Can we all take a moment to pray for Thea, living life on the brink of poverty at £6k a month (£3.2k of which is UC).

[BananaramaDefence]

In a good month when UC gives full entitlement, Thea has a total of £6,142.00, from £2,800 in take-home pay and £3,342 in universal credit plus child benefit. Her monthly expenses such as childcare, rent, council tax, energy and food etc are usually around £6000. She says: "So it’s living very much on the edge."

And now the cap is removed she will get more!!

From this: Pregnant mum-of-four: 'Budget benefit change saved our Christmas' - The Mirror https://share.google/QGbNeuIKPAmg1qNG5

No wonder people get pissed of with welfare in this country. I work 40 hours plus a week, have children, have to pay a mortgage, childcare and I earn way less than this!!!

No child should live in poverty but at the same time no family should get this muxh in benefits.

Before people say, yes but it's to pay rent and collate, I also have to pay all that and my mortgage is half my wage!!

That isn't Thea.

Thea is a single mother of 3 children and is not pregnant.

I would have reviewed it again if you hadn’t reported it, which resulted in the posts being deleted. It’s fine, though. I followed the discussion closely while it was still up. The original poster was simply sharing their views and experiences. You seemed unable to handle that, and when someone called you “yappy,” perhaps you reacted from a shameful nerve.

At the end of a discussion, it’s okay to agree to disagree. Going out of your way to report posts instead of moving on feels unnecessary and, frankly, a bit immature.

Thought UC was introduced to cut down on Welfare Benefits not increase them to seemingly ridiculous amounts.

I don't know how UC is worked out. But the amount pre UC payable on housing benefit was based around a strict local area allowance. That is an amount that was capped at a certain cost

Lower for Social Housing, as the rents are usually lower. Private Sector rents were more generous.

However if any rent was more than the capped applicable amount. The renter had to pay the difference.

Or move to a cheaper place. Maybe out of the area to live in another cheaper area.

Yes, l do realise that rents have risen astronomically nationwide. But surely some kind of cap should be applied.

No.idea how to rest of UC is worked out but the figures quoted see really high.

There was a women on News Night a few months ago who was crying poverty about her UC benefit which with her wages was about £8,000 a month.

So please include this women in your prayers when you pray for Thea.

Amen
💰💰💰
🙏

That's how UC works too. Unless rent is very low, not many people will have their full rent covered from UC.

I reported it because it wasn’t okay and isn’t okay to personally attack another poster. Not quite sure where ‘shame’
comes into that?

I’m not sure why you were keen to assume the posters comments or arguments were from a position of shame. Perhaps you’re own logic is failing you?

But you are yapping 😂 and derailing the thread with pseudo academic aspirations. Your perspective is no more valuable than anyone else’s, why is that so hard to understand?

Thea is on a decent salary - I seem to recall it's over 40k pre tax.

She has three children, one at school and two still in nursery. So that's three children who need childcare paid - and legal requirements say that the youngest is probably on a 1:3 ratio, the middle probably on a 1:5. Call it 1:4 average and Thea needs half a staff member per day to care for her children directly - account for the fact that nursery days are long so staff work 4 day weeks (so that 0.5 person is now 0.625). Then add on the staff holidays and Thea would need to be covering around 0.7 of a childcare staff member salary just for the direct care - plus cleaners, cooks, managers, building, heat, light etc. Then there's her older child. That's another few hundred a month. With 3 kids, Thea realistically needs to be paying a full childcare staff member salary just to care for her kids.

If your argument is that employers should pay enough that one salary can cover childcare for 3 children, then you create an unsquarable circle as the childcare staff would need to be paid that much too. So Thea needs to be paid enough for the childcare (which is in turn an entire person's salary) plus rent, bills etc. That's mathematically impossible as an average situation.

Since modern childcare - with strict ratios and high costs and stringent regulation-there has never been a time when a single full time average salary (let alone a minimum wage) would cover 3x childcare plus rent plus....

It's completely unrealistic to expect a single wage to cover that - because the maths don't work. A single parent with 3 children will (on average) not be able to afford everything without help.

Just leaving this here incase anyone wants to have a read at what child poverty does and how much it costs the wider system in the longer run.

www.jrf.org.uk/child-poverty

There are also children in the next and much worse bracket down which is classed as ‘destitution’. That means their parents cannot afford the very basics. It probably means that right now on a pretty cold and wet Saturday evening (it certainly is here where I live) there is no heating on in their home, there’s no nice dinner cooking in the kitchen. Monday is 1 December. They’ll know they can’t do the nice Christmas things like panto and Santa trips like their friends. There’s no point making a Christmas list as their gifts will come from generous donations from strangers who give to charities like Action for Children. There’ll be no decent Christmas dinner.
That’s not pure emotion by the way, that’s a bit of a vignette of real life situations in my area that I’ve seen with my own eyes or heard about via friends who work with these families. Most are what are termed ‘the working poor’. They have minimum wage jobs and are squeezed by the extortionate costs of private renting as they couldn’t buy anywhere as they don’t have a deposit because they’re unable to save as they’ve been living on the edge of their monthly budget for ten or more years. Some are single parents. I know one is a single parent because her partner was violent and nearly killed her so she ended up in a women’s refuge then into a flat which she can barely afford. She’s on a local authority housing waiting list but it’s a long wait and she’s not homeless so she’s not a priority,
On Thursday the government (elected by the majority of those who voted last year) decided this kind of situation wasn’t okay in our country and decided to at least try to help. Personally, I think that was a very good move. The changes won’t help for this Christmas but hopefully by next year a lot of children will be in a much better place. They’ll be by no means rich. But they’ll be a bit better off. I’d happily see my disposable income dip to know it’s helping people far less fortunate.

Im not saying it is more valuable but im
allowed to share it.

Are you aware that the term ‘yapping’ is derogatory?

I also don’t have ‘pseudo academic aspirations’ but I do work with academics (as I said if you’d read back) who do the work and the economic evaluations and the social evaluations and feed that into the policy makers who take it into account to make decisions. Like they did on Thursday,
That okay with you hun or was it too ‘yappy’ for you to deal with?

Geezus. WTAF

Then why are these people producing offspring? It is they who are directly choosing to raise children in poverty.

Maybe if they used contraception & focused their efforts on work & education, instead of childrearing out of wedlock and in disadvantaged circumstances, they’d move up out of poverty. Instead of perpetuating it.

It’s not as though contraception and abortion are difficult to source. This isn’t 1960, it’s three generations hence. And where are we?

There needs to be SOME effort on the part of those receiving assistance. But one never sees it. Just the complaints that the handouts aren’t large enough.

@CheeseIsMyIdol well I’m a centre left voter and totally agree -

What impact do the people you are disparaging have on your life? They have zero on mine. The only impact they have had is me feeling awful for them and wishing they had a better life.

You’re lovely aren’t you. Happy to see ‘offspring’ in poverty. Thing is, I’m not. It’s not a child’s fault. But say for arguments sake your point is right and their parents made ‘bad choices’ (most didn’t btw) and had these ‘offspring’ and brought these ‘offspring’ into this world we all live in together. Are you happy for those children to go without because of it? I mean, it’s happening right now in this green and pleasant land we call home. Kids are cold and not properly fed. Are you okay with that? I’m not.

I’m not either.

Where did the poster you are quoting say that they’re happy to see “offspring” in poverty? I think you’re taking it out of context.

Yeah you’re right she didn’t say it directly. I just inferred it from her post where she referred to children as offspring.

They aren’t just children, though. When people choose to reproduce, their offspring (child then youth then adult) are affecting society for potentially 70-100 years. Often for the worse, if reproductive decisions are made unwisely. Doing so repeatedly when one cannot even support one is extremely antisocial.

No one wants innocent children to suffer but any suffering that does occur is 100 percent the fault of the parents. No one else had any input into the decision process.

Shd those dependent on the state for housing be given a choice on where they are housed? The rent and childcare bills are huge and funded by benefits. Outside London would be cheaper. Shd north london even be on the list?

The salary may also be as it is because she is in London. So what's the trade off? There are several examples of people on here that pay theirs (housing/childcare) with no help and are also high tax contributors. Resentments build and understandably so. It cannot continue as it is.

They drag down society because so many resources are spent remediating problems & dysfunction that could have been avoided with prudence and self-restraint.

Those resources could instead have been spent on things like health care, climate change and other pressing needs.

Mind blowing perspective there. Thanks for enlightening me on how some people think.

I think this is exactly the point.

A family with a lone working adult in London is in an extremely difficult financial position.

The problem I, and other high earners have with "Thea" is that she is being topped up by the state so heavily she is trapped by the system that supports her.

Sure she can get a job that slowly pays her more. But she won't jump from 45K a year to 100K a year overnight. Every pound she earns from promotions or even just inflationary rises erodes her benefits. So she'll be less likely to take promotions or move up, perhaps she drops down to 16 hours because that's what the government classes as full time (in what universe exactly...?)

By topping so massively (£3342 a month!!) the system kills aspirations as survival today requires her to keep her benefits.

As the kids grow, yes she'll lose childcare but also she'll be able to claim more housing element as you become eligible to claim for larger housing as the kids grow older.

Wonderful we live in a caring considered society.

Except - because the job she works at pays less than mine, I can't get any benefits or state support. So I end up worse off each month than Thea because I earn 80K a year. I have no child benefit, have to pay my rent and childcare for my three kids.

I just can't understand how anyone thinks this is reasonable.

This isn't about Thea. I'm glad she's so vocal... I had zero clue. Although I often wonder how so many people around me seem to have so much when they have such low incomes. I have always been a big believer of state support, but this is not right.

This thread needs to go to Rachel Reeves and every major party leader.

Exactly.

Its indefensible that people who don't claim benefits but do pay eye watering amounts of tax have to make difficult decisions about how many children to have. Often carrying a quiet grief with them for the babies they wanted to have but couldn't But the government will pay others to pop out babies left right and centre. Its wildly illogical

You're ignoring the reality that a lot of child poverty is caused by irresponsible adults who have more children than they can cope with let alone support financially, emotionally or educationally. They often do not have the skills to provide a healthy diet and a routine to their offspring. The first time I had a dental appointment I was nine and it was set up by my teacher because my mother never bothered to buy any of her children a toothbrush yet could always afford cigarettes for herself. Also, my severe tooth decay was caused by my mother who used to give the baby/toddler a bottle of sugary water to keep us quiet. She was far from alone in these behaviors. I called her out on it when she started to do the same thing with my sister's children when she was looking after them. There needs to be education on how to care for babies and small children as part of maternity care as this is not innate.