In hoping the benefits cap may prove to be A Good Thing?

And yes anyone equating benefits with neglect can sod right off; having worked in sector of child support (for a charity), been raised in a working but abusive family and now having my own family claiming some benefits- not true. I would never ever allow my boys to be neglected and certainly tehy never played out in roads- heck only one can play out at all, ds2, and he's 11 next week!

Sevenfold- assume meant to work school hours; becuase of course jobs school hours and without holidays are easy to come by!

Even if ds1 was not violent (and as I said earlier, he ahd a go at nreaking my hand yesterday- granned fingers and twisted with all his body weight; I am no petite flower, if he does this to me well.....) there is no childcare available in our village that takes kids over 14 and only one aplce taking kids over 12 ewith a long wait of approaching a year for a palce, and several local aprents who would (IMO rightly) walk away if they knew ds1 was attending.

As for ds3 who does actually get MR atm (ds1 gets HR but will be reassessed soon and very few kids like him being allowed HR now) if tehre are more than 12 children in a room he shutds down entirely and becomes extremly distressed afterwarrds. Is this supposed to be an OK way to treat a severely disabled child now? (and he is severe, just sleeps between 11 and 6 on maybe a night or two a week which is enough for them to say middle rate)

oops forgot to say, I like the comment earlier about "when you snip one thread all the others start to unravel". the knock-on effects look likely to be disastrous.

I would probably have said that benefits were too high if it was more profitable to stay on them than take work.

BUT reading all this has been very interesting, I had no idea that so many people were in receipt of WTC for example.

Housing seems to be the critical issue - secure, affordable housing which enables families to live their lives with their support network - family, schools, doctor etc etc - around them. What is the point of moving them away from all that when there are unlikely to be any jobs in the cheaper areas anyway?

Where are the housing associations in all this? I thought they were almost quasi-council housing, ie providing affordable housing for people within communities?

I think some people have missed what I was worried about, having read the report I thought it was youngest child aged 5 - 12 = 20 hours for second parent, 12+ = 36 hours for second parent.

Plus room within the legislation (which is the other bit I'm worried about) to push the hours that must be worked by both parents all the way up to the working time directive - 48 hours, by as many jobs as nessessary and with a 90 min commute from home.

AND I KEEP TALKING ABOUT MORE THAN ONE COMMUTE!!!!!!!!!!

IF both parents have long commutes to make the hours up with two/three jobs and the jobs are within 90mins of home BUT across town from each other then is it possible there is a problem? With the job market the way it is at the moment I know too many single people working like this who are rarely at home to make this an impossible situation for people in low income insecure work. If they had kids there is a possibility that they wouldn't see them at all in the morning and not be in until 11 at night. 4 days out of 5.

To anyone who thinks I'm accusing you of harming your children or miraculosly making it through your childhood intact is this anything like your situation?

I guess I'm not thinking about having Grandparents nearby or other relatives/trusted people - which would make this not a great situation but workable. But then that's becasue all my family lived about 5 hours drive away when I was younger and I forget it's not the same for everyone else

peachy - someone was saying that people with children shouldn't have to travel for 90 mins to a job because it would affect the child's development.

And yes I guess I am prejudiced against parents when i see their children playing in a busy road unsupervised (and they look about 4) or they are in a pushchair with their mother pushing them with a fag in their hands wafting spoke around their heads. If they are that lax in public, what are they like in private. I have no idea if they work or not.

some children would probably benefit more from going to an after school club than having their parents look after them. if they were properly fed and could have help with their homework.

I'm sure they would, but unless you're making the assumption that most benefit claimants are inadequate parents (which says more about you and your prejudices than it does about anything else), how is that relevant?

Peachy so someone with a child on MR DLA would be expected to work!!
where the hell would they get child care.
dd is on HR but if she didn't have sleep problems she would be on MR.
where on earth would someone on NMW get affordable care?
she and young people like her couldn't just go to the local childminder.

The proposal is that the second parent would have to work a minimum of 20 hours a week if they have children aged 12 and above - so we are not talking about the second parent being made to work long hours - although many actually already do.

I have 4 kids - all teenagers - and I work more than 20 hours a week - my DP works full time. And loads of my colleagues who work full time or nearly full time have kids, its really not that unusual. Most people rely on a range of options for care of their teenagers - being home alone, being with grandparents or friends or being at afterschool activities.

A 90 minute commute and 20 hours a week would mean a parent being out of the house for example from 9am to 4pm. Is this really going to traumatise a child? Really!!! If so my children are fucked.

some children would probably benefit more from going to an after school club than having their parents look after them. if they were properly fed and could have help with their homework.

And the amount is for a household, not an individual.

So feckless single bloke with no intention of ever working in his life, living on his own = not affected by cap.

His ex-wife and three children who fled his violent abuse, crammed in with her parents (one moderately disabled) = very likely to be affected by cap.

i dont understand why a non SN 12 year old cannot be left at home. my parents didnt fuss over me at that age & a friend whose mum did wished her mum would get a life & stop focussing on her too much.

NIl - read beyond that part - we went home to our own house when we were 12. We went to my grandparents when we were younger because it was beside our primary school - we could walk home there. Our secondary school was miles away so it didn't make much sense for us to go back there and have my parents come pick us up.

gabid the average claimant doesn't get £26,000.

HTH.

I'm pretty sure most of the children in my class were in similar situations too tbh and we were in a grammar school in a rural area. It was probably like that because we were in a rural area - most people had to commute to the closest city for work.

"we would go to my grandparents house"

And that in a nutshell is the point about not relocating away from your social networks in a nutshell.

If your parents had relocated, they wouldn't have had the childcare and might not have been able to do those jobs.

I'm not saying everything's hard and fast rules about this, just that it's all connected. If you snip this thread here, that one way over there suddenly unravels.

£26.000 seems to me a lot of benefits, unless you have 10 kids. Can someone explain who that average claiment would be who gets £26.000 or more and why they couldn't live on that.

My sister and I both went on to university btw so no delinquents with antisocial behaviour and development issues here.

And before anyone says anything more about that 90min communte, I've done it - but it was one job and it wasn't minimum wage (slightly above) and I didn't have children to worry about. I too paid my mortgage, council tax, bus fare and household bill with my wages and little else.

Um trickle...my parents both worked over a 90 minute commute away when I was 12/13. When we were younger we would go to my grandparents house but it meant they would have to collect us which meanest we were even later home so when we were happy to do so we went home to our own house. We came home from school at about 4.30 and they usually got in after 7. We watched TV/started homework and usually had dinner started for my parents coming in. My younger sister and I certainly weren't traumatised by it and my parents both had jobs that supported us, put food on the table. clothes on our backs and a roof over our head. That is the reality for most people. Why should someone be able to choose NOT to do that because they can just get a handout instead? I'm sure my parents would have LOVED not to have had to commute so far for work but they did it because they had to.

You'd be fine with someone with a 12 year old working two different jobs that ended up being 90 mins from their home in different directions?

I'm not so worried about people who have one job, 90 min commute with teenagers, but with two or three jobs with long commutes these parents may not have time to parent. I hate to think of kids being forced into that kind of pattern because their parents have low waged insecure jobs. It wasn't good for me and it won't be good for them.

Children need more than just parents who work bloody hard to provide a roof and food.

I make no apologies for being left wing and a bit soft, but I've known true 'sroungers' people struggling to make ends meet and doing thier best and people who are well off and have no money or job worries. Each persons world is so far removed from the others it's easy to let myths and fear override the reality of what is for some people an unfair hand they have been delt. The true 'scroungers' I have met in my time would be totally unemployable - you wouldn't want them in your place of work. I'm not sure what the answer is to all of this - but I'm quite sure it isn't 12 year olds alone at home and teenagers that rarely see a parent - it certainly won't help with social mobility, anti-socail behaviour, child development or a whole host of other things I believe would lead the the entirety of society being a little bit safer and (god forbid) happier.

90 minutes commute isn't desirable. It would certainly put an employment offer lower down vs. other offers on the table, if any.

But plenty of people have to do it, I have, because benefits should be a safety net for temp. unemployed or those too ill to work. Saying that you don't feel like commuting for 90 minutes after you've exhausted all other options (looking into all types of work, alternative transport) is surely a choice - a choice that should be reserved for people when moving between employers. Not "I think I'll just claim benefits instead."

At the momemt my door to door commute is about 1.20mins dependant on traffic (can vary a lot - can be just over an hour when i go in early, or up to 1.5hrs if i hit roadworks or jams). It's not nice, but... how else am I supposed to pay the household bills? It's not like we're living in luxury, I'm talking about an inability to pay mortgage, council tax and utilities if I don't work.

peachy - Sadly social services are unlikely to pick up the cost of caring for an elderly person currently being looked after by someone not living with them.

Of course low wages may mean it isn't affordable to commute long distances or isn't physically possible because of poor transport. But tbh commuting up to 90 minutes 1 way when you have teenage children really isn't an enormous deal. No one wants to commute this distance - but plenty do.

dreaming- possibly, if they worked PT and had several kids or and expensive rent yes