2 child limit, why is nothing done about it? Do you agree?

[Hopeforchildren]

Hey guys, so it has been a fee years since the 2 child limit on tax credits. I know a few families with 3 children and started this thread for them. It seems quite odd that nothing has been done about it while most families have more than 2 children and are on low income. I mean not just single parents and non working parents, it’s a common struggle for all this including full time working couples or lone parents. What are your views on this subject. Shouldn’t there be a stop to it since its unfair on the child and even the previous children that has to go without? Before anyone attacking, please bear in mind that some people don’t agree with abortion or feel strongly connected with the baby to terminate the pregnancy. Looking forward to hearing your views. Please stay kind.

The idea that loads and loads of people were popping out 3+ babies just for extra money or without thought for how they'd afford them is laughable

But isn’t this why the government introduced the policy? Because people were taking advantage?

It would’ve been better to cap benefits at first point of claiming. If you had two you can only ever claim for two. If you had four you can only claim for four. That should apply to both parents immediately.

Look at that woman in the TV claiming to be single yet having another baby year on year with her ‘Ex’ partner - blame the like of her

Anyone familiar with me and my posts on benefits may be surprised even shocked that I actually agree that if you’re in receipt of benefits you should be doing all you can to avoid conceiving another child.

Benefits are not easy to access and should be a safety net for when people need them for as long as they need them.

But it’s irresponsible and selfish to bring a child into that situation.

They’re not as generous as some like to think/claim and it is not easy living on them especially now when the rules seem to change almost on a weekly basis!

BUT I think children who already exist when their parents circumstances change such that they need to claim benefits should be covered regardless of birth order.

I also think that we need a massive overhaul regarding how nrps (who let’s face it are mostly men!) are made to meet THEIR financial responsibilities to the children they are half responsible for creating.

Cm needs to be higher and properly enforced. I suspect the only way to truly ensure this is if govt pays cm to the rp and recovers the money from the nrp. There are far too many loopholes with cm currently that need closing and enforcement is practically bloody non existent! The cms HAVE powers to enforce sanctions on non paying nrps yet don’t use them.

In addition I would apply the 2 child limit to nrps also - if they already have 2 dc with one woman they shouldn’t be allowed to claim beyond the cap for subsequent children.

My ex never paid cm consistently and even when he did it was rarely the full amount that he should have been paying. He’s gone on to have 5 more dc with wife 2 which I know they have when they could claimed working and childcare tax credits for. He’d try and make out he was skint meanwhile they have a large detached house in the south east, both have decent cars and they and the kids have the latest phones and other tech plus at least 2 holidays a year. It’s a piss take!

Like the pp who mentioned a guy with 7 kids he doesn’t pay for - that’s outrageous and plain shouldn’t be allowed!

Plus if the men were cracked down on I’m fairly sure the number of “accidental” pregnancies would drop significantly. I’ve had an accidental pregnancy myself (was on combined pill and taking properly) I know they can and do happen BUT having had it happen once since then I used 2 methods of contraception unless I was actively ttc. And I’ve not been pregnant unless I’ve wanted to be since.

I’ve a medical reason why I can’t risk even another pregnancy past first trimester let alone a birth and I would really struggle with having an abortion, so that’s another reason I’ve been very careful with contraception (weirdly even with that being the case I STILL couldn’t get permanent sterilisation on nhs).

An awful lot of these deadbeats are also the type of men who “don’t like” using condoms - tough shit!

Ex was a bit like this at beginning (red flag?) but I was very clear that he wasn’t getting any without a condom! I explained my reasons (sexual health as well as contraception) and said I wouldn’t be allowing condom free sex until we’d both had sti screening AND we were both completely ok with the possibility of a pregnancy as I wouldn’t be having an abortion either (didn’t know if the health issue at that time as undx until I had dd).

He was blasé about sexual health stuff as both of us had not had many partners prior to meeting each other (we were still teens) but he WAS wary of the pregnancy side especially when I told him I’d become pregnant before while on the pill and he definitely didn’t want to be a father at that point.

At various points throughout our relationship he’d try and push the no condoms thing (by this point we’d had screening though given what happened later that was no guarantee of safety!) but I’d jump in with “oh are we trying to get pregnant then?” Said half jokingly (I’d have been happy to ttc as soon as we were married he wanted to wait a bit) and he’d backtrack.

But if men were properly pursued and made to step up on their financial responsibilities to children they half create I’m pretty sure a lot more of them would be more keen to use condoms!

“I also think that any maintenance received should be deducted from benefits.” It used to be, this was stopped precisely because the deadbeats were so unreliable and the system couldn’t cope with intermittent payments - still can’t! So that policy plunged many children into poverty. Personally they should have fixed the issue with non payment of cm!

I was under this system when ex and I first split and I was on benefits for the 1st time. If he paid even just £5 of cm it was assumed he had or would soon pay the full amount (just over £50 a week it was supposed to be) and the full amount was deducted from my benefits payments - and the full amount was a lot of money then! It meant that in order my dd didn’t go without that I often did, without food, clothes, shoes, a heated home when dd wasn’t home...

He NEVER went without! That’s wrong.

“£150 / month flat rate regardless of a NRP's income is an insulting suggestion” it’s more than many nrps are assessed as needing to pay now! If they pay at all! It would certainly be a good start.

“how do explain to your children that you sent their father to prison for money?” Oh come off it! Even if as should happen the cm rules were enforced imprisonment would be a last resort and would be as a result of the fathers actions in refusing to pay cm NOT the mothers - quit blaming rps!

“so no existing kids should suffer this cap.” I believe it also applies to new claims so a family with 3+ children born before the 2017 deadline but only starting a claim now is I think affected by the cap.

I chose to only have 2 as I can't afford 3

Why would I expect other people to pay for me to have more children?

Oh and I receive no benefits, not even child benefit

Agree with Graphista that any cap should also apply to men, and that payments from NRP needs to be more rigidly controlled and enforced. There seems to be a ludicrous amount of blokes going self employed etc. To me it's fairer that any benefit cap starts from the moment you claim - so no new babies. You cannot penalize existing children.

I agree with the cap.

You've got people like the Radfords (yes I know they're not typical) having child after child, after child and claiming around £50k a year in tax credits. That can never be right. People got to work day in and day out yet don't earn anything near that. I'd bet my last pound that had they not had generous handouts like that they'd have though twice about having so many kids.

We've got 2 children. DH had a vasectomy before DS2 was a year old because my body couldn't take another pregnancy and we couldn't afford another child so we made sure we didn't have one.

We, also, paid maintenance for DSS and made sure he never went without. I think that maintenance should be deducted at source, be that from wages or benefits, so that no absent parent gets away with shirking their responsibilities. It's not the state's job to pay for the children at the end of the day so it's about time parents who don't pay were punished.

I absolutely think something needs to be done about the feckless men that seem to spread their seed around the country.

This thread is depressing.

Firstly, The policy was not introduced because people kept popping out kids for benefits, despite media sensationalism to convince us otherwise. It was introduced as part of an ideological shift in policy.

People on here really think that anyone who falls on hard times has only themselves to blame for not having the right insurance policies or the foresight to plan for every eventuality? So the 1 in 3 children living in poverty are only living that way because their parents are feckless? The 1 in 200 homeless people (1 in 52 in London) are only in that situation because they don't know how to plan properly? Those who have died as a result of austerity policies, including the fiasco that is PIP only died because they were too useless to get the right insurance policies? People needing to use food banks just need to budget better (perhaps take the advice from the twat of an MP that suggested they should use pay day loans! 🤬)?

Fucking hell! It seems (too) many posters would like to take us back to the times of work houses and proposals of labour camps. Dickensian Britain resurrected!!

The discourse and rhetoric that's come from the government over the past 10 years has done a right number on our society. Apparently, anyone who is poor only has themselves to blame and society has no responsibility towards them. Vile stuff. What's scary is that I can now easily picture threads in 5 or 10 years time with poster after poster claiming that those who can't afford health care only have themselves to blame and the government was right to sell off the NHS. That makes me despair and want to weep.

Dickensian my fat arse

I agree with the cap. The more money being spent on the welfare bill means less being spent on the NHS and other important services. If you want more than 2 children then go out and work to support them and don't rely on the state to bring them up. If you can't afford to give your children you have a good life why on earth would you want to have another one and struggle even more? It could also be worse, look at China and their child policies and we should count ourselves lucky that we don't have the same ones.

I agree the cap should apply to both parents. The father is still responsible for his existing children and he and subsequent partners need to take that into account when planning their families. It's not the fault of existing children if their father has decided to start a new family. If he cant afford it, he cant have any more. It may discourage men from running off having multiple families or just getting women pregnant all the time like the idiot GoFundMe bloke. It may also make women think twice about starting families with feckless men who already have several children they cant afford by several women.

At the risk of giving tmi, since my husband left me I have had sex with 5 different men. None of them were obvious deadbeats.
But all of them were willing to have sex with me without using a condom (one did say he'd had a vasectomy but I don't like to take this on trust) I didn't allow it and condoms were used, but it goes to show how little men care about possible accidental pregnancies. Because they know the consequences, financial and otherwise are easy to avoid.

@Zaphodsotherhead exactly - 3 children is a luxury or risk that few people can afford and people should consider the long term costs.

Because they know the consequences, financial and otherwise are easy to avoid.

Exactly!

We shall see, FruitcakeOfHate. They may have no choice but to roll back in order to comply with international law.

I was a lone parent on benefits back in the 90s when the CSA first came in. The rules then were that if you were on benefits you were obliged to name the father of your children or sign a legal declaration that you did not know who the father was. If you didn't comply your benefits were reduced. Any child maintenance was deducted pound for pound from your benefits.

The upshot was:

1. Loads of women were put in danger from their abusive exes - and there was far less understanding of abusive relationships back then, basically if you weren't actually being hit and had the evidence to prove it you were fucked.

2. If the father failed to pay up you were also fucked. I used to spend a whole day once a fortnight in the DSS office waiting 6 hours to be seen by a human to explain that once again I had been left with £11 for food and bills for the next two weeks for me and two kids because he had failed to pay. Even back then £11 didn't go very far.

There were legal challenges and the government were forced to change the policy. This is why child maintenance is now completely separate to benefit entitlement.

Even now, with the tories in charge, there are multiple legal challenges going through on the benefit rules all the time and some of them stick. This is why a UC claim now only takes 5 weeks to payment instead of 6 (all being well) - the government were forced to drop the extra week's 'waiting days'. This is why people who are entitled to a severe disbility premium can still make new claims for old benefits and if they have already 'naturally migrated' to UC are entitled to a lump sum of back payment and an ongoing transitional amount.

@Graphista but not for the women. The 2 child cap impacts on more women than men.

Like many mn threads people can't see past their own life experiences.

Women on benefits (working or not) must have only had a third child because they are feckless, doing it for the pay check or short sighted.

Most women don't ask to be in poverty, they are products of their environment and a lot of the time, victims of controlling and/or abusive men. That's not even considering women with learning disabilities or poor standards of education that can't manage their finances or life choices.

I have some sympathy with the concerns behind the 2 child limit, but also worry about those people whose circumstances have changed.

But logically, if there's a two child limit on child benefit one, should there be a two child limit on funded nursery hours?

Well I’d argue that you hadn’t planned well enough - deciding on how many children to have should hinge on ‘worst financial case scenario’ not best case.

However financially comfortable, virtually no-one is immune from the kind of disastrous circumstances that can result in losing everything.

So by your principle, no one should be having any children!

It often seems to be families on benefits who have got 4 plus children. Just saying.

@WorldsOnFire what do you think I pay my taxes for if not for all the children? Charity, seriously! Benefits are entitlements not charity!

Welfare system was set up to safeguard working class low income families not a form of charity... seeing all these people in foodbanks shouldn’t surprise anyone then since benefits are equivalent to charity In your view.

@FriedasCarLoad
They brought in the free 30 hours at age 3 for couples where both parents work (or single parents working a certain amount of hours) only as incentive to make working pay. It wouldn’t really make sense to limit tax credits to encourage people to work rather than rely on benefits for an extra child but then also take away something designed to help and enable parents to go out and work to support their families.

Having RTFT I've changed my mind. No longer on the fence!

I'd rather some undeserving people got more than they should than that some children suffered. So, especially as someone who hates abortion, I think child benefit shouldn't be limited to two children.

@Hopeforchildren are you a net contributor?