Finally ! A government policy that worked.

[SerendipityJane]

Given how perfectly it delivered:

However, the study says the policy’s impoverishment of larger low-income households has helped few parents get a job – instead, its “main function” has been to push families further into poverty and damage their mental health.

It's impossible to believe that wasn't the aim all along. (See also bedroom tax).

Still voting Tory now, eh ?

(We'll put to one side the unspeakable policy if a rape resulted in a 3rd child. That can't be debated anywhere except Tennessee or Texas).

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/jun/01/two-child-limit-on-uk-welfare-benefits-has-failed-to-push-parents-into-jobs

This isn't the case though. Plenty of people have children they cannot afford.

It's an unpopular view but I agree. People don't listen to us children who have been through it though and tend to argue til the cows come home that parents should be able to have the state support however many children they recklessly have. It's sad.

"Working families who qualify for Universal Credit can claim back up to 85% of their monthly childcare costs. You must pay for the childcare upfront first and provide receipts to get money back. You can only claim for childcare that has taken place during your assessment period." so, if you can't afford to pay for it upfront, you can't claim it back.

Human support is a must, people taking advantage of that system, or buying into the fact that it is more financially viable to be unemployed is the issue. People that weigh up childcare, end up a couple of hundred quid down for going out to work and therefore deciding against work is wrong, if you are able bodied, get out, do your jobs and better your lives without relying on the rest of the country to pay for you. No child should suffer, I support anyone that sincerely needs help, not those that see it as the more financially rewarding option.

Who do you resent though - presumably the adults and not the children? Do you actually want those children to go hungry or not have a home that's warm in the winter? Even if you judge their parents I can't imagine you actually want to punish these kids?

You can apply for an advance payment.

@BMW6 I was coerced and abused into having more children than I wanted, should I suffer?

People that weigh up childcare, end up a couple of hundred quid down for going out to work and therefore deciding against work is wrong, if you are able bodied, get out, do your jobs and better your lives without relying on the rest of the country to pay for you.

The best way to stop this is to fund childcare so people aren't making those calculations in the first place. It's also one of the most effective ways to break this cycle bc it means work actually pays (big Conservative slogan except they mean 'let's cut benefits to the bone') and therefore does better your life. And people actually make better decisions when they have reason to be a bit hopeful and don't spend their lives jumping through depressing bureaucratic hoops.

That was one of the few policies they brought in that made any sense!

The qualifying weekly limit of childcare costs is something like £200 for one child, though. So you can claim about £ 170 per week. For two or more children you can claim 85% for f approximately £300, I believe. So it's not a panacea. It's not necessarily going to cover holiday care for two children, for example. So that's still a problem for people doing essential minimum wage jobs.

The answer to people getting trapped in a benefits trap is this: Stop topping up the wages of people in work who are not paid enough to live on by the large corporations they work for. As I said, a large amount of families in poverty are those where there is one person in work. I object far more to corporate welfare than child benefits.

Actually …..

You still get for a third or subsequent child born after April 2017

-child benefit
-help with childcare costs
-disability element of child get dla
-FSM / PP entitlement

The only thing you don’t get is the UC child element

Absolutely this. The policy was never about the people it was going to impact, but about the message it sends to others.

Likely if the parents don’t work that some of the dc get dla so parents have no requirement to work as could be carers ? I wouldn’t swap with them if that’s the case so I wouldn’t be jealous

So, introduce an ACTUAL minimum living wage and properly fund childcare. This will go far more towards getting people into work than cutting benefits. And, as I keep repeating, keeping children in poverty costs far more to the taxpayer to support in the long run throughout their lives than funding children properly AND can lead to generational poverty which is a very expensive problem. Want to stop being taxed so much? Make sure corporations and the wealthy pay for their workers and make sure children grow up properly educated and healthy so they don't become adult burdens on the state and don't produce children in poverty.

Considering that we supposedly need to increase the birth rate here in the UK (so we have oodles of future taxpayers to support our ageing population, any policies that don't support this aim seem very counterproductive.

There's some good suggestions on the thread beyond give people money though

Well said!

Because the children suffer, children in poverty have worse outcomes in education and health and so the cycle continues.

Sorry, are you suggesting childhood poverty doesn't have an effect on people's futures? 😳 Well done if you managed to escape it, but most don't. And I wouldn't piss on the Tories if they were on fire.

If all you're worried about is the taxpayer funding - failing to pay for children in poverty leads to the taxpayer paying for adults in poverty. And that is far more expensive a proposition and creates more children in poverty when those adults grow up and inevitably have children. You will pay for one or the other.

We have really low unemployment in the UK- 3.7% are out of work. We have 30% of children living in poverty and 3% of the population resorting to using foodbanks. That's the same percentage of children in poverty as in Spain, where only 2% of the population are in enough food poverty to resort to using a foodbank, and the unemployment rate is 13.27%. 70% of children in poverty are in working families, 53% of those are under 5. If we want people to be working we have to make that work pays enough to avoid families being in poverty; otherwise all we are doing is pushing people into poorly-paid work and then funding their employers' profits.

But nobody in the "I want to make sure that only rich people can breed" eugenics brigade have not come up with a precise final solution on how they plan to achieve that. Pushing children into abject poverty isn't working; wagging the finger at them isn't working, so what's next? How do you plan on stopping the poor from having kids?

Not stop, but recognising that 2 children is enough.

And this is the original argument, stopping payments at two children SHOULD be sufficient, no one has a god given right to have the country fund however many kids they decide to have. Naturally this does not work in every instance, but if the system wasn't so abused, it wouldn't have needed to get to this point. Where do people think this magical pot of money comes from exactly?