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?

Just asking because your messages come off as if you believe it is only single mothers who are targeted.

no am responding to the thread - it's specifically about LP's.

So am kind of assuming the random comments like this one will be applying to LPs, but could be wrong, these threads twist and turn...

I said people so that's what I mean. To my mind LP's may well have more obstacles than most and I have said repeatedly that I have a lot of sympathy for LPs on benefits while their children are pre-school but this thread poses the question why should LP's go back to work (what's in it for the Govt)? and that's what I'm addressing.

Fivecandles, you CANNOT Run a house with 2 children, pay all your rent, pay your council tax, water rates, GAS (and that's £20 a week minimum currently if you are saddled with a card meter), electric, childcare, and still feed your family if you are working for the minimum wage, full time, if you aren't picking up at least SOME of the benefits you swear you'll never take. What are tax credits if not a benefit?

Outgoings
Childcare, full time, for 2 children at a childminder £7 ph (2 kids) x 50 hours = £350

Rent - £70
council tax - £20
gas - £20
Electric £10
Food - £40

God help you if the kids grow because your income doing 45 hours at £5.75 an hour is

Income
Child benefit - £31
Wage before tax and NI - £258

It doesn't add up. You may earn enough to afford the child care, but many people, for one reason or another, will not. They will have to claim benefits in the form of tax credits.

'We've all worked shitty jobs. But there's a hell of a difference knowing that this is for summer till I go back to uni, and this is my career.'

Yes, but I don't really understand what you're asking for. I worked in shitty jobs until I was qualified and experienced and skilled enough to get a better job. If you work in a shitty job and don't make try to get more qualifications and experience or a different job you can't really expect someone to knock on your door and present you with a better job.

I agree that the minimum wage should be more but the fact is that if you do a job which requires no or few qualifications or skills then it is not going to be well paid.

I have said repeatedly that I am talking about parents with school-aged children.

And what I meant is claiming benefits INSTEAD of working.

"If you work in a shitty job and don't make try to get more qualifications and experience or a different job..."

and once again we are back to what was discussed last night - that getting quals costs money, time and energy which simply may not be there. Did you actually read those posts?

'don't want to be academic' then you can't be too surprised when you are earning considerably less than those people who have tried and worked really hard academically or in their careers.

There is no reason why though a person doing a manual or menial job shouldn't earn a living wage that doesn't need to be subsidised by the goverment/tax payer. There is a difference between a living wage and a gp's wage. I am not surprised, as you put it, that I dont earn the same amount of money as a gp or an accountant etc - but I would like to earn a living wage. In fact I do love my job and am very happy to preform a meanial job.

I did plan my life out, unfortunately I didn't take some factours into consideration, you never know in life where you may end up. people have accidents, die, have affairs, mental breakdowns - no life is so secure that outside factors may not unbalance thoses plans.

The fact is most single mothers didn't actually plan to be singles mothers - they have that plan thrust upon them.

When life takes a course and throws you into being a single parent there is and are a lot of unexpected challenges, that havn't been planned for.

Sometimes life just bites you on the bum when its not expected...

Well actually IK makes a v. good point. Even an unqualified job, if done full time, should provide a living wage.

But I can't stand this attitude that some people are too good for shitty jobs. If you think you're too good for them then you have to work hard to get something better.

You say this in your post after I have written this:

Everyones job is important it make the world. If you dont employ a kitchen porter you will soon see a hotel fall to its knees - no matter how good the manager is he can't let the waiters serve food on dirty plate

It clear that I value every job and dont think anyone is to good to wash dishes or clean toilets, I dont see them as shitty jobs as you seem to, I see them as important jobs that have value.

You think your job is better than my job, I dont want to have a "better" job, I want to actually do my job which is of great value to society and be paid a reasnable wage to do that job - I do not though want to be paid as much money as you get.

Oh and by the way I do work hard, obviously I dont work as hard as you do though candles.

You know, this thread is making a point that I've actually never considered before - that we the taxpayers (and I include everyone in that, even people on benefits) are subsidising private companies (and the public sector) and their crappy wages.

But I am intrigued to know at what point things changed. There never used to be a minimum wage, and there never used to be tax credits - how did people survive? Did the trend towards double incomes happen because of rising living costs or did it cause rising living costs?

I earn a lot more than the minimum wage (but below average). I am the main breadwinner in our family, as I've said before, because I did not spend 4 years trying to have DS to put him in full time childcare. DH and I made the choice to survive on one income, and that is all we do - survive. There is no way we could manage without the £30 a week in tax credits that we get. How on earth did we get here as a society?

V. V. interesting question Twinklemegan. It is a bit chicken and egg. The big changes happened in the eighties, when suddenly lots of mothers started to go back to work after having children, and also Nigel Lawson changed the rules on MIRAS so that 2 incomes could be taken into consideration when giving tax relief on mortgages... within a few years, it was no longer an advantage to have 2 incomes, it had become a necessity.

In the fifties, housing costs took roughly a quarter of the family income and it was usually just one income earner. Now, it's not that unusual for them to take half of 2 people's income, so has increased unbelievably. Most poverty goes back to housing costs.

TM, You got my point!

It's costing tax payers a FORTUNE.

Companies benefit by having lowpaid cash poor workforces who won't complain about shitty conditions and appalling pay because they are, after all surviving.

SIngle parents benefit from not being forced to stay on benefits in order to survive.

But the country as a whole is not benefitting from this policy, and I thought that government (maybe I am young and naive here) was put into place to serve the country as a whole?

Would it not, therefore, be wiser to put the minimum wage up? Companies would have to pay more, taxpayers would have to pay less, and really, people who are poor won't complain about where the money comes from as long as they actually get it.

And to answer your question about how people survived - well, a far greater proportion of Lone Parents didn't work before Tax Credits. With all their weaknesses in terms of value for the tax payer, they have actually genuinely made it possible for many LP's to work. If they were abolished, the % of LP's joining the unemployment queue would suddenly go way back up again, because it simply wasn't possible to pay childcare costs and buy food from most people's wages.

twinkle - wayhay, thank you - you have made my night.

Yes the tax you pay goes to the large companies to help their wage bill. Not only that but pay there big cats wages.

Not only that - take a hotel, the wages are being helped with your taxes. So why dont they put the price of the rooms up - well they sell them cheap on block to other large companies. So not only is your tax helping to pay the wages, it is helping business men to operate and keep company costs down.

Tesco, sainsbury etc both employ on minimum wages - if they put their prices up you would pay more for your food, or the share holders would get less profit. They take the easy option and pay less wages, the goverment will supplement them so that keep share holders and shoppers happy.

Expat has said it many times, large companies swindle this country far more than anyone else - and get away with it, no one notices...

Oh gosh yes, it goes without saying that people couldn't afford to pay for childcare.

The only problem I have with putting the minimum wage up, is that it gets closer and closer to the wages earned by many people who have worked very very hard for qualifications. The minimum wage increases every year many times more than my own pathetic cost of living pay rises. I already seriously question why I bothered working hard to secure good A levels and a good degree when we are very little better off than if I worked in the local supermarket. I realise that's a selfish point of view, but I guess what I'm saying is that it's not just the minimum wage that needs to rise.

At least if you get a pay rise this year - it will actually be worth something with deflation any pay rise is going to be good. I shall be glad if I can stay in employment

If everyone's wage rises then we get inflation and the pay rises become pointless.

Twinklemegan, I think you are being unreasonable to think that going to university and having good A-levels gives you a right to substantially more pay.

Qualifications tend to lead to more interesting jobs, rather than necessarily better pay. I have good A-levels and degree, but I am paid very badly. However I have a lot of fun at work and I care that people doing shitty jobs might earn as much as me.

Weeell - I've already taken a 20% pay cut as it happens to keep my job. But yes, I am public sector and I thank my lucky stars for that at the moment. Any cost of living rise does depend on the results of our long awaited job evaluation exercise - past experience is filling me with dread.

Oops again, I meant I don't care that those in shitty jobs earn more than me. I have lots of fun at work.

This thread shows a fundermental level of contempt for those who do unpleasent jobs. Why should the person who packs your bags at Tescos live below the povety line.

I am actually in favour of tax credits. It redistributes wealth where it is needed. I wish it wasn't so complicated claiming for them and I get frustrated by the level of mistakes.

I did admit it was a selfish point of view, and yes it probably is unreasonable - I'll admit that. But would you agree that it should be the case that someone with a job that requires a degree - which I only mention because it is the very thing that the Government is pushing young people to get into debt for - still needs subsidy from the tax payer? I realise how this might come across - I'm taking that risk because I think it is an important point. University is being sold to young people as the route to financial security, and it's simply not true!

The wider point to what I'm saying is that the sheer amount of subsidy required to make a minimum wage job viable means that you can earn £8k a year more and really be no better off once everything is taken into account. I think that demonstrates quite well just how out of kilter the minimum wage is with the cost of living in this country.

There were vast swaths of people with degrees who left uni in the 1980's and couldn't get a job. The reason they couldn't get a job, they were over qualified.

A university education is not the path to everlasting employment. It may be the way to everlasting debt though.

I couldn't agree more. That's why I vehemently disagree with Government policy on getting everyone to university. I was lucky enough to go to uni when the old student loans were still around. At my current rate of earning I'll never have to pay it back, as the gap between my income and the paying back threshold widens every year! Sorry, I realise this has gone a bit off topic. Like I said my main point was the huge disparity between many wages (not just the minimum wage) and what the Government actually determines that we need to live on.

But the thing for the gov't is that if everyone has to go to uni until they are 21/22 then it keeps them off the unemployment lists for a few years. And if everyone is getting 'A' levels then you will need a degree to get the jobs that years ago you probably didn't even need an o'level for. Cynical, moi?