Single parenet benefits proposed to end when youngest child is 11 rahter than 16

[uwila]

Oh this will be popular round here.

here

Isn't it so shocking that the taxes of hard -working parents and families are going to prop up the likes of Wal-mart and Tescos so they can continue to pay their staff far less than a living wage? And why ius it so rarely pointed out, when someone says that enforcing a minimum wage will put some companies out of business that, if your company can only survive by paying staff slave wages then maybe it deserves to go out of business?

And finally, why can't right-wing commentators make up their minds? On the one hand, they want the EvilNewLabourGovt to pay parents a sum of money to stay at home rahter than just pay them a some of money to spend on childcare - on the other hand, parents who accept money off the Govt to stay at home with children are EvilDolescroungingPikeys.

I think those of us who pay nannies try to ensure we pay above the minimum wage and give them good working conditions as far as we are able. That's just market forces at work. You don't keep good staff if you treat them badly.

I don't think any party should pay parents to stay home. I would like a much simpler tax and benefits system with much lower tax rates so you keep more of your take home pay and then decide whether to spend it on a nanny, childminder, expensive hobby or holidays at your own choice.

In a sense we all have a choice. We can move to countries like Finland, Iceland and Sweden if we prefer those systems as regards tax and childcare or we could move to a flat tax country like some of the ex Eastern bloc or a country with big inequalities between rich and poor and very cheap servants or we can stay here. Lots of choices depending on your politics.

id also like to know why i am still getting my part time earnings topped up by IS (which gives my son free school dinners and the youngest the new free veg voucher), when my ex now has nearly £400 a month taken out of his wages by deduction of earnings order.

i "presumed" that i would lose the IS, lose some HB and CB and gain all of the maintenance and obviously feel a lot better in myself for not receiving as much state help.

when i queried this i was told quite bluntly that my exes money would go straight in tony blairs pott and i would receive £10 a week disregarded (i havent received any yet, hes been paying since last July).

i argued with them that i thought it most strange that the exes maintenance would get me off IS but apparently for some reason they want me to stay on it

brandy that is unbelievable.

No wonder the CSA is so unpopular.

yea i know caligula, thats what i thought,i made so many phone calls about it and in the end i gave up and thought ok if you want to keep giving my kids free dinners etc then carry on. bloody daft if you ask me

Didn't read the whole thread, just the article and the first few posts. I was surprised that income benefits are paid for such a long period (till the youngest dc is 16).

Here (Germany) single mothers on benefit are not obliged to find work before their dc are 3. (Yes 3, not 13) However they want to change that now and force single mothers who are out of work to do full-time community work where they get paid a token sum of say 1.50 Euros an hour or oblige them to do some kind of course.

I find it really hard to imagine how a single mother could cope here working full-time, it would be a major task arranging your childcare.

if you get IS then any maintenance goes directly to them-you dont see it.i didnt think the csa actually existed as,although i have phoned them many times over the years and always gave my xp's details to them when asked,i have never had a single letter from them.ever.and i dont think they've ever contacted my xp.

so when i was a single mum,living off taxpayers' hard earned money,the father of my 2 oldest children was working and not paying a penny towards their upbringing.

the whole system is screwed up,and the government just keep making it more complicated and wasting more money.

yea i know divastrop, i get a top up of IS ontop of my meagre wage.the fact is, is that if they paid me my full maintenance then i would not have to claim the IS and the maintenance would also contribute towards my rent which means the state wouldnt have to pay me so much,seems bloody daft. there must be a reason why they do it likethat,il have to do some googling

AH, the Germans have the way forwarrd then... which in fact benefits women although mothers on benefits don't realise it - because the discipline of work, how it improves your self esteem and the example it gives to your children is almost as important as the other issues too.

No Xenia the German example isn't one to follow. At present the whole social welfare/unemployment benefit system, which was re-organised a couple of years back, is one big mess. No one knows what to do about it. Perhaps Scandinavia is a better model where childcare is affordable and widely available and also of good quality.

I didn't mean to say I find it right that mothers with dc under 3 be obliged to take up very low paid community work when there is no affordable daycare available for most dc under 3. It just isn't practicable the way things are right now over here.

In Germany it used to be the case that single mothers with dc under 3 were not expected to work, most areas don't have enough state-funded nurseries/kindergartens. However they were expected to do so once their youngest turned 3. I was just surprised that in the UK, the dm are not expected to look for work once their dc start school because here it would be unthinkable that the state would NOT expect this of them IYSWIM. I'm just surprised at the totally different approach.

Xenia: how good is it for children to see their parents forced to take risks with their health, in badly-paid, improperly insured deangerous jobs (because cutting costs and boosting profits has meant making safety compromises all over the place) obliged to lie or con other equally desperate people (yes, all those dodgy cold-caller companies and risky loan-shark enterprises have offices stuffed with staff earning slightly less than the minimum wage plus "commission" that they'll soon end up selling their own body partys to achieve)...while there are plenty of perfectly ethical employers out there, for people who have dependents and who have been out of paid employment for a while, the choice of possible jobs narrows drastically. If you were skilled before you had your DCs your skills may be out of date (and a course to update them way beyond your means).
While you have a point that a reasonable job (ie one that keeps the other half of the unviersal bargain and offers a fair day's pay for a fair day's work) does improve one's self respect, a bad, exploitative, underpaid and totally insecure one makes things worse, not better.

But Xenia - in Germany it is now frowned upon for women to return to work after childbirth! (Or so I'm told by sil who lived there for many years.)
Not only that - the excellent benefits available for mothers mean that German employers shy away from taking on women of child bearing age.
Surely that doesn't fit with your ideals?

In Germany it isn't frowned upon for mothers to return to work at all if they would otherwise be dependent on benefits. They would meet with overwhelming approval I'd say. I would say society as a whole here disapproves of single mothers on benefits with dc over the age of 3. Some people are more tolerant of dm whose dc are smaller but not everyone by any means. Basically if you have the choice between being on benefits or going to work, you're expected to work, whatever your situation is.

Mothers who have a partner in work - that's another story. If they go back to work, they're somehow doing this for their own benefit and to the dc's detriment. However, because single mothers would be dependent on the state if they stayed at home, I would say there is universal disapprovement of their situation.

Yes the double standard about what's right for children depending on whether their mother has a partner or not, is pretty universal I think.

At least Xenia is consistent in thinking that all mothers should work outside the home regardless of marital status; my real beef is with the idiots who think that married/ partnered mothers are neglecting their children by being WOHM's, but as soon as it come to lone mothers, they're suddenly in favour of mothers being WOHMs. Then they can slag off LP's for neglecting their kids, when they're not slagging them off for being on benefits. Wankers.

yea wankerspmsl

It's only the lazy English who don't think people should work for their benefits. We don't have a good enough work ethic and we think things should be handed to us on a plate. You do well in the US and people think - I could emulate her. You do well in the UK and they all sit there jealously thinking how much they'd like to over tax you if they were in charge. We have a fundamentally defective mindset over here.

If we made benefits so very unpleasant then we might get people up off their bottoms and in the workforce which actually is better for them anyway than relying on state benefits if they can't find a man to sponge off.

xenia-why not just bring back the f*ing workhouse and be done with it?i can understand people getting annoyed at single mums sitting on their a**es all day when their kids are at school but you cant seriously think that women should be forced to put tiny babies into nurseries so they can go out to work?thats if they can find any work in the first place!

ds, that's exactly what most married women have to do if they can't afford not to work. No reason single mothers should get special treatment some kind of luxury position different from those who are tolerating husbands and trying to make ends meet without being a burden on the tax payer. Sounds like it's similar in Germany, France, US. I don't see why there should be a problem with people doing at least some work for their benefits. The link between work, national insurance set aside in a fund that you then draw on when you fall on hard times is rubbish and has gone - we never set that aside. We should remove that mental fiction and merge NI and tax.

I love "Xenia Bluntery".

I dont think that any parent single or otherwise finds it easy to manage money wise these days. I do think childcare should be cheaper and buisiness should be more accomodating to working parents as a single parent i dont expect any special favours but i do expect a little respect.

A lot of this is to do with the idiot mindset that whatever women do is not work and therefore doesn't need to be paid. Looking after babies and toddlers is work whether the LOs are your own or ones you're employed to look after (of course, if you're employed to look after children your wages are generally shit, despite the fees nurseries and agencies charge parents for childcare (or indeed care of the elderly, disabled or unwell). Because childcare is work that women love to do...) And it's funny how often the sort of rightwing commentators who demonise everyone on benefits as a lazy workshy moron spend nearly as much time whining that the Govt won't fund "married decent mothers" to stay at home.
When it comes to work vs staying at home for the impoverished, unskilled or lving-in-high-unemployment-area mothers, the cost to the state is similar whether the state is paying for childcare (cos whatever jobs these people can get don't cover it) or paying the children's parent/s to look after them. It's not actually making a difference to your tax bill whether the sum of money hypothetically paid out to the hypothetical mother is spent by her on a nursery place or on food/rent so she can mind her own kids. So why all this aggro? Is it just that some of you can't bring yoruselves to believe that people outside your own social mileu are human beings? Or do you want the poor to be obliged to come round and scrub your toliet in return for the odd food parcel?

sorry haven't read the whole thread. i suspect it would make my eyes bleed.

I've always worked full time, I have three children, my ex buggered off and i get no maintenance, so I work ( well, i worked when the ex was still around, but meh) I am absolutely exhausted. I get home from work around six having picked up the children from afterschool. do all theusual evening chores, make tea, make lunches, supervise homework, break up minor spats, bathtime, bedtime routine etc. the difference being that I do all of this on my own. there is no-one to make the tea while I help with homework. no one puts on a wash while i make sure school bags are OK for tomorrow.

it's a hell of a lot different being a single mother who works to a partnered mother who works, because all of the responsibility for everything is yours.

one plus recently folded in scotland, taking 600 childcare places with it. my local council has stopped funding it's after school programme and has put it out to tender, meaning a lot of uncertainty and potentially huge price rises. it's all very well for labour to posture about the evils of single parenthood, but they need to back it up with decent afterschool provision so our 11 year olds aren't roaming the streets.

some people seem to think that 11 year olds are perfectly fine "for a couple of hours!" yeah right.

but seriously what do single parents do with their kids whilst they go to work?

and who stacks the shelves in tesco or cleans the office buildings at 6am?

i bet those wonderful fullfilling jobs dont pay enough for a nanny, private school or nursery

xenia judges things by her own world. thats nice. when your on the bones of yer arse on benefits with fuck all for xmas and no gas in the meter and 2 milk tokens left to last, when you have PND, your marriage has broken down and your educational attainment wasn't outstanding. when going to college isnt an option family help is non existant you cant afford childcare - how the fuck are you going to work?

Well said custardo, pps and m

Here, here, runkid!

I work full time - NOT by choice. My husband works evenings and weekends.

We're working poor. It's low paid and crap.

But I don't mind my taxes going to help single mums because I know damn well what sort of jobs many of them would qualify for, and they are 9 times out of 10 not compatible with any sort of quality of life at all, much less bringing up children.

As for the US, well, I'm from there, and I couldn't get out fast enough.

Was SO sick of a person's sense of identity being tied to what they did to pay hte bills.

Yawn! Boring!