[GiRTh]

They take into account any income earned but not any customer costs. So if you say work for 10 hours a week then that money will be deducted from your claim but your expenses in taking that job will not be paid. Its so bad that in many cases its better for the person to not declare any income because the deductions from their UC are far too severe. They end up better off not taking on any work or doing work on the side which I'm sure was not the intention of the scheme.

Its a disaster and its so bad I cannot for the life of me understand why it was implemented so rigorously knowing full well that people will clearly suffer hardship

[user104658]

Originally Posted by GiRTh

They take into account any income earned but not any customer costs. So if you say work for 10 hours a week then that money will be deducted from your claim but your expenses in taking that job will not be paid. Its so bad that in many cases its better for the person to not declare any income because the deductions from their UC are far too severe. They end up better off not taking on any work or doing work on the side which I'm sure was not the intention of the scheme.

Its a disaster and its so bad I cannot for the life of me understand why it was implemented so rigorously knowing full well that people will clearly suffer hardship

To be fair, that's always been the case even in the "old system" of JSA + Tax Credits + Housing Allowance. I was unemployed for around 4 - 5 months just before my eldest was born (which is nearly 10 years ago ) and they were expecting me to interview for jobs paying £140 a week, that would have had £80 a week in travel costs. They sanction you if you don't interview or turn down an offer so the only choice was to sabotage interviews .

I found a job (as a li'l cashier at the bookies ) literally 10 days before my daughter was born and have probably never been so relieved before or since that I didn't have to navigate that system as a new dad. Then of course I ended up staying with the company for 9.5 years and going as high as store manager and despising the soul-sucking mess with a firey passion so... swings and roundabouts I guess . Odd remembering how elated I was to get that job offer, unware that it was going to wear me down to a stump over the following decade

[GiRTh]

Originally Posted by Toy Soldier

To be fair, that's always been the case even in the "old system" of JSA + Tax Credits + Housing Allowance. I was unemployed for around 4 - 5 months just before my eldest was born (which is nearly 10 years ago ) and they were expecting me to interview for jobs paying £140 a week, that would have had £80 a week in travel costs. They sanction you if you don't interview or turn down an offer so the only choice was to sabotage interviews .

I found a job (as a li'l cashier at the bookies ) literally 10 days before my daughter was born and have probably never been so relieved before or since that I didn't have to navigate that system as a new dad. Then of course I ended up staying with the company for 9.5 years and going as high as store manager and despising the soul-sucking mess with a firey passion so... swings and roundabouts I guess . Odd remembering how elated I was to get that job offer, unware that it was going to wear me down to a stump over the following decade

Thats not my recollection. I was unemployed for almost a year about 15 years ago and I thought they were very understanding and any work I did was fairly judged. It was an easy system to abuse but UC is too far the other way. I'm hearing stories of one person who was recently made unemployed, but as part of his old job he got a bus pass that still had six months left. His employer took six months worth of bus pass from his final pay check which accounted to about £300. The UC took that as income and deducted the £300 from his initial claim. That wouldn't happen under the old system.

[user104658]

Originally Posted by GiRTh

Thats not my recollection. I was unemployed for almost a year about 15 years ago and I thought they were very understanding and any work I did was fairly judged. It was an easy system to abuse but UC is too far the other way. I'm hearing stories of one person who was recently made unemployed, but as part of his old job he got a bus pass that still had six months left. His employer took six months worth of bus pass from his final pay check which accounted to about £300. The UC took that as income and deducted the £300 from his initial claim. That wouldn't happen under the old system.

I believe it was something called "New Deal" (I might be remembering the name wrong) that was just coming into play when I was on JSA. They were also phasing in mandatory weekly "jobseeking classes" - I had to attend ONE of them, even though I had already secured a job, because I still had to claim for the three weeks up until my start date. So I was lucky enough to know that I was just there as a "box ticking exercise"... but it was utterly awful. Everyone lumped in a room together, so you literally had guys stinking of alcohol and people who were struggling with literacy in with temporarily unemployed professionals with Masters degrees, being patronised by some of the worst people on the planet. Like I say... I'm glad I could treat it as a "fly on the wall" situation because if I'd actually felt like I was "in it" it would have pushed me over the edge at that point. And all of that was a Labour initiative. Again, none of it anywhere NEAR as bad as the mess that is UC, but it would be an error to remember the "final" Labour system with rose tinted glasses.

[GiRTh]

Originally Posted by Toy Soldier

I believe it was something called "New Deal" (I might be remembering the name wrong) that was just coming into play when I was on JSA. They were also phasing in mandatory weekly "jobseeking classes" - I had to attend ONE of them, even though I had already secured a job, because I still had to claim for the three weeks up until my start date. So I was lucky enough to know that I was just there as a "box ticking exercise"... but it was utterly awful. Everyone lumped in a room together, so you literally had guys stinking of alcohol and people who were struggling with literacy in with temporarily unemployed professionals with Masters degrees, being patronised by some of the worst people on the planet. Like I say... I'm glad I could treat it as a "fly on the wall" situation because if I'd actually felt like I was "in it" it would have pushed me over the edge at that point. And all of that was a Labour initiative. Again, none of it anywhere NEAR as bad as the mess that is UC, but it would be an error to remember the "final" Labour system with rose tinted glasses.

I remember new deal. It was the start of the new way of thinking that has lead to UC. I remember I once claiming a tax credit for a year after I was no longer eligible. It was almost too easy to exploit but UC is too much of a correction. The queues to food banks are now filled with people waiting for their first UC payment to be released.

ITs like they think every one leaves a job with a final pay packet of a about 4 grand. The system is so stacked toward causing hardship that they clearly didnt think it thru properly

[user104658]

Originally Posted by GiRTh

ITs like they think every one leaves a job with a final pay packet of a about 4 grand. The system is so stacked toward causing hardship that they clearly didnt think it thru properly

The problem is that it's designed by Tories who, I think, genuinely believe that everyone "has savings to dip into" while they wait, or a family that can support them, because they've never known anything else.

[Oliver_W]

Originally Posted by GiRTh

They take into account any income earned but not any customer costs. So if you say work for 10 hours a week then that money will be deducted from your claim but your expenses in taking that job will not be paid. Its so bad that in many cases its better for the person to not declare any income because the deductions from their UC are far too severe. They end up better off not taking on any work or doing work on the side which I'm sure was not the intention of the scheme.

Its a disaster and its so bad I cannot for the life of me understand why it was implemented so rigorously knowing full well that people will clearly suffer hardship

I think they used to deduct something like 60% of your earnings from what benefits you get or something, have they stopped that? I assumed that was to cover travel and other expenses?

[user104658]

Originally Posted by Oliver_W

I think they used to deduct something like 60% of your earnings from what benefits you get or something, have they stopped that? I assumed that was to cover travel and other expenses?

UC has a "full taper" where it gradually decreases as earnings increase, right down to zero (like you could in theory be getting £4 UC a week once you have much better earnings). This is one of the things that UC actually gets right over JSA in my opinion, which has a "hard cap" where you lose lump sums in steps as soon as you hit a certain threshold, which (for example) lead to situations where, let's say, someone could be working 16h a week and be offered an hours increase to 20h a week, but they would actually end up financially worse off if they took the extra hours.

Again though, it's part of UC that looks good in theory but is full of glitches that make it not actually work as it should, and people are turning things down based on the sheer uncertainty of what will actually happen.

Another "on paper improvement" of UC for example is monthly payments, rather than the weekly / four-weekly current system, which is in theory much better. Getting money in 4-weekly when your rent and bills come out monthly gets really messy. However, again, it's broken... some people end up getting their full payment for 2 months, every 2 months... so 6 lump sums a year. Who can budget with that? Just a mess. And there's no reason for it other than that the system is full of bugs that they haven't managed to fix.

But I do honestly suspect it's deliberately messy to stop people from being able to easily access it. Like I said above though - that leads to the worst possible situation where the people who need it most - vulnerable people who are less likely to be able to get their head around the system - are the ones most likely to end up with no help.