The Benefits System: EXPOSED

"The TUC tackles some of the media and political myths about the benefits system, with the aid of a talking dog".

Great Video. Hope everyone shares it with work colleagues and family. Need to expose the Tory myths about benefits.

How wrong public opinion can be on key social issues

Hat tip Redbrick "A fascinating paper published yesterday by the Royal Statistical Society and King’s College London – The Power of Perception - reported on a survey undertaken by Ipsos MORI which ‘shows just how wrong public opinion can be on key social issues’.

1. Teenage pregnancy: on average, we think teenage pregnancy is 25 times higher than official estimates: we think that 15% of girls under 16 get pregnant each year, when official figures suggest it is around 0.6%.
2. Crime: 58% do not believe that crime is falling, when the Crime Survey for England and Wales shows that incidents of crime were 19% lower in 2012 than in 2006/07 and 53% lower than in 1995. 51% think violent crime is rising, when it has fallen from almost 2.5 million incidents in 2006/07 to under 2 million in 2012.
3. Job-seekers allowance: 29% of people think we spend more on JSA than pensions, when in fact we spend 15 times more on pensions (£4.9bn vs £74.2bn).
4. Benefit fraud: people estimate that 34 times more benefit money is claimed fraudulently than official estimates: the public think that £24 out of every £100 spent on benefits is claimed fraudulently, compared with official estimates of £0.70 per £100.
5. Foreign aid: 26% of people think foreign aid is one of the top 2-3 items government spends most money on, when it actually made up 1.1% of expenditure (£7.9bn) in the 2011/12 financial year. More people select this as a top item of expenditure than pensions (which cost nearly ten times as much, £74bn) and education in the UK (£51.5bn).
6. Religion: we greatly overestimate the proportion of the population who are Muslims: on average we say 24%, compared with 5% in England and Wales. And we underestimate the proportion of Christians: we estimate 34% on average, compared with the actual proportion of 59% in England and Wales.
7. Immigration and ethnicity: the public think that 31% of the population are immigrants, when the official figures are 13%. Even estimates that attempt to account for illegal immigration suggest a figure closer to 15%. There are similar misperceptions on ethnicity: the average estimate is that black and Asian people make up 30% of the population, when it is actually 11% (or 14% if we include mixed and other non-white ethnic groups).
8. Age: we think the population is much older than it actually is – the average estimate is that 36% of the population are 65+, when only 16% are.
9. Benefit bill: people are most likely to think that capping benefits at £26,000 per household will save most money from a list provided (33% pick this option), over twice the level that select raising the pension age to 66 for both men and women or stopping child benefit when someone in the household earns £50k+. In fact, capping household benefits is estimated to save £290m, compared with £5bn for raising the pension age and £1.7bn for stopping child benefit for wealthier households.
10. Voting: we underestimate the proportion of people who voted in the last general election – our average guess is 43%, when 65% actually did.

UK Welfare Spending 2011-12 (Fact Not Fiction)

Hat tip for picture and great rant to Jon Leighton"Ok, I can't keep my gob shut any longer. I'm sick to death of seeing posts on Facebook about benefit scroungers. Do you know the figures? Because if you did you might see it in another light.

Did you know that only 3% of the benefits budget goes to people seeking work? 53% is pensions and other related old age benefits, 18% is Housing Benefit (which currently goes directly to landlords) 18% is working tax credits, and the rest disabled benefits and other bits and bobs. (And by the way, the Government figures say the fraud rate for disabled benefits is 0.3%)

In fact, the majority of folks claiming housing and council tax benefit ARE IN WORK.

I could write a bloody essay on this because I deal with it everyday. Our benefits budget is not out of control. According to the OECD Britain's benefit bill per head is nowhere near as generous as half the countries in Europe. (And unemployment benefit is particularly stingy compared to most)

The vast majority of folks just want to get on but minimum wage jobs are not paying enough. (This might explain why at work we're seeing working people going to bloody foodbanks every week.)

This shitty government is turning people against each other. And it's totally unwarranted. Yes, welfare needs reforming but you don't do that by kicking people out of their homes, stigmatising them so that they get spat at in the street and driving them to suicide. - these have all happened so far.

In the last two years 80% of people applying for housing benefit were all working. We can reform welfare by bringing in a living wage so that people don't have to claim benefits to get by. At the moment the welfare budget is subsidising low pay and private landlords on a grand scale.

When you see a post that puts the boot into benefit claimants, think twice before you like it because let me tell you, we are ALL only three mortgage payments away from disaster.

(If anyone wants the sources of the figures I have quoted, I will only be too happy to provide them)

I've attached a pie chart from 2011 to give you an idea. Figures will have changed a bit."

Welfare reform: Its a £500 per week cap: its not a minimum

Last week I was having a conversation with a (Non Unison) trade union colleague about welfare reform and its impact on our members who work in Housing organisations and the backlash they will face.

She agreed about the backlash but said it was about time that the Government cracked down on benefits since people got too much money.

I disagreed and said that Job Seeker's allowance is only £71 per week, so how can she say this is too much money? She replied by saying that "£71 per week? They get far more. No one can live on that". I said no, it is only £71.

She came back by saying she had a "friend" who hasn't worked in years yet she has paid off her mortgage while on benefits and goes on foreign holidays.

I said you only get some of your interest paid not capital repayment if you have a mortgage and are on benefits. It sounds like your "friend" is fiddling somehow, not that benefit levels are too high. Which is a totally different and criminal matter.

Later that day I went to a trade union shop meeting and when again I brought up welfare reform, I had one member say that he only earns £22,000 per year and it is wrong that families who don't work get £26,000. A number of people agreed with him. I had to explain that only a tiny, tiny number of families get anywhere near that amount of money and only if they have a large family and have to rent in an expensive part of London. I explained that most benefit claimants are on £71 per week income. Again, this figure of £71 per week was disputed since surely "they must get more" and "no one could live on that amount".

I think that this (totally unrepresentative) sample shows the job of work we all have on welfare reform. Such is the power of the propaganda by the right wing tabloid press such as the Daily Mail and The Sun, that many ordinary working people are believing the fibs about "striver's and shirker's".

Too often in the Labour movement we live in our own bubble and imagine that everything thinks the same as we do on key issues. We need to step outside our own self congratulatory comfort zone, speak to real members and challenge tabloid Tory lies.

 Picture hat tip Press Not Sorry

The new CONDEM medical assessment: Sink or Swim

hat tip to "Respect for unemployed and benefit claimants".  Many moons ago, in the midst of rampant Thatcherism, I use to be the "Lothian Claimants Union" secretary.

Naive fool that I am - I use to think things then were horribly tough on claimants.