To be shocked that in 1970 a woman with 2 kids got in benefits the equivalent in purchasing power of £58.20 a week?

[crunchymint]

That was it. With some contribution towards rent, bills, food and clothes to pay for. No wonder lots of women stayed in awful marriages rather than being on benefits. I can't imagine how those single mothers managed.

I agree that stuff cost a lot more relatively. There were no supermarket clothes, let alone Primark and its ilk. Most people just didn't have much stuff and what they did have they valued. And I came from what would be considered a very middle-class home.

However, my father would not have been able to afford that house today. He bought it for £7k in 1965 and it has just sold for £1m. (Sadly my parents died many years ago before house inflation.)

So although people have many more possessions, the Big One (ie, a house) is the one thing that is infinitely more difficult to get your hands on.

Cake Depends where you lived. Plenty of people in 1970 were still living in a single room or two rooms. It was when slums were being cleared and social housing built, but the poorest still lived in slums. So one or two rooms with no hot water and outside toilets shared between 4 families was the norm for the poorest.

And I remember the benefits office being very big on benefit cheats then. Yes fiddling the electric meter or doing midnight flits was common.

Also that £58 a week had to include rent.

My ex husband walked out in 1996 leaving me with four children under the age of 10. He paid the princely sum of £450 a month in child maintenance and this was topped up by 1 penny a week in Income Support and that was all we had to live on and that included contributing towards the mortgage. It was hell!

My parents house cost £3000 in 1970. My dad was earning £1000 a year then, and they really struggled to get a mortgage for £2700. The interest rate was really high, and they could only get an endowment mortgage. Their building society - the Halifax - wouldn’t lend them the money. My dad had a ‘good’ middle management job and they don’t live in the SE.

By the end of the 70s inflation had reduced their mortgage to virtually nothing. However, they had to live through that inflation and the resulting wage restrictions.

They certainly felt poor - but so did everyone else around them.

With record low interest rates, much easier credit and longer mortgage terms, I would imagine just as many people are able to get onto the housing ladder now and their relative purchasing power with thier ‘disposable’ income is probably far greater.

We lived in a block of flats and midnight flits were so common people would just leave I used to wonder where my friends went

Crunchy your absolutely right when i was thinking about the 70's social housing i was thinking about the end of it and it as a decade rather than in your title the beginning 1970 where there was a disparity in standards

Helendee That sounds like hell.

Cake Also benefits were introduced in the mid 70s to top up low wages. So things were much better by the end of the 70s. At the beginning of the 70s some people were still living in unimaginable poverty. I can't imagine bringing up a family over many years in one room or two rooms with no hot water and a shared outside toilet.

I remember hearing an economist on the radio recently who said that if chickens had gone up as much as houses they would now be £50 each. (admittedly they weren't talking about as far back as the 70's). So the value of 'stuff' has certainly stayed the same and decreased in relative terms.

Yep we lived in a 1 bed tenement in glasgow. Outside toilet shared with others in the close. We were a family of 5 , bathed in the kitchen sink and slept in the kitchen. The only good thing about moving to a new town was getting a three bed bungalow and a garden. However wasn't so great being left with no family around and a DF not coming with us! Anyway that is another thread....

There are far fewer people living in absolute poverty now than in the 70’s. But statistics only measure “relative poverty”, ie how many people have less than 60% of the median income.
Many of those would have been thought comfortably off in the 70’s.
The average person in those days did not have central heating, colour tv, a phone, a car, their own washing machine, hot water every day, etc.
Having been born in the 1950’s, I see a massive improvement in living standards over my lifetime, and also in human and employment rights for women, gay and disabled people.
Of course some people are still poor, and an estimated 900,000 children are living with alcoholic parents, who are likely to be very dysfunctional in providing a decent home or managing their income, but in general life is hugely better than the 70’s.

My first job in 1974 paid £1.98 a day.

I don’t know about the 70s but I was shocked when I first saw how poor some people are and how little they have.

I remember in the 70s as a teenager visiting friends in houses that families had been living in for many years, and yet they had very little furniture, no floor coverings, etc. These were not families with alcoholic or drug taking parents, just families that were very poor.

That still happens

We had no carpets outside toilet one fire in the living room mattresses on the floor one bath a week on a Sunday

We though a bottle of lemonade was a right treat!

Clothes were hand knitted or mum made them on a hand turned sewing machine

We used to take bottles back for the pennies, and collect green stamps as a discount. We had free milk at school.

Walked rather than catch a bus - no car.

Proud my mother learnt to drive as woman driving was seen as unusual.

Parents divorces (thank god) as my mother was regularly beaten - which wasn't a crime!

immortal Does it really? After years of living in the house and parents not having alcohol, drug, or gambling issues? I know it happens for maybe a few years while people struggle to get stuff in a place they have moved in to. But I have been in various families houses on benefits for years, and all have had basic furniture.

Well, I have come across some pretty wretched living conditions. Certainly one of the families I work with have no carpets or floor coverings and no bed. I can’t say for sure there aren’t other issues there, though.

If you were a widow you got a little bit more, but not a lot.

I was a single parent in the late 90s and early 2000s and worked for cash in most places.

Everything was cash, though not necessarily cash in hand. My father was a farm manager, and I remember him lining up all the square brown wages envelopes across the desk, then the wage slip on each one, and then he'd count out the money, which he'd been to the bank to draw out in a big bag earlier in the day. Sometimes, once we'd learnt to count, we were allowed to count it all our. It seemed to me at that age that they were all paid fortunes (there was paper money, and not just pound notes,) but by the time we were old enough to actually have some understanding of the pitifully low agricultural wages, there were far fewer workers (mechanisation), and most had moved to BACS.

I also remember going into the bank with Mum before ATMs were available - she'd write a cheque for "cash" and pay the catalogue, and the rest of the money was in the right denominations so we each got our pocket money and school dinner money and subs for Brownies and so on for the week.

You actually had a legal right to be paid in cash then, because lots of people did not have bank accounts. But that does not mean cash in hand.