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The issue is the benefits system broke down during lockdowns. The sanctions/checking if you can actually work part was suspended and the civil service never rea

The issue is the benefits system broke down during lockdowns. The sanctions/checking if you can actually work part was suspended and the civil service never really restarted it. Now more than 5 million people are claiming out of work benefits despite there being an abundance of work. Employers are complaining because they are competing against a benefits system that theoretically acts as unemployment insurance and encourages people to find work, but in reality is currently just giving out free money. It's a sort of real time experiment in UBI for the lower paid classes. The result is predictable: many firms cannot compete against the state paying people not to work. Lockdowns have had all sorts of weird side effects like this. COVID became a sort of wildcard justification for anything at all, and government departments used it to do whatever they secretly wanted to do anyway (give out free money without the "being mean" parts, working from home even as backlogs at their departments soar, etc).

pjc50 4y ago
I find this hard to believe given the history of things like Universal Credit. > working from home even as backlogs at their departments soar There's no evidence that this affected efficiency?
- origin_path 4y ago
  There's an article here on the 5 million problem, that talks about Universal Credit and ponders what's gone wrong. Telegraph is usually paywalled but you may be able to find a way around: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/06/02/benefits-britain-back-condemning-millions-dependency/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/06/02/benefits-britain... Firstly, he tackles the bogus claim that it's to do with Brexit: "Immigration has bounced back. There is no Brexit-sized hole in our workforce; not anymore. Immigrants now account for one in five workers in Britain, the highest ratio ever." Then he tackles the definitions used for unemployment stats: "The low unemployment claim is a mirage. Britain has, in fact, been suffering a period of mass joblessness as big as any in our recent history. The proportion of people who are neither in work or looking for it is higher now than it was in the mid-1970s. More than five million people were claiming out-of-work benefits at the last count – a figure as big as the population of Scotland. But many of them don’t count as unemployed, because they’re not looking for jobs. So – presto! – they vanish from the national debate." Parts of the UK have become massively dependent on benefits: "In Blackpool, official figures show 26 per cent on out-of-work benefits. In Middlesbrough it was 23 per cent, in Hartlepool 22 per cent, in Manchester, it’s 18 per cent." Why doesn't the Universal Credit system fix that? It's as I said: "Why? How did we get here? How did Universal Credit, the flagship reform of the Cameron era, start to produce the problems that it was designed to solve? It was created with strings of conditionality on welfare payments, with sanctions imposed if people turned down jobs or missed face-to-face meetings. During lockdown, the conditions were abandoned – and never properly restored. So the new system has started to trap people in welfare as surely as the old one did. It has started to become an issue in Cabinet."
  - pjc50 4y ago
    I could see the byline was Fraser Nelson, so I'm not going to bother with that piece of propaganda. > More than five million people were claiming out-of-work benefits at the last count The government thinks that's 1.5m. https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peoplenotinwork/outofworkbenefits https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peoplenotin... edit: look, the problem with basing solutions on a nonsense assessment of the problem is it doesn't work. We've been round this with disability benefit; it was made much harder to claim by simply rejecting a very large number of valid claims upfront. A bogus appeal process through ASOS was put in place to further deplete people's ability to claim. However, once the claims got in front of a real court or external appeal, the majority were upheld. There isn't a hidden army of the idle.
  - mmarq 4y ago
    As usual the Telegraph publishes stuff that an intellectually normal 14 year old would be ashamed of thinking. > Immigration has bounced back. There is no Brexit-sized hole in our workforce; not anymore. Immigrants now account for one in five workers in Britain, the highest ratio ever. There are 33 million employed people in the UK. One in five is 6.6 million. There are 6 million foreigners in the UK: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/bulletins/ukpopulationbycountryofbirthandnationality/yearendingjune2021 https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populati... We must deduct that Mr. Fraser Nelson is describing an economy where newborns work, probably aiding 600’000 foreign zombies. Or one is still an immigrant after 10 years and even after naturalisation? > The proportion of people who are neither in work or looking for it is higher now than it was in the mid-1970s. Employment rate is at 76%, as high as Germany and higher than in the mid-70s. https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/employment-rate https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/employment-rate I don’t have time to research the benefit data but it’s not necessary because Mr. Fraser Nelson has totalled the bullshit meter. Maybe these work lazy Britons should get a job as Telegraph editorialists? They don’t publish articles anymore, so I’m sure they need some help and the bar doesn’t seem too high.
  - graememcc 4y ago
    The source data does not support his (and by proxy, your) points. The bulk of the growth in claimant count came from Feb 17 to Mar 20 - it nearly doubled over that period, when conditionality of benefits was in full swing. It simply does not follow that conditionality reduces claimant count. In any case, conditionality was reinstated in July 20, and unless you or Fraser can precisely define how conditionality was "not properly restored", I'm going to take the government's word on it. Per his tweet, https://twitter.com/FraserNelson/status/1530206631195201536/photo/1 https://twitter.com/FraserNelson/status/1530206631195201536/..., we can see in his computation of those on out-of-work benefits he includes pension credit (what demographic receives this, I wonder?), and 1.7M people on INCAP - the various disability allowances, the majority of whose claimants will, due to the closure of the old schemes to new claimants, be on the modern ESA benefit where eligiblity is assessed by an independent healthcare professional. For example, as my mother withered away in her final months, bedbound with oesophogal cancer, she became eligible for ESA, and contrary to one of your other comments to another poster about the 5 million, she most assuredly was dying. Note also that UC is in turn becoming a replacement for ESA. He did not avail himself of the facility on Stat-Xplore to breakdown those aggregated UC figures into the "out-of-work" and "no work requirement" figures - they are 2,103,346 "out of work" and 1,399,843 "no work requirement" - no work requirement being defined in https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/dwp-statistical-summary-policies-and-statements/benefit-combination-statistics-background-information-note https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/dwp-statistical-s... as "those who are not expected to work at present, such as those for whom Health or caring responsibility prevents claimant from working or preparing for work" Thus, the 5 million figure is inflated by a mere 3.1 million people who are either retired or who have been assessed as having some inability to work. I would suggest critically examining the source stats instead of uncritically accepting the interpretation of right-wing journalists with an agenda, though I fear you share said agenda...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jodrellblank 4y ago
UBI isn't paying people not to work, it's paying people regardless of work ("Universal" meaning it's not means tested, not lmited to just unemployed people or just disabled or etc). Benefits stop paying if people start working, even if the work pays less than the benfits. > "The result is predictable: many firms cannot compete against the state paying people not to work." Maybe many firms could stop abusing employees to extract money for record profits and instead compete on being decent places to work where people want to work because they feel like they are adding value to the world rather than being exploited and trapped. Management Consulting is the fourth most profitable industry in the entire UK, how are so many companies so badly managed?? https://www.ibisworld.com/united-kingdom/industry-trends/most-profitable-industries/ https://www.ibisworld.com/united-kingdom/industry-trends/mos...
mmarq 4y ago
Benefits in the UK are barely enough to survive, and only if you have a serious disability that entitles you to the entire package. It’s frankly ridiculous that we expect people to work full time without getting paid enough to live a good life, which means renting your own flat (if not buying it) not too far from your workplace and pay for all the groceries and bills and taxes and whatever. If renting a half-decent flat cost £1500 per month, I don’t see how we can expect people to work for less than £2500 per month.
- origin_path 4y ago
  Those 5 million people aren't dying, and they aren't taking all those open jobs either, so apparently it's not that hard to survive on out-of-work benefits.
  - bostik 4y ago
    Actually, they are. We have working people in the UK in the situation where they would be delighted to have to choose between "heat" and "eat". Because now they are forgoing both. FFS, children are stealing toilet rolls from their schools because their families can't afford to buy them.
  - mmarq 4y ago
    The employment rate in the UK is 76%, in Germany it is 77%, 68% in France. I don’t see work laziness in the data, at best I see employers wanting to hire full time workers for £1800 a month when renting a half-decent flat cost £1500 and transport cost £2-300 a month. I’m sure there aren’t 5mil vacancies for fully remote jobs that pay £100K.
kmeisthax 4y ago
The funny thing is that most of the "being mean" parts also didn't make financial sense, either. In some cases you paid $2 to means test every $1 of benefits, which just jacked up the cost of social programs for zero benefit to anyone. Well, except for politicians. They got to say they "fixed" the "problem" of people mooching off the system. Except what this actually does is create a bureaucracy that people have to specialize in, so only very dedicated moochers will know how to use the system at all. People who use the system for its intended purpose will not know what to do in order to navigate all the government bureaucracy around it. Lots of employers were used to buying into a labor market in which their workers had zero negotiating leverage besides minimum wage. This is deliberate. If the labor market had consolidated or changed in such a way as to naturally make prices rise through market mechanisms, then those employers would be calling on the government to manipulate the market the other way. In fact, that already happened: the whole concept of trade liberalization was weaponized to do exactly this to union labor. Speaking of, we also need to account for the fact that China has shrugged. The torrent of cheap-as-free overseas labor is now not nearly as free and comes with significant problems; i.e. being tied to the CCP's political priorities and frequent lockdowns as a result of China's COVID-zero strategies. So even if we weren't running a UBI experiment, we'd still see shortages and wage inflation, because the country we built the entire global economy around is no longer providing what it used to.

pjc50 4y ago

I find this hard to believe given the history of things like Universal Credit. > working from home even as backlogs at their departments soar There's no evidence that this affected efficiency?

origin_path 4y ago
There's an article here on the 5 million problem, that talks about Universal Credit and ponders what's gone wrong. Telegraph is usually paywalled but you may be able to find a way around: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/06/02/benefits-britain-back-condemning-millions-dependency/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/06/02/benefits-britain... Firstly, he tackles the bogus claim that it's to do with Brexit: "Immigration has bounced back. There is no Brexit-sized hole in our workforce; not anymore. Immigrants now account for one in five workers in Britain, the highest ratio ever." Then he tackles the definitions used for unemployment stats: "The low unemployment claim is a mirage. Britain has, in fact, been suffering a period of mass joblessness as big as any in our recent history. The proportion of people who are neither in work or looking for it is higher now than it was in the mid-1970s. More than five million people were claiming out-of-work benefits at the last count – a figure as big as the population of Scotland. But many of them don’t count as unemployed, because they’re not looking for jobs. So – presto! – they vanish from the national debate." Parts of the UK have become massively dependent on benefits: "In Blackpool, official figures show 26 per cent on out-of-work benefits. In Middlesbrough it was 23 per cent, in Hartlepool 22 per cent, in Manchester, it’s 18 per cent." Why doesn't the Universal Credit system fix that? It's as I said: "Why? How did we get here? How did Universal Credit, the flagship reform of the Cameron era, start to produce the problems that it was designed to solve? It was created with strings of conditionality on welfare payments, with sanctions imposed if people turned down jobs or missed face-to-face meetings. During lockdown, the conditions were abandoned – and never properly restored. So the new system has started to trap people in welfare as surely as the old one did. It has started to become an issue in Cabinet."
- pjc50 4y ago
  I could see the byline was Fraser Nelson, so I'm not going to bother with that piece of propaganda. > More than five million people were claiming out-of-work benefits at the last count The government thinks that's 1.5m. https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peoplenotinwork/outofworkbenefits https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peoplenotin... edit: look, the problem with basing solutions on a nonsense assessment of the problem is it doesn't work. We've been round this with disability benefit; it was made much harder to claim by simply rejecting a very large number of valid claims upfront. A bogus appeal process through ASOS was put in place to further deplete people's ability to claim. However, once the claims got in front of a real court or external appeal, the majority were upheld. There isn't a hidden army of the idle.
- mmarq 4y ago
  As usual the Telegraph publishes stuff that an intellectually normal 14 year old would be ashamed of thinking. > Immigration has bounced back. There is no Brexit-sized hole in our workforce; not anymore. Immigrants now account for one in five workers in Britain, the highest ratio ever. There are 33 million employed people in the UK. One in five is 6.6 million. There are 6 million foreigners in the UK: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/bulletins/ukpopulationbycountryofbirthandnationality/yearendingjune2021 https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populati... We must deduct that Mr. Fraser Nelson is describing an economy where newborns work, probably aiding 600’000 foreign zombies. Or one is still an immigrant after 10 years and even after naturalisation? > The proportion of people who are neither in work or looking for it is higher now than it was in the mid-1970s. Employment rate is at 76%, as high as Germany and higher than in the mid-70s. https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/employment-rate https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/employment-rate I don’t have time to research the benefit data but it’s not necessary because Mr. Fraser Nelson has totalled the bullshit meter. Maybe these work lazy Britons should get a job as Telegraph editorialists? They don’t publish articles anymore, so I’m sure they need some help and the bar doesn’t seem too high.
- graememcc 4y ago
  The source data does not support his (and by proxy, your) points. The bulk of the growth in claimant count came from Feb 17 to Mar 20 - it nearly doubled over that period, when conditionality of benefits was in full swing. It simply does not follow that conditionality reduces claimant count. In any case, conditionality was reinstated in July 20, and unless you or Fraser can precisely define how conditionality was "not properly restored", I'm going to take the government's word on it. Per his tweet, https://twitter.com/FraserNelson/status/1530206631195201536/photo/1 https://twitter.com/FraserNelson/status/1530206631195201536/..., we can see in his computation of those on out-of-work benefits he includes pension credit (what demographic receives this, I wonder?), and 1.7M people on INCAP - the various disability allowances, the majority of whose claimants will, due to the closure of the old schemes to new claimants, be on the modern ESA benefit where eligiblity is assessed by an independent healthcare professional. For example, as my mother withered away in her final months, bedbound with oesophogal cancer, she became eligible for ESA, and contrary to one of your other comments to another poster about the 5 million, she most assuredly was dying. Note also that UC is in turn becoming a replacement for ESA. He did not avail himself of the facility on Stat-Xplore to breakdown those aggregated UC figures into the "out-of-work" and "no work requirement" figures - they are 2,103,346 "out of work" and 1,399,843 "no work requirement" - no work requirement being defined in https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/dwp-statistical-summary-policies-and-statements/benefit-combination-statistics-background-information-note https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/dwp-statistical-s... as "those who are not expected to work at present, such as those for whom Health or caring responsibility prevents claimant from working or preparing for work" Thus, the 5 million figure is inflated by a mere 3.1 million people who are either retired or who have been assessed as having some inability to work. I would suggest critically examining the source stats instead of uncritically accepting the interpretation of right-wing journalists with an agenda, though I fear you share said agenda...

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

jodrellblank 4y ago

UBI isn't paying people not to work, it's paying people regardless of work ("Universal" meaning it's not means tested, not lmited to just unemployed people or just disabled or etc). Benefits stop paying if people start working, even if the work pays less than the benfits. > "The result is predictable: many firms cannot compete against the state paying people not to work." Maybe many firms could stop abusing employees to extract money for record profits and instead compete on being decent places to work where people want to work because they feel like they are adding value to the world rather than being exploited and trapped. Management Consulting is the fourth most profitable industry in the entire UK, how are so many companies so badly managed?? https://www.ibisworld.com/united-kingdom/industry-trends/most-profitable-industries/ https://www.ibisworld.com/united-kingdom/industry-trends/mos...

mmarq 4y ago

Benefits in the UK are barely enough to survive, and only if you have a serious disability that entitles you to the entire package. It’s frankly ridiculous that we expect people to work full time without getting paid enough to live a good life, which means renting your own flat (if not buying it) not too far from your workplace and pay for all the groceries and bills and taxes and whatever. If renting a half-decent flat cost £1500 per month, I don’t see how we can expect people to work for less than £2500 per month.

origin_path 4y ago
Those 5 million people aren't dying, and they aren't taking all those open jobs either, so apparently it's not that hard to survive on out-of-work benefits.
- bostik 4y ago
  Actually, they are. We have working people in the UK in the situation where they would be delighted to have to choose between "heat" and "eat". Because now they are forgoing both. FFS, children are stealing toilet rolls from their schools because their families can't afford to buy them.
- mmarq 4y ago
  The employment rate in the UK is 76%, in Germany it is 77%, 68% in France. I don’t see work laziness in the data, at best I see employers wanting to hire full time workers for £1800 a month when renting a half-decent flat cost £1500 and transport cost £2-300 a month. I’m sure there aren’t 5mil vacancies for fully remote jobs that pay £100K.

kmeisthax 4y ago

The funny thing is that most of the "being mean" parts also didn't make financial sense, either. In some cases you paid $2 to means test every $1 of benefits, which just jacked up the cost of social programs for zero benefit to anyone. Well, except for politicians. They got to say they "fixed" the "problem" of people mooching off the system. Except what this actually does is create a bureaucracy that people have to specialize in, so only very dedicated moochers will know how to use the system at all. People who use the system for its intended purpose will not know what to do in order to navigate all the government bureaucracy around it. Lots of employers were used to buying into a labor market in which their workers had zero negotiating leverage besides minimum wage. This is deliberate. If the labor market had consolidated or changed in such a way as to naturally make prices rise through market mechanisms, then those employers would be calling on the government to manipulate the market the other way. In fact, that already happened: the whole concept of trade liberalization was weaponized to do exactly this to union labor. Speaking of, we also need to account for the fact that China has shrugged. The torrent of cheap-as-free overseas labor is now not nearly as free and comes with significant problems; i.e. being tied to the CCP's political priorities and frequent lockdowns as a result of China's COVID-zero strategies. So even if we weren't running a UBI experiment, we'd still see shortages and wage inflation, because the country we built the entire global economy around is no longer providing what it used to.