General Chat

Kitty it does all good to have a good grumble now and again.

:-D

Blimey Sue, I am glad it wasn't the first figure you posted! :-0 but it's still horrendous.

Sue..............phew, slightly less shocked, but that is still a huge bill for a one bedroomed flat!! :-0

I believe (someone correct me if I am wrong) that the £500 per week benefits is all non-taxable.
To earn £26,000 pa net requires a gross salary of something in the region of £35,000.
And someone working and earning £35,00 pa would be expected to support themselves and their family.
So a £500 pw cap may not be that unreasonable after all.

Well, £350 a week is more than I bring home, for paying full rent, single person council tax etc.
I am left with £200 a month - that's £50 a week after rent, council tax and utilities have been paid.
With that, I need to feed and clothe myself - and they prefer me to wear smartish clothes to work, if I wasn't working I'd live in jeans - and bus fares.
I WAS in a decent paid job in local government. Thanks to various governments deciding
a) Civil servants earn too much (some do - head of Hampshire County Council is on £245, 000 a year - that's with a £45,000 pay rise THIS year
b) we can now, apparently do the work of 2 or 3 - which has led to over half our team suffering workload stress.

Quite frankly, I don't earn enough to justify ANY stress.

Looks like I'd be better off - and my health would improve if I wasn't working!!!

I agree that the benefit system needs to be reformed, however this cap in my view has nothing to do with cutting the benefit bill as it will not make any real savings to that, this cap is politically motivated and based solely on this governments ideological views.

In a recent interview on BBC Iain Duncan Smith said that he did not believe the governments policies had forced people out of their homes and that all the reports about thousands being made homeless was not true and he said the homeless figures had hardly moved at all.

This was despite figures from his own department showing a 10% rise in statutory homelessness in the last year alone and that the homeless figure in England, according to the House of Commons Library, has risen by around 27% since this government came to power.

It has also been reported that a leaked letter from Communities Secretary Eric Pickles's office warned the cap would leave 20,000 households homeless, on top of another 20,000 made homeless by the bedroom tax.

So Iain Duncan Smith does not believe the governments policies have forced people out of their homes as his figures say otherwise, but why should we believe a man who has, on more that one occasion, been accused of manipulating statistics and making misleading statements to the media and parliament.

In my opinion the only way to reduce the benefit bill is to generate growth to create jobs - proper jobs and build more affordable houses.

The government should be concentrating on this instead of concentrating on creating lucrative opportunities for their friends in the city and they should stop designing policies that appear to verge on what is called social cleansing because some in the government consider all ordinary working people are layabouts and scroungers which is far from the truth.

Putting my non political Devil's Advocate hat on.

What if the 20,000 about to become homeless because of the "Bedroom" tax were encouraged to share their homes with the 20,000 who are about to become homeless due to the benefit cap?

That way the 20,000 who were about to be made homeless because they could not afford to fund an empty bedroom themselves and similarly the 20,000 about to become homeless due to the benefit cap would all have somewhere to live so nobody needs to become homeless after all.

Simples ;-)

Remember 93.17% of all statistics are made up. :-D