That’s a phrase that hit home on the news recently. A man explained that his wife works in the health service and he works part time in order to raise their children. He was talking about his need for help with the cost of living crisis. Together they don’t earn enough to heat, feed and clothe their children, and yet they earn too much to be eligible for any benefits from an increasingly parsimonious and Scrooge-like government. Is it time Rishi was visited by three spirits? Or just thrown out to allow a new boss in, who would pay Bob Cratchit a living wage, and provide health care for Tiny Tim without a year’s wait for a medical appointment? Or six hours for an ambulance when his medical problems become an emergency?
My employer has been generous and tried to help, and I’m in the team that sorted out second pay increases for everyone, and one-off payments for immediate help. I’ve had to deal with requests from some of our lowest paid staff not to pay them the lump sum in one go, or at all, because of the effect it would have on the 1984/Brazil type way their top-up benefits are calculated. At least one was pleading not to get a pay rise, because they were moving into a new rented home and had previous experience of how last year’s pay rise meant housing benefit was stopped for 12 weeks, until the system finally admitted they’d got it wrong.
You see, last year we delayed our pay rise until September and then backdated it to April, so people got a bigger pay packet that month than usual. She explained this to the benefits people, with letters we gave her to confirm that this was back pay, and her normal monthly pay would be just a little more than she had been getting. All to no good – faceless bureaucrats or heartless algorithms (or vice versa) decided one big pay packet meant she didn’t need any more help. The stress of arguing with them made her ill, and in fact unable to work for a while. They could actually have made her lose her job. Thankfully she’s getting better, but they’ve made her too scared to accept a payrise, because of what it could mean.
The agencies that administer many of our benefits, especially those for people with chronic illness or disabilities, are actually incentivised financially to reduce the number of successful benefit claimants – not by helping them get better jobs, but by finding loopholes, real or imagined, to cut them off. People are dying as a result, either through getting sicker or by suicide because they cannot face the struggle any more. When finding out so many people were below the poverty line, their solution is to lower the line artificially so that they are above it again.
The current system is broken. The current government is broken. It feels like our country is broken. I hope those Christmas spirits visit soon.
If you’re suffering from some of the problems written about in this post, please speak to someone. Below are links to the Samaritans and the UK government’s website that might be able to help with the cost of living:
Get new content delivered directly to your inbox.