How did people survive before wftc, ctc etc?

Yes houses were cheap but wages were very low. I can remember my dad thought he had really made it when he earned £20 a week. That would have been in the mid 1960s. It did pay a mortgage and bring up 5 DC. Mum worked for the extras......Holidays at Mablethorpe.

DH first managed the magic £1000 in 1971. Women earned much less of course.

morethan - yes, employers have to pay NMW. i didn't mean less than NMW, i meant that employers are less likely to employ an older person.

"yeah mum probably cos he cost of living was a lot lower and wages were actualy in proportion to your rent / mortgage / fuel / food etc"

In the 1980's and 1990's?? 1980's was a tough time for a lot of people. Late 70's we'd had rampant inflation, fuel prices going up so fast the signs in petrol stations whizzed round like fruit machines, until we hit a brick wall not dissimilar to 2008 and the brakes went on. Mass redundancies etc. 1990's less dramatic but I can't be the only person who remembers sobbing at the news that interest rates had shot up (10%+ was it?) and wondering how I was going to find the mortgage payments ... there was a recession, house prices crashed, jobs weren't safe again.

Possibly with the exception of the job-heavy 1960's there's been no 'golden age' for working class people.

Nickelbabe.

But won't employers be forced to pay nmw when UC comes in as you have to be working at 70 hours x min wage to claim. This is as a couple obviously but whatever your circumstances it states at least nmw.
Will people not work for less because they will lose entitlement.

My mum was a single mum in the 80s/90s.

We used to eat porridge or flour based meals as she had little money (dumplings/pancakes etc). I ended up in care and was apparently malnourished.

We had hardly any clothes.

Mum used to send us to neighbours to beg for money.

Our gas and electricity used to run out regularly.

Houses used to be ridiculously cheap (or are now ridiculously expensive, or in between the two). My uncle was given a house as a wedding present - cost £3,000. It's now worth about £1m. It was common for only the husband to work - his wage was designed to be enough to raise a family on (talking about the middle classes there). People were also more careful with money, I think, especially those who grew up in wartime. My mother when a young mother would never buy herself a cup of coffee. That's where I am now, mind you.

Hopeforever is correct that was the idea. Also to try and get rid of the 'poverty trap' because lots in work were much worse off than those on benefits. And in that WTC and CTC have worked.

interesting article here

People didn't have chicken very often it was a treat. You ate mince (beef probably!), liver and other offal, sausage, corn beef and a roast on Sunday with the left overs on Monday.

Way back only the working men would get meat. The children and the wife would have gravy and veggies. And I'm sure many mothers skipped meals.

no, people didn't always live well on what they earned.

my dad used to work double shifts and weekend overtime to afford stuff.
but doing so meant that he could pay off their mortgage in half the time (from 1968, and about £3000), which meant by the time I was 4, they were mortgage-free. (or could have been, had they not bought the extra land)

but we never went on holidays abroad (we had a week in a caravan at Mablethorpe or Lakeside), and we had one car for the whole family, and had clothes from the jumble sale, etc etc.

May be wrong but I thought part of the idea was to provide a safety net for those who would have been better off on 'the Dole' than working, by making it possible for them to work in a badly paid job but still get financial help from the government.

You often used to hear the phrase, "I'd be better off on the dole" but not so much now.

i am always amazed when people talk of a chicken lasting 4 days. it must have been a bloody great big chicken,ours barely last until teatime.

Don't know what rent was like in the 1980s and 1990s. We were paying a mortage and interest rates were VERY high. DH didn't have a pay increase for years and many lost their jobs.....bit like now! And no we didn't get WTC and CTC.

It was CB and what you could earn. Thats why so many lost their homes during that time. The lucky ones got a council house the rest went into B&Bs.

My MIL was a single parent to 2 children in 1967 after her husband fucked off never to be seen again. She lived in her parents house (2 up 2 down) until her oldest (my DH) was 6. She worked nights cleaning to earn a wage that her father would then take off her. He was an abusive bastard that beat her regularly. When he started hitting her DD (my SIL) she left.

She was housed by the council in a 1 bed tenement house. She put the kids upstairs and slept in a chair downstairs. She would leave the kids on their own overnight so she could work. Her neighbour took pity on her and used to buy her a loaf of bread from the milkman (that my DH would then steal and feed the birds!). She regularly went without food to ensure the kids were fed.

When my DH was 9 and SIL 8 she married again and had another DD. When DH was 12 his SD died and MIL was on her own again. Luckily this time her husband had a pension that she was able to claim.

Thats how people survived. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy.

my mum's always banging on about oh we never had all these tax credits when you were growing up like you all get today (i grew up in the 80's and 90's)

yeah mum probably cos he cost of living was a lot lower and wages were actualy in proportion to your rent / mortgage / fuel / food etc

:/

"people managed on what they earnt when we were young"

Nope. The benefits were just called different things. National Insurance started in 1911, and there was certainly dole from the 1930s or earlier.

And even with these benefits, from the family history I've been doing, I can say people often didn't survive very well.

I've seen children abandoned in orphanages because one parent absconded and the other couldn't afford to keep them. That was c1920.

I've seen a woman, abandoned by her husband, taking up with a man who abused her children, because it was a way to get bed and board. She died young, probably hastened by malnutrition and poor living conditions, leaving her 6 children to more abuse. That was 1960s.

More generally, childcare was done by older girls, who were expected to leave school to look after the little ones (see socio-political writer Winifred Holtby's 1936 novel South Riding ).

Indeed the school leaving age was only raised to 15 in 1944, and to 16 in 1972. At the start of WWII, children from poor families were expected to be working full-time at 14 or doing housework so others could work.

It just took one serious illness or death to drive a whole family under financially. And that's before you take into account cocklodging bastards of the sort who even now fill the Relationships threads. They were no thinner on the ground then, and the impact on women and children was vastly greater.

Many mortgages were based on joint incomes even in the late 1970s early 1980s. I can't remember what the 'formula' was but an estate agent tried to persuade me to include my income (pre DC) for our mortgage so that he could sell us a bigger house. Estate agents were as much to blame as the lenders in forcing house prices up.

In the past, the non-working spouse could transfer their personal tax allowance to the working spouse.

Mortgages were only based on one income so house prices were more reasonable.

"Wouldn't it be more beneficial to people and the economy to dramatically increase the minimum wage? "

no, it wouldn't.
companies couldn't afford to pay people a realistic minimum wage.
a lot of small businesses can't afford to pay NMW as it stands now

it means that a lot of people are being employed with less experience because they're a lot cheaper, and younger people.
anyone who will accept a lower wage is more desirable than someone who wants what they're worth, and what they're worth has gone up because of the NMW.
i can't afford to pay an over-20yo £6.19 an hour, when i could employ an 18yo at £4.98 or a 16-17yo at £3.68

For a short period we also had the pleasure of paying poll tax. Every adult over 18 had to pay the same no matter what their income.

I was a SAHM so annual income was NIL. DH paid mine as well as his.....bless him!

I think students were exempt from poll tax but everyone else over 18 paid.

people accepted fewer things, houses were a heck of a lot cheaper and so was inflation.

When I bought my house, in 1999, it cost me £22,000 - it was a 2 bedroomed terrace.
a similar sized house in the same area now sells for £80,000 now.
my wages at the time were £9,000. a similar job now would earn £12,000.

so, house prices have risen by 4 times, wages have risen by a third times.
my mortgage was £130 a monthy. on a £80,000 house, my mortgage would be
nearly £500 a month.

that's how people managed.

children went to school in plimsolls, no socks, no winter coats, no hats nor gloves.
Parents had no supper, just their lunch. All clothes were hand-me-downs, or jumble sales, or from kindly people at church (and you were unlucky if all your cousins were boys as a teen!)
No-one, literally no family at my school owned a car, 1 person in my street did, he was single man, no kids, regular job.
My parents had no possessions besides clothes and books, same coat and boots for 10 years or so.
Walking everywhere because the bus was too much... though with my brother this was a false economy, because then he neede extra food so he didn't starve

I had my eldest 3 in the 1980s. DH had married mans tax allowance and I claimed Family allowance (not sure when it became CB). We did put in a claim for FIS......he earnt £6 per month too much for us to qualify. The free school meals we would have been entitled to amounted to more than that over a month.