more teens on benefits but not looking for work

Lindsay Mitchell posted this table, which was a slight increase in teen benefit numbers from July last year.

National MP Judith Collins has said that there is no way that so many teens should be getting the sickness benefit. Yet even more are getting the Invalids Benefit. Why is that?

Despite the high numbers of teens on sickness and invalids benefits, the biggest number of teen beneficiaries - outside the DPB - are in the "other main benefits", which includes Emergency benefit, Training Benefit, student hardship, Independant Youth and widows benefits.

These "other main benefits" may be hiding the true number of unemployed teens who are not granted sickness or invalids benefits.

There was a push to get the unemployment benefit figure lowered several years ago, and many were transferred to sickness and invalids benefits. But many are being transferred to training benefits. What I do know is that there were 3130 transfers of 18-19 year olds from the unemployment benefit to training benefits in the year to June 2007. Many could have been transferred on a number of occassions as they did some "training-hopping" from one course to the other and WINZ has no idea if such training is increasing well being.

I`d guess many of the 18-19 year olds on "other benefits" would be on training benefits. Even if only 30 percent are on training benefits, that is still well over 650 extra officially unemployed 18-19 year olds registered with Work and Income that are not on the unemployment benefit. If 60 percent of officially unemployed 18-19 year olds are on this benefit, this means that most are on training benefits, are not work tested, and are probably not looking for work.