A million years ago, back in the days when one joined an organisation at the bottom and 40 years later retired at the top, I recall being on weekly pay. Then as I progressed up a grade, I was suddenly on monthly pay. This coincided with me having matured and taken on responsibilities in my private life and having already discovered that the world revolves around quarterly or monthly bills.
In many ways it was going to be easier to be paid monthly. Trying to save up bits of weekly wages and then allocate them to calendar monthly bills needed a large collection of calculations since a calendar month is not a set number of weeks, although foolishly one thinks of it as being four.
What wasn’t easy was the transition from weekly pay to monthly pay. The organisation was fairly kind and tended to pay people mid-month instead of at the end of the month. Also, as a help, they paid me half my month’s wages after two weeks, meaning that my first monthly pay, approximately two weeks after that, was then only half a month’s pay. I then had to wait a whole month before getting my next pay, which would finally be a full month’s pay.
None of this was actually that helpful. I hadn’t put anything by to help make up the shortfall. I had problems paying bills and it probably took me a good few months before I finally got sorted. Maybe for others it was easier, but most people I spoke to at the time struggled too. I’m guessing those that might have been earning far more than they needed didn’t have a problem. Whoever they were, they weren’t among the group of folk I knew making or having made the transition. Despite being fairly well paid, we all have a tendency to spend what we get anyway.
So, it was with this in mind that I was interested to read that the all new ‘Universal Credit’ will be paid monthly.
Ouch.
Now then. I’m not being unkind when I say that even those getting their tens of thousands of Pounds a year of handouts to support the running of their free ‘social house’ and the upkeep of their 10 or 11 children, as well as doing the odd bit of cash in hand child care or cleaning, are probably living such lives that they will notice a shortfall when they are moved to monthly handouts.
For these people the resposibility of paying for things is removed in the main. Bills tend to be paid automagically by those giving them their handouts. The remaining bills, such as their £95 a month subscription to watch Sky TV via their 65 inch screens, they are used to being calendar monthly, but everything else is based on spending the cash as soon as they get it.
For these wasters, the next 48 hours are worry free. They then have 5 days to try to fund. This is fairly easily done by stealing from houses, nicking and selling bicycles, and mugging others. Having funded the 5 days of no official handouts, the official handout comes through again and the cycle starts all over again.
So, with everything being moved over to handouts being made only once a calendar month, a number of things are going to happen. Firstly, on pay day the buying power of the handout is going to be approximately four times that of the previously weekly handout. This will lead to far more overdoses and the stretching of the resources of the Emergency Services. Equally, the stoners will be guilty of far more anti-social behaviour and violence for the period of the extended high.
But after this comes not 5 days of no handout cash to buy drugs, but 25 days of no handout. During this time there will be more house and shop thefts, more missing bicycles, and more street muggings of normal people.
The net result of moving to monthly payments will be more strain on society and on those who try to protect us or mend us once we have become the victims of the wasters.
Universal credit is going to hurt the hard workers in society.
England's England 