That’s all well and good except the way the UK has tended to do it is to have the staffing by incompetents done by the private sector (usually Capita or G4S).
So the private sector stuffs it up and somehow the answer is still more private sector.
I don’t think so. The nationwide roll out will be no different from the pilots.
If it were, then clearly the pilots wouldn’t have been a success.
And the message from on high is that the pilots are successful, the peasants are blissfully happy at being able to pretend to be real people with actual money which they can choose to spend how they like and the Tories are the caring party, Theresa May is a strong, stable leader and Brexit means something, mumble, mumble, something.
The crony companies are already there, mostly as providers of ‘training’ for jobseekers, doing the assessments for disability benefits, etc.
This part will be true.
The bit I especially love is that for a scheme that is supposedly all about enabling people to learn to manage their budget, the first thing it does is ensure that you start with a nice fat crisis, i.e. not being able to pay your rent which usually has to be paid on either a monthly or ,if you’re really poor, possibly a weekly basis because your old payments stop and you don’t get any new ones for six weeks.
Guess how many months in arrears you have to be before you can be evicted for non-payment in the UK? Two. Does that equate to 8 weeks? Why yes, it does.
Will your payments ever clear the arrears? Why no, of course not. You’d be overpaid if they did and the government would demand the money back. So at best you are now one missed payment from being evicted.
That eviction will be because you failed to pay your rent, so the council given the already overwhelming demand on its housing stock will probably class you as ‘intentionally homeless’ and decline to help you. They wouldn’t have anywhere to put you anyway so…“Have you got any friends or family you could stay with?”
There’s nothing like a crash course in household budgeting for people who the scheme proponents themselves claim can’t currently manage their money very well.
