Underworked and overpaid..!? IDS should look at a House closer to home.

Quickbeam

Nice one - shift the blame to immigrants, next in line the EU I suppose....

Everything but a world recession!!

"Ministers know that large numbers of people have no intention of working "

Without asking how they can possibly 'Know' everyone's intentions (are our Ministers also mind-readers?), with all the recent Ministerial shambles we've seen, I am certainly not confident on that score.

My point was that it's a complex problem and the sledge-hammer/nut solution may not always serves us best (although our Daily Wail readers will obviously disagree!).

spider9

You may not be confident that there are large numbers of benefit cheats who have no intention of working for a living, but it's a fact. Ministers don't have to be mind-readers, they have the evidence from those who work in social services.

Whatever your point was, you said that there are 20 people chasing each job - what was the source of your information? I suspect it was a newspaper.

"If people in work were actually paid a decent living wage then I would imagine that the necessity to claim benefits would be removed."

In April of this year the national average weekly wage before tax was £506.

There are obviously lots of people who get less than that,but employers can't pay less than the statutory minimum wage - currently £6.19 per hour for those over 21. There are roughly 11 million people whose annual income is less than £15,000, but many of those will be pensioners who have income from part-time jobs or other sources.

Employers obviously pay what they have to in order to get employees - market forces are at work,that's always been the case, and always will be. Someone who runs a business has to balance wages paid against revenues. The government imposes a minimum wage in an attempt to stop unscrupulous employers from exploiting their workforce, but it can never be a perfect system. Raising the minimum wage has an effect on the price of goods in the shops - the farming industry is particularly vulnerable in this respect - which in turn leads to inflation. In a market economy there will always be this problem of lower-paid workers having to struggle, and the welfare state inevitably has to shoulder a part of the burden.

"If people in work were actually paid a decent living wage then I would imagine that the necessity to claim benefits would be removed." is an overly simplistic view of the problem.