UK Benefits System In Deeper Trouble? 266
judgecorp writes "Two media reports suggest that the Universal Credit scheme to overhaul Britain's welfare programme is in trouble. The IT project to support Universal Credit was launched by the Cabinet Office, and it will be completed and run by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) — but the Guardian says the Cabinet Office has pulled out its elite experts too soon, while a different leak told Computer Weekly that the four original suppliers — HP, IBM, Accenture and BT — have been effectively frozen out in an internal change. It's the biggest change to Britain's benefits system for many years, and all the evidence says it's not going well."
no HP, IBM, Accenture and BT? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds like it's going well then...
Re:Benefit system ? (Score:5, Interesting)
For those who don't follow UK politics: 'Benefits tourism' is a big issue here, mainly because it's being pushed by anti-immigrant parts of the press and because various parties are competing to curb it as a vote-winning measure. It's especially brought up as an argument against the UK's EU membership, because the UK can't refuse to admit EU nationals.
There's very little evidence of benefits tourism actually taking place within the EU, and EU immigrants actually pay more in tax than they use in public services (for non-EU immigrants it's a little the other way round, but not very much). A quick Google suggests that EU migrants pay 34% more in tax, non-EU migrants 14% less and UK citizens 11% less. Numbers are rarely mentioned in this debate....I suspect that most parties like the idea of cracking down on it as a largely symbolic response and don't care if it makes any difference.
(It also looks like some Bulgarians complain about hordes of British tourists going to Bulgaria, getting drunk and relying on Bulgarian health care).
Personally, I think that, instead of complaining about the EU, EU governments should get together and decide that the citizen's previous country is responsible for benefits for a couple of years after he moves/pays taxes and then it switches over, or something along those lines. At least it might shut people up.
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Re:Benefit system ? (Score:5, Informative)
The sad part is this hurts British people the most, especially those with foreign spouses. I can't get a visa for mine at the moment. Essentially my country thinks I am some kind of scammer because I didn't choose to marry another UK subject. In the end it may drive me away from this country to live with her abroad, meaning the country will lose my skills, my contributions in tax and my business.
All this because the Daily Mail hates everyone, especially foreigners.
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The sad part is this hurts British people the most, especially those with foreign spouses. I can't get a visa for mine at the moment. Essentially my country thinks I am some kind of scammer because I didn't choose to marry another UK subject. In the end it may drive me away from this country to live with her abroad, meaning the country will lose my skills, my contributions in tax and my business.
All this because the Daily Mail hates everyone, especially foreigners.
To paraphrase Winston Churchill:
In politics xenophobia is a good starter but a bad sticker.
The British should heed that advice. The guy whom Winston directed the original quote at didn't listen and things ended pretty badly for him.
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EU migrants pay 34% more in tax, non-EU migrants 14% less and UK citizens 11% less.
Wouldn't this only apply to documented working migrants that talk to the survey people? Seems like there must be a really strong sample bias toward the law abiding migrants.
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Initially I took the figures from a BBC news article, which took them in turn from this: http://www.cream-migration.org/publ_uploads/CDP_22_13.pdf [cream-migration.org] Table 5, panel B on page 41.
So, I should correct one thing: 34% (actualy 33.9%) is for EEA migrants (the EU plus a bit) arriving between 2001 and 2011. This is the period when large numbers Poles (and other eastern European new EU members) arrived, who seem to spark the most concern. Taking all EEA migrants it's much lower (4.5%), but still higher than the -10.6
Re:Immigrants (Score:5, Informative)
Can't help thinking I'm feeding a troll here...
You keep on harping on the "EU immigrants" while avoiding talking about what is going in England.
You believe that EU immigrants only settle in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland?
There are so many immigrants in England that in maternity wards across England's hospitals you find *MORE* non-white babies than the white babies !
As you no doubt know, race != nationality. This, I think, demonstrates why most of the mainstream parties like policies such as benefits clampdowns on immigrants and restrictions on student and marriage visas. It allows them to say 'we're like you, we're on your side' to racists and xenophobes, whilst not having to actually be (overtly) racist or xenophobic and putting off everybody else.
Most of those who are receiving "benefits" are people formerly from Pakistan or Nigeria or India.
42% of benefits are old-age benefits, mostly pensions. 2.57% is for the unemployed, who will also get a big fraction of the 21% low-income benefits (like housing benefit and council tax concessions). 18% goes to parents (not just poor ones, most/all parents get these). 16% is for the disabled and sick. So, Mr AC, which of these groups do you believe to be mostly people from Pakistan, Nigeria and India?
Also for those not following UK politics, almost all benefits are being attacked by the current government, except for the biggest part, old-age benefits, which are being protected despite pensioner incomes doing better than they have previously. This is for political reasons: old people vote more. Also, older people are more anti-immigrant and young (and more educated) people more pro-immigrant.
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Wales may have gotten its own assembly as part of the devoluion of powers, but it's still part of England, has been ever since Edward I conquered it.
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So in the UK, you get hordes of handicapped or elderly immigrants?
I don't know much about the UK, but over here in the Netherlands, mostly young people seem to migrate into the country. They tend to be healthy and require very little healthcare.
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Lets not hope it's like the NHS IT disaster (Score:2)
Re:Lets not hope it's like the NHS IT disaster (Score:5, Interesting)
To be fair a single NHS IT system is a very good idea. Its just a shame the contractors smelt money and decided to milk it for all it was worth rather than bother to deliver a working system. I actually worked for a small company that was subcontracted by a certain large telecoms company back in 2007 to work on a subsection of the DB side and we did our best , but unfortunately the powers that be at said telecom company just didn't give a sh*t. We'd send them new binaries which would then never get tested or if they did it would be months before we'd get an in the field report back. Utterly shameful.
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No, it was a terrible idea.
Rather than defining a common data standard for patient records and having a centralised lookup system that facilitated record transfer between locations, they instead created a dreadfully designed, poorly tested, feature-poor, monolithic system intended to replace the hundreds of clinical applications that everyone was already used to using.
"Here, now you have to use this application with a totally unintuitive interface that's totally different to your current system. It won't wo
Re:Lets not hope it's like the NHS IT disaster (Score:5, Informative)
"We won't import half the existing records and the ones we do can't include any mental or sexual health information because we didn't bother with fine-grained access controls"
I hate to ruin your rant but - and I know because I worked on this - that the database records had various levels of encryption (by which I mean if you just did a SELECT from the DB on certain patient fields all you would see is garbage so even DB admins couldn't see it) which meant that - in theory - only the correct people could access certain parts.
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Blowfish IIRC. And what was in the Oracle DB was just a key pointing to an encrypted hash DB elsewhere.
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That may well be true, but I know that none of the 3 NHS Trusts in which I worked were able to import mental or sexual health records into the national system because they weren't able to stop people who had access to a patient's general medical record from also being able to see the mental & sexual health portions of the record if they were on the system.
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The entire point of the buzzword "SOA" is that you aren't supposed to do that.
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Suppliers are understandably wary of signing such contracts, when ministers regularly get 'good ideas' and start imposing new design requirements regularly during projects.
Is this the fault of 'fat cat contractors' - perhaps to a degree.
Does government have its own share - oh yes.
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Its just a shame the contractors smelt money
Smelting money is always a bad idea. The base metals are worth much less than the original coins and they're not even good metals for making tools, etc. (which could be sold for profit).
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Whoosh
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Re:Lets not hope it's like the NHS IT disaster (Score:5, Informative)
it wasn't just a database. It was a database that had to incorporate and interoperate with a vast array of existing legacy software written in every language you can possibly imagine. Not only this, it was a stupid idea to start with, because MOST patients don't move around the country and a series of smaller regional systems would have made a lot more sense for MOST of the problems in communication that could be solved by interfacing computer systems.
The project was hampered by problems of patient confidentiallity, and who was reasonably allowed to access patient records at any given time. Data needed to be tied to locations that the patient was frequenting e.g. my GP is allowed to see my records, the doctor in the A&E I've just been admitted to is allowed to see my records but a doctor at the other end of the country doing a bit of record-surfing is not allowed to see my records. except when he is?!?!
The hospitals themselves pretty much (quite rightly) tried to keep the national system at arms length because it was not clearly understood or believed to be core to their day-to-day activities.
All-in-all the government of the day would have done much better to define a minimum data set and standards for interoperation rather than interferring and trying to control everything centrally. Given a decent interface and data set spec the miriad of small (cheap) software vendors already supplying the NHS would have all been motivated to implement it so they could interoperate with each others systems in a more uniform (read cost effective) manner. Communicating between hospital departments and between the hospital and the patients GP then would have been a much more simple affair and this would have solved most of the communication delay problems that happen in the real world on a day-to-day basis.
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Unified medical record systems are killed from within once the coders start to understand just how bad of an idea it is to have universal access to medical records.
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Re:Lets not hope it's like the NHS IT disaster (Score:4, Informative)
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> required the input of five (was it only five?) major contracting companies
I worked in the NHS at this time, and there were originally 9 companies I think all working on the same thing, but working in different geographical areas - the idea was that the failure of any single company would not cause a major problem - indeed it was accepted that it would probably whittle down to 5. Of course that also fell to 2 companies doing it, which in the end weren't actually doing anything other than sucking up lar
Re:Lets not hope it's like the NHS IT disaster (Score:5, Insightful)
But none of those problems you mention are insurmountable, the real problem is as it always is in the UK - the same old companies get hired time and time again despite failing over and over and the contracts are always so badly negotiated that the companies involved get paid regardless of whether they actually deliver.
Until government stops using the like of Accenture and so forth for these projects it's never going to see things turn out any differently. They pay way over the top for something they could get so much cheaper that corruption is the most likely reason.
Too many public sector workers allow contracts to be signed that award private sector companies to be paid even when they fail and then those very public sectors end up working at these companies when failure occurs. It's money for nothing and the payer foots the bill.
They just need to start hiring companies that actually want to do the job, rather than companies whose entire business model revolves around back-handers and getting paid for favourable contracts that award them greatly for not doing the job.
Look at G4S with the Olympics, they completely failed to deliver but rather than refusing all payment and recovering all funds paid to date for breach of contract the government spends months bartering over how many millions it should give them with spurious comments from the executives of the company like "We may have to take a loss on this" - no fucking shit? You failed to deliver, if it cost you that's not our fucking problem we still want our money back, though from what I understand they didn't make a loss on it in the end, despite failing to deliver.
As soon as reward for failure stops in British public sector projects, then failure itself will suddenly become much less common.
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I worked for a company that dealt with health records. In Canada mind you, but our main customers were in the US.
From my view, there are basically 2 main goals for electronic health records.
1. So patient data is portable. People see different health professionals, they move, they show up at the ER...
2. So everything can be put into a code of some sort and easily used for data. Be it for research, insurance, statistics...
My problem with the whole this is you can get really bogged down in 2. I mean really bog
Re:To paraphrase Helmuth von Moltke the Younger (Score:4, Insightful)
Quite. The USA likes to see itself as a first world country yet if you get ill and you can't afford health insurance can basically go die in a corner for all they care. Even some 3rd world countries give more of a shit than that.
Re:To paraphrase Helmuth von Moltke the Younger (Score:4, Insightful)
There is a reason why some USA detractors call it the Great Satan, some evil things are regarded as normal there.
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Does that mean the US has a method of testing for how people suffered an affliction?
How does the US differentiate between people who got HIV through carelessness and those who were raped? What about telling the difference between people who got lung cancer through smoking and others who got it because they had to take a bar staff job to be able to afford to eat and contracted it through no other choice than to suffer passive smoking?
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Or self inflicted hereditary disease or self inflicted chronic injury from a car accident or self inflicted random disease that can hit anyone.
Most state ER rooms will only stabilize a patient, they will not do long term treatments. Even if there is a drug that will treat their condition, it is not given freely.
The only people who can benefit from Medicaid (intended for poor people without insurance) are people who have nothing that can be reposses by the bankrupcy court.
All anyone need to know about public
Wankers (Score:3)
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That's because it wasn't outsourced to Accenture along with a contract that lets them get paid even if they fail to deliver.
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They use US government technologies. We are very reliable, apparently.
Alternative Summary: (Score:2, Interesting)
4 major fortune 500 hundred companies who are major contributors to /. and the status quo have been marginalized by a government ministry's own in house IT staff, and therefore the major corporations are goings to demand that this disaster by put on the front page of /. /. will comply. We are in compliance with our corporate overlords.
Launched by DWP (Score:5, Interesting)
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So it would be Iain Duncan Smith, for as far as I'm aware he has overall responsibility for the DWP.
So they're drinking the agile pondwater? (Score:2)
Switching from large commercial providers using a disciplined time-tested development methodology, to a few (probably less-experienced) internal developers, using an ad-hoc "Agile" (probably undisciplined) software development methodology (that management probably just thought was cool). What could possibly go wrong?
To extend the current IT solution we will be using a standard waterfall delivery approach largely using existing suppliers and commercial frameworks, in order to de-risk delivery and ensure
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Agile is hardly 'undisciplined'. There's also a lot to be said for 'fail early' when dealing with a project like this. That said, I would have thought they would have had a fairly defined and static set of requirements for a project like this, making waterfall a possibility.
Re:So they're drinking the agile pondwater? (Score:4, Informative)
Defined and Static? You've not worked for a govt project then?
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Don't even try, most Agile detractors on Slashdot don't know the first thing about it, they just had a bad manager come in one day and tell them they were doing some Agile when they weren't, they were just doing some half-arsed hearsay version in a poorly implemented manner that they thought could just be shoe-horned in and somehow achieve results. They're completely oblivious that the likes of scrum is as well defined and disciplined as anything like waterfall.
Not to mention that waterfall has been behind
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They said from the start there was no hope of reaching the goals with anything but "agile". Sure, there was no hope of reaching them with agile either, but then you could at least blame agile.
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As planned (Score:3)
The Rand / Koch movement is not just for domestic US implementation.
Seems reasonable? (Score:3)
I may be misunderstanding, but it appears that the existing contractors are using old-school waterfall. Gee, government contractors using a heavily-specs-oriented approach, when has that gone wrong?
The new idea seems to be having a team of smaller players use an agile approach to deliver the real system.
Any time you can get a group of smaller developers doing rapid iterations with the government it's a miracle... It is also vastly more likely to deliver something decent and on-budget.
Anytime I see HP, IBM, Agilent, et al winning a contract for some government system I automatically assume it will be an epic fail.
What a mess (Score:3)
When the politicians in the same government start bailing on a project and start to point fingers at each other, it's only a short amount of time thereafter that you'll see resignations and folks trying to distance themselves from the coming disaster. It's that rat instinct we all have and this project sounds like it'll completely blow up here shortly.
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It certainly can!
Who do you think the losers will be?
Hint, not the people who wasted a fortune on a system that doesn't work.
Already people are being driven to food banks (much to the amusement of the Tories*, as seen in a debate on the subject) and that's just the few changes they've managed to get through so far.
When UC comes in it'll be a lot worse, homelessness will skyrocket as those who are unable to take care of their finances fall behind on rent (Currently rent is paid direct to landlord by the gove
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I do apologise, the MPs pictured in the link above are Labour, although the Tories were at it too, Guido and his selective reporting -.-
not entirely correct (Score:5, Interesting)
This change was made under the last Labour government as a way of encouraging tenants to get some practice at budgeting for expenses; Naturally for a small and feckless proportion of the housing benefit recipients, the extra money paid direct was a windfall they spent on drink, gambling and drugs.
Should be added that for most recipients the total of housing benefit received is less than the total rent and they are expected to make up any excess from their unemployment or disability living allowance payments (where 'rents' include standing charges such as power, heating, council tax anyway) - so even if the landlord has a defaulting tenant and gets direct payments from the local authority, they only receive the element of the total rent that relates to actual rent, and must pursue the tenant for the rest.
this system has caused many UK landlords to refuse to rent premises to recipients on housing benefit (although of course if a tenant went from employed to HB and kept up the payments rather than defaulting, the landlord would never know, which is some shielding...)
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Should be added that for most recipients the total of housing benefit received is less than the total rent and they are expected to make up any excess from their unemployment or disability living allowance payments (where 'rents' include standing charges such as power, heating, council tax anyway) - so even if the landlord has a defaulting tenant and gets direct payments from the local authority, they only receive the element of the total rent that relates to actual rent, and must pursue the tenant for the rest.
this system has caused many UK landlords to refuse to rent premises to recipients on housing benefit
The situation is even worse than that. My sister is moving abroad temporarily, and is trying to get her flat rented out while she's away. She was personally quite happy to have the property let to benefits claimants, but none of the letting agencies she spoke to were willing to do it.
The problem isn't simply that they don't get the money, it's that the regulations make it very difficult to get an HB tenant to leave. If they leave the property of their own accord, then they're no longer at involuntary risk o
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Citation needed.
And not a Daily Hate Mail opinion piece, please.
well its hard to have a citation before the event but parliament thinks it will be an issue [parliament.uk].
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I've seen it happen. There is a small minority of people who really don't seem to understand that sometimes you have to keep money back to pay rent, or that any loans you take must be paid back, they just see a loan as 'free money'.
I knew someone like this and what was extremely puzzling was she was running her own small business profitably. But her personal finances were a disaster - she treated loans as if they were a lottery win and free money (took loans without ever considering that she would actually
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And why exactly should the government (ie those of us who pay tax) subsidise someone consuming drugs and alcohol?
The benefits system should provide an absolute baseline standard of living, ie it keeps you alive but you get absolutely no luxuries whatsoever. That means basic food nothing fancy, no car, no drugs/alcohol/tobacco, a room to sleep in with access to basic facilities, and access to education/training.
The benefits system is not there to provide a lifestyle, it is there to TEMPORARILY provide the ba
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Why should we all have to sub the bankers?
These things cut both ways, the people at the top cocked it up and those at the bottom are suffering.
Also, kindly remember all benefits are not paid to people who won't get a job, some are paid to people who can't, for valid medical reasons, why should they be condemned to a workhouse style existence in a modern civilised society*?
Think about it...
* I realise I'm stretching things a bit here...
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We shouldn't sub the bankers either.
And sure, the system should be different for someone who has a genuine reason why they're unable to work...
Living with a genuine disability is very expensive, and yet the benefits available are being cut because there isn't enough money to go around. If you cut down on all the people falsely claiming disability benefits, and those claiming benefits because they are simply too lazy to work then a lot more help could be made available for those in genuine need.
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The present mess is for a big part the product of generation after generation of self-righteous idiots imagining that they had the means to tell who the deserving poor were, and what would help for the undeserving poor. When will you realize that we all are recipients of lots of stuff that we don't deserve. Y'all need Jesus, I tell ya.
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And if they don't find work, what then? Do you let them starve?
This number is actually very small, and it constitutes the rare exception, not the rule.
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And if they don't find work, what then? Do you let them starve?
Training (to make them more employable in the future) or community service.
It shouldn't be possible to sit on your ass doing nothing and get free handouts. If someone is able to work but unwilling to do so, then sure let them starve - thats their choice.
If you want money, wether you get it from an employer or the state you should be spending most of your time busy doing *something* (legal) in order to get it.
And plenty of those who "cant find a job", either make no effort whatsoever, or intentionally sabota
Re:Really??? (Score:4, Insightful)
Free handouts my fat arse. I have paid in the unemployment insurance for years. Bugger it, if I am to be unemployed for a while, I expect to keep my dignity and not be insulted by puffed up self-important bigots.
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"People should have to work....." many of them DO.
A large proportion (possibly the majority - I don't have the stats to hand -- of those claiming benefits are in work but in low paid jobs.
Someone on minimum wage (or just over) cannot afford to live in large parts of the country. I know of a head chef who works 60 - 70 hours a week yet has no prospect of affording to rent [let alone buy] a small flat where I live -- and that even without food, heating, lighting..... Before we get the "free market will fix
Re:Really??? (Score:5, Insightful)
Have you ever been unemployed? Even are a month of it, it's mind-numbingly boring. You've got the jobcentre staff warning you that you've got to be available for work at any time, so you're not allowed to go anywhere interesting. So on the one hand we've got Iain Duncan Smith telling us that looking for a job "is a full-time job", but on the other, we're being denied the basic rights of full-time employees to paid leave. You've not got the money for lots of interesting things outside of the home, and when you amortise the cost of those "luxury goods" (games consoles, home entertainment systems etc) over the amount of time you're stuck in front of them, they're actually one of the cheapest ways of distracting you from the dull emptiness of your life.
The first time I was unemployed (over ten years ago), I had a job coming up, so I wasn't afraid to spend what I had. I looked for temporary work locally, but not having found any, I bought a book on playing blues and boogie-woogie piano, and taught myself. I bought a bunch of wood and parts and built myself an electric guitar. And it was also summer. I enjoyed that unemployment. This time round, though, I'm stuck in a house in a small village, isolated from any and all fun activities, in the middle of an unusually wet winter. My only real opportunity for social contact is the village pub, and I occupy my mind with the internet.
I'm trying to build up my skillset with the aid of the internet, but you have no idea how time just drags when you've go no externally-enforced routine. One day I can spend 13 or 14 hours working on my Python project, and the next I do nothing, because there's no defined "start point" to my day.
I'm not a heavy drinker, I'm not a smoker, I'm not a gambler and I'm not on drugs. I am a cyclist. If I was told that as an unemployed person I had no right to own both a £1000 road bike and a £500 touring bike, I would be upset. If you took it away from me, I would cease to function. It's very difficult for an unemployed person to give up their only comfort and escape, so no matter how bad that escape is, don't begrudge it to anyone.
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Have you ever been unemployed? Even are a month of it, it's mind-numbingly boring.
Well, that's your fault, bro. Go to the library if you need to.
As my mum said, "Only the boring are bored."
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Can I be honest? you seem to live in the UK, and you seem interested in software development. I have absolutely nothing against Python, I quite like it, but across much of the UK it's just not where the jobs are.
You may hate Microsoft or whatever else but if you want a software development job in the UK then C# and .NET is where it's at, there's just so many jobs floating around and not enough people to fill them. It's a gravy train right now, and .NET salaries have most definitely been on the up for a good
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I don't know about his country, but in my country you might get in trouble for that. If he codes python for 14 hours a day, they might deem it self-education, and as a student you're supposed to live on loans, stipends and savings.
They're so worried about students abusing the system, sneaking out of getting in student loan debt by registering as unemployed, that they'd rather a genuinely unemployed person sit at home with his Playstation.
Better watch it. (Score:2)
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Maybe it's just your spelling.
Re:Really??? (Score:5, Interesting)
Ah, get over yourself. Why should they subsidize fuel, house ownership, exporting businesses and a ton of other things? Yet they do.
Hey, you are British, I assume? Look up this book of a countryman of yours, George Orwell. No, not the more famous book, but "Down and out in Paris and London". He does a good literary job of explaining why the poor smoke. It might even be able to get through to you, who've apparently never had a tough day in your life.
If you want a more experimental/scientific explanation of what Orwell describes, take a look at this classic NYT article [nytimes.com].
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So don't allow them to be idle, if they're able to work then they should be working.. If they can't find a job through the normal channels then they should be required to study/train towards finding a job, or work community service.
Taxpayers shouldn't be paying for fit and able people to sit on their asses all day consuming drugs and alcohol. The rest of us don't have that much free time because we actually have to work!
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Yes, you would have thought that "education and retraining" should be the fundamental part of unemployment. But it's not, it's on job seeking.
Lets say you were a "coal worker" and you've been doing that for 25 years. When your pit closes the only thing you're good at is coal minining, but no other pits are open, so you now have a defunct skill set. Yet you still need to eat, pay rent, support a familiy so you no longer have a chance of retraining, but as you started working at 15 you don't have an educat
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Many of those taking drugs also turn to crime, even when they are claiming benefits. Either the benefits handout is insufficient to fund their habit or desired lifestyle, so they commit crime to supplement their handouts, or they commit violent crimes as a direct result of being out of their minds on drink/drugs.
As a taxpayer it makes little difference if the state buys him a tv or he steals mine, i end up paying for it either way.
Look at the arrogance of such people, they feel they have a divine right to h
Re:Really??? (Score:4, Informative)
'The bumholes that defraud the benefit system on a long term basis and drug addicts picking up their state-funded high'.
The implication of this government has always been that fraud is high.
However, their internal checks have consistently failed to find numbers matching this rhetoric.
Illness and disability benefits when checked find about 0.5% fraud. And about the same amount of awards due to staff error.
The implication of benefit fraud is being used to excuse a 20% reduction in eligibility for one disability benefit.
Fraud on job-seekers allowance is higher.
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Where do you get your numbers?
From about 2005 to 2011 disability benefit claimaints increased by 30% even though there's no justifiable reason for this to be the case because the benefit hadn't really changed and there hadn't been any kind of mass reason for increased levels of disability in the populace.
When the government decided to reassess all claimants the initial figures showed that 37% were found to be fit for work which isn't too dissimilar to the unexplained increase, especially when you factor in
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The numbers above are somewhat flawed.
27% 'found fit' - this is before appeals.
For represented appeals - there is someone to help with the appeal - well over 50% succeed.
Of those not appealing, it neglects those not doing so because they go on to claim some other benefit - because they are caring for someone with disabilities say.
'Acted somewhat as an amnesty' - this is very, very much not the case.
The regulations for IB, and ESA are utterly different.
As one example, IB had to make some finding that there w
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"The numbers above are somewhat flawed.
27% 'found fit' - this is before appeals.
For represented appeals - there is someone to help with the appeal - well over 50% succeed."
So assuming you're right - I couldn't find any evidence for the figure you claim - but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, that's still going to be at least 10% of claimants that are taking the piss. That's still hundreds of thousands of people, that's still many millions of pounds of tax payers money down the drain just because peopl
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Responding only to the new claimants point.
That number includes people who claim ESA, and then get better, and report they have done so before the assessment.
If you've broken both legs, you will normally be fit again before 13 weeks - as with most short term illnesses.
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They looked.
In depth - and did detailed examination of a random selection of cases.
A low level of fraud was found.
The problem is that it is politically convenient to state that there is a lot of fraud, because this gives an excuse to reduce eligibility, because 'they're all thieving bastards anyway'.
This is also great for the press, as it generates nice simple stories 'Look at this man, he claimed to have a bad back, and is running a marathon'.
The story 'Well, it turns out there are actually quite a lot of
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Incidentally, if you are physically capable of committing violent crime then you are physically capable of doing legal work too.
If such people want money they should be required to work for it. Either get a job in the normal way, or if you want state handouts you should be spending normal working hours (eg 40hrs/week) in training or doing community work for the state.
Think of the benefits system as a fallback job... You should still have to work and not just sit on your ass, even if your wages are coming fr
Re:Really??? (Score:5, Insightful)
'Incidentally, if you are physically capable of committing violent crime then you are physically capable of doing legal work too.'
Really?
Violent crime requires no timekeeping.
It does not require you to work with others.
It does not require literacy or numeracy.
It doesn't need reasonable personal hygiene.
It doesn't need you to be predictable.
Nor reliable, or any other of the many things normally required by an employer.
Even leaving aside the issues of actual employability.
You have two applicants. One of which just came out of Wormwood Scrubbs for punching to death someone in a job interview because they asked too many questions. The other is fresh out of school.
Who gets the job?
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I note Iain Duncan Smith has said of the rise of use of food banks. 'Well - it's free - of course people will use it' - implying people not in need use them.
And it's been made general policy for local DWP staff to avoid giving reasons 'late payment of benefit' when referring people to food banks.
This makes it harder for the food banks to collect proper statistics.
This has lead to the government reporting rises at food banks as 'anecdotal' - because they have to ask the person turning up why they were referr
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Re:Really??? (Score:4, Insightful)
So what you're saying, is that the only reason food banks are used, is that they are there?
Maybe the other way is more true? There was a need for food banks, so charities intorduced them, as more people need them, charities are introducing more?
Oh, and most food banks require a "voucher" that is given to the person from Drs, social workers etc, you can't just walk up yo a food bank and demand food.
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Is your real name Ian Duncan Smith? That's his argument - they're not budgeting correctly.
It seems that the argument "Food banks are available so people use them" is as tortuous an argument as any other.
But that's okay, it sounds like you're in the "I'm alright, Jack" crowd, so you're alright. As long as you're alright that's fine, well done and good luck.
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You utter fool.
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there's not a programmer worth $1m/year we can get them from China and India and instead pay them $30,000/year and get over 3000 of them which of course means we'll need 300 middle managers/ 30 directors etc. It's all about hiring in government projects regardless of where the "jobs" actually are that way when it comes to election time we can point back and say "we put over 3000 people to work..."
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