Letter: Use resources for those who want to work
Monday 28th November 2011, 8:03AM GMT.
The Government wants to create a whole new workforce to ensure that people who are long-term unemployed through ill-health are really unfit to work and if they are not will take them off benefits. Why?
There are millions who actually do want to work and people who want to start their own businesses. They need help.
Why not devote resources to those that want to work and leave the lazy skivers for another day when the economy has picked up because for the handful that will lose entitlement to benefits a whole industry of inspectors and ‘panels’ will have sprung up and all paid for by our taxes and I suspect the end result will be a net loss to the nation.
Cabinet members, deep thinkers or what?
Michael Wilkinson,
Ketley
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Couldn’t agree more. I believe the estimate of people leaving public services will be somewhere near 700,000. Many of these are educated to degree level but there are simply no jobs, unless you want to flip burgers and even then there are dozens of applicants for each position. There are certainly no jobs at equivalent level available. Many of those leaving the public service are trained in sector specific tasks which have no equivalent in the private sector but nothing is provided for retraining. If you have a degree you get no help to get another one in another subject. You haven’t got the funds to start a new business and no adequate financial help is available. The banks won’t lend you the money on fair terms in any case.
The government are aware that by their plans the public service would shrink dramatically. The should have put schemes in place to help those leaving. They haven’t.
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£40bn of state-underwritten bank loans for small businesses not quite good enough for you?
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‘There are millions who actually do want to work and people who want to start their own businesses. They need help.’
I couldn’t agree more. Anyone who actually *wants* to work, most definitely needs help.
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Or, even better, simply scrap (or time-limit) benefits completely. And stop making NI contribution payments on claimants’ behalf just because they have turned up once every two weeks to sign on. That will soon sort out the workers from the skivers.
In more “socialist” countries than the UK, like France for example, if you’re over 18, then you cannot claim benefits or get state medical care (except for life threatening cases) for longer than two years without contributing through a paid job which you have to hold for at least a year.
After the two year limit, during which time benefits are generous, the tap gets turned off.
In UK by contrast, NHS services are free for life to everybody who has British (or EU) nationality, even if they have never, ever paid into the system through work. Why?
Anyone who doesn’t work at all during their life and contributes nothing will get a guaranteed level of pension when they “retire” from a life of claiming. Why?
The more you give something for nothing to people, the less they appreciate it and the more they come to expect it as an entitlement with no responsibility attached.
After a fixed time, no contributions should equal no benefits.
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Well said Rodney, your last line, is what I have been saying for years, the more you pay in the more you get out, pay nothing in, you get nothing out.
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I would request that the low wage earners who have to rely on top-ups get left alone too (huge changes to tax credits coming up from 2014 onwards). We are doing enough! I could be MUCH better off on benefits if I was sacked, but feel I can hold my head up and have a sense of purpose as a worker. Again I state, please leave us alone.
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Yes, pretty much agree with the article and the comments so far.
We should stop flogging a dead horse and forcing the work-shy to “back to work” clubs and the like, and instead put more time and effort into helping those that really do want to become productive members of society.
In my day-to-day work, I see a large number of people who have what I would class as genuine, but minor, disabilities who are perfectly capable of doing something. Just because their old career is now closed to them, shouldnt mean they write themselves off.
I do think that benefits should be in proportion to the amount you put in. Benefits should be tailored to what you have contributed to the pot, and only paid out when you prove you actually do want work.
And no one should be allowed to choose to live on benefits over a job that’s within their capability.
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