by Doorstop » Fri May 09, 2014 2:02 pm
Ephemerid, a regular contributor to the Grauniad (and an unemployed disabled person) on McVile and her bullshit about ZHC's and Universal Credit.
"What she is claiming is not - to use her favourite word - correct.
UC will, according to the DWPs own guidance, be assessed monthly.
The payment will be calculated by - the claimant updating their part of the system with hours worked etc.; the employer and HMRC updating their part with tax and NI conts; DWP ensuring all benefits have been accounted for (as some are calculated in the means test for UC and some aren't); and the local authority ensuring that HB and CTB is calculated correctly. All this has to be done in real time every month.
After that, the UC claim must pass muster with the jobcentre adviser/coach or the Work Programme provider - as all claimants are required to jobsearch under UC, the ones who work must do so for 35 hours a week minus the hours they work.
Failure to comply with the conditions means sanction; in the case of UC the entire claim (including HB) will be sanctioned for a minimum of 4 weeks with repeat "offences" leading to sanctions of up to 3 years.
McVey neglects to mention that the Labour Market Survey shows that ZHCs were steady at about 200,000 or below from 2000 to 2012; in 2013 that increased to 300,000, and it's nearly 600,000 now.
She also doesn't say that if you have one ZHC, the jobcentre will be able to insist that you apply for as many more as necessary for you to reach the UC financial cut-off point of 35 hours a week at NMW.
All UC claimants will have to apply for more or better work - and it is the jobcentre who decides what this means. McVey is pretending that having a ZHC - or several - will mean that you can keep on claiming UC and get, as she says, "more money". This is totally untrue.
Various charities and bloggers have worked out what UC actually does; as all claims are means-tested, including claims where there is a pensioner in the household, there is a cut-off point. Someone currently claiming tax credits and housing support can expect to keep, on average, 75 pence in every pound earned; under UC this falls to 65p.
Universal credit will make work pay.....LESS.
I know it, IDS knows it, many many others know it.
McVey probably knows it too, but as we know she likes making stuff up whilst simultaneously murdering the language to such an extent that most of her screechings are unintelligible.
If UC is ever rolled out nationwide, it will affect 9 million people.
If McVey or anyone else at DWP seriously thinks we believe that all those people are going to be better off than they are now, they are even more stupid than I thought they were.
Today the government released its' figures on the benefit cap. Those figures show that about a tenth of all the capped households had, at some point in the year, an open claim for working tax credits which rendered them exempt from the cap. The figures do not show that the 5,700 claims concerned represented all those people getting work; all they show is that a small proportion of people who were previously capped had some periods of time when they weren't.
CCHQ has been tweeting away with the news that 100 people a week are finding work as a direct result of the cap - which is arrant nonsense. The report itself notes that caution should be employed in drawing conclusions from the data.....
We have been, and are being, lied to on a massive scale."
I like him ... He says "Okie Dokie!"
