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Is a phone contract a luxury? Owning a smartphone allows you to both 1) look for a job, and 2) use the Universal Credit portal.
Both of those things are absolutely essential if you want to claim UC because well, they made it mandatory to claim online, so...yah.
Tory gonna Tory I guess. I won't lie, I do enjoy watching them shoot themselves in the foot as often as they do.
A £30 contract is not needed to have a phone to browse the Internet.
Lots of people don't know how to find good deals, and funnily enough that is impossible without the Internet and good knowledge of how to avoid the various traps laid out for people. I learned about this stuff and general computing myself, not at school. Most of my friends and family still don't know a lot of this so rely on me for advice.
It's easy for us to judge but imagine you had no Internet. What would you do? You'd go into a mobile phone store where they are engineered to make you leave with the highest contact possible, and you don't know enough to challenge them. Or you search on a friends phone but what comes up is SEO gamed to again, give you a high contract. Or you know there's Vodafone as they advertise heavily so go straight to their website. Funnily enough, the contracts they initially advertise are pretty high and they don't advertise their cheaper sister brand talk mobile.
Now, imagine trying to do all this when your PIP payment has not come through so you have £6 in your account. You try going to the job centre but they just say you have to go online. The council can't help. Your friends don't know enough to help. So you desperately are trying to get a phone contact to figure out what's going on and decide £30 sounds reasonable and it's less of a concern than trying to find money to feed my kids today.
I dunno man. I used to be on the dole, it was something like 56 quid a week? Anyway, I didn't have the money to go into a mobile phone shop and get shopped into a 30 quid contract. I had the bog standard pay as you go.
Seo and getting dunked on by salespersons are not good excuses for why the state should manage a persons money. If you are skint, you tend to be really good at budgeting.
The issues tories have is with people who want to have it 'all' and not cut their cloth accordingly.
Granted I'm fairly sure if every poor person sat on their hands all day, they'd complain about that too.