It is hard to believe Liz Kendall’s claims about unemployed young people
Considering the statistics she is using, it is hard to believe Liz Kendall’s claims about unemployed young people.
She is telling us that people aged 18-21 who refuse to work will have their benefits cut in the future, supporting herself with official figures saying nearly a million people between those ages were out of education, employment or training between July and September.
But this is hardly proof of an epidemic of laziness; for a start, higher education institutions are usually closed between July and September – as are training organisations, depending on what Kendall means by that. It is unreasonable to expect people to be attending those places at that time of year.
Furthermore, while it is common for young people to take jobs during the long summer break, This Writer is not convinced that many of them would willingly claim out-of-work benefits during that time, if they were going to go back to education afterwards; it simply would not be worth the aggravation.
So it seems to me that any who are claiming benefits are probably in genuine need of them.
It occurs to me that Kendall [pictured] may be hoping to use an inflated July-September figure to falsely claim success for her “earn or learn” scheme – that probably doesn’t need the benefit of such a deception.
It occurs to me that, if offered an apprenticeship or a job instead of unemployment benefits, most young people who did not have higher education obligations would be happy to take either – so Kendall doesn’t need the crutch of a falsely-inflated unemployment figure to support any claims of success.
More concerning is the BBC article’s concentration on people claiming benefits due to ill-health.
That isn’t refusing to work, of course – such people simply can’t work at the moment – but the rhetoric used in the article suggests that they are work-shy, crying off it for the sake of it. That would be misleading.
If this new initiative is just another excuse to demonise people who are genuinely sick or disabled, then the media need to expose it as such – not support it as this BBC piece seems to.
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while our politicians let hundreds of thousands of work jobs taking away to poorer parts of the EU just look metal box morganite and many more companies why did they allow this has it places us without these jobs for those who wanted to work. I wouldn’t trust a politician words has we now they lie they broken our social security services. and given us American style benefits system
‘Out of work benefits’ includes those IN WORK whose employer pays SSP (which they claim back) If you get full pay on the sick your employer will still claim SSP back through the PAYE Tax/NIC scheme. The vast majority of claimants for any sickness related benefit are short term ie a few weeks at most. Unemployment benefits are the same, usually a few weeks. Disabled people are the exception, of course. But that’s why they are considered disabled. They are relatively few in number and now even fewer given just how difficult PIP is. You can have your GP, practise nurse and various hospital consultants agree that you shouldn’t be at work only for an underqualified ‘medic’ to call you lazy. This is why the appeals process is mostly successful for those who go down that route. The largest cost to the taxpayers is pension payments, free prescriptions to the elderly and their healthcare. I spent many years in the civil service and noted that the resources given to a local DWP fraud team usually exceeded that given to the whole of Scotland’s Tax Fraud team. Therein lies our problem..