Your Money: Benefit due to self-employed

THE self-employed are not entitled to claim unemployment benefit, so many mistakenly assume that they cannot claim Income Support either.

Those who do realise that they can claim after they have given up their business, or it has given up on them - or if they are still struggling on but working fewer than 16 hours a week - are given a hard time when they go to the local DSS office.

The National Audit Office pointed out in a report published last week that 65 per cent of the self-employed surveyed had not been told that they could work and claim the benefit. Only 8,000 of the 5.2 million people who receive the benefit are self-employed people working part time. Half the DSS staff surveyed had had no special training in Income Support claims from the self-employed.

There is a training package available on request - but across the nation just 14 members of staff had applied to use it in the first six months after it was launched in December 1991, and only five of them had completed the exercise correctly.

Add to this an average waiting time at benefit offices - not usually the most congenial of locations - of an hour and you will begin to see why the self-employed would just give up.

But as long as savings do not amount to more than pounds 8,000, excluding the family house, and you can convince the DSS that you are available for work, you may be eligible. As well as the basic pounds 44 a week for single people over 25, and pounds 69 for couples, and child allowances starting at pounds 15.05 for children under 11, it can be a passport to other benefits such as help with mortgage payments and free school meals.

The self-employed are regarded as a problem when they go along to benefits offices. Their affairs are far more complicated. Some give up the struggle to keep their business going by working part time and claiming Income Support.

It is pretty difficult to convince someone how few hours you actually work if they are minded not to believe you. So many probably give up trying to claim at all.

After the go-getting Thatcher message of the 1980s, too many broken-spirited entrepreneurs need their financial sores bandaged by social security. The rules are hard enough. The least they deserve is decent treatment and correct application of the rules.

THE CONSUMERS' Association sent out 82 undercover researchers posing as buyers of contents insurance. The results of the survey make worrying reading. The researchers found it difficult to establish whether they were talking to a genuine broker or someone selling the policies of just one company. In 11 cases, the claim to be brokers was false.

And when it came to choosing the most suitable policy, most of the researchers were asked too few questions to give the salesman even a chance of getting it right.

For instance, the researchers were primed to disclose that they were planning to go away for more than a month, as many policies withdraw cover if the property is left empty for more than 30 days.

But in only 18 of the 82 interviews was any question about the property being left empty asked.

Although few bothered to establish the clients' needs, all but five felt able to recommend a policy. But only 12 mentioned more than one policy before recommending a company. A few big companies came up over and over again.

Only four of the salesmen handed over a copy of the policy, even when asked. One of them said as he passed over the document: 'Will you understand it? We don't'

It hardly inspires confidence. The research was carried out in response to the Department of Trade and Industry examination of insurance regulations in the light of European moves to tighten them up.

The DTI believes the rules that govern brokers (the codes of the Association of British Insurers and the Insurance Brokers Registration Council) provide enough protection for consumers.

But the research has highlighted how far adrift practice is from the conduct laid down in the codes.

The Insurance Ombudsman, Julian Farrand, handles complaints about insurance companies, but his remit does not extend to the way that policies are sold by brokers.

The Consumers' Association recommends that he should widen his scope to take in those who sell the policies. A splendid idea.