To think the 2-child benefit cap is fine?

I agree with the cap somewhat, as a child of the type of feckless parents the government want to avoid paying.
I was 1/12 children had between my mum and my step dad. They never worked, and had a very good living from benefits, not that any of us kids got anything. School would have mufti days and they'd send me in with a note that read they live off the minimum the law says we can live on, we're not paying for this. I was so embarrassed, but I couldn't change it. I was just a child. They always had cigarettes, mum always had her hair done, and always new jewelery though.

I would however like to see the government ensure that the children who cannot be supported by their parents are somehow fed and appropriate clothing can be provided to them. I'm not sure how it would work, as we've all heard of some parents selling the lunch vouchers from the government, clothing would be a similar issue I assume.

But I feel very uncomfortable with the fact that we have hungry children in this country.

Yes there were probably very few families who had 8 or more kids but wether you like it or not there were definitely people who spaced out having children so they could continue not having to look for work
You don't have to beleive me but it happened and I saw it.

You might do if you were otherwise being made to look for work which is low paid and monotonous
I know its alien concept to d some ,but it's an extra 72,/ chid added to everything else, no you wouldn't be living the life if riley
But for some people staying at home looking after children is preferable to a minimum wage job.

It’s approx £72 a week ? I don’t know of anyone who would actually want another child just for an extra £72 a week the effort of raising a child and long term costs aren’t worth it just for that money each week / month !!!!!! But what it would do is improve the lives of those third and subsequent children immensely

It's a silly policy.

We are being told that the birth rate is too low at the moment. Rather than the replacement rate of 2.2 children, it stands at around 1.5 children per woman. That has long-term demographic and economic consequences.

The most popular family sizes are 0, 1 and 2 children. There is no good reason not to extend child benefit to "extra" children in the fairly smallish percentage of families (around 15%) who have 3 or more kids. It's not going to make lots of people rush out and have more kids since most people only want one or two. In fact, for all the prejudice against only child families, they actually outnumber families with two children.

2 is quite arbitrary isn’t it? Why not say 1? Some people want more; others less.

The birth rate in this country is falling so most people now have fewer than 2 kids.

As a country we need more young people to look after and pay for our increasingly elderly population.

Maybe theres a middle ground ? A 2 child cap of the £287.92 child element rate and for third and subsequent children a lower rate ? Eg £143.96? Then nothing after a certain amount of children (5? 6?)

I genuinely don’t understand why people (deliberately) have more than two children? Should families be financially supported by the government? Others? Not trying to be goady, I just honestly don’t get it.

When the cap was introduced by Osborne, the scare stories about ‘benefit families with 8 kids’ were shown to be nonsense. Don’t believe everything you read in the right-wing press.

Wow, that’s extremely patronizing.

People getting uc are not net contributors. It’s fair imo to limit size of families that people get benefits for. If you can’t afford a large family, don’t have one.

It's curious how there seems to be a generalised acceptance that the UK is full of these multi-generational feckless families, yet when it comes to actually tracking them down, even the likes of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation find it surprisingly difficult to actually locate them.

Of course there's an element of politicking at play.

It's not a good look that you have an enormous majority, yet still feel the need to three line whip an opposition amendment, AND then hit the handful of dissenters with a 6 month expulsion. Just reinforces the perception that Starmer is a thin-skinned dictator who can't overcome even minor dissent within the party for fear of the papers ripping him to shreds.

It's important for the SNP especially, because the Labour leader in Scotland has been tying himself in knots over this and we're under two years away from a Scots GE.

What a silly post.

All us taxpayers give "handouts" to other people's children whether their parents are on benefits or not. How do you think children's healthcare and education is paid for? Child benefit?

It's not just the 3rd child that suffers though. Whatever income the family has caters for all of the children and all of the adults, so if it's insufficient, everyone feels the consequences of that. There's a lot of mentions of "3rd children" or "children" living in poverty, and I'm guilty of repeating that myself, but the reality is it's the entire family unit languishing in poverty because of this draconian nonsense.

@Shoopstoop i assumed you were the poster who I initially replied to, who said:

I completely agree with it. Hopefully it stops people having more kids then they can afford and expecting us to pay for them

If you didn’t say this, and don’t actually think it, why are you arguing with me? I think we actually agree about why there shouldn’t be a welfare cap.

And really there is no need for such passive aggressive personal attacks even if we did disagree.

YANBU. I think it would be obtuse to try and say that the two-child limit doesn’t go at least part of the way to deterring families from having multiple children on benefits to avoid working or as a life style choice. I know several families and indeed generations of the same families that have had many children in this manner and whatever people like to claim it was a problem. It doesn’t make a person heartless, out of touch or child-hating to say that - it’s simply a fact. To state otherwise is absolute nonsense. I’m aware that there are exceptional circumstances that can’t be helped but if we are being totally honest this rule wasn’t put in place for unfortunate families who worked and lost their job for example. They were not the problem. It’s for people who have used having children to take advantage of the benefits system for years because they were allowed to do so before the two-child limit was introduced. It was a policy that received a huge amount of media coverage and the rule was well advertised to people for many months before it became law. You’d have had to have been living on Mars for you not to have been aware that it was coming in and that was 7 years ago. Yet, still people are beyond the realms of stupidity to have babies that they know they can’t afford and have the audacity to claim how unfair life is when the fact of the matter is the only thing that is unfair is that selfish parents put theirselves over their children’s wellbeing because they know that they can’t afford to keep them. People need to start accepting responsibility for their actions and stop blaming other people for their thoughtless actions. Something definitely needed to be introduced because the economy simply couldn’t afford it. You have to decide where to draw the line somewhere whether it’s two, three, six or any other number of children before it were capped. If everyone were allowed to sit on benefits and claim for as many children as they wish where would we house these children and where would they go to school? The country would be bankrupt - more than it already is. It’s not a workable or sustainable situation and change needed to happen somewhere along the line. Sadly there will always be people who suffer in life no matter what you do.

Thanks @x2boys it’s much more complex than I initially thought. You can get a lot more benefits than I realised.

It's difficult to explain but if you claim universal credit either as a single parent or a couple it will state on the claim all the different elements it's broken down into, so say for l arguments sake ,your a couple with two children under five one parent working full time in a low wage and you get £1000 / month universal credit
You ill get so much for rent g, so much for each child, and the couple element ,
And yes that's cash in your pocket psid in one lump sum ( I'm plucking amounts out of the air because everyone, s circumstances will be different.

People should provide for their own kids. Like why have multiple multiple kids if you can't provide for them?

"Circumstances change". Ok. Have contingencies. Have savings

🤣🤣🤣 good for you but most people aren’t happy to work and pay tax for people to have numerous kids they can’t afford and hold their hands out.

well if you care to notice my post history on this thread which is right between your barrage of self-righteous posts you’ll notice that i don’t believe that welfare should be capped.

Not because I’m Lady Bountiful of the City with morals only money can buy, but because the failure to invest in childhood will compound intergenerational poverty and make bad outcomes worse on every metric you care to mention.

I also don’t live in Britain so I am not a net contributor to British welfare, unsurprisingly enough. You are however very safe in assuming you’re a higher earner than me (that’s so important to you isn’t it?) choosing instead a profession that actually benefits society rather than that beacon of moral rectitude, finance! And as an upper middle income earner I pay more tax than I should and receive no welfare benefits whatsoever.

I don’t take issue with investment in children, I take issue with your comments.

Something who has no control over - the children or the parents?

The parents come before the children - and the target is at those who make the choices.

Benefits bill aside - All children are impacted by the choices of their parents in life. This is but one of them.

Very sad but very true.

Absolutely Yes to support but handouts on behalf of Deadbeat Dads is not it.

Other mechanisms are rightly being looked at.

I don't understand why it only applies to rent and not a mortgage. I sold up at a loss and had to move back home for 8 years and take on 2 jobs which I still do 🙄