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?

yes you have a PARTNER to share the load with. Do you actually realise what a difference that makes? Not just for 6 months, but on a long term basis??

And again I point out that you wouldn't have been able to do that particular job if you'd been on your own - £300 wouldn't stretch very far.

And £1000 is more than I earned (on an "above minimum wage" salary) if I worked 4 nights a week (37hrs). I remember one month (nearly bloody killed me), was an October (not sure how I remember that, or indeed that it's at all relevant actually but anyhow) I worked 3 weeks of 4 nights each week and 1 week of 5 nights, and came home with a lot less than £1000. (not sure why I bothered really)

'fivecandles of course if you did it, then that must mean that everyone can and should do it.'

My point is that life IS hard. Everyone has to work hard and make sacrificies to get qualifications and get a job that makes them happy and financially secure. But it is possible. Lots of people do it LP or not. As I say, a good example is Xenia.

Oh but sorry you didn't, did you, you had a husband, which is different to doing it on your own.

I did the full time work thing for a few months when I was first a LP too. Try keeping that up for longer than a few months as your children grow up. Honestly, I'm having a vision of those Tory MP's who go and sleep on the streets for a night and then tell us all how easy and unproblematic it is to be homeless.

6 months is nothing. The average time for being a lone parent is 5 years. We can all do something for a limited amount of time, it's keeping it up for the long term that counts. Ask anyone who has ever dieted.

well aren't you lucky that you're contraception didn't fail then

Yes I am complaining about lack of opportunities, because it took me several months (of proper searching) and a long time before that to actually find the course in the first place. It was hardly like I had a huge range of options to choose from.

"
Many LPs have the support of the father from the off. "

PMSL - you really are living on a difererent planet aren't you? Have you ever looked at the posts in the LP section on here, on on legal and money? Many LP's don't have the support of the father. In fact I'm the only single mother I know in RL (and I sadly know quite a few) who's exH does support the children in any way (financial or other).

gold, yes I do. And once again I have only ever been talking about parents with school-aged children. As happened and would have happened if I'd been with dp or not I carried on working for what amounted to be not very much money until my dcs were in school when I didn't have to pay childcare to keep a particular job that I loved and which I knew would make me and my kids financially secure in the long-term.

Reading this thread, I got the impression that a much larger proportion of UK population was on minimum wage.

Instead, workers on minimum wage are only about 1.4% of the workforce, and I guess it is the thread title that has attracted a disproportionate number of MNers in this bottom 1.4%.

There will always be a bottom 1% in wages. If you believe you are too good for minimum wage, study, get qualifications, and work work work to move up the pay scale. Sorry, but there is no easy answer.

FFS when you start quoting Xenia at me as a good example of anything, I simply cannot take you seriously. Xenia is someone who has frequently referred to the poor or women who stay at home with their children, in the most offensive, patronising and contemptous tone. I have always considered her to be a sort of glorified troll as her postings seem to me to be designed to elicit outrage and hurt. Please don't tell me I should look to Xenia as some kind of wonderful example of how we should all be looking to live our lives.

gold, you're not listening. I am well aware that many LPs don't have the support of the father but some do.

The way that some of you are presenting this argument is wrong because it suggests that all LPs have no support from the father of your child(ren) and no new partner who is unqualified and only able to get a part-time job on the minimum wage when the reality is there are few people in this situation for ever and there are plenty of LPs who ARE qualified who DO have the support of the father or a new father or move from one situation to another from year(s) to years.

'well aren't you lucky that you're contraception didn't fail then '

Maybe you mean this is as a joke but there's that word again 'lucky'. The assumption that the way that my life has turned out is all to do with luck as opposed to the planning and hard work which I've had to do and which it is perfectly possible for most people to do. Nothing to do with luck at all.

but fivecandles - you can't honestly except someone that is already living on the poverty line, buying value products every month, sacrificing everything they already can to "sacrifice" anything else (probably their home or their health) in order to try and better themselves and try to get themselves into a position where they may eventually get a job which means they no longer qualify for any benefits at all.

The bottom 10% of earners in the UK earn £262 a week - (taken from the NSO website) - which means they'd still qualify for their housing benefit and council tax benefit, and a fairly large chunk of WTC too.

no I don't mean it as a joke - unless you were abstaining from sex then there was always a risk you would fall pg.

I am just saying that not all LPs are the unqualified, unsupported, unemployed people who are being constantly referred to here.

Some have support. Some have qualifciations. Some have jobs.

It's really odd how some people here argue that LPs are stereotyped and dismissed and patronised and then present this almost entirely stereotypical and negative picture of LPs themselves as hopeless and helpless!!

Have just ploughed through the whole of this thread.

FWIW I think the Govt are using knee jerk tactics to appease the people who believe everything they read in the Daily Mail (who spend half their time slagging off LP and the other half spouting on about how working mothers "damage" their children).

I would support the Govt IF:

They could guarantee parents would be much better off.

They did not stop benefits the day that Mum went into work leaving her struggling financially (which is what happens at the moment).

They accepted that for some parents working is just not a viable option.

There is nothing wrong however, with offering people the option of preparing for going back into work and providing support for that.

LOL at the idea that lots of ex partners give the level of support needed to work your way through college.

What a truly lovely idea. Like fairies and Santa.

school aged children still need childcare before and after school if you're working full time, not to mention during the school holidays (well they did last time I checked........)

of course their are LP's who work - this thread isn't about them - it's about those on benefits, and it is also about Government plans to reduce the age that you're expected to work to when you're child is 1yr old.

No it's NOT Government policy at the moment, but it IS something that has been proposed - and it's those proposals that we're talking about.

Well, LJB, again you're reverting to worst case scenario.

Are you trying to tell me that all or the majority of LPs are unqualified before they have children?

Because this does beg the question of why?

And if they are then we've been over and over the sorts of support and funding available to them to get THEMSELVES through college with or withought the financial and/ or other support of the father of their children or new partner.

Yes, gold but it's about why they DON'T work and some of you seem to be arguing that actually it's impossible for LPs to work what with them all being unqualified and so on.

'you can't honestly except someone that is already living on the poverty line, buying value products every month, sacrificing everything they already can to "sacrifice" anything else (probably their home or their health) in order to try and better themselves and try to get themselves into a position where they may eventually get a job which means they no longer qualify for any benefits at all.'

It's not for me to say what others should do but again it's the implication that getting qualified and getting a job is somehow impossible.

When I was a student I had no grant and had a couple of thousand to live off. I literally lived off beans on toast and potatoes. I lived in a house where you had to put 20p in a metre for a shower with no central heating and mold on the walls. Looking back, I can't beleive that I lived like that. I really can't. But at the time it's what everyone did and we had a fantastic time. I do think that now there's an assumption that everyone is entitled to a certain level of comfort etc. I think the jumble sale and cooking lentils etc attitude that my parents certainly had while I was growing up and I had as a student has gone. These days student halls ahve microwaves and en suites!! But they end up paying for these luxuries through debt years and years later.

oh yes that mystical support and fudning that's so easy to find that it took me several months to find something suitable (and I'm not stranger to searching things out, and finding information)

but Fivecandles - that's fair enough when you don't have children (damn I lived in a tiny house with a roof like a sieve - literally!! - and a family of cockroaches that lived in the base of the kettle) - but you wouldn't actively choose to live like that now with children in the equation...........would you????

Before and after school care is minimal compared to full-tiem nursery costs. My area (very deprived) offers holiday playschemes for a couple of quid a day. Yes, I know, I know, it still adds up but you can pay these costs and it still be finanically viable to work.

Or you can find ways of avoiding them. Employers legally have to allow you flexible hours if you have children. For the last two years I've worked part-time school hours 9-2.30pm. My unqualified sister in law works mornigns as a teaching assistant. My friend who is a LP works as a driving instructor and fits her lessons in school hours or works while her ex dh has contact with her dc.

Nobody chooses to live like that and actually I think health and safety has got a hell of a lot better since I was a student. But if it were ME and it was for the short term so that I could have fianncial security for me and my kids for the rest of my life than I persoanlly would think it was a wrothile trade off.

But nobody has answered my question. Why (as you are suggesting) are so many LPs unqualified in the first place???

but it takes so long to get a job that fits in with school, it took me 5 yrs and it was down to luck more than anything

I earn the minimum wage but its better than nothing (although we lose a lot in tax credits as I'm now working, theres no logic in that)

well we have one regular (cheap) play scheme the others are all sporting type ones that cost a bloody fortune. The breakfast clubs at the schools cost £2 a day, so £30 a week for 3 children, not sure how much the after school care for school age children is, but I do know it has an extremely long waiting list (approx 18 months last time I checked it out at the start of this year)

I thought we'd already established that unless you are on a good wage that part time hours don't usually make financial sense?

Your friend's exH obviously has very regualr contact with his children if she's able to fit lessons into that time. My exH has the DS's reguarly, but I could never fit work into the time he has them