Fed up of my cousins comments about benefits and UC

Also rent in London. We moved out but even a couple of years ago it was £2k for a one bedroom flat, with a baby in the closet basically. Our friends in London are looking more like £3k just for an ordinary 3 bed flat

Also sad on a societal level, because these households were paying six figure income tax. And it’s gone. The grads in our company are looking for overseas opportunities also, as they have a good salary, but can’t really afford much standard of life

Just wanted to correct these figures a bit.

Not London, but South East. Childcare for two is £5,100 for two children. Not a fancy nursery. Fees have gone up twice this year to cover the free hours (that I’m not entitled to) and the NI increase. Travel to my job is £300 a month on the train. My friends in London are paying more for childcare. We basically are working for no extra money, to keep our jobs open, and to contribute to society.

Unfortunately quite a few of our friends and family have moved abroad, as the above wasn’t sustainable, and they were working long hours to pay huge amounts of tax but living in small rented flats. I understand why they have, but it’s sad for us

No. UC is a top up. So it’s not total income is it? Plus it varies. But there’s options regarding working hours and job.

While I agree that the system needs looking at, posts like this make me laugh.

What's Universal Credit, 380 quid a month? And that's supposed to cover food, bills, clothes, transport, phone? Could you live on that? I couldn't. That's not even living, it's existing.

No holidays, no savings, no pension, no insurance, no little luxuries to make life more bearable.

There are obviously a tiny minority gaming the system, but if we're saying that UC is a 'choice'...I can't imagine the majority are making it because it's the best choice.

I pay around £2700 tax a month. I am fine for the OP to get some money. It doesn’t sound like an easy life at all, and not one I would want. Being a single mum is tough mentally as well as logistically.

Re the actual question..
Anyway, I have a family member I'm quite close to, and she often makes comments, not aimed at me, but towards people who claim UC. For example, she mentioned that it's unfair for her to pay almost £300 a month in tax while others can work part time and avoid paying anything (I don’t earn enough to pay tax) and that she has to pay more to subsidise the people that don't. She even told the entire family that she pays almost £400 a month, including national insurance, which made things awkward and nobody knew what to say

I would say very little unless you want to get into an argument. Don’t defend your situation or say much. Just show polite sympathy perhaps with trite platitudes eg ‘I am sorry. That sounds tough. I hope things improve for you’ etc and change the subject. No point in getting into a MN debate with her.

@LakieLadyThats not an average rent though! It’s pretty high. It’s £600 a month cheaper in my commuter town 40 miles from London. I’ve seen perfectly nice places for under £1000 in MK. So there’s obviously choices to be made to avoid huge rents.

I hope things improve for you. The system is supposed to be a safety net for people in your situation.

Sorry, the take take take entitlement has left the country in a precarious situation. People need to start taking responsibility for themselves

I don't understand why people can't see this.

I've just calculated how much a single parent, with one child, renting a 2-bed property in my area would be able to earn before their income reached the point where they're no longer entitled to UC.

It came out at £36k*, way above NMW, and the reason it's so high is because the housing costs element alone is £1,200 a month. Even at £1,200 a month, it doesn't come close to covering the average rent for a 2-bed place, which is a gobsmacking £1,950 a month. This wouldn't be so bad if it was a high wage area, but it isn't. Hospitality and retail jobs are plentiful, anything else is very competitive. It's commutable to London, which pushes up housing costs, but a single parent would be very lucky to find childcare that fitted around a long commute.

*I didn't include student loan repayments or pension contributions in that, so the salary threshold would be higher for someone paying those.

Then legislate for employers to pay a living wage so the tax payer doesn’t foot the bill enabling them to get away with crap pay while they pay themselves handsome bonuses and dividends to their shareholders.

They aren't too high. They are too low if anything.

I agree that benefits are too high and also child care is best supplied by parents, at least for most of it, until the child is three. Personally, I do not begrudge parents taking time out of the workforce to care for small children. Families only have two or three and the babies want to spend lots of time one on one with parents.

It comes across that if they didn't have that choice than no other woman on UC should either. Pure jealousy.

When l worked in benefits l saw many cases where the absent parent would ‘lose’ their job where maintenance payments were taken from their wages. Many more were self employed and not declaring enough income to pay as they should. The benefits system isn’t designed to iron out these problems - admin costs would be sky high and children would lose out.

OP says she works 3-4 days a week, sometimes more. I think she is ths type of person who will step up her hours when her kids get older.
I think reform of the benefit system is certainly needed. But I don't see the OP as undeserving, and I wouldn't want her children to suffer. Ideally the dad should be made to pay. But sadly men get away with everything.

The biggest change in COL is caused by unaffordable housing. If we didn't sell off our council houses and remove our rent caps we would have a fairer society with the chance to be socially mobile.
Council housing was developed to allow a home whist people had a enough spare money to save for private purchases. It was a badge of honour to hand back your keys because you had bought a house. That is virtually impossible today. Ex local authority houses are sold to BTL landlords and now they are being turned into HMO. TV programmes encourage it. When I did my masters the one thing that stuck with me is Maslows pyramid of needs and housing is the foundation of everything. Kids that are moved on every year as rentals are sold have no chance of living with any certainty in the same area (estate agents insist the tenants are given notice to make it easier to sell. You get two months to relocate your family) . In private rentals they can't even put a poster up. There is no certainty.
Every goverment says they will build new social housing, they never do. They've allowed this mess. Shelter and food is the keystone yet we allow multiple properties to lay empty.
If people had secure housing we would see a change in ambition and a marked difference in people's mental health. If your housing costs are under thirty percentage of your household income you have chance but that would be rare and impossible near to London.
Anyone keeping a roof over their head is doing OK.

Benefits should only be for people that are si disabled that no form of work is possible and as a short term safety net of you lose your job.

Tell me you know nothing about being disabled without telling me………………

Nope. There are no plans to include PIP in UC. PIP is a universal and non means tested benefit available to all disabled people regardless of income. The planned changes to PIP apply to how claimants are paid disability premiums on UC, not PIP itself.

Absolutely true. People need to understand it’s never free money, someone is paying …and those people paying are giving up and leaving the country in numbers never seen before.

...sometimes to the detriment of their children, who spend from 7:30am until 6pm out of their home in the care of strangers 5 days a week. Starting as early as 9 months old.

It's the children who suffer when support is removed for parents. But I suppose the truth is that a lot of people don't mind that other people's children suffer, and think they shouldn't exist in the first place. Children are only for the wealthy.

Excellent comment!

Well we all ‘get something back’ for the tax that we pay (in the sense that it all gets spent on stuff we use) but it doesn’t go into a little savings pot with her name on it for when she retires. The amount of pension she gets will depend on government policy when she retires, not how much NI she pays now. Although the amount of state pension you get now (obviously the government can change this any time) is linked to years in work, if your income is sufficiently low (because you didn’t work enough) you just get pension credits anyway to top it up.

Maybe they didn’t plan well or maybe they enjoy working… who knows (only them)

Yes of course, the government spends about 1 trillion pounds a year, on all of us. Some of us benefit more from that spending than others (and it changes throughout our lives)

I was pointing out the economic ‘case’ for funded childcare is quite different to a lot of other benefits because without it lots of people would leave the workforce. I’m not, FWIW making a judgement about the extent to which we should and shouldn’t support people who are out of work.