Should Labour abolish the two child benefit cap?

[changefromhr]

In two minds about this. Yes for those who find themselves on benefits after having more than two children (job loss, divorce etc) but perhaps not for those who choose to have more than two children when they have never worked (disabled families excepted).

https://www.theguardian.com/society/article/2024/jul/11/uk-two-child-benefit-cap-affected-1-6-million-children-last-year-figures-show

The "stop gap" is to fund councils to buy properties, as LLs sell.

Again sorry I don’t have stats but anecdotes and painful memories of a difficult time in my family’s life.. and know that has no value to some here who only want published stats from one perspective. 🙄

100% agreed

I asked for stats to prove your point. I don’t care what perspective they come from.

Absolutely not

And refer what I said about there not being any studies looking into this properly for fear of the optics.

I was joking when I said they should forcefully take the properties but seriously we do not need more migration for more workers that's a lie to keep wages low. Even if we did need some it would be far less than the amount at the moment. The record immigration levels over the last decade or two are the reason there's a shortage of homes and rent is so high. It's simple supply and demand but I'm ready for y'all to call me racist 🤷🏻‍♀️

I think it should be abolished.

I think that once a child is here we need to make sure they are provided for, regardless of what we think of parental choices.

So i basically think it’s the lesser of two evils that we might end up funding very large families for people who really should have thought twice, than that children go hungry and otherwise without.

I don't know when we got to this bizarre point in society that even hinting that people should engage in some level of thought towards social responsibility before having children is somehow "right wing". It's not.

The truly wealthy in this country do not pay their fair share, and we have an underclass in society that are perfectly happy for their lifestyles to be funded by the state. And that is paid for by middle class people who are nowhere near as well off as they should be. It's a bit of a kick in the teeth to go to uni, work hard at your career only to be hit with a 50% tax rate and for it still to be a struggle to get on the property ladder. And I get that it's even harder when you are poor but we have created incentives where wages are so stagnant and the benefits system so badly designed that it punishes people who are genuinely disabled and need help but also rewards people for having too many children. And don't get me started on the birth rate let's be real if you are born into a family where nobody has worked consistently for decades and mummy has been able to keep having babies with different men who also don't have jobs so she can get a bigger house the chances of you entering that top tax bracket are almost nil. If out of 4 children only 1 becomes productive that isn't a good investment.

So on the one hand children shouldn't be punished for the mistakes of their parents, on the other hand it is unfair to ask the very same people who work hard and budget for the size of their families to fund it.

The homes are still there. They won't be left empty. Someone will be living in them. They don't just disappear or spontaneously combust! If landlords sell up, someone else will buy them and someone else will live in them.

@WanOvaryKenobi

100% agree with everything you say. You've hit the nail on the head in all aspects there!

It's complicated for sure. Do I like the thought of children growing up in cramped conditions? No. So I won't have more children than I can fit into my house. It would be unfair otherwise.

Do I think it's fair that a couple who have not worked consistently in years get exactly the same new build 3 bed house as someone who has earned it? This is happening in my area, the council are buying off the shelf. No, I don't think that's fair either.

No, i'm not someone who says anyone concerned about migration is "racist".

But the fact remains is that in many sectors we do not have the supply of workers already here to do the work we want doing.

Immigration at 200k is probably sustainable, but migration at 760k is not, completely agree but why is this happening? migrants from Asia/Africa do not ever intend to go back home, so they bring their families with them, so last year, 134k care workers came here, they bought more than 200k in dependants.

anyway, a bit off topic.

Yes children should be provided for once here but not via child benefit.

cheaper childcare, before and after school clubs which provide a decent meal for those who truely need jt. Vouchers for things specifically for the children, money put into schools for extra lessons for those falling behind, money to go into PSHe lessons to explain the costs of children and better contraceptive advice. Better information about how to get out of poverty so they children don’t repeat the cycle etc.

just throwing money at parents did not brake the poverty cycle before the cap came in and won’t if the cap is removed.

And what about the people displaced when their landlord sells their home?
Where will they go in your world without priblvaye landlords?

Our local council have nothing to do with housing now, haven't done for a good few years handed it over to two companies to run and now depending on where you live that's who you deal with.

Due to letting staff still work from home they've recently sold off the local offices to private developers too, its a 12 miles one way journey to where they're based now so if you want to speak to someone face to face that's a fair old round trip by car let alone cost on public transport.

Don't you get that the problem will just repeat itself? Being shafted from one landlord to the next, paying ever higher rents propped up by housing benefits. It's miserable and unsustainable.
Private landlords don't provide housing. They control access to it.

OK. So what is your solution to house people who cannot buy their own home for whatever reason and can not be housed in social housing because there's not enough of it?
It's fine getting all het up and righteous about it, but what's the viable solution here and now to house families if there are no privately-owned houses to rent?

There is not enough housing (in areas where people want to live at least) in general. The only solution is to build more housing, and use existing housing more efficiently.
Private landlords are not providing housing. Large numbers of them are not essential. The houses exist in the same quantity with or without them, they are not actually contributing anything to the housing market.

Without "professional" multi-property landlords buying up nearly every single available house, demand will fall, and prices will plateau or fall, making it easier and more affordable for renters (who want to) to be able to buy. At the moment, they're often priced out by the "professionals" who often can borrow at lower rates due to ratcheting up using one property equity to be the deposit for the next or get lower commercial loans to encompass several (or more) properties which is cheaper than single residential mortgages. Or they're priced out by professionals who have a shed load of cash behind them and don't need a mortgage/loan at all. After all, lots of people jumped onto the property rental bandwagon to get better returns on their savings when bank interest rates were so low! If more people are buying, then they're not renting, and we'd need a smaller "pool" of rental properties, which could more easily be run by councils or housing associations or private renters (i.e. those with just 1 or 2 houses to let rather than dozens or hundreds). A huge number of renters want to buy but simply can't get on the housing ladder because they're priced out, ending up paying more rent than they'd pay as a mortgage.

So where do you suggest people living in private rented housing live? I am well aware that we need more housing, obviously. But 'we need more housing' is not a solution to the issue that we have more families to house right now than properties to put them in. Remove private landlords from the equation and the problem is even worse.

I am not sure that offering the rented house to its tenants to buy will help out in anywhere near the numbers you seem to think.
Likewise, I would like to know where you get your assumption that landlords have 'a shed load of cash behind them'. Some may well have, but I suspect most don't, hence a lot of BTL houses being jettisoned as the mortgage rates rise. I wonder how many of them have been bought by their tenants?

No. One of the reasons DH and I stopped at 2 kids is because we know that’s the amount we have the money and space to support.

Yeah, you probed my point there...it's women's responsibility, not men's.

We absolutely marry and have children in good faith. We might discuss with our partners the what ifs...but no one is going to say, 'when I have an affair I will withdraw all financial support in favour of my new partner and then will use self employment as a means by which to avoid paying child maintenance', are they?

And plenty of people will never have anything that resembles a career. Hell, I have a teaching career and in the early years paid out the same in childcare as I was paid on a monthly basis. If we are saying that teachers can't have children because they can't finance a family on a teaching wage then what kind of dystopian future do you envision, exactly?

It's a problem that middle class parents feel they can't afford to have additional children, when their taxes are supporting low income families to have more children than them. That is neither fair nor sustainable.

The high cost of childcare and the huge price disparity of housing in different areas of the country throws income redistribution way out of whack. You end up with a single mother having the same disposable income regardless of whether she earns £14k or £70k. Again, that's neither fair nor sustainable.

I think the best way to tackle the inequality which childcare costs bring (women being forced out of work, or working for nothing - just to keep their career going) would be to extend state educational/nursery provision to the preschool years for long enough hours for parents to work, like France and Germany have. Ideally with cover during school holidays too.

I know the government have tried various things like free nursery hours, but they are so under-funded and so limited compared to normal working hours that nurseries just make up the money by increasing the cost on the non-funded hours which parents have to pay in order to work. It doesn't actually help parents to work: in fact working parents end up funding non-working parents even more!

It needs to be state-managed, with employed pre-school teachers and government-owned premises, like in France.

It would be very expensive (maybe £30 billion? Ie 1/3 of the current education budget allowing for fewer years but higher ratios). But so is the welfare budget at £100billion for working age benefits excluding incapacity and disability benefits. That should go down a bit when the childcare disincentive to work goes. There are great incentives at the benefits income level so that 'working always pays' but that disappears at the tax-contributing income level, where it's arguably more important.

Families not having to pay for private childcare would also leave more head-room for increased general taxation (every 1p increase on basic tax raises £5.5billion). Each citizen benefits from their own childhood education and then pays taxes to cover it for the next generation, so over time it's fair for this to come from general taxation even from people with no children themselves.

It makes it fairer between the genders too since even absent fathers would be paying the higher tax rate to support childcare costs, instead of it falling so heavily on women. 25% of families are single-parent in the UK, overwhelmingly financed mainly by the mother. It's time we recognised that reality.

And by removing the huge financial disincentive to having children, we might actually increase our birthrate - which has huge long-term benefits for the country.