Means Testing (why don't we do it)?

paulmapp8306

Pimperne1 wrote: »

Perhaps we could start off with them one at a time. Pensions (I assume the £5k pa is not means tested but if I am wrong then I apologies - the reason I think it is not means tested is that I expect to get it and I do not need it and there are many more much richer than I). If you are of retirement age and your income without a state pension exceeds, say, £20k, then you should have sufficient to live on - the figure might need some fine tuning but it should not be beyond the wit of man.

Indeed, and fits my model. If your retired, your not earning so get the basic "min living level" of payments - £24k (taxable) in my example.

macaque_2

Pimperne1 wrote: »

Not an expert on which allowances are paid without Means Testing but I believe the following are:

Pensions
Family Allowance
Some Disability Allowances related benefits
Winter Fuel Allowance

If we are ever going to get our financial house in order we must stop paying money to people who don't need it (would any other country just pay out to someone who was already quite well off?).

Instead of making 1000 or so of those civil servants redundant we should keep them in place and have one office which will review all allowances and remove those from families who don't need them. After a year reduce the staff to 900 and make it 100 less each year from then on (leaving by natural wastage rather than redundancy I would suggest).

Simple process, you provide your P60 from last year along with a consolidated claim for that which you current receive. No ifs and buts so if you earn in excess of, say, £40k a year jointly then you don't need the taxpayer to provide you with financial assistance.

I for one am looking forward to us actually grasping this bull by the horns and showing the outside world that we are taking our responsibilities seriously.

Fair point Pimpernel. While we are at it, lets also stop subsidising the debts of foolish borrowers who overreached themselves. A fair price for borrowing must factor in the risks of inflation, debt default and currency devaluation. Given where we are, I would say that deposit holders are entitled to interest rates of nearer 10% than 0.1%.

Pimperne1

macaque wrote: »

Fair point Pimpernel. While we are at it, lets also stop subsidising the debts of foolish borrowers who overreached themselves. A fair price for borrowing must factor in the risks of inflation, debt default and currency devaluation. Given where we are, I would say that deposit holders are entitled to interest rates of nearer 10% than 0.1%.

I'm with you on that (bit unusual as we don't normally agree). I suspect that your second point on interest rates would benefit me more than you.

Batchy

The biggest problem with benefits,

People get them who dont need them.

People get them when they are not entitled to them.

People get an inproportionate amount compared to whats really necessary.

The most important thing is benefits should be fair and reasonable, and important, not just a benefit. They should compliment workers hard work and effort, rather than try to keep benefit seekers in a comfortable financial position.

BigAunty

I can't find the original news article, but one labour politician was in favour of universal benefits to ensure goodwill to the benefits system by those who contribute taxes that prop it up.

His take is that the public need to be on board with the aims of the benefit system and therefore need to get something back from it to promote support for it.

There has been a significant hardening of public attitudes towards benefit claimants over the last few years, I reckon, so he does have a point.

If you take away universal benefits such as the state pension and child benefit, then you will make the middle classes completely hostile to the idea of the benefits system to which they contribute to but cannot draw upon.

Consider how the BNP thrived through the racialisation of the social housing system, the way the shortage of it and the way it is allocated helped to make them more popular - so do we want this kind of demonisation towards claimants by making people feel excluded from a particular national resource?

StevieJ

BigAunty wrote: »

I can't find the original news article, but one labour politician was in favour of universal benefits to ensure goodwill to the benefits system by those who contribute taxes that prop it up.

That was an absolute bedrock of the Welfare state from day1 but that relates more to services than paying the rich to have babies

BigAunty

StevieJ wrote: »

That was an absolute bedrock of the Welfare state from day1 but that relates more to services than paying the rich to have babies

My attitude to child benefit hardened when my affluent friend (hubby is a barrister) saved it into her child's future university fund. I nicknamed the CB my mother received as her 'gin and fags fund'.

One of the things I'm disappointed about with the proposed move to the Universal Credit system is that only replaces 6 of the income related benefits but not all.

Child benefit is still going to be dealt with separately - pointless separation really, so too, is council tax benefit.

There's a lady on another forum moaning about the loss of EMA for her teenage child who rejects the argument that her tax credits and child benefit should cover educational costs, too. Apparently CB is just for their clothes and food...?!!

Emy1501

We get DLA for one of our children. Have no problems it being means tested. For us though the money we get is spent on treatment which the Nhs won't fund due to lack of resources. We let it slide as we are happy to use DLA money for this but if DLA money gets taken away then we will make sure the Nhs\education services pay. Also 40k is not a lot in especially in the SE and as the low to middle class seem to have been affected the cuts so far you start to wonder when exactly the rich or those who choose not to work will be hit by the cuts.

dtsazza

lemonjelly wrote: »

Secondly, you will have to have some flexibility in the system in order to account for peoples circumstances. If you don't have sufficient flexibility, you will have expensive human rights act cases going on. Simple example, men were refused widowed parents allowance as they weren't widows but widowers, despite the fact that they met every other criteria. Cue an expensive legal battle that cost a lot.

Surely that's an argument for less flexibility?

If everyone was treated exactly the same, i.e. everyone got a benefits handout of the same amount, then there could be no possible complaints (human rights or otherwise) as everyone would be being treated equally.

Flexibility or caveats would by their very nature be about treating some people differently to others, and so would give rise to potential discrimination claims.

LydiaJ

dtsazza wrote: »

Surely that's an argument for less flexibility?

If everyone was treated exactly the same, i.e. everyone got a benefits handout of the same amount, then there could be no possible complaints (human rights or otherwise) as everyone would be being treated equally.

Flexibility or caveats would by their very nature be about treating some people differently to others, and so would give rise to potential discrimination claims.

The small print comes into being because people aren't all the same. Take your example about boarding schools - you can send your kids to boarding schools if you're working outside the UK and your wife accompanies you, I think that's what you said. You think that's simple????

What about if you're female and working abroad and your husband accompanies you? Does it include civil partners? How about if you're single and haven't got a partner to accompany you? What about if your partner (who accompanies you) isn't the other parent of your kids? How about if your former partner is still in the UK but doesn't have parental responsibility for your kids? How about if you and your former partner are both working abroad separately? Those are just the ones that occur to me in the first minute or two of considering how the problem in the widowers' example would apply in this case. There are plenty more.

If you want to cover all the possibilities, so as not to get claims for discrimination, then you'd have to redraft it to say something much more like: Kids may be sent to boarding school at the taxpayer's expense if everyone with parental responsibility for them is either (a) working abroad, or (b) living abroad with a spouse or civil partner who is there because of their work.

PS lemonjelly - do you happen to know when that widows/widowers legal battle happened? It seems quite amazing to me that any government would bother fighting it - it's so obvious that (a) it's grossly unfair to give it to women but not men and (b) they would lose, so fighting it would be a waste of money. Why didn't they just agree to change the rules as soon as it was pointed out to them? Or was it a long time ago when attitudes were different? It's not as though there are huge numbers of widowers bringing up minor children - it must be a drop in the ocean of the benefits bill. I do know it's called "widowed parent's allowance" now, although the JobCentrePlus computer can't cope with that, so sometimes (but not always) when they send letters about it, they refer to it as a state pension, which confused me no end the first time I got one of their letters. :rotfl: