Claiming benefits

The sheer complexity of benefits regimes (it can take 45 minutes to put in necessary details into a benefits calculator) makes it really difficult for claimants to understand what they are due and also makes it expensive for the government to administer it.

In my experience a key reason reason for the complexity is that a persons benefits are the result of their interaction with a host of different products with slightly different rules. The amusing thing is that a lot of the discrepancies between products are purely accidental and result from them being developed by different people in isolation.

One answer is to look at the benefits from a claiments perspective and change / harmonise the rules to achieve the holistic consequences desired. The sort of rule to look at would be what is meant by income and how is it measured (weekly, monthly etc. and in advance or on past history, NB I can't see a good reason for there being more than one definition (and the safest definition is one that looks at history). As most income needs to be declared to HMRC and most payroll is done by software one could, in time, arrange for automatic capture where the claimant agrees the loss of privacy is balanced by faster / more accurate benefit payments (but whilst there are different definitions I can't see payroll software suppliers agreeing).