Are you saying you would have only £200 or so quid income a month to live off?
If it was my property you’d need to demonstrate a monthly income (from any sources) of at least £2,563 to even get a viewing. If another applicant could show my ideal of 3x rent for monthly income then you’d be at the back of my queue. It’s all simple economic discrimination which, thankfully, is not on the basis of a protected characteristic.
Yet.
That absolutely takes the biscuit. So you’ve gone from saying you get £20k per year in benefits to actually getting £15k and you want a landlord to trust that you’ll pay the rent with only £225 left over to cover electric, council tax, water and food? Give me a break!
What I was getting at is you’re saying you’ve got savings and started talking about paying a years rent up front. If you have more than £16k in savings you lose entitlement to universal credit full stop. If you have £12k in savings to be able to pay a years rent upfront, my point was what happens after the first 12 months are up when you’re having to spend 82% of your income on rent?
Did anyone read in the Telegraph this morning
Government funded BMW’s epitomise Britain’s dysfunctional welfare state
A well-intentioned scheme for the genuinely needy has grown to gargantuan proportions
If you want a brand new BMW i4 M Sport, you have two choices. The first is to lay out the full £52,770. The second is to tell the DWP that your mental health makes it hard to leave the house, claim the enhanced mobility rate of the Personal Independence Payment (Pip), fork out a down payment of £7,999, and get the Government to lease it for you.
In exchange for the mobility component of your benefit, you’ll get a new BMW every three years, your insurance and accident breakdown paid for, your servicing and tyre replacements covered, and your choice of “conventional metallic paint option”.
The only catch is eligibility, but thanks to the soaring growth in sickness benefits claims, that’s less of a barrier than it used to be.
The number of people who could potentially claim a Motability vehicle has risen by over half a million since 2019, and the organisation now has 800,000 clients. The result is a bizarre behemoth: a car-leasing programme for the disabled that accounts for roughly one in every five new cars sold in Britain, and is one of the country’s largest issuers of corporate debt.
It’s hard to think of a better summation of Britain’s welfare state: a well-intentioned scheme set up to help the genuinely needy swelling to gargantuan proportions as the state struggles to control the numbers eligible.
The total bill for working-age sickness benefits is now in the region of £48bn annually, and is set to reach £67bn by the end of the decade. Each month, 80,000 new applications are lodged for Pip and there are roughly 1.2m more people claiming disability or incapacity benefits than there were in 2019.
Attempts to explain this increase usually note two features. The first is the post-pandemic timing. The second is the composition: roughly 16pc of the rise is explained by claims for mixed anxiety and depressive disorders. Another 10pc, claims for autism. Fibromyalgia explains another 5pc, ADHD and depressive disorders 4pc each, PTSD and anxiety around 4.8pc between them, and various back pain conditions another 3pc.
In other words, about 47pc of the rise is attributable to conditions with few hard, physical conditions for diagnosis. As the Institute for Fiscal Studies notes, there is some evidence that people are in worse mental health than they were previously. Lock a group of people in their homes for a year and a half, and it’s not surprising that they might take a while to adjust.
But applications for diseases with hard physical markers have also increased significantly. Part of the issue might be incentives. For the last decade and a half, Britain has effectively been engaged in a [monumental effort to incentivise people] on the boundaries of work to identify as sick. The net effect of cutting back unemployment benefits while raising sickness benefits has been to make the latter more appealing, particularly as they’re not means-tested: if you find a job, you can keep your claim.
Moreover, Pip is more generous than the benefit it replaced, with 32pc of working-age adults transferring on to the scheme awarded the highest possible payment. Only 11pc of the same group received the highest award from the previous scheme. In part, this might be down to a change in the assessment process triggered by remote working during the pandemic.
Prior to 2020, around 80pc of assessments took place face-to-face, with roughly the remainder waved through based on sufficient paper evidence. Since 2020, however, the number of face-to-face assessments has plummeted to just 4pc, with remote phone or video calls displacing them. These remote assessments have a success rate of around 57pc, compared to 44pc for face-to-face meetings.
It’s true that the system could probably be tightened up. Dig into the data, and among those claiming Pip are 23 people with “factitious disorder”: a condition whereby otherwise healthy people fake illnesses. To put it another way, people who want to be sick, but aren’t sick, are categorised as sick and therefore receive sickness benefits. Some 14 of them paid the enhanced mobility award necessary to access a state-funded BMW.
Another 16 people have managed to claim Pip for acne. Five were awarded the higher mobility rate. Some outcomes are less amusing: people attempting to claim for asbestosis are less likely to win an award than those claiming to have autism (around 59pc of whom are eligible for Motability).
But the timing and scale of the rise might not be down to remote working or NHS dysfunction alone. Welfare claims are state-dependent: people who claim welfare at one point in time are more likely to do so again in the future than similar people who don’t.
Part of this is due to differences between individuals that are hard to identify in statistical datasets, but part of it seems to be a treatment effect: exposure to the welfare system has the effect of increasing future use.
What happened during the pandemic was a country-wide experiment with exposure to the benefits system. People who were working went on to furlough. They learnt to navigate the system, and they learnt what was on offer. The social stigma was broken. And we know that the more people in your community there are claiming welfare, the more likely you are to follow their example.
Behavioural economists have found that when people view benefits less as a matter of eligibility than as money that belongs to them, their interest in claiming rises significantly. Is it particularly surprising that once normality was restored, more people were interested in submitting claims?
Since the pandemic, the relationship between people and the state has shifted. Public services have stalled out in productivity. The NHS waiting list has ballooned, teachers have gone on strike. And against this background, the rise in benefits claims might have become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In a high-trust society, you might not claim every benefit you’re eligible for, reserving the money for the genuinely needy. If, however, you see people claiming who clearly shouldn’t, while state services are falling apart and the Government is using your taxes to house illegal migrants in hotels, you might see things in more transactional terms.
You might come to believe that if you’re a taxpayer who doesn’t claim every single penny you’re eligible for, you are a mug, a mark, or to borrow a word from our Israeli friends, a freier: someone who lets others take advantage of them. If the state sees you as an ATM, you might see it in the same way. That disability benefit is an effective rebate that you’re owed for your contributions. Why would you pass it up, and watch the Government give it to someone else?
S -155
Do yourself a favour and get a car from the government
It has deeper pockets than your landlord
I think you have a bigger prize to chase now
Mind benefits are discriminated against …
Yes they can get a BMW but I can’t
You hit the nail on the head
Why can’t they use this money to subsidise taxes or let landlords charge market rate rather than introduce soft rent control
I think she forgot what she was saying. A liar has to have a very good memory of what they say. Impossible with so much verbal salad. ))
This is the rules of the New World Order. The labour will not listening because they need to obey to the invisible oligarchs. The same happens with me, I reached the MP of my loval council, and the MP didn’t absolutely nothing. In my case I have to earn per year £55000. Imagine, a CEO salary. If I earn this amount I would never rent a house, I would owned one. This government like the test of the world are implemented the New World Order and people need to be united. They will take form us everything, including our freedom and control everything even what we were, eat and dream. We must to say NO, or we are done. And this applies to landlords too, as the first step is take all their properties. I very sorry to hearing that you are in this situation. I am already a homeless professional, working full time and sleeping on the streets. I wish you all good. Kindly, Ana