Why are the government BOTHERING to push single parents back into paid work?

[Coldtits]

If you have two children, pay for £35 a week childcare and work 16 hours at the minimum wage you get

£70 a week working tax credit
£117 a week child tax credit
£30 a week child benefit
any maintenance your ex partner/s give you
And some of your rent paid if you are renting

That's a total of £217 of government money PLUS whatever they pay towards your rent.

Without working you get
£60 income support - with whatever maintenance your ex gives you being knocked (less £20) off this sum
£90 child tax credit
£30 child benefit.

SO, this is £180.

It costs the government LESS for me to stay at home and not work, they way the current set up is.

Why, when they are screaming from the rooftops about single parents going back to work, would they make it financially advantagious to THE GOVERNMENT for them not to? Why have they done this?

you can research it if you want- Wellingborough.

As it happens I'm starting an OU course in February so if you do find something then it won't be relevanat for me anyhow (and a disclaimer - I settled on the course I've chosen in September, haven't looked properly since just before the Summer holidays so please don't flame me if something new and wonderful and has appeared

It will be interesting to see the effect this has on the children of the lone parents who will be required to be available for work, no matter whether it means putting children into inadequate childcare settings or if they're older leaving them to their own devices, having to reclaim benefits with all the delays in payments it entails if employers aren't willing (understandably so) to accept that some parents will have to leave early/arrive late/take time off at short notice, deal with the nightmare logistics of juggling work and home life with noone to take some of the burden.

We'll just have to wait 20 years to find out if it's had any adverse effects on the children. And if it does, guess who'll be to blame? My guess is it won't be the government.

FWIW, my mother was a widow at 46 with four children still at home - the youngest (me) was 5. She had 5 jobs (one in the day time and various evening jobs). We never saw her and if she was in she was either catching up with house stuff or zonked on the sofa too tired to speak. We were always skint. So we never had Mum around much and there was no financial benefit to make that sacrifice easier to bear. If the benefits system had been around then I'd have much rather she claimed them rather than having to run herself into the ground with fuck all to show for it.

I fully expect to be in work by the time my son hits 7 and my IS claim would stop. Not sure what work it will be yet as anything part time round here tends to be care work and/or shift work and usually minimum wage. So I either accept a crappy job at minimum wage for the rest of my working life or retrain (fortunately, I'm capable of that) for something better paid. No idea what that might be though.

I agree with others who have wondered why it's always the parents with care of children who are targetted and not the absent parents who don't contribute or the childless JSA claimants who have no real obstacles barring them from work.

Those of you who keep banging on about how training oppurtunities are thrown at single parents are wrong. Not everyone is offered the same things.

I looked for a job for 2 years and during this time tried to access lots of back to work schemes that would supposidly help me find a job and I was told that I wasn't eligable for help from these schemes because of my postcode.
I live in a HA house on a big social housing estate. Down the road is a big council estate, but they are both in what is considered to be an affluent area, and because of that I was told no.

I wrote to my MP about it who's response was that I could access the same sort of help at my job centre. Erm, no, I was already doing that and getting nowhere.

So, that didn't work and so I looked into other ways of getting a job. I wanted to do further training but ideally wanted to train on the job. I looked into apprenticeships but found I was too old. A couple of places told me that they would have no problem offering me a place but that the government only funded the training up to age 26.

I carried on looking and looking, getting nowhere fast and then I heard about Adult Apprenticeships. I emailed/rang every single place I found that had any info on them and asked about them at the job centre only to be told that they were so new that they weren't yet available in my area.

It is a joke to suggest that there are so many things thrown at single parents to help them get back into work and simply is not true.

In the end I was lucky enough to know someone who managed to get me into the job I will be starting next month. Nothing that the job centre or the government did, helped me to get this job.

This notion that mums are entitled to stay home with their little babies is mystifying. It must be a UK thing.

In most other places, mums go back to work after maternity leave, unless they are comfortable enough financially not to.

If government wants change, it seems to me that first the benefits need to be reduced, so that calculations such as those in OP yield a different result - one where people are better off financially by working.

I'd argue that the minimum wage needs to be increased rather than benefits decreased.

Cutting benefits will do nothing to alleviate in-work poverty, and the need for Govt to subsidise mothers to work (which as ivykaty pointed out, is also subsidising big businesses to pay shit wages and make big profits).

To be honest, I think the government is trying to remove the concept of money for nothing. If people are working, they are contributing, even if it costs society more in monetary terms, it is a better overall solution.

Many many studies seem to be sending them the message that there is also more to work than money - it builds self esteem etc. Loads of mums have to juggle things with a husband who is away all week, or one that does nothing to support them in terms of childcare.

I am not having a go at benefits or single parents, but I think in principle I agree with Labour's premise that benefits should be a safety net, not a choice.

However, the minimum wage and the cost of living in this country appear to be the root of the problem. How have we got into a situation where working puts you below the poverty line, and you need two incomes to be financially viable?

On a personal level, I am sure I wouldn't work if it made little economic difference. Of course I wouldn't - I would much rather be with my gorgeous little children.

How about free nursery places? Here in France, nursery is free for children of working parents. (Working single parent, or both parents working if living together)

"However, the minimum wage and the cost of living in this country appear to be the root of the problem. How have we got into a situation where working puts you below the poverty line, and you need two incomes to be financially viable?"

Exactly. Single parents who get no support from their ex are incredibly disadvantaged there. One person alone cannot earn two peoples' income, run a home, and be two parents to their DC. There's just not enough of you!

The minimum wage is not a living wage for an adult with a family to support.

No amount of free nursery places or in-work subsidies can change that.

Were I to work I'd rather earn a decent wage and spend it as I chose, than earn a pittance and have to apply for umpteen different subsisidies from incompetent Govt departments to enable us to survive.

Well, this was jolly interesting, as I thought it might be.

Incidentally, it was me who pointed out that NOBODY thinks their relationship will fail (although I'm sure other posters have said it before me), nobody ever believes the man who gazed adoringly into your eyes would, 7 years later, be so intent on taking something out of your hand he entirely fails to realise he's breaking your wrist. Nobody thinks their partner will be hit by a lorry, or have a brain tumour, or find spotty teenaged girls to be incompatable with family life and ditch the family.

The calculations in my op show that you are, for a start, £37 a week better off by working but that THE GOVERNMENT IS HAVING TO SUBSIDISE THIS HEAVILY.

I do work, as a point of fact, but my tax credits yeaily more than my wages. How on EArth is that logical? Why can't we put the minimum wage up? Why should private companies (yes, residential homes, I looking at you and your BMWs) have their wages bill heavily subbed by the Inland Revenue?

"If people are working, they are contributing"

If you are bringing up children, you are working.

It makes me larf to see all these women with husbands telling us how many job and training opportunities there are for lone parents out there. Tell you waht, you lot go out and bring up children on your own on one income and grab those opportunities and "progress" in your work, then come back and tell the rest of us who are doing it, but obviously know sweet FA about it, how it's done, eh?

FFS.

oh coldtits, if your dh breaks your wrist, it's because you've made bad choices, doncha know.

I consider bringing up my child to be contributing

I also consider the person whose contribution is conspicuous only by its absence to be her father.

Yes and my ex finding a teenage girl more exciting than his family was probably because I didn't give him enough blow jobs - entirely my fault of course.

Benefits should of course protect the vulnerable. It should continue to be a safety net - i.e. partner leaves you or turns aggressive, state supports you.

I don't think anyone is arguing against benefits as a safety net.

What gets feathers ruffled is when benefit recipients don't seem to be interested in getting off them. Being a single parent is not a disability. Once the initial shock wears off, and especially when youngest child is of nursery age, I don't see why it is unreasonable to expect them to work for a living, as is the norm for the rest of society.

oh ffs.

have you read the rest of the thread.

do you know that more single parents are WOHMs than other mothers?

do you know about holiday care?

do you know that nobody here has argued that
being a single parent is a disability. We have merely argued that being a single parent is different from being a parent with the back up of a husband and the support network that goes with that and that therefore the logistics of working are different and need to be dealt with differently.

MORE of us work in the cash economy than married mothers. So fucking stop telling us that being a single parent isn't an excuse to sit on our arses for the rest of our lives. We know more about it than you do. When you've done it love, then tell us how to do it. Because most of us are doing it already and don't need lectures from people who know sweet FA about it.

You need to calm down a bit.

I am not talking about YOU.

I'm calm thanks

Just effing sick of reading a whole load of the usual lone parent bashing myths being promoted as reasonable arguments.

And it doesn't seem to matter how many times the myths have been refuted, people return to the same old mantras involving lone parents being somehow a specific group of society intent on defrauding the public purse.

And every time a new poster comes on, we have to keep repeating the same old stuff over again. About holiday care for example. Or that two thirds of LP's are already in paid work. Or that 1 in 4 LP's has a child with SN or disabilities or serious illnesses, so a large proportion of that other third are going to be made up of LP's who are never going to be able to participate in the cash economy because of the specific needs of their children.

And yet we are still being talked about as a group which contributes less to the cash economy because of our laziness, rather than a group which disproportionately contributes versus married/ partnered mothers, or is simply unable to. There are probably fewer lazy malingerers among LP's, than among other social groups. But because of the effective hate campaign against us over the last 30 years, these mysogynist myths are being promulgated time and time again, and excuse me if I occasionally get utterly pissed off with it.

I wasn't "bashing single parents" and I certainly wasn't talking about all single parents.

I was talking about those on benefits who do not make an effort to come off the benefits at all, which was clear from my post. That may not be a large portion of overall beneficiaries. Great.

Well the Government is happy enough to spend the taxpayers' money on propping up their rich pals and subsidising the royal family: why is it always the poor who get the most condemnation?
Of course, another big problem that people conveniently forget about when they start suggesting that women can just go to work because that's what they do in poor countries/did in my grandmother's day etc, is that poor women quite often took their children with them rather than paying for childcare, which you can't do now - or they had informal arrangments to mind each other's children, which you equally can't do now without all the form-filling and CRB checking to become a Proper child minder...

No I know you weren't "bashing single parents".

My gripe is that the repetition of the myths ("being a single parent is not a disability" as if we need to be told that, we know what it is to be a single parent) re-inforces that old idea that LP's are disproportionately more likely to be workshy lazy gits than other groups. Which if you look at the figures, is shown to be completely untrue - it's the opposite, we're more likely to be in the workplace than those married women who slag us off as being workshy.

Sorry, don't mean to snap at you, it's just been a v. long thread with the same points being repeated and to a large extent ignored by people who aren't interested in acknowleging the facts and continue to bang a loud, repetitive and dissonant drum (and I'm not implying you are one of those).

Sorry my point is that repeating the same old myths re-inforces those who want to bash single parents (and there are a lot of them about)

LJB, I might cut and paste your last few posts into every other future thread about lone parents. Excellent stuff.