Lone parents with babies of a few MONTHS old being threatened with sanctions...

[MrsNextDoor]

here on the Gingerbread site

Bloody bastards!!!

One lone parent was told that she was being sanctioned because she'd turned down a nightshift job on account of not being able to find overnight childcare.

Others with children of 3 or 4 months old were being told they had to find work immediately or lose their benefits.

What the actual!??? In many cases, job advisers are giving their clients the wrong information....seemingly deliberately...telling them the law has changed and they must get work now....the most vulnerable people...lone parents with infants...being bullied. AIBU to think this should be stopped immediately!?

Parents in couples do not have to return to work. A mother with a partner who decides to leave her job after maternity leave will not be expected to attend interviews at the Job Centre and be in work by the time the child is 5. If her partner is on a relatively low income, then her choice to not work is effectively rewarded by the tax credits system, with no pressure on her whatsoever to return to paid employment. If and when she does choose to return, she will have the option of sharing child care with her partner, and will also have the emotional support of another person sharing the pressure. I'm not against this system, although I do think it's disingenuous when SAHMs talk about having no recognition for the job that they do. I do, however, think that there should be parity. If a lone parent has to be in work by the time the youngest child is 5, then so should both partners in a couple, otherwise there should be no eligibility for tax credits.

Ditto me - single single parent in every sense and work full time and pay for everything and in that sense keeping lots of single mothers who don't work at all. There we are. Hopefully it will pay off longer term that I work for me and my children

It's straightforward enough - raising a child is two jobs; caring and providing. If you don't earn enough to buy the care someone else has to do the providing - partner or state.

There's little point 'making it fair' - you can't. Not everyone earns the same or has the same outgoings.

I do feel having a child shouldn't be a lucrative way to avoid work which at one point it was.

BatFox. I do all the drop offs and pick ups. I go to all the appointments. My husband works far from home on building sites in various locations so all of that is down to me as I work 40 minutes from home rather than two hours. I also get up if anything is needed at night because he gets up before 5am every day and needs the sleep.

Yes some single mothers might have unpleasant exes. A lot of women have unpleasant partners too. Have a read through a few threads on here. Plenty of women get little or no support from their partners.

To say that all lone parents are unsupported and all primary carers in a couple are supported is a completely false distinction and isn't justification for the state deciding one set of children need a parent at home with them and the other doesn't.

Plenty of single mothers have supportive families and ample free childcare options. Plenty of mothers in couples are isolated and have little help. You can't make decisions on which children need their parents at home and which don't based on sweeping generalisations based on anecdotal evidence.

The problems with paying for childcare apply just as much to couples as they do to lone parents.

Personally I would have no objection to single mothers continuing to receive support if the system was changed so that working mothers could use their tax credit childcare entitlement to fund actually staying home and care for their children themselves. As opposed to the current system where it can only be spent on paying other people to look after them.

Personally I find the current system indefensible. Offering one group of people the opportunity to stay home, while denying the same opportunity to others and only offering them help to put their children in childcare is deeply unfair.

The tax credit system doesn't provide enough to cover the shortfall caused by loss of housing benefit and having to pay full council tax.

It's not a choice to go back to work, it's a necessity to keep a roof over your head and put food in mouths.

Aer,

I think you may be right in that sense. I think it would be wonderful if all of us as parents were allowed to spend as much time looking after our own children as we wanted to, and not have to send them to other people to care for.

It makes me very sad to see tiny babies put in nursery - not because their parents think it is best, but because they feel they have no option.

I would think that the child's needs ought to come first always. Of course if parents want to use childcare and work then that should also be supported. But enforcing the use of often substandard childcare (in some areas/situations) is to my mind wrong, for the children of single parents and of married/paired up ones.

There was a discussion quite a while back last year some time re tax credits and couples. I don't think it will be an option to claim tax credits and be an SAHP if a couple claim tax credits because of low wages. Both people will have to work a certain number of hours. I think this is one of the things that will be changed in those cuts. No longer topping up people who opt to work part-time or opt not to work at all in the case of one partner of a couple.

Vivienne that's already how it is isn't it? You can't just work a couple of hours a week to get working tax credits. You need to fulfill a certain amount.

Vivienne, Universal Credit will be bringing in those changes - as I understand it, a couple will need to be earning the equivalent of the minimum wage x 35hrs to be able to claim UC. It still means that, as long as one parent is working full time, the other can choose to stay at home until the children are 18. Meanwhile, a lone parent has to return by age 5.

Just out of interest, I've played around with figures in the "Entitled to" calculator. To make it easy to enter the details, I've made the assumption that s/he lives in the same area as me (NW England). The maximum Housing Allowance would be £109pw, and I think that would probably get you a 2-3 bed terraced house around here. S/he'd received the following benefits:

Income support - £3822pa
Child tax credit - £6108pa
Council tax support - £715pa (council tax payable would be £773)
Housing benefit - £5685pa
Child benefit - £1789pa

Making a total of £1510pm. If s/he was working 40 hours per week on the minimum wage, and had to put the 2 children in full time child care (I've used local figures again for this - £170pw per child), s/he'd have the following income:

Net salary - £12273pa
Child/working tax credit - £18913
Council tax support - £380pa (council tax payable would be £773)
Housing benefit - £4604pa
Child benefit - £1789pa

Taking off the child care costs, s/he'd be left with £1690pm, making her £180pm better off for working full time.

A couple with the same children, with one partner working full time (NMW) and the other not working, would have the following income:

Net salary - £12273pa
Child/working tax credit - £7993pa
Housing benefit - £2466pa
Child benefit - £1789pa

Making £2043pm. They'd have to pay council tax of £1031pa as the lone parent has a 25% discount.

If both were working full time on the NMW, with the children in the same child care as the lone parent, the figures look like this:

Joint net salary - £24546pa
Child/working tax credit - £13378pa
Housing benefit - £1172pa
Child benefit - £1789pa

Leaving them with £1945pm after child care, and actually financially better off if one parent stays at home. So, who's actually being incentivised to stay at home?

Thanks for doing these calculations Elizabeth. I think things will change after this budget in July. I didn't think it was an option now for only one parent to work and still claim top up tax credits once the child is over a certain age. I don't think that's fair at all. Better off not working than working which is ridiculous.

But you also need to account for work-related costs when doing better off calculations - travel can cost a lot, along with work clothes, work social costs/collections and generally not having free time to shop around as much. And on the flip side there is the potential for promotion and a higher salary in future if a parent does work. So simple comparisons like that don't always work in individual cases.

Currently, to qualify for working tax credits a lone parent of child under 16 has to work 16 hours pw. A couple have to work a combined 24 hours pw. It does not matter if one does zero as long as the other does at least 24 hours.

I know steady, and I also know the situations I gave as examples won't be the norm for the vast majority anyway - e.g. the couple may be able to work round childcare better so they don't have to pay as much, or the lone parent might be able to compress working hours and also have help from a family member for a day per week. Everyone's situation varies, so I just used those set-ups as an illustration. I also know that the figures I used are for a relatively cheap area of the country in terms of housing and childcare costs.

Vivienne, I think very few people realise how the system is set up in relation to SAHPs. For some reason it seems acceptable for SAHPs who receives masses of tax credits to say "oh I don't work because we can afford for me to stay at home", while a lone parent saying they could afford to stay at home would be lynched. Obviously, the figures I've given are for 2 pre-school children in childcare, which is not a situation that lasts forever. You can see, however, that during that period of time, the state is actually paying more to the parents who are in work than if they had the lone parent or one of the couple at home, and the half of the couple who is working is not paying much tax at all. It's undoubtedly an expensive period of time in anyone's life, especially if you are a low earner, and I'm not opposed to parents being supported/allowed to have one parent at home in those early years. I just think there should be equal treatment for lone parents and couples, and if a lone parent has to be in work once the kids are at school, then so do both partners in a couple.

Elizabeth with UC a couple will have to earn the equivalent of 70 hours at NMW not 35. If they have a child under 13 it's 52.5 .

Viviennemary a couple could have a Sahm under UC as longer as their partner is earning the above amounts. Actual hours worked per couple is irrelevant.

Very helpful to have the exampls. I did soething similar for a single mother who did not work and one who earned £45k or £55k and had £14k tax./NI, £14k rent or mortgage (SE) and £10k pa per child - her twin sister. The worker was no better (except longer term when no childcare needed to be paid for and in terms of "career investment").

That change to UC so that whether parents work or not to get the working tax credit both parents will need to work 35 hours will make things a lot fairer particularly for those of us women who work full time including single mothers like I am.

I find it shocking that the jobcentre are making heavily pregnant/very ill people "jump through hoops" as some say. My last appointment i went to was for 3pm so i struggled to get there via public transport (thankfully no 2mile walk this time as made connecting bus) and got made to wait 40mins to be told ill phone you in a fortnight to see how you areangry why could she not of phoned me instead of me having to do a fair bit of trailing while in pain?

That is why from your 29th week of pregnancy, you are eligible for income support.

The job centre are only making you jump through hoops because you have chosen to not go over to income support, so the ESA related hoop jumping is still being applied to you.

Thanks SoonToBeSix, I didn't know that. They have been very vague about what the requirements will be under UC. It's almost as if they haven't got a clue what they're doing

And I commuted to London regularly to work full time until I went into Labour. Workers do work in pregnancy. I don't see why pregnancy unemployed single mothers should be subject to greater feather bedding.

People have different pregnancies. If you're working you can start maternity leave from 29 weeks, and if you aren't working you can claim income support from 29 weeks, there's no special treatment.

I hope I am misunderstanding this. Are we saying that people have found themselves in a situation whereby (single or otherwise) where they are able to choose to do less hours and get topped up by tax credits.

Hillingdon I think that is the current system. Universal credit is trying to address that.

Someone who earns £13k a year on part time hours might find they end up with the same money as someone on £25k a year full time because of tax credits and housing benefit.

That's exactly the situation at the moment. I know two people offered permanent extra hours who won't take them as they would lose tax credits and would have to be at work more. I genuinely think that's wrong.

Omg. No wonder in certain instances people are claiming it's not worth working. I really do hope this is changed. Thank god the Tories got in. Labour seems to be going from bad to worse, will there be anyone left to go for the leadership?

Those figures are wrong.

You are not entitled to housing benefit if your working and receiving tax credits as part as a couple. You have no help in that aspect. Which is righty so imo.

child benefit is not £1789pa at all - £20.50 a week at 52 weeks = £1066pa.