The intention to check the condition of people drawing incapacity benefit, and to switch those who fail to job seakers allowance, led to a discussion on the BBC during which opponents of the idea protested loudly and repeatedly that there aren’t enough jobs available. This diverted the discussion from the real, and only, issue, whether or not some people are registered for the wrong benefit. The number of jobs available is irrelevant to that point.
Boadicea's Chariot 
I can’t say I agree with you. If there are no jobs for them then it is just a device to save money.
Of course the jobs should be freed up by throwing out the illegals and then making the British take what has become available. Should they choose not to, then they may legitimately starve and all and any benefits removed.
Equally employers who do not pay proper minimum wage and their employees NI contributions should get a ten year jail sentence.
Let us be equal handed to our own, relevancy, or not as it may be, ‘butters no parsnips’.
One of the issues involving the graduate end of the market, and I am not talking hairdressing and Media degrees here, but the health sciences – medicine/nursing/physiotherapy and so on, is that the system is producing far more graduates in these disciplines than the state can afford to offer jobs to – and the NHS has a near monopoly in terms of the job market for these disciplines. In physiotherapy for instance there are being produced 100 graduates in the UK for every eight jobs available. Is there no join-up whatever between the NHS and the universities offering these degrees? Are they incapable of forecasting that in 2016 we will require x hundred new intake of such-and-such a health professional, passing that information on to universities, which are supported by the taxpayer, who should not be allowed to churn out many, many more graduates than there are likely to be jobs for?
A senior health professional in a local hospital told me recently that he had already taken on, on an unpaid work experience basis, three new graduates, but could not take on any more as he would run out of supervisors to keep an eye on them in their first year post-graduation, with patients. He also mentioned that he had an intray full of applications from graduates with First Class Hons from last year, who had still not succeeded in obtaining employment. The graduates if signed on at Job Centre Plus offices, are expected to appear once a week, listing the jobs for which they have applied. After three months they have to apply for anything on offer – attempting to sell things on the phone by pestering people from Call Centres, and so on. I am amazed that the suicide rate is not a whole lot higher amongst our youngsters.
What sort of a cock-eyed system are the health and tertiary education system czars operating, where this can be allowed to happen?
I suspect it all stems from the notion that everyone should be able to go to university, or at least whatever the Labour party’s target was, without regard to whether there will be jobs for these individuals who have studied for four years to obtain their science degrees, just to find themselves washing glasses in a pub…so much for socialist central planning.
Apropos washing glasses in a pub, a pub in deepest Devon had a sign up for “Bartender Job Vacancy – only Firsts need apply”!
The whole core of this argument is in the last paragraph of your excellent response. When did it ever say that everyone had to go to university? Why this blind rush to fill seats of learning with dross? Not everyone is born to scale the heights of academia but whereas in the past they could apply and get an apprenticeship, because of the decline in manufacturing, this path is not open to large numbers and there are only so many miles of supermarket shelves to fill.
OMG – I suspect it was to meet the aspirations of the poor, some of whom believed that a university education would pull their children out of poverty, and it was money alone which was hindering their progress. In Scotland, intelligent children, from whatever class, have been able to win scholarships to our universities on the basis of passing their entrance requirements.
The recent change has been a marked decrease in the entrance requirements to permit the more poorly educated to enter university – a sort of affirmative action programme, which argues that any fool can be nurtured to pass their A levels at the required standard in a private boarding school’s maximum-eight-to-a-classroom, but those in classes of thirty and more, deserve a leg up.
One of my offspring recently qualified and told me that about 28% of the first year students had abandoned the course, after Year One, of Four. They came predominantly from poorer families in the Glasgow area, and had simply not expected the course to be so “difficult”. I suspect there may also have been an element of financial hardship involved for their families, despite Student Loans etc. Now that’s a very useful way of spending taxpayers’ money…
cwj, this wastage rate has been happening since the nineties.
the boy told me that at Swansea in the engineering faculty in 1996 they did not have places for more than 200 in the second year, yet their first year intake was 300! The university made no real attempt to retain them, more ‘good riddance to bad rubbish’ but they had gone through the motions and retained their funding.
Evidently most of them didn’t make past the first term never returned after the first Christmas.
To be fair I don’t think most of these students end up on incapacity. The long term abusers are the uneducated breeders and general mumpers much further down the aspirational slope.
What we always found to be hysterically amusing was that the boy was deemed to be ineligible for virtually all handouts. No leg, no hip, crutches and a wheelchair, bone cancer and lung cancer were not deemed serious enough to qualify. His major crime being white, middle class, educated and articulate!
Somehow they changed their minds after I started proceedings to bring them to court.
Evidently you have to have a bad back and still be able to fuck/breed like a jack rabbit to qualify for whatever.
Oh we did have fun, I don’t think they liked us very much by the time we had finished with them!
One thing, it relieved the tedium of it all writing suitably derisive letters to all and sundry.
The expansion of Tertiary education was not designed only to provide ‘qualifications’ for those who were formerly unable to obtain them – but also to ‘mask’ youth unemployment figures. Over-supply of qualified people and juggling with entry requirements has also been a long-standing problem: many years ago students for a Teaching Certificate had to have marks in the top 10% to qualify to go on to do a B. Ed. One year there were just too many teachers being qualified – so the requirement was dropped to the top 20%. Instant devaluation of the qualifications of those who had struggled previously to attain the top grades.
Whether or not there are jobs available is irrelevant as to whether people should be taken off disability benefits – except, of course, that there is an assumption that if one is disabled one may not be able to work. It is important that only those who are incapacitated should receive that sort of benefit… and probably a bit more.
I really do not understand why there is a ‘job-seeker’s allowance’ anyway. Surely it should be incumbent on everyone who is being paid unemployment benefit to be seeking work? Do people march into the Benefit Office and say: “I’m unemployed, I have no intention of ever working again so don’t give me the job-seekers allowance”? Of course they don’t…
On the other side, I agree with Christina. It’s about time all employers were required to pay a living wage and not be allowed to use the benefit system to supplement their employer’s incomes.
It is interesting that nowadays British degrees in the Health Sciences count for nothing in the States, where all foreign degree holders, regardless of whether they hold US nationality or not, are required to pass the US State Board examinations, which in the particular discipline we were looking into, required a 75% passmark. This certainly separates the sheep from the goats, when 40% in UK universities seems to secure a degree of some questionable sort.
They have also just recently banned outright, applicants from India, Pakistan, the Philippines, and a few other well known degree-forging states.
My children were surprised to learn that in Civil Aviation exams for a pilot’s licence, the minimum passmark is 75% (CWJ averaged 92%, he says modestly!)but took the point when I asked if they wanted someone flying them who didn’t know or remember 25%+ of the subject. Personally I think similarly high benchmarks should apply to many of the Health Sciences in particular.
Should apply to every subject – or what value has the qualification?
I suppose what I meant was that a just-over-the-(low)bar pass in Media Studies is not likely to lead to the death of anyone through the incompetence of the degree holder…when a surgeon is performing intra-ocular lens replacements on me, I prefer to think that his success rate is as close to 100% as it is possible,with human error, to achieve. My surgeon rather reassuringly told me he hadn’t blinded anyone, (yet)! Equally reassuringly he suggested not performing a rather trickier vitrectomy, as he didn’t want to spoil his batting average, and with blurring from about ten minutes of “floaters” a day, I wouldn’t be sufficiently impressed with the improvement to enhance his reputation sufficiently for the risks involved!
I agree with what you say. There was a criticism of the Medical Studies here a while back – that there was too much emphasis on ‘bed-side manner’ and not enough on anatomy… I know what I’d prefer!
However, the devaluation of qualifications does tend to leave people believing that they are ‘experts’ when they are not. I had one woman here telling me that she ‘knew all about British History since she had done a six week course on the subject”
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I find it interesting that my comment led here to a discussion on jobs, as did the suggestion on the radio that I mentioned. The incapacity benefit system has been in need of reform for a long time, since its introduction, indeed. The fiddles are the stuff of legend. I could give several examples, but shall settle for one. A friend of ours suffered serious injuries in a road accident, she was a passenger in a car. She was disabled, but recovered over several years, while being in full-time employment. Eventually, she became the head of the place where she worked, on a very reasonable salary. She retired a few years ago and got an OBE. Throughout, she obtained incapacity benefit, which she banked.
Tom, my apologies for veering offcourse there.
The application of Incapacity Benefit seems to be at the whim of the GP involved in signing you off as incapacitated. You can be on crutches for over a year, with a one mile walk to the nearest bus-stop, and taking taxis to work, because you can’t walk to the bus stop, and you can be considered ineligible, and there is the case you refer to. I am sure the whole system must be awash in scams, and not all the tales you hear can be apochryphal.
The Job Seeker’s Allowance, which I believe is about Ā£65 a week,in cash terms, with council tax reduced to the water and sewerage element, and rent paid (if not in own accommodation), is hardly at a level to encourage a single person not to work, which seems to be the suggestion of the “let-them-starve” brigade…