Tuesday, 16 July 2013

UK Welfare Statistics

A helpful (if left motivated) Guardian article detailing some useful welfare statistics in the UK:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2013/apr/06/welfare-britain-facts-myths

Number of benefit claimants:
4.3 million households get at least half their income from benefits, including:
1.3 million with 1+ kids
115,000 families with 4+ kids
13,000 families with 6+ kids

Worklessness:
340k households in which nobody has ever worked (though 170k of these are under 25)
150k households which have 2 generations workless

Total spend:
£210bn p.a. on benefits (DWP), including pensions (DWP) and tax credits (HMRC)
0.8% of welfare benefits are paid fraudulently (£1.2bn)
58k households hit by the benefit cap

Addendum: consistent with the above, the Rowntree Foundation indicate 5m people as being on major benefits, with 50% due to ill health, 30% due to joblessness, 20% due to lone parent/carer status.  However, this is only £20bn worth of benefits - much more comes from housing benefit and tax credits.

My conjecture now: In simple terms, although there are ~30m people in the UK who get some form of benefit, I imagine that the 5m above get about £13k p.a. each (£65bn) and the other 25m share the rest (£65bn), while £75bn goes on pensions and £5bn on admin.

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Medical student, keen on travel, piano, and the outdoors. Past work in psychological research and healthcare IT consulting.