feeling that tax credits are totally biased towards working mums?

[Dragonhart]

I am a SAHM and I get the min working tax credit as my DH earns just over the min for getting more help.

I was talking to my friend yesterday who works 4 days a week as a teacher (their combined salaries are just below the top of the band of getting any money) and I was saying what I got now we have two children. I get just over £40 plus about £40 baby element. When dd is 1 and I have two under 3 I will get £40.

She told me that she gets about £160 a months towards childcare in vouchers on her and her husbands paypacket (not sure if this is classed as tax credit?) and £75 permonth for her only ds in tax credits.

I am not making a coment about whether or not people choose to work as I stongly believe that everyone should have a choice to do what is right for them.

I just think that I should be supported in the same way as working mums. Surely I am my childrens 'childcare'?

"the low income families have to have BOTH people working just to survive,"

Well precisely. And I'm not sure that many people would beleive that surviving on benefits is an ideal situation to bring up a family.

Well, I agree they are shockingly complicated. I remember literally crying over the forms when I tried to fill them in (didn't seem possible to do them if you used to be employed but had become self-employed)
I gave up in the end. No idea if I'm entitled to anything. Gordon Brown can keep his sodding money and spend it on body armour if he likes.

I now owe them money because when I rang to change the day of my DS#2's birthday they changed the year instead! So according to their system I only had kids in 2003-2004. The've fixed it now but that year has been 'put to bed' and I can't get them to change it. I've almost given up now. Like banging your head against a brick wall.

Aloha - I'm trying to discuss principle, which, believe me, is an issue in ALL countries.

The tax and benefits sytem in France is incredibly complicated, and has been for a lot longer than in the UK which has only recently messed things up big time.

Xenia - totally agree that universal tax-free child benefit (perhaps even on a sliding scale) is a much more cost-effective and transparent way of supporting families.

Yes, but your principle - that tax credits for childcare discriminated against poor single earner households in favour of wealthier dual income households - simply doesn't hold if that doesn't happen.

If we're going to be political about it in the UK what we want is clever university educated mothers to have 4 and more children and those who find life hard to cope and are 3rd generation jobless with a heap of problems not to. Thus I suppose you need benefits for children targetted at the highest earners of all.

I am reeling from Anna888's assertion that women working outside the home are earning money for themselves which therefore counts as 'time to themselves'. If that's the way you measure 'time for yourself' then the long hours spent hanging out washing, cleaning etc for the SAHM surely counts as an abundance of time to yourself!.

When do you think working women get time to go for a walk by themselves, go to the hairdresser etc? SAHM have far more time than WOHM. After all, if your children are too young for pre school then they must sleep for at least 12 hours out of every 24 if not more.

Yes, working mothers of under 5s don't get time off particularly as most people these days work through their lunch break, so you get home at 6pm and move on to the second job until you go to sleep before the baby wakes you in the night.

yeah and being a sahm is always 24/7 where as being a wohm is somehow not...

Someone please enlighten me on the whole tax credit thing? The form made me almost cry, it was so non-sensical.
So I phoned up to talk it through, and was told you don't get working tax credit if either of you earns more than £15k pa, or if you earn that between you.
Eh?? Can this possibly be right? Surely everyone earns 15k per household, don't they, unless on benefits? Am so confused.... am I to believe that only dual-income households on more than 15k but less than c. 55k are eligible?

Sorry for being thick. Filling in forms brings me out in hives, almost.

too right xenia rush home from paid work to start unpaid work at 8 or 9 pm.

Aloha - DH is in the same situation. Gave up working to be self-employed. Now I look at these forms and can't get my head around them.

I found a few worked examples on the IR website - it's very complicated when you see how the actual calculations are done but I guess at least transparent enough for those with more of an accountancy brain. Part of me thinks I should give up, then the other part says that even the £545 a year child tax credit would be worth my time.

I don't actually believe that feral children running around are the product of absent family structures. They are (if indeed these feral children are a new phenomen, which I doubt) the product of a shifting in values, lazy parenting, poor education which isn't necessarily linked to the time spent at work by the parents.

MeandMyMOnkey - have you tried this on-line calculator?

"After all, if your children are too young for pre school then they must sleep for at least 12 hours out of every 24 if not more."

Clearly never met my DD!!!

I have only been dipping into this thread on and off, but how has this turned into a "who is more hard done by" thread?!?!

SAHM - 24/7 with small children - you get breaks if you can convince someone to have them/escape for coffee with someone who also has small children (but then not a proper break as you are still being mummy)

WOHM - 50/50 home & work - same breaks issue when home, you get a break from the mummy thing at work so some time to be you but still working so not always enjoyable "break"

WAHM - Trying to divide your time between work and children and feeling guilty for both. Never a break because when one stops the other needs doing.

The answer here??? Pros and cons with every job!!! Take time for yourself of an evening/weekend/whenever and leave
children and work behind you. Don't try to assume that you will ever get a break with either one around.

 
Tax credits - I still have no clue... I tend to fill in the form (actually I call em), and then they send me a bit of paper telling me what I get.

Xenia - I read somewhere that it costs about 1/4 million to raise a child from a baby to 18 or in other terms, about 20 years worth of averagely-paid work .

statistics says that most teenage mums are the daughters/grandaughters of teenage mums and teenage grandmums, i.e. it runs in the family.

one can lead by example, you don't have to talk about sex in the home all the time to get it through to a child that unprotected sex is bad (unwanted pregnancy, HIV, all sorts of nasty diseases that health centres tell us are on the increase because people, esp. teenagers, do not use condomns) - how hard is it to get this message across to a child/teenager/young adult ? if the schools don't do it properly it is every parent's responsibility to do it.

i gather this is what happens in societies that don't have hang ups about nudity or sex, i.e. Holland and Scandanavia, where teenage pregnancy is very low despite the legal availability of sex at a very young age.

why do we need unwanted teeange mum babies as a society Xenia ? of course there are babies of teenage mums who live in loving, caring families, but more often than not i am thinking of the teeange mum whose boyfriend DOES f* off after he has screwed her a few times, then leaves her to bring up the child in appalling living conditions.

i DO sympathise with the girls of course whose boyfriends f* off, but i still think that these girls need to be told that it is best not to get pregnant while they are in school and have dodgy boyfriends, all it does is create an underclass of poor children in poor conditions, poor health, how is this a benefit to British society (quite apart from being a drain on the tax payer) ? please get real !

the UN report quite clearly tells us that millions of children in this country live in poverty. i bet most are from the sort of background i describe.
lowering teenage pregnancy rate should be a priority for any govt.

Me, it's about £55k above which there is no working tax credit. That link below is to a good summary. Always check the calculations as they have made huge mistakes with many tax payers and not people who can easily hand back £10k. Mostly they are people on tbe breadline who have spent it. It's so complex. Why not just raise the single person allowance to some much higher level. If you go back to about 1900 I think most people just didn't earn enough to pay any tax at all.

Who is the most hard done by? I think it's an internal psychological issue. You could be a stay at home mother with loads of staff who never lifts a finger but feel depressed and I would even argue you have no purpose in life other than to look pretty and give your husband good sex to keep him and that that in some ways is worse than the two working couple on £15k a year each working very hard but with purpose in their life and no depression.

Thanks for help - Cristina, I think so but it still left me befuddled. Will have another look.
I don't know if Op is being unreasonable or not as i still can't work the damn thing out!

Ok so Nanny/cleaner/maid/butler(must be someone?) employers -does your employee have to claim TC? or do you pay them £10-12+ an hour?

And should they all go to University and get a job paying £40K at year?

Exactly bossykate! The assumption that working mothers are somehow not mothers 24/7 drives me nuts. SAHM also seem to forget that working mothers often have to do all the cleaning, cooking, homework, lunches, chores in a few small hours every evening.

Flamesparrow, if you have a 2 year old that sleeps less than 12 hours in 24, that is relatively unusual. I have 3 children aged 2, 4 and 6, a husband who works 60 hours a week and is out 2 -3 nights a week, no childcare and no family. Quite often I feel at death's door with exhaustion but I still have more time to get stuff done than when I was a working mother.

But a SAHM doesn't get a lunch break or a tea break

The reason that they will not increase the tax allowance (lower earnings limit) is because that would not differentiate between earned and unearned income.

They want to avoid someone who is not working but who has investments/property/interest income from paying less tax. Instead they want to target it towards lower earning families where one or both family members work.

Paula - the majority of working parents I know don't either!

IME most, where it is possible, try to compress their working hours by giving up breaks in order to get home to their second job sooner!

Depends on the ages of the children. Looking after a new baby and toddler is probably harder work than most jobs but once you get the hang of it is possible to get some cooking, pushing on the washer, outing to collect dry cleaning and shopping etc possible during the day and working parents slot that into the evneing - supermarket at 10pm is not that unusual around here having done 2 hours extra work in the evening too.