Dustydog said:
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/apr/06/welfare-britain-facts-myths
The above report puts the whole benefits thing into perspective.
Pitpony.
I think you have nothing to worry about.
I know a few people in the same situation as Mel's daughter.
The paltry additional benefits they get to top up their wages not only helps them keep their heads above water but keeps them working in jobs that most probably wouldn't want to do plus of course both directly and indirectly they
are contributing to our society.
I don't want to get too political here and what I have written is heavily self censored, but the recent narrative from the government, (helped in no small measure by a compliant media running scared of the veiled threats posed by the results of Leveson inquiry and questions surrounding tv licence fees), has been that we are a nation of work-shy scroungers.
Workers who have been made redundant, people with disabilities, young people unable to find a job and workers on low wages who need benefits to top up their wages in order to live, all seemed to be blamed and marginalised for the predicament that they find themselves in.
Tub thumping fat cat politicians, many who have never done an honest days work in their lives, constantly get on their hind legs to denounce the 'idle scroungers' and to promise ever deeper and more savage measures against the unemployed, the disabled and the vulnerable.
The actual financial savings made by these benefit cuts are so miniscule as to be non existent when administrative costs are taken into account.
To any person who looks behind the lurid headlines to think about what is actually happening, this means that the hate campaign under the guise of 'austerity', in which the vulnerable are labelled as 'scroungers' is purely ideological, no actual money is saved.
I can't believe that as a first world supposedly educated nation we fall for this rubbish.

I'm off to a darkened room for a lie down :S