Back up a sec, £55 a week Mobility allowance is £8600ish for a 3 year period. You can buy and run a decent car for far less than that, ergo it is an extravagance!

But can you run it!? Mobility allowance is about allowing people access to the world, their medical appointments, etc. Also, cars may need to be specially adapted, which costs money and they are not readily available on the market. Ergo, it's not an extravagence and far from it.

I can't understand why they ever got rid of those little light blue three wheeler shopping trolley car things that they gave invalids, for invalids is what we called y'all back in the day - apart from the fact that they got blown across the road in a stiff breeze into the path of large trucks and buses of course, apart from that though...

£55 a year would pay for one of those.

Used to get a few parked round the Boulevard.

You would be better off leasing three year old cars when the bulk of the value of the car is written but - in most cases - the cars are perfectly usable and reliable. Having new cars is an unnecessary luxury.

That is exactly what I am saying - if what is being suggested here that most participants are not interested and are only doing it to keep their JSA that is hardly the best way of building a working relationship. Do these participants really want a job at Poundland?

It should be offered as an option in the job seeking arena - if you want to give it a go in the hope of securing a job then you should have the option it should not be compulsory.

However there still the issue of should you have to do anything for your benefits?

Well then we agree on that.



Given the benefits (i.e. JSA) is so low I would have thought the requirement to be able to prove you are actively seeking work was pretty much what you needed to be doing. Any voluntary work such as that what Cat Reilly did should also not be used as an excuse to say someone wasn't available for work.

The whole problem of any kind of real employment undertaken for JSA is as has been said several times in this thread that it is tax payer funded cheap labour that us a disincentive for employers to take people on and for the employers, not the taxpayer to be paying their wages. I can't really see how you can solve this problem.

As soon as you have people working as in real work for JSA you end up in this situation. It would surely be far better to abandon this notion of working for benefits completely and just accept it is nonsense to suggest people work for £54.25 or £71 a week (depending on age). People just need to go back and think for a minute that these benefits are a safety net and not something to begrudge others even if they are themselves in a low paid job.

If it isn't a wage then by definition it is working for free.
So i'll stick with my comment ta.

Don't feel down though as IDS couldn't get his head around it either.

IDS is clearly an angry little man isn't he.
He is a nasty little toad. When he piped up with 'We let them get work experience' like he is doing them a favour.

I did love O'Brians reply of 'There are more people alive today than at since records began.....What a strange observation' when IDS got on about there being more people in work today then at any time during records.

As usual, you take a simplistic view and reach the wrong conclusion.

There are many factors involved in costing any contract hire agreement and while depreciation is a major factor, what needs to be determined is the sale price from which that depreciation is calculated. The on-road price will be far less than what an individual could expect to pay and becuse the manufacturers have knowledge of how Motability cars are maintained, the residual price will be far higher than would be offered to any individual: the result is a low monthly rental.

But first you need to look at just what Motability does.

Motability does not buy cars and then rent them out, they operate a back-to-back leasing scheme, coupled with a manufacturer-backed warranty and maintenance programme. This offers straight-line accounting, so cost projections are simple with little opportunity for any surprises down the line: a major plus from an accounting point of view.

Of course an individual could pick up a three year old car and run it for the next three years at a lower cost than Motability, providing that everything runs and works to plan. That lower cost would be blown out of the water if there was a failure to a major component: add a blown engine or gearbox and your calculations would be bolloxed. Now multiply that by a nationwide factor and you can see where your "savings" could easily evaporate.

It is for these reasons that Motability operate new vehicles. To depart from the model would leave too many variables for any government accountant to be comfortable with. And before you jump back in, I have previously supplied hundreds of vehicles, large & small on various forms of contract including: cash purchase, HP, simple washout lease, operational lease (with or without maintenance), full contract hire etc. The area of vehicle supply is certainly not alien to me.