You know what, i have had the childcare migraine from hell today and have been ranting to my poor partner. I stumbled upon your website trying to search to see if the council provided any sort of childcare grant. Let me put you in the picture .... My husband walked out four years ago leaving me in a ton of debt which i consequently had to go bankrupt for. I have been debt free for the last three years, myself and two children. I actually have a half decent job thats pretty secure and i have a good disopsable income left after paying childcare. But can you beleive this... Myself and my partner want to move in together. I merely rent a council house and he joint owns a property. Myself and two children are moving in with himself and his two children. I lose £540 per month and would not be entitled to any help from child tax credit. This is insane!!! Surely everything that this country stands for goes out the window. The cost of putting my children in to breakfast and after school club and holiday schemes comes to £89.00per week for 52 weeks a year. Now i can change 55 per week into childcare vouchers which saves me £950 but i cannot afford to. £950 is nothing when your childcare for the year comes to £4650!! I just cant beleive it. I have worked since i was 15 years old and only stopped to give birth. It seems i would be better off sitting on my ass claiming benefits ridding the tax payer of their hard earned cash. What incentive is it for any working mother, to know that they will lose so much by becoming part of a family. Family britain i think not. Credits are hard to understand, and when you seek help, the professionals know less than you do so you end up telling them how to do their job! I have spent today searching internet sites and ringing enquiry lines that keep transferring me to find out the following. I am not entitled to tax credits even though my partner and i are not rolling in it. I am entitled to child care vouchers which gives me a £950 tax refief. Was i mistaken or did the government want mothers to return to work. In my opinion dont bother. Unless you can get a job at your childs school (which i have tried and many other local schools) its just not viable. The childcare either costs more than you earn or takes your pride away and you become bitter from working your ass off for £100.00 per month. Surely they can come up with some better way of helping the working family. £950 tax relief a year is pants. We have worked out i would be marginly better off staying exactly where iam and also paying my half of the mortgage!I just dont know what to do next. Still i love my children dearly x

OK, have not got time to read all 8 pages, but I shall stick my beak in.

The reason for all this trouble is life is too BLOODY COMPLICATED! Every 5 minutes an amzing new initiative seems to be launched, with it's own new acronyms and jargon - no one understands what is going on so they nod and agree until it all goes tits-up (see child tax credits, CSA, ASBOs etc etc). It's like when Excel first arrived in peoples' offices and all of a sudden everyone was creating unnecessary spreadsheets just because they could, without thinking how many other people were affected, or even knew what was going on. Tax and benefits should be one clear system, with tax thresholds set, and a straightforward benefits system based on what you earn. The child tax credits are a nightmare - so much to wade through, and I consider myself to be reasonably intelligent (A level educated, worked in finance), so how on earth would I be sure I was getting my entitlement if I was not well-educated and didn't particularly stay up to date with the news?

Banking - at the upper echelons the products/arrangements were so far removed from reality that people seemed to have lost sight of the fact that it is basically about lending money out based on the money people have lent (deposited with) you and making a turn on that. Simple.

Bonuses and bankers - will everyone stop tarring the whole industry with the same brush!! If the bank made a profit, without taking taxpayers' funds, why should they as a company not be able to distribute their profits as their shareholders/management team see fit? I wholeheartedly agree that those in higher positions who were involved in the catastrophic packaging of these on-sold toxic debts etc should be called to account and not receive a bonus, but if a local manager (and in business banking it is not all computer-driven and the managers do know their customers personally) has delivered on his targets for the year, by providing appropriate products and services, then why does he deserve to be penalised? The bonuses are generally not a percentage of a salary (only speaking from personal experience here) but as a share of the "pot" allocated to your team. So if the bank hasn't done well, or even your whole team hasn't, but you are the best performer, you get the best share but only out of a small pot.

I hope that the credit crunch will make a lot of people think long and hard about how we have all let the buy-now-pay-later mentality spiral out of control. A return to saving for things (assuming interest rates ever help in that!) is no bad idea.

Tax - a return of the married couples' allowance would be a huge help to a lot of families.

must be more to say but DD3 is yelling (apologies if some of ramblings incoherent but she was starting to stir and I was hoping for a few more minutes..)

The credit crunch has not left us destitute but we are always pretty tight and sensible with money so whilst our friends are adjusting to having to budget, we are just carrying on as normal

However, we wanted to move in a year or two but now that our index linked savings have plummeted and interest on cash savings is terrible that doesn't seem likely.

If savers were offered better deals we might be able to help the economy recover by spending our savings and interest on houses and cars etc but that's not going to happen as our money is just not growing (and some of it has shrunk)

There just aren't any decent savings options out there

I've just found out that the World Development Movement, always a peaceful and justice focused organisation who stand up for the world's poorest people, has been blocked from entering the G20. They have been given no reason, and are the only NGO that have been declined. I think this is outragous. What kind of police state is the UK becoming? The UK is rapidly loosing it's status as the cornerstone of democracy.

The recession is affecting our family life, we are on a tight budget as I am coming to the end of my 9 months paid maternity leave. Luckily my employer was incredibly flexible to accommodate my new working hours to work around my kids and husband as we have no spare money for any kind of childcare, and closest family is 70miles away
This equates to buying less food, sticking to value brands, using value clothes stores ie Matalan, Asda, Tesco.
I feel my husband and I are equally concerned about the recession, he is an engineer and the spectre of redundancy haunts that industry
Even my job, in high-end retail is not 100% secure as I always assumed it would be, especially if things worsen considerably.
I still think young new parents need more help with claiming all benefits they are due, systems could be simpler
ie the working tax credits seems very complex and if you phone them to say you are going on/off maternity leave on x date, they ask you to call back after the event as they can't put future changes on the system...meaning I had to go through all the rigmarole again one week later, seemed a waste of time for them and me.
Government could help with tax breaks for married couples who can prove they are married and cohabiting to bring up children,

The government needs to forget the ID card plan, and plough that money back into services
Bonuses are an important tool to attract the best talent, but need to be controlled by tough laws from the FSA, a cap on top % bonus earned for all executives. If the bank or financial institution in question is now nationalised/ part nationalised, bonuses should be even more tightly controlled.
Equally important is controlling the 'golden handshakes' and the cast iron pensions
Aside from the bankers...government ministers themselves need to be completely beyond reproof and be seen to be honest and open and lose this scandalous image we all have of you robbing us blind by claiming inflated expenses, claiming false housing expenses, claiming anything you can get your sticky paws on.

finally... we have had our house on the market for over a year now, it has lost over 30k of its value at the height of the market, we are not in a desperate situation to move, thankfully, but need to relocate as soon as possible.
Could the government do more for home owners, maybe start a scheme to buy houses to rent to all the illegal immigrants/terrorists that are being allowed to stay?! Don't they need somewhere to live! You would know where they were if you did that....

No I don't think women worry about the recession more than men, we probably deal with it differently.
Yes, we are affected by the recession. My husband has just been laid off from the Olympic site in London, the biggest construction site in England at the moment. Apparently there is lots of work to do but no one is signing the orders, the people that are working there are foreign!(health and safety signs are in Polish, too!) The big foreign firm in charge and all the consultancy firms connected with MPs (round the back door) have bled the pot dry and I dare say their probably waiting for more money from the government (British tax payer) to carry on, after all, it has to be built, right? What's the point in sinking the tax payers money into the banks, when their not helping us, the customers? I read on a blog recently that the mortgage companies were trawling through old mortgage applications and picking up on discrepancies and using them to default the mortgage, obviously, no one can get a new mortgage so they repossess on the quiet.I was in a county court two years ago and the board was full of Northern Rock and Halifax cases, this trouble has been brewing for a long time but it has been hushed up, and when you've got work it's not affecting you too much, but when you haven't and you know the bank is hanging over you like a vulcher it's sickening.
Our own small businesses should be our first port of call when it comes to assistance,men or women, what's wrong with companies who earn GBP? Lets recycle some of that GBP and stop sending it abroad, that's why we're printing more!
Free childcare for workers and those that want to retrain, help the people that want to help themselves! We don't all want to become scroungers off the state! The few are getting richer and the divide is getting bigger, which spells trouble for everyone.

we have no debt, i work 15 hours for local authority and my partner is a self employed electrician. Our mortgage has went down by 100 per month in the last 12 months but my shopping bill and gas/elec bill has demolished that money and then some! we are just keeping our heads above water by buying shops own brands and smart food shopping i.e local farm shops and butchers. we have a tax bill coming up in april that we are extremely worried about - and to top it all off my tax credit went down this month to £35 and i need that extra cash. Give us a tax break or even a council tax break! we pay out over £1100 in bills now and that includes NO wasteful items - we are very careful! I don't know how others are managing as i think we're lucky in the sense we have no debt - we are determined not to borrow our way out of this but it is becoming increasingly difficult. Just a couple of months off from our over taxed society would be enough to get our bank accounts over £0 by the end of the month

The credit crunch is affecting us because of the worry about the future and the stress of keeping everything going right now. We have both increased the work we do by taking on extra jobs, because prices of everything have risen and because individual jobs are so unstable. In my main job all staff had to drop their hours and pay, so I had no choice but to find more work. This has increased the stress between us and with the children, although we try not to let it show. My main worry is about what happens after this period, when the government have to think about clawing back all of the money that's been thrown at the banks. I'm sure interest rates will go through the roof, which will mean we might not be able to afford our mortgage any more. Rather than propping up the banks with such a staggering amount of money, they should have nationalised them and spent the majority of the money on helping businesses and families more directly. And as for this latest call to build thousands more houses when all the new houses around us are standing half-built and empty - what madness is that?? I hope the government learn from this experience and don't let it happen again.

The credit crunch has not affected us as we do not rely on credit, the collapse of the economy has, as we do rely on that.

We are not in debt [but have a mortgage] but the collapse of manufacturing [husbands sudden redundancy] has ripped our family to shreds. This

will result in much reduced maternity leave for me, cutail my baby's exposure to breast milk - which is in my view a crime agaist her - and tip me into depression.
to
So take that reality of sexual equality and fix it as some half arsed tax credit doesn't seem to be helping.

The recesssion is affecting us because we have less disposable income, both our jobs are under threat and we have pretty much decided not to have another child because we are so worried about the future. My husband and I argue more and are tetchy with each other because money's tight and child care costs are a considerable part of our monthly income, and we don't earn huge amounts. I work on a tight food budget and always take a calculator/ use the net/ go to cheaper discount shops. I don't know what can be done to stop the rot but it really is all pervasive.