Workless Households - Lowest on Record

OffGridLiving

Dunroamin wrote: »

You can't be both a full time student and unemployed, the one cancels out the other.

Exactly my point. Otherwise we'd have an extra few million to add to the unemployment figures with those doing Degrees, Masters, PhDs, including those students from overseas.

Moot point as the person who my comment was aimed at has floated away from the discussion (as usual), but he'll be back spouting the same claptrap on a different thread. Par for the course with these repeating/circular discussions.

chucky

Loughton_Monkey wrote: »

I leave that primarily to Mrs LM. Now that I'm retired, I do very little that would come under the heading 'work'. That was the plan. I can thoroughly recommend it....

Unemployment must have been sky high in the period 1950s until the late 1970s with all those stay at home mums and single wage households where just the man was working.

Where they included in the unemployment numbers?

chucky

OffGridLiving wrote: »

Moot point as the person who my comment was aimed at has floated away from the discussion (as usual), but he'll be back spouting the same claptrap on a different thread. Par for the course with these repeating/circular discussions.

It's a mute point actually.

Graham_Devon

chewmylegoff wrote: »

Going on the definitions they use, the effect of more 16 year olds being in education should increase the number of non-working and mixed households.

Yer, thinking about it, maybe they would. But I think they count none working households as non working and not in education (and training!).

I.e. doing nothing.

Same as the unemployment figures. If you are in training, even sometimes just doing an online course, you are not classed as unemployed. Therefore a household of say 4 people would only be classed as none working should all of them of working age not be either in work or in training.

Therefore, if they use the same measures, with a whole extra year kept in education (and training), you should have less workless households.

Works alongside child benefits. Stay in education and the household continues to get child benefits up until around 19 I believe?

chewmylegoff

Graham_Devon wrote: »

Yer, thinking about it, maybe they would. But I think they count none working households as non working and not in education (and training!).

I.e. doing nothing.

Same as the unemployment figures. If you are in training, even sometimes just doing an online course, you are not classed as unemployed. Therefore a household of say 4 people would only be classed as none working should all of them of working age not be either in work or in training.

Therefore, if they use the same measures, with a whole extra year kept in education (and training), you should have less workless households.

Works alongside child benefits. Stay in education and the household continues to get child benefits up until around 19 I believe?

I don't think so as it says that 50% the households containing people who have never worked are student households.

Households where not all adults are in work but at least one is are classed as 'mixed'.

Loughton_Monkey

chewmylegoff wrote: »

I don't think so as it says that 50% the households containing people who have never worked are student households...

er...

Doesn't destroy your point at all, but the extract below seems to imply less than 50%....

Households where all members have never worked (Table E)

In 2013, there were 297,000 households in which no adult has ever worked, down 43,000 from a year earlier. In relation to all households in the UK containing at least one person aged 16 to 64 years, the percentage of households containing only people who have never worked was 1.5%, down 0.2 percentage points from a year earlier.

Excluding student households, where everyone is aged 16 to 24 and in full-time education, there were 224,000 households containing only people that have never worked, down 41,000 from a year earlier. This represented 1.1% of all households in the UK, down 0.2 percentage points from a year

earlier.

But overall, I find the headline figure of 17.1% a bit misleading....

Focusing on the workless households, the majority were households were everyone within the household was inactive, so either not looking for, or available to work. Overall, inactive workless households accounted for 12.7% of all households in the UK. A further 2.6% of households were where every person was unemployed and 1.9% of households had a mixture of unemployed and inactive people.

So in fact 75% of the headline figure (12.7%) are indeed 'workless' but not in the job market. They presumably have a valid 'excuse' and are not necessarily a financial drain on the taxpayer.

If, for example, next quarter saw an increase to 18.1% simply because there were 1% who have made their pile, freely retired early, releasing a job back to the market, are not costing the taxpayer an extra penny, and are net spenders into the economy, then surely that would be very good news?