Working families £18k worse off than benefits claimants after budget

[shoelances]

This is madness. Can the last taxpayer in the UK please close the door behind them.

www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/households-on-handouts-to-be-18-000-better-off-than-families-on-modest-wages/ar-AA1RqxlQ

There is some truth in this : but on the other hand,,in a world with rising cost of living, should having a given number of children only be the preserve of those with a certain income?

Moreover, the birth rate continues to plummet. There are pros to policies that encourage more children but they need to be paired with incentives and inspections for at least one parent to work hard outside the home.

You're missing the point. Our population is only growing because of high migration, and most people don't want that to continue.

Populations are falling all over the world,,apart from some developing countries and those are also set to fall, only more slowly.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/aug/27/england-and-wales-fertility-rate-falls-for-third-consecutive-year

So you think most families on benefits don't need them?

Your ignorance does not make me a liar, thanks.

We don’t need the population to grow. Population growth in productivity economy such as ours is a proxy for unproductive people. We have 10 million people of working age on benefits.

We need them to work. We don’t need to keep expanding the population while all these people are not contributing.

Please go back and RTFT before you fall for rage-inducing Daily Mail bollocks.The figure was actually for five kids, with disabilities.

I’ve just done the calculation for a couple with three children in private rented accommodation. The figure was £18,864 a year in UC, plus child benefits Nowhere near £71k before tax.

Most people on benefits are hard up.

There is not 10 million job vacancies though. There is not even a million.

👏

We don't need the population to grow but we do need to avoid a cliff-edge decline, which is what we are facing.

We need to get more people into employment and for people to start having more children.

Incidentally, about 3.5m on UCI are already in work, and there will always be those who very clearly cannot work, either because of their own health or because they're someone else's carer, so although our rate of economically inactive people is tok high, the idea that there are 10m people who just need to get a job is the stuff of fantasy.

It's 18 hours (not gov website but BBC):
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9rzvwrn30ko

The average number of hours worked is 20;
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-future-cohort-study-understanding-universal-credits-future-in-work-claimant-group/the-future-cohort-study-understanding-universal-credits-future-in-work-claimant-group

"So it would make sense to make us a prosperous trading nation"

But the UK voted for Brexit so this ship has sailed....

We are now suffering from the economic harms the public wanted and voted for. Project fear indeed.

Can you say whether the workforce will require as many entering it in twenty odd years as AI increases

Working token 16 hours to claim maximum benefits is not work. It’s gaming the system.

There is no other way to spin this. We have 19 million working age on benefits, 5 million of whom don’t work at all and those that do, many are only working token hours.

The ‘we need more people’ argument is basically just saying ‘we need more people so these people can stay on benefits’.

So, no we don’t need more people. We need these people to work full time and not be on benefits. Even if you exclude the genuinely unable to work, which is far smaller than the number who claim to not be able to work.

I'd prefer not to hang my hat on "the robots will find a way to save us".

‘Save us’ that’s not the question. It’s will you have jobs for the people entering the workforce in twenty odd years time or a large number unemployed?

If the latter how will they be supported?

Well I know some as well as do many people

With the rapid development in AI we fewer but more highly skilled people in the country. Lots of entry level jobs are going. There will be a two classes as a result - those who do manual/unautomatable jobs and those in skilled work.

This is why many people are moving to vote for Reform - they see the bigger picture. We need tightly controlled bordered and we need unskilled Brits to do the unskilled work. No one should be allowed to sit at home on their Xbox when there are veg to be picked.

These days many Labour voter vote "labour" to be ironic. They don't know what a days labour actually is.

I'm a single parent who has worked her way out of the benefit system and in to a job where I pay high rate tax - I have never not worked. I absolutely do have more money than I did when I was being topped up with tax credits. Even today I looked in my bank account, all bills paid including my Mortgage, all Christmas presents etc and there is still a good chunk of money left over for the rest of the month that I could only dream of at one point.
Half the stuff I read on here about benefits is total batshit, I don't credit the system for helping me improve my situation but I do credit my parents for supporting me by doing random needed bits of shopping for me, helping with childcare, helping with expensive activities so the kids didn't miss out, looking after the kids for a week while I went away with work etc....
It gets completely missed on here that working your way out of the system that constantly feels like its going against you is HARD and also being at the mercy of whichever government is in power. I can't imagine how hard it would be to on benefits and unsecured housing. In my town there is very little housing that you can get that accepts benefits even if you are entitled to them so it's not like people are living it up.

That just proves the piss take. If the minimum is 18 and the average is 20, assuming a hand full of people actually do a proper weeks work, the vast majority do the absolute minimum to get the benefits.

The need to move 18 to 30.

Are you sure they arent keeping thier hours low because they feel the deductions made for the bit of thidr income over their work allowance amount make it not worth working more hours in terms of stress and logistically rather than they physically get more money for working fewer hours? I think the deductions are 55p from net pay.

I am very sure about that thank you. People who only work part time and claim benefits for staying at homes are the ones who should be working full time. And from what you have described about it really doesn’t make them look any better.

I wasn't really talking about morals. Just quite a people say they people on universal credit have a higher income by working fewer hours, but I dont think the total income is more (more of a smaller income is made up of benefit though). The total income is less.

@NiftyBird and others: do you really believe all these necessary increases in population will translate into future taxpayers?

If people aren’t paying into the system now, why will the next generation?

There are families who have many children where the women do not work because it is culturally inappropriate to do so. They must have children. So 8 kids, 4 girls… that’s 50% at least of the family who will not be contributing. As well as the “feckless” we always hear about who are generationally welfare-dependent.

The point really is that people do not want to work the extra hours, they would rather benefits cover that off and to me that’s unacceptable.

I personally think they'd get more people working more hours if it wasnt 55p deducted out of net pay. To me you earn £1 and keep 20p of it after income tax, ni and the deduction. Its not the most motivating amount of money if you are a single parent who is struggling to access childcare during the hours work is available to you. Its factually more money but a lot of effort to get it.

I dont really have a string opinion on the hours peoolr should work I just think that the current set up could be more motivating by a lower taper.

Im fairly consistent on this in that i think the tax cliff at 100k is bonkers too. People do all sorts to keep under 100k so they can keep their free childcare.