Excuse me! We would like all your savings before we give you the money we owe you... (Means testing)

Member Name: thedevilinme

Product:	Means testing
Date:	20/02/08 (114 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: None

Disadvantages: Bye bye savings...

When a government pushes means-testing it has one simple remit: to fleece people's savings, especially pensioners. My mum has a few quid in her bank account that she has been saving for a rainy day, but now finds herself constantly dipping into it to meet the bills. With all these increasing utility bills and council tax demands these days its pouring down for pensioners right now as that rainy day has arrived sooner than they thought. Those savings are not eligible for tax and fairly earnt over the years, but when you introduce means testing for things like state pensions and grants then it's a mechanism for governments to get at it. The fact is that there's over 1 billion pounds off unpaid pensioner credit uncollected out there, purely because the pensioners have too much savings to be eligible for it or too proud or disabled to fill out the forms so to collect it. It's rightfully their money but they can only get at it by a trip to the local town hall to fill out complex forms or the humiliation of the dole office where they will also fill out complex forms. So why can't the government just automatically pay it? Well the answer, of course, is that they know all pensioners won't claim what they are entitled to through the reasons above and so they know their savings will subsidize that unclaimed billion quid.

The new Home Information Packs (HIPS) that all house sellers must buy that came in last year are also a disguise for their real intention. The cost of £400 is bad enough to a seller, the idea being that it won't be painful as a house sale is so expensive anyway and you will just pay it, yet more tax for the treasury. But the ruse here with these is it surreptitiously allows government officials into the house being sold to effectively reassess the properties council-tax band. Suddenly heres all these house that have been surveyed and data logged and then, wouldn't you know it, higher council-tax brackets come in. The reason why the government are not happy with current bands and assessments is because the original way houses were banded in the early nineties was by estate- agents, who were paid a small sum for every house they claimed to have assessed. But instead of getting access to the houses and taking two hours to earn £50 they quickly figured there was more money to be raised if they did more houses, accuracy seemingly not relevant in this plan. So they just jumped in a cab and 'guessed' the band by looking out of the vehicles window. If you are old then you know just how crippling the council tax bill is and for many it's up to £150 pounds per month coming out of your pension, which is ludicrous. When you all cheered when income tax went down two pence in November then you know who has to find that lost revenue now. The biggest irony about trying to get your means-tested council tax reductions to cut that drag on your pension is 25% of all council tax revenue goes on council employees greedy pensions.

Working Tax Credit is another example of how governments use means testing to get what they want. This payment to families and single working parents effectively subsidies the minimum wage, the tax payer meeting the money private business refuse to pay their workers in fair wages, driving wages down again, creating a large chunk of dependant workers on Gordon Brown give aways, who they will have to vote in next time to keep this perk. It may feel like free money to people who get it but it's so expensive to administer, meaning a flat tax rate for low paid workers would certainly be more practical, that extra cost passed on to us in stealth tax. But that wouldn't win votes and bring in the right tax levels and so Working Tax Credits are here to stay, how ever poor the system. Doing it this way means Brown has the working class voter in the palm of his hand. The levels of fraud and overpayment in WTC are one in every four pounds handed out. So porous is the system that the Poles are beginning to claim the tax credit, and things like child benefit on top, one triggering the right to the other for kids many don't actually have. They don't seem to be checked up on as much as the pensioners who have all of those intimidating forms to fill in.

It's the same with out nation's prisons when it comes to this absurd system of means testing checks. Students, and parents of students, know just how tough it is financially to go through university, so they would have been seething when they read the article in last weeks press where prisoners on university educational courses were claiming general student expenses for 'food and lodgings'! Some clever inmates managed to claim £370,000 in the past year alone in student grants and loans, even though they are getting 'fed and bed' from HMPS. Apparently this scam has been going on since Blair came into power and in 2007 alone they have found 91 prisoners who have creamed off £250k in maintenance loans and £120k in maintenance grants. These grants are normally repayable once claimants graduate and earn more than 15k. I suspect these guys and girls won't be repaying them.

One means tested benefit that has got peoples shackles up is the payment of benefits to Muslim men's multiple wives. Muslim guys can have up to four wives in their culture and a recent British ruling has allowed them to claim state benefits for each wife, even though bigamy is illegal here. In fact you can get up to seven years in prison for concealing a second marriage. There's believed to be around 1000 polygamous marriages here in the U.K Muslim community, which seems a low number, but now it's legal to claim for each wife you can watch it shoot up. A married couple gets £92.80p per week and if this ruling is embraced the husband can bag another £33.65p a week for each wife, these women often living far away in Pakistan. Because of high unemployment levels in the Pakistani community here and the arranged marriage problems, women are not encouraged to work and so the amount of claims we will see go in over the next few years will, for me, expose a lot of sham marriages. The government is so sensitive over this ruling that few knew about the change. A block has been put on these multiple wives claiming marriage visas but they have so many have tried and tested ways of getting in and so on benefits that it will be hard to resist now to really milk this.

I think we can all understand there's one rule for one and not the other when it comes to race as we are scared of being racist, but this is clear law breach and whilst pensioners freeze of ALL ethnic minorities because they cant fill in forms to get their full pension they are entitled to this sort of thing is allowed to go on to give pen-pushers and politicians an easy life. We also have young Pakistan males going out to Iraq and Afghanistan to fight with the Taliban against British soldiers and then they come back to the UK and sign back on. The security services know this is going on but don't seem to do much about it. I have always said that if any known Irish thug or terrorist was in the IRA or loyalist gang then if we had cut their benefits off from day one of the troubles it would have lasted about two weeks. Some of the terror suspects under the so called 'control orders' in the U.K are receiving up to £22,000 a year in benefits, the perks also including free utilities, phone calls, and even internet services! Off the 31 detained since the laws introduction, 13 have shared 300,000k expenses between them in these 'living costs'. Again, suspected terrorists get anything they need to pay the bills, but the pensioners are told to 'eff off' when they want a little extra to pay the gas bill, British Gas profits up 600% in just one year through profiteering. Indeed another pensioner was jailed for non-payment of council tax only this week with 34 days to serve.

With the news that 2.2 million children-one in five-now live in households totally dependant on state benefits, one in six young people between the ages 16-24 not working or in training, and some 6 million people not working at anyone time, the means testing method is under yet more pressure. In areas of Manchester, London and Glasgow almost a half of all children are growing in entirely benefit-funded homes. Research is adamant that these households will just repeat the circle and create more of the same poverty. Britain now has Europe's highest proportion of children in workless homes. The Manchester Central Constituency had the highest proportion of benefit dependency at 49.2%; Liverpool-Riverside, Islington South and Glasgow North not far behind. In Buckinghamshire it was just one in 20 kids in benefit homes. It's believed this type of household costs the UK taxpayers around 12 billion a year, which is 25% of Northern Rocks loss, which means it's a lot. The point here is that everyday in the U.K we create more and people who are not going to contribute and we see more and more leave who were contributing.

The benefit system is wide open to fraud and although Gordon Brown claims to have cut tax it's believed for every one pound spent to detect fraud only 30p is recovered. An example of how easy it is to claim means tested benefits when you don't deserve them is the crime of a 52 year old businessman from Manchester. This guy received £108,000 disability benefit over six years, claming he was too ill to work. He claimed the benefits legitimately at the start when his first business collapsed in 2000, but 'forget' to cancel the claim when his other businesses flourished over the years, soon raking in £1.75 million from property deals involving a Manchester hospital, all the money channeled through the Middle East to avoid business tax contributions. He was only caught when someone tipped off the benefit office. This guy was driving around the North in a performance sports car and was never asked to attend an interview to prove his illness. It was particularly annoying because he had appeared in court in the last three years for claiming a £5000 grant for renovation work that never happened. The means-testing system is wide open to be abused by those who just don't care and yet pensioners have to choose between 'heat or meat'.

Summary: More tax grabbing..