Politics vs. Reality: a Study in Perversity

So I find myself, for the first time in my 12-year working life, without a job. This is fun. The hours are great. My mortgage lender is happy to give me a break. The cat is happy to see more of me. After 12 years of stress and toil, I'm happy to take a rest for a few months. Everyone is happy.

Well, almost everyone. The exception being, of course, the Benefits Agency, which is now paying me the princely sum of £52.50 per week.

Now, it seems reasonable that it should want to discourage me from treating this break as an extended paid holiday. That's what it's supposed to do - encourage me to look for work. But what it is actually doing is everything within its power to stop me from working.

Here's how it works. I make a little money (which I declare in full) from freelance work. The first £5 I make in any given week is mine - I get to keep it all - less tax, of course. The next £47.50 is subtracted pound for pound from my benefit, and it's also taxable - which means I'm actually paying more than 100% tax on that money. What fiscal genius came up with that one?

Then if I ever do more than 16 hours work in a week, my claim is "terminated", and I have to start again from scratch the next week. Now, the process of making a new claim is neither quick nor painless, so there's a powerful incentive for me to make sure that I never get that much work in any one week.

The agency considers me to be paid hourly - its forms don't even admit any other possibility. But I'm paid by piecework, and I work in my own time. If I do one piece of work one day, another piece the next, I'm supposed to translate this into hours, then translate my pay into an hourly rate (and what makes this is any of their business, I should like to know?). Then I'm supposed to give them documentary evidence of the hours I've worked and the pay I've received.

Of course, there is no such evidence.

Now, if I didn't declare the work, I'd be spared this interrogation. Then they could catch me at it, investigate and prosecute me (at truly vast public expense) and stop paying me. Of course, then I'd have no income, so I'd have to claim Income Support. And guess how much Income Support I'd get if that happened?

That's right. £52.50 per week.

In their anxiety to be "tough on benefit cheats", the politicians have made it as hard as they can for me to be honest. It would actually save taxpayers' money if I simply took all the income I could get and kept my mouth shut. But of course, politicians have to make speeches to show how tough their rules are, so we're stuck with this insanity. And a huge and costly bureaucracy to administer it.

Here's a thought for the next Budget. Scrap all state benefits, including housing, unemployment, sickness, pensions, child benefit, family tax credit, mortgage relief and whatever pittance it is that students are still supposed to get. Replace the whole boiling of it with a flat rate of £40 per week paid to everyone over 16, rising to £100 per week over 18, regardless of whether they're working or not. Then let us sort it out.

As the good book says: "whose life is it anyway?"

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