A minimum wage after tax earns you about £10,870. The Conservatives have announced that a JSA claimant should be willing to travel 90 miles to work and back every day. On a 48 week year at 6 days a week that's more than 50,000 miles a year. That would net a businessman up to £20,000 in company mileage expenses but a minimum wage worker is expected to pay it himself.

Even if we accept these figures at face value (yes, again there are no sources), Eoin's still wrong. Salaried employees are not allowed to claim back via the expenses system the cost of getting from their home address to their normal place of work. If the business does reimburse this cost, then HMRC treats it as earnings, with all sorts of hilarious implications for the employee's and employer's tax and NI situations. So in this situation any comparison between a JSA claimant and a businessman travelling the same distance is meaningless.

In any case, I don't suppose the government expects employees to travel 90 miles to work in the medium to long term.

Update - 5 October

The Guardian is reporting it as travelling 90 minutes each way to work. That, generally speaking, isn't the same as 90 miles at all. Yet again, Eoin makes an idiot of himself because he's fast and loose with his sources.

He's linked to an earlier article from The Guardian, which also says 90 minutes. But a sloppy sub-editor has transcribed this to "90 miles" on their Money homepage.

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Filed under: Other blogs, Taxation with tags benefits in kind, eoin clarke, guardian, hmrc, idiots, jobseekers allowance