What evidence do you have that child benefits are going on expensive tvs et al? That the people who are doing this - and not people who actually need the benefit to feed their children - are then complaining benefits don't cover the costs they're meant for?
A fuck tonne of personal anecdotal evidence. I'm from a very lower working class background from one of the poorest cities in the UK so don't give me this junk. Unless you're claiming there's no way they spend it on luxuries?
I made no such claim. You made the claim that the benefits received go on these luxuries.
In my very personal experience, the child benefits my mum received were not spent on luxuries. Whose personal experience is more right? This is why I asked for citations. There's less emotional attachment to it, it's more evidence-based so that things can be refuted or argued, and it can be discussed without either of us going "well your experience is fucking wrong, mate"
And that's ignoring the fact I've worked in retail before and had copious amounts of people come to me with HEALTHY START vouchers and spend them on alcohol, cigs and everything else under the sun. (Something I refused until I got told to let them spend them or get fired.)
I also worked in retail and was told specifically not to accept healthy start vouchers unless they were for the things they were meant for. I was working for one of the big four, though.
That housing benefit is being kept and not sent to the landlord? And then, of course, that the landlord is not then evicting said people.
Housing benefit getting paid to tenants:
How you’re paid
Housing Benefit is paid by your council as follows:
council tenants - into your rent account (you won’t receive the money)
private tenants - into your bank or building society account (rarely by cheque)
That's how the benefit is paid. This provides no evidence for landlords not receiving rent, which seems it would only ever affect a private landlord.
Some
government research (the link to the full report is at the bottom, it's a pdf) from last year says that the proportion of private landlords unwilling to rent to housing benefit recipients is quite large. About the only time they are willing to rent to them is when they don't have a choice.
Note in section 2.1 that housing benefit will be paid directly to a private landlord when the tenant is in arrears for 8 weeks, are unlikely to pay their rent, or if they are unable to manage their own finances.
Part of the research found that private landlords were evicting people purely on the basis that they were receiving housing benefits, as the changes the Tory government were enacting (the four year freeze on the Local Housing Allowance being a big one for that) made them uncertain about future income streams.
How long it takes to evict a tenant:
Section 8: mandatory grounds
If your landlord proves a mandatory ground, the court must order you to leave, usually in 14 days.
Ground 8 is the most commonly used mandatory ground. It's used if you have rent arrears of at least:
2 months if you pay rent monthly
8 weeks if you pay rent weekly
(This doesn't include having to move to the county court to get the eviction order or moving to the high court to get a high court bailiff to actually evict the person if they refuse to leave. So we're talking 2+ months for the most basic cases, even ignoring the fact that you can't be evicted before you've lived in a property for six months.)
My point was that a troublesome tenant can be evicted. It takes a long-ass time, yes, I will accept that, but they can still be punted.
Here's a guide to the process a letting agency will go through prior to letting a property.
To be fair, I'm only really interested in the first bit: references. Basically, you're going to be asked to show that you're going to be able to pay your rent. Asking a previous landlord if there were issues, doing a credit check, asking for bank details, and then employment details to make sure you have an income.
If any issues arise with these checks, they will ask for a guarantor. This is a person who will be legally responsible for paying your rent if you don't.
Essentially, a private landlord who gets into a situation in which someone won't (and I would like very much to stress that this is separate from someone who can't) pay rent is probably an idiot. Even if they are an idiot, they can still evict someone from their property, and rent it to someone else, hopefully having learned something from the experience.
[personal aside] Presumably advertising in a "no Irish allowed" manner and saying they don't want benefits recipients, because that's not discriminatory, apparently. [/personal aside]
Oh, and three in four benefits tenants are now in arrears which isn't possible unless they aren't giving their rent to the landlord:
Social housing representative bodies are calling on the government to review Universal Credit as new research finds more than three-quarters of tenants are in rent arrears.
That's a headline and a sub-headline, unless I register for the article.
According to
these guys who source the article, these people are in arrears mostly because of the way the Universal Credit is paid:
All respondents said the six-week period before a tenant receives their first UC payment is “very frequently or frequently a factor in claimants falling into arrears”.
The guys who did the report also think that these people don't have enough savings (including from their last pay cheque) to cover the cost during that time.
Basically, these people are in arrears because they
can't pay, not because they won't.
Further, they also note that demand for money advice services, food banks, and hardship funds has increased in the areas they were surveying, as well as the surveyed saying that these tenants are using loan sharks pay day loan services to fund the shortfall.
In other words, they're putting themselves in greater financial difficulty in order to pay the bills that they can't otherwise pay.
Then that people with lots of kids don't work.
Closest I can find:
In 2015, 10,500 families in London were affected by the overall benefit cap, almost as many as in the rest of England put together. This includes 2,400 families losing more than £100 a week; 6,500 affected families had at least three children. When the cap is lowered to £23,000 those already affected will lose a further £58 a week and an additional 20,000 households in London will be capped.
Almost 65% of families in London affected by a benefits cap in the past (NOT the two child cap) have more than three kids.
That doesn't say whether or not the affected families were working, though.
Further welfare changes were announced in the 2015 Summer Budget. Some (such as limiting child tax credits to the first two children) will only apply to new claimants. But other cuts will make individual families materially worse off than they are now. In particular:
- freezing the value of benefits for four years (except certain disability and pensioner
benefits); - lowering the overall benefit cap to £23,000 per year in London;
- lowering tax credits for households whose gross earnings exceed £3,850 a year.
Like... wow.
Anyway, Google found this:
Office of National Statistics on working/workless families between October and December 2016.
I linked it to the part I found most interesting:
The number of children living in workless households decreased by 145,000 or 1.3 percentage points compared with the previous year to 1.3 million or 10.7% of all children, the lowest level since comparable records began. The percentage of children living in working households was at a record high of 58.3%, an increase of 2.0 percentage points over the past year.
Obviously this doesn't say whether or not these folks are receiving benefits, but there are more children in working families now (or at least a few months ago) than has ever been recorded.
And that families that do work don't claim benefits.
Irrelevant, trying to make a false comparison.
The second problem is that the people who have over about 4 children probably don't work and will never work. This will not harm them at all, it will only harm families who actually do work and therefore don't claim benefits.
You made the comparison.
I highly recommend giving up now.
Why are you so certain that your position is correct and that mine is not? I am genuinely curious to know the answer to this, even if you ignore the rest of the post.
