What are your views, is it fair or not?

[chickengrandma-2008]

I just read this in the local paper.  I can't decide what I think really.  Should he be penalised for saving or should he have blown the lot on booze and holidays, **bleep**s and the like?  He came by it all legal and above board apparently. 

[ilove2patch]

I guess he was legally required to declare it & he didn't. Therefore he broke the law & presumably got away without paying tax on it.

[cookiecookuk]

i have not read it all but can understand what you mean.but when singing on for any benifit it asks have you savings of £8.000 or more(i think it is still that amount) so in theory he should have stopped claiming years ago.

[chickengrandma-2008]

Yes, I can see he has broken the law and surely in this case 'The law is an ass'  So the rules are, 'Here's your benefit that you are entirely entitled to.  If you waste we'll give you some more but if you're very careful, you'll have to give us some back!

[millielilac]

It does seem strange that someone on benefits could manage to save £100,000 ......just by being frugal.

Maybe he should write a book ...lots of people could benefit from his tips.....

[stroppy*cow]

He has my sympathy. I too fell foul of this with youngest son, I had money in a joint account with him, was open and honest about it, but they insisted that all the money was his.

This has been dragging on for 2 years, in April a tribunal decided that it was a true joint account, and they should have only counted half of the amount, that he is entitled to benefit back-dated.

DWP still haven't sorted it out though, and of course any back-pay will just become "capital" and will affect his benefits.

They are really intrusive about asking for information, for instance they demanded all MY bank statements - I had dared to "lend" son money so that he could pay his rent, so they tried to say that every penny in my personal accounts was available to him.

As the new "Universal Credit" credit comes in, even more folks will be affected as benefits that weren't means tested or affected by savings will be. For instance with tax credits, you ahve always had to declare bank interest as income - I have no problem with that. However when Universal Credit comes in, any savings will affect the amount of tax credits.

It also annoys me that the rules are different for "working age" people and "older people" - after all age discrimation is supposed to be illegal.

It does make difficult if you need to save up to purchase a large item of equipment. For instance a replacement wheelchair would cost £5000 to £6000, but if I save up money, I can then be penalised  as I have savings. The advance payment for a new leased car, plus the cost of adapting it to my needs can come to nearly £3000, but again if I save I can be penalised.

[chips-and-brown-gravy]

Absolutely fair in my opinion.

Just work out how much he would have saved each month - if it was £1000.00 each month it would have taken him over 8 years to save that amount.

He broke the law, simple as that. Unemployed for years with a bad back!  There are plenty of jobs that can be done with a bad back.

Makes me angry to think how long it would take me to save that amount of money and I'm well paid and careful what I spend it on!

[vamo48]

He should have checked the rules re savings.  Very silly.

[artisanone11]

What makes me sad is the chances are most of that saved money is from disabillity benefits for his son, and  if he has lived that frugally, the provisions for his son's quality of life are likely to have been pretty thin too.

BTW he may just have a 'bad back' but a 'back condition' would also cover someone I know whose spine is literally crumbling away disc by disc and who's now house and hospital bound.

[**towery**]

if he didnt want to spend the money he could have bought gold or silver or invested in premium bonds

he should have declared when they reached the limit

[guardpig]

It is probably fair.  He didn't declare it and he should have.  However he could have been sent to prison and wasn't, he repaid the money and he had the money to repay it.

My daughter who is a profligate spender(on Sproglet) is managing to put a little bit of money aside  on her good weeks though a catalog of "musthaves" like shoes for babe and cooker repair have meant she spent about half the amount.  She is now saving for Xmas.   It isn't easy to save on benefits so maybe he should be writing a book on how to, many people would be interested.

[*pixachu*]

It's a tricky one... he broke the rules that he must have been aware of. But if he was really just being frugal, I feel bad that the rules mean he should have been penalised for saving.

However - benefits are for living on, and if he was given too much to live on, they shouldn't be expected to keep giving it to him....

BUT part of me thinks there is no way he just saved that out of his benefits. Part of me thinks he probably did some odd jobs along the way. 

www.votecharlie.co.uk

[soppysofty]

£100000.00 in 5 and a half years!!!!!!!

That works out at over £18000.00 per year.

That is more than I take home working full time as an IT engineer.

It is also more than the total amount of benefit he could have been entitiled to.

This is one fraudster who got very, very lucky.

[artisanone11]

 I'm not sure calling him a lucky fraudster is fair.

I might be wrong, but I read the five and and a half year period as being the period he and his familly had more than the allowed amount of savings while carrying on claiming income support and housing benefit, rather than he got that amount in that time?

Because of the amounts I was also suspecting the son was getting SS payments in lieu of services as well as disability benefits and they were squirreling them away rather than using them for his quality of life, I'm afraid it happens more than people would like to think.

I might be barking up the wrong tree but I doubt nobody did the maths and worked out how he could have legally amassed that amount if they declared it legitimate, as normally DWP go through it with a fine tooth comb if theres any possibility of it being fraud, which it usually is and fairly easy to prove.

[lhasa.two]

It doesn't say in the article how many people are in the household in addition to him and his son with cerebral palsy, there could be others with disabilities too. Reading between the lines I think he was saving in case anything happened to him and his son could be taken care of, otherwise what's the point of being so frugal... Whatever his motives, he was wrong not to have declared it.

If he had savings in 'savings accounts' tax would have been deducted from source so I doubt HMRC lost out. 

He still has £55k so there must be others in the family who are eligible to claim and who are not above the savings threshold?

[chips-and-brown-gravy]

---

 

If he had savings in 'savings accounts' tax would have been deducted from source so I doubt HMRC lost out. 

---

...but the taxpayer did!

There again some people think of taxpayers as fair game, after all we are earning therefore we must have money to burn and our incomes can be pilfered by government for all their hairbrained schemes and people fraudulently claiming benefits.