www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-21238363

Have a little play with this!

I put my standard fill-up in (using today's price for unleaded - I paid 132.9ppl at Texaco this morning to fill my tank) and if I was Venezuelan, I would have paid £52.49 less than my £53.16 today!

It looks like where I live is reasonable for fuel - supermarket fuel is around the 128ppl mark and garages are charging about 131ppl.

"UK pensions are abysmal compared with many counties in Europe"

Yes.. I accept taht but the benefits are crazily high..

See Housing benefit...

And you only need to breathe to qualify.

My wife's pension is 400 pound a month after paying a full stamp for 45 years.

On another subject David Cameron said we should be proud of our foodbanks well there you go.

The big problems for everyone - on benefits or not - are:

immigration increasing demand for housing

Social house building collapsed to virtually nil after 1999.

High demand for housing has meant house prices have kept rising.

Housing beenfits actally keep house rentals high

A recent study in shows rental returns are best where the Housing Benfits is highest

tinyurl.com/axcgw32

"Figures from Zoopla.co.uk, the property search website, show that the cities offering the

best rental returns are Liverpool, Hull, Coventry and Middlesbrough. Reflecting the

widening of the North-South divide, house price falls in these locations have been deeper

than the average; there are also more homeowners struggling with their mortgage

repayments.

In those regions, mostly in London and the South East, where house prices have

remained more resilient, rental yields are lower."

Edited by madf on 31/01/2013 at 14:29

We have extended family members, a couple deservedly on benefits, who are resisting moving out of their 4-bedroomed social housing where they rattle around on their own and seem oblivious that all 4 of their grown-up children are struggling with space in their own over-crowded homes because of ever-increasing numbers of the couple's grandchildren.

The main reason their four grown-up children are struggling for space is because the UK's housing stock is too low, the population is too high, house prices are still being kept artificially high, mortgages are harder than ever to obtain and wages are being depressed.

I should've clarified the 200 a day comment; I meant the UK has to build 200 homes a day more than it's currently building just to meet the demand created by immigration into Britain. I have no opposition to skilled people who will benefit the UK coming here to work, nor am I opposed to a sensible, time limited work permit scheme for foreign workers.

However I don't think the population of Reading arriving in the UK every 12 months is sustainable.