This site has one main purpose (apart from advertising my other services):
Benefits Owl aims to to give clear information, in plain English, about common benefit issues.
However, here comes an important warning… Benefits are complicated. Really complicated. If you don’t understand them, don’t feel bad: they are very hard to understand. Click here if you want to know one reason why. There’s already some very good information around about benefits. For example, one of the main resources available to benefit advisers and claimants is the Child Poverty Action Group Handbook. It covers pretty much everything anyone needs to know about all the benefits available today. It about 1800 pages long and contains roughly 4 million words (that’s about five times more words than in the Bible). I have to be realistic. I can’t compete with that. And I don’t need to, because it’s already been written! But from my experience as an advisor at various advice agencies I have learned that, in practice, it’s the same problems and questions that come up, again and again. So I've decided to concentrate on these. Because of my limited resources I've also had to make a difficult decision not to deal with some situations (yet): the main examples of these are:- People who are self-employed
- Young people under 18 years old
- Students
- People who are subject to immigration control or have come from other EU countries
- People who are polygamously married
Some Helpful Hints...
I put some information in boxes, as follows: WARNING
BOXES: These contain warnings of things you need to be careful
about. |
 KEYBOXES:
These contain key information, or a useful way to look at
something, or something like this. |
 EXAMPLE
BOXES: These provide examples that might help make something
easier to understand |
Sometimes I include some calculations - you may find these useful, but if you don't feel up to looking through these it's fine to skip them!
Oh, and finally:
This is not an opinion website. I'm here to give information, not to go on about what I don’t like about the benefits situation. However, sometimes I will be talking about something that annoys me so much that I can’t keep from expressing an opinion...If you want to know what I really think about things, check out my blog at http://benefitsowl.blogspot.co.uk.