a job!

amcluesent

Career scroungers DO NOT exist on JSA. They'll have had a menagerie of bas*ard kiddies to get the council house and on the sink-estates they'll pass on tips for scrounging IB, HB, CB, free NHS etc. etc. Any half-competent scrounger should be living just as well as a family on average wages, so car, ciggies, brewskys, plasma telly, Spanish hols, away-matches with Engermerlund! are all ''uman rites, innit!'

Shakethedisease

Get a job.

There aren't enough of them to go round at the moment.