To think that a 23k benefits cap will drive some families in the SE

[Minifingers9]

... Into destitution?

I live in a pretty unappealing and comparatively cheap part of greater London but you can't get a 3 bedroom rental for under £1400 a month.
If we lost our jobs we wouldn't be able to live on 23k a year as a family of 5. Not when 15k of it was going on rent.
Why don't they have regional benefit caps?

Oh, and the key words in that ridiculous article ( the Guardian just gets worse - it's more hysterical than the Mail!!) are relative poverty. Not poverty but relative poverty.

Which usually means not having a holiday or eating out more than twice a year .

The report also says

“If these families respond to the cap by making behaviour change, for example moving into work, they are likely to see themselves and their children move out of relative poverty,” the civil service author adds.

So the parents (who are the ones ultimately responsible for their children) can make the choice to improve their circumstances.

Also the report talks about 'relative poverty' as opposed to absolute poverty. There's a big difference between the two in terms of how 'poor and destitute' someone actually is.

Agreed Saucy - and really, let's be honest, the kind of people who think nothing of having 5/6/7/8 kids on benefits with no intention of working are unlikely to be paragons of parenting virtue.

Most smokers come from the lowest socio economic group. A quick squizz at Bebefits Street and the only one swithout a fag hanging out are the babies. Give up fags and save £70 a week. Each.

And we have to remember that its potentially this amount for lazing around, no travelling costs, no getting up in the morning, no worrying about your job and responsibilities. Just so we all understand what it I'd for;

TTWK who asked me how much I put away in the halcyon days of earning a take home pay of £1950 a month.

Enough to keep me going for a few months...trouble is that autism is a lifelong condition! So do I qualify in your opinion now? .

Cannot believe the fucking attitude of some in this thread. Fuck right off, I worked for over 30 years and for some of that was a HR taxpayer and happy to be so. It never occurred to me to wonder where the tax money went or to begrudge benefits to those who need them. I therefore cannot and WILL not feel guilty that I now NEED to claim. I STILL would not CHOOSE to be on benefits if I didn't have to be though....why would I?

And to have someone who (if under a certain age) I probably supported through school, every time they saw a doctor etc over the previous 30 years question me about "how much of my salary I saved" is beyond obnoxious and rude. How fucking dare you?

May life smack you right between the eyes so you learn some humility....and I mean that most sincerely. Only then might you understand.

I DO hope you too are saving in your halcyon days because when life goes bad and your crystal ball has failed then you will need it. When it runs out though you WILL need benefits too.

Mini: how much do you think the maximum should be then?

I have no doubt a cap will affect some people, but it comes down to one thing: how much state subsidy does a family or individual/couple (excluding those with a disability/whose children have a disability) have a right to expect? I think to cap total benefits at the equivalent of a wage of £29,000 is not entirely unreasonable.

Lots of people live on this sort of income, and are expected to pay for everything- living costs, travel, accommodation etc out of this. Some working families in this wage bracket will be entitled to child tax credits etc, but will be not be getting the full £23000.

In general, if you are working I'd think it is unlikely that you would exceed the benefits cap (unless you had a large family and thus had high housing and childcare costs) and so are less likely to be affected by the cap. At the end of the day, benefits are a safety net IMO. They are not there to allow you to live where you'd ideally want to indefinitely, but should allow you to have a roof over your head, enough food on the table, a warm home and suitably clothe your family.

I could probably be persuaded to support a short period of paying to keep families where they are for a while they try to find a job (e.g. after a redundancy)- but after say 6 months, they would revert to the cap and if that meant moving somewhere else, well that's what would need to happen.

It is true for many people not in receipt of benefits that if they can't afford to rent/buy suitable accommodation in the area they would like to, then they have to compromise by either moving to an affordable area or live in less than ideal accommodation. Sometimes that means having to move jobs or have a longer commute or the children move schools. I don't think people who receive benefits should be exempt from having to make those choices, in the same way I have to. I don't want people to be homeless or starving, and I don't view them all as scroungers or lazy.

And I STILL support a benefits cap . I would just like it adjusted for regional differences.

The bit that sticks out to me is where they talk about people having to move away from London where they are more likely to find jobs.

It's strange, because inspection of the ONS regional labour market stats for May shows that London has higher unemployment than many other areas, including the East Midlands.....

Very good post jacks

Oh I didn't realise that anything in the Guardian was automatically assumed to be hysterical nonsense.

Would it have been better to link to a document written by the government's own ministers?

Oh, hang on ...

I am as wary of the Guardian as I am of the Fail. Both can be hysterical but the Guardian tends to couch theirs in a more educated way,

not read all the thread its to long. I dont think there is a simple answer. but i do think something needs to be done about the high private rents. how can it be right that. the smiths have a family who live in social housing. rent is 120 a week. so they are not effected by the cap...next door lives the jones with their family. but their rent is 250 a week and are effected by the cap and are really struggling.

Hillingdon I do believe you would last 5 minutes trying to manage on benefits. Yet still preach away.

And there you have it - inverted snobbery, envy and class hatred in one.

What, you think only people on benefits are repulsed by the injustice of expecting the poor to up sticks and leave just because a bunch of well-off people have decided to settle in their community and pushed house prices up?

If you object to 'rich-twat' being used, do you also object to 'benefit scrounger'? If not, why not?

Suburban - ok. Here's what I mistrust regarding the article.

'Tens of thousands of children face being plunged into poverty'

I have bolded "plunged into poverty" because it is emotive and lacking accuracy. If you were claiming £26,000 and are now on £23,000, you are not being 'plunged' into poverty. That would be if you had £26,000 then suddenly had to get by on £6000.

"If parents are unable to find extra work the policy will put 40000 more children on or below the official poverty line."

I have two issues with that. Firstly, parents who don't find work will be worse off than those who do. That isn't surprising. Secondly, the official poverty line is pretty high.

"Social landlords .... say lowering the cap will make it economically risk for them to house all benefit-dependent families."

That's not an issue with the cap, that's an issue with the fact that it's hard to find private rents when on benefits. I agree that's an issue; I disagree it's specific to this issue.

"the lower cap level will make all three bed ... and some two bed instantly unaffordable to capped tenants in ... Tory heartlands from Thanet and Basildon to Reading and Winchester."

Again, it's not astonishing that the poorest people in the country can't afford sizeable homes in the most expensive areas. Plus I dislike the phrase 'Tory heartlands.'

"Many associations ... may decide they can no longer take the chance of letting homes to larger families on benefits."

May. May. Not will. May. But she goes on to say "The impact this will have on homelessness is truly worrying."

What, you think only people on benefits are repulsed by the injustice of expecting the poor to up sticks and leave just because a bunch of well-off people have decided to settle in their community and pushed house prices up?

It's not just because of that though is it? It's also because they don't work and expect to be able to live wherever they like at other people's expense. I'm sure no me would expect the working poor to up sticks and leave because their area has become desireable, were talking about people that choose not to provide for themselves.

No-one forces anyone to have large families while living in the most expensive bit of the country.

"I don't know whether to laugh or cry at minifingers tiny violin about having to buy cheaper food. What - like 90% of working families earning less than £29 K , then?"

I would really struggle to feed my family of five on an income of 23K, if I was paying 13K to 15K a year rent (which is what a three bedroom flat costs in my very down at heel, grim part of greater London).

I know a family who lives near me. Single mum, 6 children. She is subject to the benefit cap, but luckily for her lives in an affordable HA property, so will probably just about be able to cope on 23K. If she was in a private let her children would go hungry and she would struggle to clothe them and heat her home.

I agree, she shouldn't have had 6 children without a job. I agree that the sperm donor father should be forced to contribute more to the upkeep of his kids, I agree she should get a job, but none of these things have/can happen. She has a baby of only 4 months, and has never worked in her life. Her children are off school sick a lot, and her middle child has quite significant special needs (he has ASD but it's complicated by physical and psychiatric issues). I can't imagine any employer wanting her as she would have to take so much time off to deal with her children's health problems. Childcare would be so prohibitively expensive that it would cost many times more to care for her children than she could possibly earn herself.

I feel incredibly sorry for her children, who are already suffering. I don't think she wants a life on benefits. She got pregnant when she was young and stupid, and is struggling to cope with her day to day life now. I think the effect of the benefit cap will be to reduce her family to destitution, and this will damage her children further - something for which we will all foot the bill for in the future.

It's all well and good to say 'well people shouldn't have had children' but that doesn't take you anywhere. Some unwise and naive women (and very young and uneducated women) have always HAD children that they can't support through work. In the past this was dealt with by abortion, adoption and probably (way back) through infanticide, and prior to the introduction of the welfare state children from these very poor families simply died in much larger numbers from poor nutrition and ill health.

I don't want to see a return to the days when the poorest families were reduced to outright destitution. I don't believe that doing this will deter people like this from having children they can't afford to raise - it has never done in the past, and doesn't in poor countries today.

The thing which encourages women to delay childbearing and to limit their family size is EDUCATION. The more educated a woman is the less likely she is to be a single parent, to have her children young, to have children without the means of raising them. Surely we know enough to realise that the way to halt the cycle of deprivation is to focus on the social well-being of very young children, and on improving their educational chances? Reducing the poorest and least educated families to utter destitution will NOT stop the cycle repeating itself.

Soverylucky I am sure you didn't think it was inhumane as you moved with your dh.

I'm tired of hearing this 'would you want to swap with someone on benefits?' line.

Look- we're all well aware life isn't a bed of roses. I would hate to be the 6th child born into a non working family, where the parents take no responsibility for limiting the family, -and (referring to the point upthread) where mum and dad probably smoke as well. I know that as a child in that postion, given that parents are the greatest influential factor, my life chances are pretty screwed to begin with.
I can know all that and simultaneously believe that it's right to have a benefits cap. I can know all that and still believe that it's acceptable for a family in that postion to have to move to a cheaper area.

The thing is that someone who is struggling to that extent won't support their kids education so the whole cycle starts again whether there is a benefit cap or not.

To my mind contraception not education prevents multiple births you can't afford.

"No-one forces anyone to have large families while living in the most expensive bit of the country."

No.

So how does that help in addressing how as a society we care for the children born in these large families to parents who can't feed and clothe them properly without significant support from the tax payer?

We do care for them.

They are fed, clothed and housed.

Minifingers please advise you friend to claim dla for her dc with asd. This would exempt her from the cap.
My dd has asd, I would be more than happy to help your friend with the claim if you want to pm me.