On the infinite stupidity of the UK welfare system...

From The Daily Mail:

Evicting a woman from her council home for failing to pay rent would breach her human rights, judges ruled yesterday. Town Hall chiefs wanted to evict Rebecca Powell, who receives thousands of pounds in benefits, after she ran up more than £3,500 in arrears on the accommodation she was given because she was homeless.

???

As I said over at HPC, the benefits system is stupid - because of all the to-ing and fro-ing and separate benefits and paying and clawing back by different departments - and encourages this sort of behaviour.

What's wrong with rolling all cash benefits into one payment (e.g. Citizen's Income or Universal Credit) and then deducting the council rent and council tax from that amount before paying over the net balance? That way it would be impossible for welfare claimants to run up arrears*.

Anecdotal: I was once tidying up a flat after the tenants had left and there were two envelopes from the council. One was a cheque from the Housing Benefit department for the rent; the other was a red reminder for unpaid Council Tax. The cheque and the demand were for similar amounts and we can safely assume that the tenants banked the former and ignored the latter.

* And instead of having means-tested Housing Benefit, it'd be far simpler (and come to much the same thing mathematically, just with less admin, faff, fraud and error) to deduct the rent directly from social tenants' wages, i.e. instead of paying them HB to cover most or all of the rent and then retrospectively reducing the HB by £x for every £100 they have earned (and at which stage they might be out of work again and so don't have the money to make up the difference), just let them live there for free and give them a PAYE code which tells the employer to deduct an additional x% from their wages. Hey ho, no more poverty trap.