Why look for a job these days?
Sunday, October 10th, 2010Hardly a day goes by without some family living on social security being pointed out as a bunch of layabouts because they’ve seemingly made a positive choice to live that way rather than to look for a job, but with the rules as they are, why would they look for a job?
Taking as a basis the so-called typical family of two adults, two kids they can easily get clear of £15,000 a year net, equivalent to a gross salary of over £21,000 and closer to £25,000 by the time you add in even basic housing benefits for an average area of the country. The problem is that all of the example families pulled out by the newspapers seem to be fairly unskilled therefore probably able to attract a maximum salary of around £12,000 thus it’s rather unlikely that they’d be able to get a job paying over twice that.
That’s just for the basic benefits and there are a lot more to be had once you’re getting one of the passport benefits like job seekers. It’s impossible to list them all but some examples are free school meals, payments towards school uniforms, reduced fees (often zero) on courses, reduced entry fees to some places and so on. Depending on your interests that could easily add several thousand pounds a year to the payments. And, of course, that’s for an average family in an average area of the country: each additional child adds about £5,000 to that gross salary and more expensive areas of the country can add substantially to the housing benefit available.
No job certainly looks like quite an attractive option these days.
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