Cap child tax credit after four children, says MP

I agree with niceguy.

woolly- some people can manage their own money, however many can not. what about children living with addicts??? do you think their parents are going to prioritise their next hit or nappies?? that is the sad reality.

How about if you could opt for vouchers or cash?

I think I would find vouchers very useful (and they don't have to say 'BENEFIT' they could be normal gift certificates) as it would help me to budget.

I would object to vouchers if I was a claimant. I was on income support for five months once (homeless with a two year old) and believe that as a mature adult I had an absolute right to decide where I spent the £75/week I received. I shopped in street markets and charity shops. You think they would accept vouchers FFS? Giving people vouchers is just a way of stigmatising them, which is probably why some people think they're a good idea. Why not make them wear a big fabric 'S' (for scrounger, obviously) on their clothing too?

God I hate benefit scum, oh apart from my mate Dave, he's alright he is.

As I said before, I don't think anybody can really judge another family, you don't know their financial circumstances, and you can't know if they have fallen on hard times - which it seems would make them deserving in your eyes.

After all, the government believes these families are entitled to financial support, otherwise they wouldn't be given any!

Out of interest, peachy, would you object to vouchers? As I said, I have used them myself and welcomed the extra milk.

sorry - should have read 'incentivised by the benefits'.

As you had your kids whilst earning a good wage, clearly you were not incentivised by the wage. In the case of Shannon Matthews' mum, with the 7 kids by different fathers, that was rather less clear.

Peachy - my comment about cigarettes/drugs was most definitely NOT aimed at you. I had in mind more the Shannon Matthews type of family.

I have five children.

Apart from now, when we are privately educating them all, I can honestly say that my fifth child cost almost nothing.

The food she consumed was negligible - within the bounds of what we threw away or overate.

Her clothes were already owned.

We didn't even need handouts from charities.

Even now, were she in state school, I think she would cost us very little. Even if she needed new school uniform, that would cost less than £50 a year.

I don't see how a fifth child means automatic government handouts.

Government handouts are a safety net (basic food, clothing and shelter) - not for luxuries. If you want luxuries, get a job.

Panda - I said and additional form of contraception - so, if you have a vasectomy and use additional forms of contraception properly I'm guessing your risk falls to almost zero.

If you can't afford a large family then you stop at, what, 1 or 2? To then go on and have 5 or more children after a vasectomy and additional contraception I think is nigh on impossible.

I'm bloody hardworking, I don't expect the state to look after me, but i'm very grateful for the fact that they do. I think people who want the support to be taken away are very selfish and lack empathy.

Now 8Nieguy's* system- capped at wherever you are (after 2 anyway) I agree with

Oh we were on about £40k in Wales when ds4 was born

Fucking redundancy; fucking autism; fucking depression

interestting gven that the Guardian article last week of the draft welfare bill (Lors Level now) caps it at 3 anyway

scarletts LMAO you do know they can;t even find foster carers for the kids whose lives are at risk sometimes, and that being taken from your aprents if likely to be more damaging than poverty?

cigarettes and drugs? is that what people think of us now? if it weren;t for the boys i;d have given up and ended it long ago doesn;t matter how hard I try to be decent, give back, find ways to work- arer = on benefits = accused of all manner of crap.

Vouchers is a constructive idea breadandbutterfly- as long as parents got to pick what they need, and the values ie clothes vouchers, energy vouchers, food vouchers etc

because it would be awful to be stuck with £100 of clothes vouchers if you really needed to top up the gas.

I am thinking of the children, sometimes it is better for the child to be taken to live with foster parents who can ensure all aspects of a childs development are met, and a huge part of that is financially based. I fully understand that parents have rights too, but in the long term, living in extreme poverty can do real harm to a child, and I think the childs rights have to be put first.

I'd like to see more benefits paid in vouchers - I received milk vouchers when pregnant with dd2 as we were at our poorest then and the extra milk certainly came in handy. That way, the kids will definitely benefit and parents will not be able to spend it on cigarettes/drugs etc. I don't think anyone begrudges the children being supported once they're here; but I think there is a certain suspicion that the money given isn't always filtering down to the kids as it should do. That would reduce the need to limit the numbers of children covered - it seems uncomfortably close to eugenics to forbid the poor to have kids. That said, the only middle-class people with more than 4 kids that I know personally are v v religious (and none of them live on benefits, no). So it's hard not to wonder if the current set-up does incentivise v large families.

Regardless - putting a child in care is much more expensive than providing tax credits, so what you propose is silly (unless you want to go down the route of forced abortions)

Please will someone think of the children! You don't get free money for having children, you get money to support your children.

I thought we were trying to eradicate child poverty in this country - please know that living under the poverty line doesn't mean you are bad parents.

It's a matter of the deserving (hardworking) and undeserving poor - how do we distinguish these?

I would go as far as to say that if they are unable to do that, how are they meeting their childs needs??

Working classes can have as many children as they like as long as they can pay for them.

My point is that if a parent is relying on a fifth lot of tax credit to keep the child out of poverty, then they shouldn't be having a child. They should only have children if they don't need that fifth lot of money coming in to be able to feed and clothe everyone to a proper standard- and by that I mean such basics as being able to buy your child a school coat for the winter.

Vasectomy is a very effective (99.85%) birth control method. Only 1 to 2 women out of 1,000 will have an unplanned pregnancy in the first year after their partners have had a vasectomy.

so 0.15% - higher than you thought.

I'd be very interested to know how many of the parents of 5 children or more had vasectomies much earlier in their breeding and used additional contraception and then went onto have more than 5.

I'd wager about 0.0001% - if that