Stopping benefits
No notice given
Under the current system, benefits can be stopped at any time with immediate effect. They don't give you a notice period while any appeal takes place. It's instant. If my benefit is stopped and I fail to restore it through whatever appeals procedure is available, I can apply for hardship payments, but if I can't get those or I can't live on them, I suppose that I'll have a choice of either becoming a martyr or turning to crime. As I live near Leicester prison, which was presumably built when there was an abundance of money for public spending (they don't build them like that now), I would probably just pay them a visit and ask for accommodation so that I could have food and shelter. This, of course, is the problem with government threats to stop benefits. If they really do stop a lot of people's benefits without warning, they will soon have a new set of problems to deal with.
Time limits
In the BBC debate Should benefits be linked to community service?, some people pointed out that other countries have schemes where benefits are time-limited. From what I've heard of some of them, they are accompanied by intensive efforts to re-train unemployed people so that they have every chance of finding work within the time limit. It is also possible that employers in those countries have a different attitude to unemployed people, since there is no incentive (real or perceived) for anybody to remain unemployed.
Maybe such a scheme could be made to work in Britain, but it could only work with attitude changes by all concerned - not just unemployed people, but politicians, employers and the general public. For as long as a large number of people, especially some employers, believe that unemployed people are no better than criminals, it's difficult for those people to find work. As this attitude adjustment couldn't happen quickly, there would still have to be some kind of safety net for those unemployed for a long time, at least as a transitional arrangement.
I think hardship payments could replace jobseeker's allowance for people out of work for a long time, as a cheaper (and possibly more effective) alternative to forced work schemes. I understand that something like this happens in Germany. People know that if they don't find work within the time limit, they'll still have enough to survive on after that, but it will be at a reduced level.
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