Is Britain’s benefits system broken? w/ Caroline Selman and John Pring
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This is Pod Save the UK and I'm Nish Kumar.
And I'm Coco Khan. As the government commits to cracking down on welfare fraud, we're looking into our broken benefit system.
And later, to celebrate the Tory party conference, we're bringing back the section lovingly known as WTFUG.
Boy, there has been a lot of wild stories from the Tories this week. And if you were in Birmingham this weekend yourself, did you pop along to conference?
I was doing one of my tour shows, to which tickets are still available, nishkamar.co.uk, in Birmingham on Saturday night. So it was like the day before the Tory party conference started. And I guess it was what... People in the theatrical or show business world generally know it as counter-programming, which is where there's a big event happening or something's being released. So you put something else on that's aimed at the exact opposite of the target demographic.
Really? I've not come across that before.
Yeah, it's a thing. There was a long history of when a big action movie was released, distributors would release a rom-com as well because they were traditionally seen as being split audiences. This was visceral counter-programming. This was... pretty woman coming out on the same weekend as Con Air.
It is a bit of the Barbenheimer about it, isn't it?
This was not a Barbenheimer. I cannot stress this enough. This was not Kumarvative. This was definitely not Kumarvative as a weekend.
That would be a sartorial nightmare, isn't it? Like conservative party conference in the afternoon and then Nish Kumar in the evening. How does one dress like that?
I genuinely, I genuinely don't know. I don't know whether it's possible to wear like red tweed trousers and Andre 3000 t-shirt. I don't know if that's the way in which you would dress for both of those things, but I suspect there is not a huge crossover in the people attending. my show and the Tory party conference unless they're doing a prank. That's the only logical conclusion that I can come to. But in any case, the Tory party conference has thrown out a huge clusterfuck of bad headlines, which must be a relief for the Labour government after back-to-back weeks of the Garm drama. and the various scandals around gifts accepted by Labour MPs. However, of course, everything has been overshadowed by the growing tensions in the Middle East. As we record on Wednesday morning, Israel is committed to launching what it calls a significant attack on Iran's oil fields in retaliation to a missile attack on Tuesday night. As always, we can't recommend our sister podcast, Pod Save the World, enough.
There is an episode in their feed right now that discusses this rapid escalation of the conflict.
So more on Tory conference later in the show, but for now, let's turn to benefits. Last week at Labour Party conference, Keir Starmer promised to crack down on benefits fraud, but he also expressed his desire to get more people claiming long-term sickness benefits back into work. Here he is discussing that with the BBC's Nick Robinson.
The basic proposition that you should look for work is right. Obviously, there will be hard cases, but the way I would do it is to say, yes, that's the basic proposition, but we also want to support that so that more people can get into work.
So it's worth pulling back and having a look at the benefit system as it exists currently. So benefits are administered through the Department for Work and Pensions. It's an absolutely massive department and it interacts with around 20 million people across the UK.
In 2012, David Cameron's coalition government introduced radical reforms to the way benefits were administered, rolling six previous benefits into one single means-tested payment, universal credit. Universal credit recipients include people on low incomes, people needing help with living costs, people who are out of work or people with health conditions. The amount paid out depends on how much money you're earning. So if you get paid more from work, you'll get paid less from Universal Credit. As of January 2024, there was 6.3 million people in receipt of Universal Credit and nearly 40% of those claimants were in work.
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