WB, You've probaly treid this already , but just incase you didn't know about it, the DWP will pay your mortgage but only the interest part of it, so if you've got an interest only mortgage they will pay it, might be worth asking at your local JSA centre   I was off work for a while untill recently and was having my mortgage paid, and living off some money my mother left me till it ran out, but there is no way anyone is better off on JSA than working, well unless they have half a dozen kids and are illegals, then they get given the earth...   I'm now working and are just about getting by, that is untill my mortgage goes up next year when the review is due then i'm utterly Fd                                                                                                                                                                             

Your right it is hard for single folk in your position £65.00 a week is not much. But when you hear the, we have 5 kids live in a 4 bed house with all rent paid no rates to pay and then thay say we only get £300.00 a week how can we live on that, and why should I get a job I have a right to live off the state. Then we get, I will fly my mom dad gran grandad and the rest of india here so we can all have free health care then over stay working for cash not paying tax and if we get caught then claim that we will die if we have to leave this country. Rant over                                                                                                                                                                              

It's not just the foreigners who are spongers though. My next door neighbours have 4 kids, 1 of those has 3 kids of her own. Now none of them has ever worked a day in thier lives but they have a 4 bed council house, rent free, 3 cars (though only 1 adult with a licence but who cares that thier youngest son has been driving since he was 13), and they claim that all the kids have learning & social disabilities so they get heaps of money coming in including carers allowances! To add insult to injury they run thier own used car business from the house, on a right little earner there with upto 10 cars a week selling.   The council & benefits people are well aware of all this and have even witnessed stuff themselves after anonimous tip offs yet they have never been penalised and conitnue to do it. Aparently they can't be held responsible (the family) because they have learning dificulties and don't understand they are in the wrong. The only disablity they have is the kids haven't been to school since the age of 10-11 despite private taxi's hired to collect them every day so they would attend, if one of them went once a fortnight that was good going.     I am currently in the JSA catagory, single white female with no kids so get the minimum £65 a week like WB, also with a mortgage to pay and i have to watch these muppets next door get given the earth to sit on thier backsides all day. I also have to find the money to pay the repairs to my property when they go off on one next door, they've caused £1000's of pounds worth of damage to my property and i've been to court twice against them when i have been physically assualted & threatened by them but each time they walk away from court laughing with nothing but a good behaviour agreement and the council say there's no grounds to move or evict them so we have to put up with it.                                                                                                                                                                              

Shazza we had a family like that loads of shit from the so called kids made everybody's life a misery, then one night on my way home from a night out I saw there dad in the take away so I had a word with him well a few words to be fair,  when he got home after realizing that every time his kid's upset anybody I was going to upset his day with free hospital treatment there was a lot less trouble from them
                                                                                                                                                                             

Im going to sell the car and bikes and buy a boat......feckin changing this and that all the time .......baa humbug......                                                                                                                                                                              

Oooh that sounds like a right nightmare Shazza! I'm so lucky to have good neighbours where I live.

Cheers Blade - I was told that as mine is not the primary mortgage on the property (I worked my butt off & paid that up early) I'm not entitled to help with the interest on it. Although the company it's with calls it a "mortgage", it's only a "secured loan" in the eyes of the DWP. D'oh!

As a family, we considered my claiming for my help with caring for Dad, but then discovered that it would cancel out the one & only benefit he gets, so scratched that as a bad idea.

Even though it does only top me up to £65 a week & I have a good old whine about how tough it can be, I really am grateful for that top up.
                                                                                                                                                                             

Imagine paying a mortgage on a house which is essentially worthless then. Due to the neighbours, who are the only council property in our street, we couldn't sell our house if we tried. The house the other side of the muppets has been up for sale for the last 4 years and only had 1 viewing as anyone who comes down to look at it drives off twice as quickly when they see the smashed up place next door where the neighbours from hell live, not to mention all the teenage hooligans that sit outside til 1am drinking and fighting.                                                                                                                                                                             

No need to imagine - I'm quite familiar with it! There's a house at the end of my street where the local HA shoves every problem family it gets.  My next door neighbours quit trying to sell after 3 years & built a loft conversion instead!


                                                                                                                                                                             

That is really bad Shezza, have you ever got the police involved? (not that they ever do much unless it involve giving someone a fine. Also have you tried getting an Injunction against harassment order against them?

http://www.tempe.gov/court/order_of_protection.htm 

As for being better off not working, it all depends on the situation of each person, as in WB and Shezza, they would be better off working but others as Shezza have said, some seem to be better off not working and live the life of luxury (British and Immigrants). Not to be racist as im not racist but I do not think that anyone coming to our country should be given any benefits, health care, etc. until they have proved they are an asset to the country and can pay for their selves and have paid in to the country first, I mean if we were to go to the USA for example, we would get nothing. Why not the same here, im not saying we should give them care if something happens but also not just give it to any tom dick or harry.

SOmething else about benefits, Iv been off work for 10 months now and I really want to get back to work, but iv found finding  job very difficult and not because they ain't there, but because of my health condition. The gov says there's the discrimination law, B/S, it is not worth the paper it's written on. Soon as they see iv been in hospital a few times, funnily enough i never hear back from them again, in my last job they would not let me progress or change to a dept that would be more beneficial to my health. As for the benefits, i was worse of when i tried to get back in to work than when i was working less, make sense, No. 
Why not make it so you are better off working than on benefits and help those trying to get back in to work rather than give in one hand and take with the other. 

As for the spending overkill on pointless projects, well we all know what could really be done with that money, excess funds at the end of the fiscal year put in to a savings fund for when the funds are needed not just waste them each year. With the snow and ice causing the damage it is to the roads, the funds would be very handy now, but no, the funds have already been spent. 

Rant over                                                                                                                                                                              

Nice to know BM is full of the same Murdoch rag reading bigots as every other website!! Of course its all the fault of the single parents (afterall have you never heard of family planning!) disabled (hell use a stick FFS!), badly educated (should of listened more at school in your 50 kid class sizes and with your disinterested teacher), asylum seekers (get back to the country where they execute you for being gay or torture you for disagreeing with the lunatic in charge!) welfare scroungers! Well sure the government & Mr Murdoch would like you to believe that!!   The road fund licence money HAS NEVER been spent on maintaining roads......when it comes to spending roads are a long way down the  list...afterall we have a war to fund first and foremost...then of course the banks must be bailed out coz they are too big to fail! Government announcements of any sort are generally rehashes of old news. so this announcement was probably announced in some budget speech 2 years ago! but it sounds good because the gullible electorate believe this is some "new" money that is now available.   Rant over! ps Huddersfield has always had crap roads...even back in 1985 when i lived there they were little better than cart tracks! Im so glad i moved! lol                                                                                                                                                                             

Yep even the roads in the "allegedly" affluent south are shite,   I managed to flat spot a wheel on my car not so long ago, when i reported it the local authority they didn't want to know, too busy lining their own pockets i suspect with my hard earned council tax,   Oh yeah and while we're on the subject, £1000 a year for what i ask, 'WE' have to split the rubbish into type, then 'WE' have to walk the bin to a collection point otherwise the lazy bastid bin men won't pick it up, and i suspect ther're on more than i am an hour, where's the fg justice in this country, well folks there ain't any unless your abu hanzer or some such then you can claim £2500 per week JSA for your 3 wifes a mercedes and a 5 bedroom house on the state, and on top of that you can stand in the street openly spouting race hate and terorist B/S and get away with it, while the people who've been here for years and who's fathers and grand fathers fought and died for this septic isle live on £65 per week and get thier houses reposessed,   And if you dare say anything against this your classed as a bigot or a racist or they'll always think of something when all it is, is you want fair rules for all, it seems there is fair for us and fairer for others, they may hate us, but we should be more like the French...   Isn't England great  Sorry rant over i'm calm now                                                                                                                                                                              

BR there are a lot of comments on here that are generalising...yours included. There seems to be a myth that everyone on benefits is some sort of scrounger to be spat on....oh but wait...only if you weren't born here??? sorry but is that not race hate?  "whos fathers and grandfathers fought and died"....yes against the blatant facism thats on display here!                                                                                                                                                                              

Usually don't get involved in any political discussions, but have to say on this one, not everyone who wants a fairer society in the UK is a bigot or reads one of Newscorp's titles. Anyway when the sun shone out of his backside "The Sun" backed Blair and his cronies at more than one election and look where we are now. 

Kwak, Yes i'm sure and i expect they would turn in their grave's if they saw what was going on in this country in 2010   Yes but the difference is, when we and by that i mean white anglo saxons say things against this sociaty this is racism and we get rebuked for it, while people like for example Abu Hanzer are allowed to stand in the street openly spouting race hate against the west, while the police stand and look on unable to do anything about it, if we and i mean white anglo saxon's stood and did the same we'd be arested a soon as the first sentence was finished,   It's wrong.. no too ways about it.   Having been on benefit's until quite recently, i know there are good people who are having problems finding well paid job or any job for that matter, i had to take a pay cut just to get back into work, but on the other side of the coin there are those who turn up at the job center stinking of beer just to sign on and then go back to the pub on the back of hard working tax payers, now tell me thats not wrong.   Oh and for the record i don't read any papers and certainly not that rag that perports to be a newspaper, they just infuriate me with the constant drivel about some celeb on a £1000 a day coke habit                                                                                                                                                                                 

But you have picked the most reviled character in the eyes of any person in the UK and held him up as an example of "people on benefits"   "white anglo saxons"??? is that how you see yourself...now if you really want a history lesson...the Angles & Saxons were both from mainland Europe! what you mean to say is you are British??? What that means exactly is open to discussion and this isnt the place to do it. But do you not think we need to get past this "them and us" thing and realise that unless you are one of the ultra rich ruling classes or some overpaid celebrity then we really "are all in this together!" The blame for the mess we are in is at everyones door....we allowed the erosion of civil liberties in this country while we were all too busy raking it in during the property bubble and therefore we all deserve what we got!                                                                                                                                                                             

Can't be everyone's fault, as not everyone voted for the party of crooks who shafted the UK for the past 13 years.
                                                                                                                                                                             

Yep it's not my fault i didn't vote the grinning t**t in, wern't they supposed to be the party for the working man.... Ummmm me thinks not,   Ok well then a brief history lesson,   My family can be traced back to 1066, when they arrived here with William the Conqurer, (so i'm an import originally also) then at some point were given amounts of land for loyalty to the cause alledgedly, so i have 944 years of Britishishness living here,   Also i'm presuming my ancestors payed their dues, faught for the country, in at least 2 world wars and probably many more battles prior to that i don't know about toiled on the land and got bloody in the process, then along the way one of them it seems pissed it all away..... or something,   This is all getting a bit deep now..... and i'm getting hungy dinner time, me thinks.                                                                                                                                                                             

ah i see - so your not anglo saxon then but a Norman!!!! bloody french they get everywhere!                                                                                                                                                                             

no CBR you are right but then thats called living in a democracy...you have to go with what the "majority", who bother to turn out, vote for!                                                                                                                                                                             

There is no true democracy in this country, whoever is in power is in it for their selves and to line their pockets any way they can and screw the as they would put it lower classes aka the ones that have to pay this legalised theft of our monies we earn. 

Im in no way raciest but you do have to remember that we can't say anything against migrants (legal or other) without the race card being played, it is positive discrimination in this country. And what about those that refuse to fit in with society and I have known quite a few that refuse to do so. 

I respect those that come here and pay their way and I also do not respect those of our own country that refuse to work just because they can't be arsed. So im saying that those that just live off benefits not because they have fallen on hard times but simply are lazy and such (and thats british and migrants alike) need to be pushed in to work or made to do voluntary work. That i would say is fair.

I just do not think this country is fair in anyway what so ever, the banks should be forced to be paid back what has been given in tax to them and not allowed to charge those unfair charges to us and bonuses stopped. 

The money in tax should be used to maintain the roads not just dig them up and waste funds and the gas/electricity companies/etc. that dig up roads and poorly cover them again should also be made to pay the repair bills. 

Ah what has happened to this country