Do you think we should life the two child benefit cap?

I am FUMING about the strong rumours today that the cap will be lifted.

Don’t forget that the benefit also applies to children resident abroad, so some people could claim for any number of children, genuine or fictional.

Before someone inevitably says “But we need them to be future taxpayers….” - vast numbers are not working and will never work. The purpose of girls (presumably 50% of any children) is to marry and have many children, just perpetuating the benefit and indeed child poverty problem.

Having four children, reasonable enough. But continuing to produce 10 or 12 is not conducive to lifting your family out of poverty. It’s a way of life financed by schmucks.

The cap was not retrospective so anyone who had more than 2 kids (excluding multiple births) did so in the knowledge it would apply.

people need to start taking responsibility for their decisions. There is free contraception and more or less abortion on demand. There is no reason to have more children than you can afford and I am not more responsible for your kids than you are.

At the moment raising taxes on the working population and ending this cap at the same time will rightly or wrongly cause resentment.

No it’s not polling well at all.

The Government. People already claim childcare benefits.

Exactly this. So many people seem to see children as ''lifestyle choices' of their parents instead of real, actual, vulnerable PEOPLE in their own right. Almost like you'd think of a car or something. Its disgusting.

If a woman is living with domestic abuse, the only person to blame is the husband who is beating her. No funding for refuges.

If someone is a victim of theft, the only person to blame is the person who robbed them. No funding for the police.

If someone is left paralysed by a car accident, the only person to blame is the other driver. No funding for their medical care.

Do you think we should refuse to help all vulnerable people whose suffering is the fault of someone else? Or is it just children?

Yes sorry it was about the quote saying about MAP

The children that are already here affected by the cap were born knowing they wouldn't be paid for. Parents responsibility! Twins or triplets are exempt from the cap.

In some cases they aren’t even directing ANY money to schools for the proposed breakfast clubs and expecting schools to staff and fund it. To put more pressure on schools to deliver will dilute the actual education they offer. Support needs to be for these children in poverty at home . As I said before no amount of extra clubs and more hours in school can solve issues like cold damp unhealthy housing that leads to poor sleep and more illness for these children, it doesn’t lift some of the burden off parents working in low paid exhausting jobs who are low and stressed, if you want to improve outcomes home is as important as school. Unless you think children should also just sleep at school too and then you can force their parents to work nights too but that’ll be ok as long as it doesn’t affect you. It’s this undercurrent of ‘yes you deserve help but only the help we think is below us you can’t have anything that we have or aspire to’ it’s like when you see people adding to food bank donation areas - always the very very cheapest as if they think they should do something but not anything to make life too comfortable for the underclass. Yes have your tin of beans but not Heinz have you dented tin of value ones but we can still say we are propping up the feckless of society

Wrong poster I think?

MAP doesn’t always work. It prevents ovulation but if that has already occurred it won’t work. It’s not something that’s 100% effective. Accidental pregnancy is always likely. Condoms break, the pill may not be absorbed due to other factors plus there’s also the issue of non consensual sex.

And if you got accidentally pregnant for the third time and didn't have much money, and really wanted the baby, how would you like to be effectively coerced into an abortion because of the cap? It would break your heart.

It's the sane decision a self supporting working family would be faced with. We couldn't have another child now because it would stretch us too thin for a decent way of life.

Only for one of them if you have two children already.

They should direct more money at decent school meals and breakfast clubs.
This will not be popular decision

I do agree with this
However I also think that more directed help should be provided to children who need it
I am not sure that lifting the cap would give much relief to children directly as the small amount of money generated from that is likely to just be absorbed into the overall family budget
I always feel sad that there are kids who are excluded from after school activities due to finances and I think that would make a bigger direct impact on their lives so would provide that

About 1mn of 16-24 yo are NEETs now, it's 12.5% of this age group. Being NEET is a very strong predictor of spending lifetime unemployed and on benefits. They will not contribute to anyone's pensions.

We don't need to increase numbers of young people, we need to improve their education and employability. Supporting families on benefits having more children will not achieve this.

Don't you see the irony of denying free childcare to families with one parent on 100k and forcing them to subsidies UC recipients with multiple kids?

I've often heard about huge amounts of waste and inefficiency in the NHS, but is that really true? I'd be surprised. It wouldn't make any sense for managers to run it that way. (I can look it up.)

Why do you blame Labour for unemployment and wage stagnation? They inherited one hell of a mess.

I agree you can't raise taxes too much, but raising a little from most people would help society a lot, whether child poverty, NHS, schools, etc.

I didn't know that. It's not something that readily comes up when you Google it.

Maybe it is fecklessness, but that doesn't change the fact that there are children in poverty. It's not their fault that their parents had them.

Funded by whom exactly?

twins and triplets are excluded from cap, read the policy.

There is no such thing as accidental pregnancy these days, MAP if available as a last resort. It's fecklessness

Labor raise taxes not to provide better public services but to fund more handouts.

There is a limit as to how much taxes you can raise before you make economy collapse.

UK unemployment rate rises more than expected to 5%

Unemployment is now higher than in coved times and wages stagnating, this is after a few years of booming market, all thanks to Labor.

And yes, you absolutely can improve NHS without extra funding, but you need strong management, the level of inefficiencies and waste there is astonishing.

So the children can just carry on living in poverty, then?

And it's not an if. Look it up. Over 30 percent of children live in poverty, 18 percent of them in absolute poverty. That's a lot of children suffering. And removing the cap would lift 600,000 children out of poverty, according to the IFS.