£30,000 a year?

One of the problems with that process of totting up the amount they have coming in is the amount of it going straight back out again. £700 per month was housing benefit. If there was a council house for them to live in then, at typical council house rents, it would have been half that. So half the money we pay for their housing is going to make some scabby buy to let landlord rich. If that's a sensible use of public money I'm a Dutchman.

Incidentally, it was obvious that the dad has some serious issues relating to grief and bereavement. It's always fun to see some fuckwit celebrity like Diarmuid Gavin doing instant diagnosis of other people's troubles when it's apparent that the subject needs a professional, not a celebrity gardener.

Yes.....I've just watched it again on iplayer and he says a fortnight but then that is less than the minimum payment which is £64.30 per week which is what I get

This is one of the points - the whole system is too complicated and the interface between low paid work and "genuine" benefits has not worked since the 1970s when the scenario first came noticable as a problem.

There is another dimension to this as well - if the interface had worked, then more people would have been in work over the years and there would have been less need for immigrants to fill low paid vacancies. Work that out since the 1970s! and the population would be noticably smaller now than it is.

Plim

Ok I'm on benefits cos I'm a full time career to my disabled some, I get £193.60 a week after paying out all my bills, including £25 a week buses fares to get the kids to school I have £47 left a week to feed all 3 of us. So thats £10,067.20 a year I get for the 3 of us. On top of that theres £1200 in council tax and £7,800 rent I get paid which in total is £19067.20 a year I cost the government.

Up until my disabled son was born 5 years ago I worked full time, I wish I could work now, but unfortunately, every interview I have had the companies have said the same sorry but we cant afford for you to take time off when your son is ill so we are unable to offer you the job.

Also it makes me mad that if there was council housing available the rent would only be around £260 a month and yet theres a 12 year waiting list in my area to even be considered for a council place.

If I could get back into my old job and find a council place to live in I would be able to afford to get in a live in nanny to look after my son when he was ill (and also look after my daughter before and after school) so that I was able to work, but until the council sort out the shortage of housing there is no way I will be able to work.

Someone on the social getting bundles?, no surpise there.......

That`d be the same person that dismantled the local taxation system and replaced it with an unworkable system that caused rioting in the streets and also sold off the utilities that are now being purchased by foreign state owned utility companies !!

The person who presided over the selling off of most of the countries assets which started the enivitable decline to the bankrupt state this country is in.

Hardly the fault of the Government....the councils just gladly took the money.

Even by your standards this is lamentably inaccurate.

Councils were not allowed, by government edict, to reinvest their capital receipts in new properties. Instead they were required to use their receipts to invest in the money markets - in many cases they couldn't even pay down outstanding loans because they were fixed term loans that couldn't be redeemed early. Where they did pay down loans they found their HRA subsidy calculations altering so that they couldn't retain reserves. New public sector housing grants were closed to local authorities and instead awarded to housing associations who had to borrow in the money markets at rates higher than those usually paid by local authorities, so that effectively government subsidy was used to enrich bankers. The fiddling of the HRA subsidy calculation meant there was a backog on most council housing stock of more than ten years worth of maintenance that was only fixed post 1997 by the Decent Homes programme.

I can understand you want to defend Thatcher, but from the moment she cancelled the parker Morris standard Thatcher's housing policies served only to enrich her friends in the private house building industry and the financiers in the city of London. The cancer of buy to let crooks that is distorting the housing market today is the logical conclusion of her cynical, wicked policies.

That`s a good point. But the fact remains that once a tax becomes so expensive to collect that the tax itself has to be increased by a very significant percentage just to make it possible to collect it ...the situation becomes absurd.

I remember attending a seminar a year before the Poll Tax was introduced ....the chairman opened the weekend by stating

"The people who came up with this idea (the poll tax) are the sort of people who, if they threw themselves at the ground, would miss ! "

The Rating and Valuation Association were consulted by the government and asked what they thought of the proposed tax. After reading all the details and proposals their reply was that it was uncollectable.
The answer came back that if they didn`t come up with a way to collect it the job would be put out to private companies !!!!

So ...the only professional organisation that had any experience of dealing with the problem at hand had made it`s feelings known and were overidden by a bunch of politicians who didn`t know their arses from their elbows !!


And ...you can rest assured, the Rating and Valuation Association were very far from being a bunch of leftie liberals !!!