How the hell everyone is supposed to cope?

[Oink38]

Having a bad day of mass anxiety.

so, hubby and I earn ok wages. Not huge but we both work for charities so probably earn between 50k between us

childcare is killing us- nearly 1k a month for 3 days a week. We have no family or friends support. Now that the new funding has come in people who aren’t entitled due to being 3 shortly and not getting that funding until September will have to no doubt have their nursery fees raised again.

no pay rises in sight. Meant to be putting into work pension and also saving but honestly where the hell are we supposed to find the money

desperate to move but can’t cos nursery fees are too high.

fed up with this government. Not entitled to any benefits barely surviving month to month. Haven’t had a holiday in 9 years. Drive old car. No fun days out. Barely have anything left to do anything with. Utterly fed up of working for basically shit.

no can’t get other jobs I am specialised in what I do and hubby earns well for the field he is in.

and no we don’t buy take away coffees or avocados

just a massive rant really. Suppose aibu in thinking how the hell people are supposed to survive when everything is going up and no positivity anywhere

@Jas5mum That’s incorrect. I have been on UC and couples certainly do not get the same as a family of 7! Please don’t mislead people into thinking couples get more money than a family. That’s just not true. If you are only receiving the same as a couple then something is wrong with your claim.

In fact, a couple claiming UC gets less than two single people claiming. I believe it’s around £570 per couple a month if they aren’t in work.

If you have a family, the benefits cap means you can only claim for two children. So as a family of 7 you should be getting money for at least two of your children and then for either one or two adults. The first child gets between £269 & £315 per month. The second child gets £269. A single adult gets £368. A couple gets £570. So whether you are single or part of a couple, if you are claiming for two children you will definitely be getting more money than a couple without children. And rightly so because you have children to provide for.

I am not disputing your struggles, I hope that’s clear. I know UC isn’t a lot of money. State support is well below sustenance levels and has been for quite some time now. I know it’s a struggle. And the child cap has made things very difficult for some families. Personally, I don’t believe it’s fair to penalise children. They had no say in being born.

I clearly don’t know where you live or with whom you come into contact .. or even what you read however the statement ‘Yes everyone should have a decent home but in the UK, everyone (with some exceptions who should be covered by social housing) is already able do this.’ Tells me it’s a very different place to the world I live in. The truth is there is a huge housing crisis in this country which massively affects those on lower incomes.. not simply the very poorest. You may find this article interesting https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/apr/15/young-adults-uk-housing Personally I believe we should all pay more tax, the polarisation in the country won’t diminish until there is investment.. Plus a shake up of the privileges happily abused by the most privileged in society wouldn’t come amiss.

In terms of the lady with a spare £1000, good luck to her. Her home is as important to her as anyone else’s is to them and having some money now doesn’t mean you had it several years ago when you moved in. HA’s don’t have the capacity to continually means test people and then evict them if they earn over any particular threshold. What sort of security would that offer people? Why should her home be less of a safe space for her than yours is to you or mine to me.

That’s the problem really.. housing is viewed as a commodity when it’s so much more than that. The attitude seems to be ‘my house is a home but everyone else’s is a disposable asset’ I find that unacceptable. These issues are always more nuanced and complex than first appears to be the case.

There is no shortage of housing, there is enough to go around, the problem is that some people have much more of it than they need.

There is no shortage of housing in the wrong places

Many jobs in places where there are no houses so their solution is build more houses....in places where there are no jobs

Having lived in the rural north-east for several years, can confirm the total absence of jobs and relative availability of housing where the jobs aren't.

For places with no jobs, some sort of triaging needs to take place.

Some areas can and should be leveled up.

Other places, it might make more sense to adopt a “shrink to greatness” policy where you pay people grants to help them relocate and bulldoze some/all of the housing stock, rewilding those areas and turning them into meadows and temperate rain forests (which covered most of Britain at one time).

I come from an area with a lot of ex pit villages. There was never any reason for people to live there in these numbers other than to dig coal and the coal mining’s not there now. I know that paying people to move away sounds harsh (“There are communities there!”) but the thing is, a lot of these villages only appeared well into the 19th century when emigrants moved there from other areas to mine the Barnsley coal seam. The people who moved there, went there in search of economic opportunities. Perhaps their descendants need to do the same.

The modern British seem to be determined to maintain their country in aspic, which ironically is not what people in the past tended to do.

But of course, triaging requires some form of “picking winners,” which the British don’t much like, despite the fact that if you want places like the north of England to succeed, we’re going to have to pick some winners and run with them.

Exactly I live in the Midlands currently there are no jobs we are building houses on land we used to farm while in the "town centre" they are knocking down empty buildings (some were successfully converted into housing) but there are NO JOBS even care work is unlikely we have so many people transport out of here is poor so the "reasons" behind building so many houses for commuting doesn't stack up the only thing reliable about our bus service is breakdowns expense and occasional flames the train service is poor too they put three carriages on at peak times and 4/5 every other time like they actively encourage you not to commute 😆

The best of it is we employ people from out of area to build in our area so we can't even say we are promoting local jobs with the builds

Other places, it might make more sense to adopt a “shrink to greatness” policy where you pay people grants to help them relocate and bulldoze some/all of the housing stock, rewilding those areas and turning them into meadows and temperate rain forests (which covered most of Britain at one time).

We tried this but without the grants in Durham, for over 20 years council defunded local services and banned new builds. It was called "Category D villages", there were 250 villages meant to be closed this way and only four were because people protested with actual street protests and refused to watch the places they were born and raised in be destroyed..

The coalowners built the villages, the coalowners paid people to move here, and then the council expected people to just leave en masse and break ties with the people they know by taking this "stick, no carrot" approach. It was never going to work.

It did make for a great documentary and poetry-with-music project for the Poet Laureate a couple of years back.

The documentary because MN put a video preview mid-sentence and hid the word:

Very interesting; will have to watch the documentary.

Grants would have helped, I think. I think there is a tricky philosophical conversation to be had about “When we see deprived people in a deprived place, is it more important to help the people themselves, or the place itself?”

Just reading up on the Category D villages. Sounds like the councils actually started denying services as a deliberate tactic and attempted to force peoples’ hand in a very heavy handed way. I wouldn’t be in favor of that; I’d focus on positive stuff like offering people a grant or subsidy to buy property elsewhere.

The cost of providing services to people in poor, outlying rural areas (where the per-person cost of providing any service is likely to be several times higher than delivering the same service for someone living in the center of a city) is so high that it would probably make more economic sense to offer grants encourage people to move, and gradually shut the place down.

Otherwise, as local authority services are increasingly strained anyway by aging populations, services may end up being impossible to provide at decent levels anyway, by which point much of the population will have grown older and find it harder to relocate.

What gets me is that urban planners are talking about "20 minute neighbourhoods" like they've invented something new and imposing ULEZ on urban districts to try to improve air quality. In the countryside we already have 20 minute neighbourhoods, they are called "villages", and we don't need ULEZ because we are surrounded by fields. But apparently our 20 minute neighbourhoods with clean air don't count because we aren't in London.

do you want ULEZ, is that what you're saying? how would that work in a village without congestion or cut through short cuts?

My point is that people are being paid to make urban areas more habitable in ways that make them more village-like, whilst in other parts of the country similarly-qualified people are trying to destroy villages by closing local services, arguing that they aren't well-suited for living in. This is ridiculous.

A village lifestyle might have been something like a 20 minutes city “back in the day” when people accepted a very low standard of living.

These days, kids need 14 years of education, kids with SEN are expected to be accommodated in schools that meet their needs, women expect to be able to work, people expect to work in towns and commute back to their village at the end of each day, everyone expects a range of foods that need to be driven in or shopped by car, everyone expects to access health care and live into their 80s, it’s expected that disabled people will access all kinds of medical services and live for decades, old people expect social care, villages expect road surfacing, bin collection and all sorts of other things. These things require heavy support from outside the city, and they are really really expensive for local authorities to provide per-person in the countryside compared to in an urban area.

And all the rural people I know drive LOADS if they have the money to do so. Poor people in the countryside sometimes do not have a car, but will be heavily dependent on very expensive govt services that have to be driven in.

The whole point of a 20 minute neighbourhood is that the core stuff is within 20 minutes walk and everything else is a bus ride away. This differs from a village with a bus service how?

they are really really expensive for local authorities to provide per-person in the countryside compared to in an urban area.

Why? What's so magic about putting a few miles of fields between two 20 minute neighbourhoods that makes services cost more? I would have thought that the soaring cost of urban land to put service buildings like hospitals on would put urban costs up?

We live in a country that has "London weighting" on wages, including on the wages of people providing services. Surely that tells you that urban life is more expensive than rural life?

Why? What's so magic about putting a few miles of fields between two 20 minute neighbourhoods that makes services cost more? I would have thought that the soaring cost of urban land to put service buildings like hospitals on would put urban costs up?

Imagine an LA say, taxiing a child to a SEN school or having carers go and help old folk out, or workmen-type people driving off to villages to renovate someone’s house; it’s not just the physical distance, it’s the fact that you’ve got to pay drivers and carers and workers for their time and they lose huge amounts of time trailing about for this one person and this one family etc. In a city you can cram in a bunch of people in in a single morning. Rural bus services cost a fortune to run as the population densities are so low; very few fares per km and a hell of a lot of km to cover. Roads themselves cost a bomb (they are expensive to build and even more expensive to maintain) and in rural areas the amount of road surface per human being is absolutely massive compared with a city.

People are being paid to bring in LTN low traffic neighbourhoods, as car congestion is causing pollution. The idea is to reduce the amount that people use cars by making a car journey to get from A to B longer than walking - as 50% of car journeys are under 3km. Or charge people for using the short cut/rat run

Living in a village, which 20 % of the population do, people need cars to access service, they don't have congestion and pollution problems or rats runs in most small village or rural towns

Those years of nursery fees are hard but please hang on in there, once free hours kick in and school starts and far less for breakfast and afterschool club, it will get better honestly! X