ENHANCED COST

Evening Post, Volume CVIII, Issue 148, 19 December 1929, Page 9

ENHANCED COST

UNEMPLOYMENT FUND

BRITISH BILL'S MAIN AIM

RESTORING- SOLVENCY

British Official Wireless.

ETJGBY, 17th December.

The third reading of the Unemployment Bill, which revises the machinery of the unemployment insurance scheme, increases the amount of unemployment benefit payable to young persons out of work, aud brings juveniles within the scope of the scheme, was passed in the House of Commons last night.

FINANCIAL BURDEN.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer (Mr. Philip Snowden) referred to the finances of the insurance fund, to restore tho solvency of which was one of the aims of the Bill. The debt on that fund had grown from £5,000,000 to £37,000,000 in a little over five years. But for the Act of two years ago, reducing the contributions to the fund, the debt would have fallen to £20,000,----000. The Government was faced with the alternatives of increased borrowing powers for the fund or the raising of tho contributions or tho handing to the Exchequer of the responsibility for keeping the fund solvent. They had decided on the last-named. The financial proposals in the Bill were very complicated. They would add £14,000,----000 to the Exchequer contribution to the fund. The increased benefits to young persons were a very small additional annual cost to the funds of the scheme—about £370,000. The increased rates for dependants would ,cost about £1,750,000. But the altered conditions regarding the finances of the fund were responsible for the main, financial burden.

"GENUINELY SEEKING WORK."

Referring to the much-discussed clause amending the conditions on which benefit is paid to unemployed genuinely seeking work," Mr. Snowden said that there were three classes of working people. The vast majority 99 per cent., and perhaps more, were nonest, straightforward men, who felt the humiliation of being out of work and who strained every nerve to got work. There was another class who might be called ineffieients, who wanted work, but experienced the greatest difficulty m getting it, and there was a negligible class who perhaps preferred to live m State-endowed idleness rather than to earn their living by working. It was much better that one in a thousand should get the benefit, though he did not deserve it, rather than that 999 who deserved it should not get it