In hoping the benefits cap may prove to be A Good Thing?

[thepeoplesprincess]

In the long run. For private renters anyway.

As things currently stand, private landlords are getting away with charging extortionate rents that few can afford because the shortfall is made up by Housing Benefit. So if benefits are to be capped, landlords will (hopefully) be forced to lower their rents to affordable levels or sell up if they can't find tenants that can and will pay hundreds of pounds a month. Either will be great for the average Joe IMO.

I havent read all the posts on here but surely if housing benefit is capped, (which it is anyway) then it should be at a similar level all over the country. If you can't afford to live in London then move.

The capped rate where I live for a two bedroom house is around £86 a week and is more than adequate for the rents charged.
You cannot be expected to live in luxury if you do not work or earn a small amount. I am currently on housing benefit and have a nice 2 bed house for me and my son. I pay roughly £20 a week for rent above my benefit but I certainly dont complain about it. I am looking forward to getting a job and standing on my own two feet again.

oblomov - as you say loads of kids of working parents move schools and they manage. whats really needed is a good role model as a parent - ie one that works (obviously families where people are disabled is a different case). that will have more impact on a child i would have thought than changing schools once.

Nd yes Trickle is right wrt UC.

Rules are this:

in a two aprent ousehold one aprent must work 36 hours to qualify.

the other parent must also work 36 hours UNLESS

there is a child under 5
someone in family gets HR DLA Care element and parent is carer
parent is disabled

A 20 hour limit will be applied to:

Carers of a child getting MR DLA
parents of a child under 12

Note that at 12 your child is deemed to be able to come home alon; social Services however may well take action. very few palces have chidlcare provision for chidlren over 12/

if you cannot find those hours you will have to be aplced on workfare where finding childcare is your responsibility. if youc an;t do it- for example said disbaled child needs you at home, chidlcare has a six month waiting list, you don't ahve a car and they allocate you somewhere off the bus route or at 3am- bad luck, you lose all entitlement to help. For the entire family.

A fmily income of just under £18k removes the compunction to work those hours, but equally I suspect this is where the TC replacement will cut off as a result. Seems logical.

Personally i'd be OK with a cap but would like to see it awarded excluding HB; HB is already ca;pped and will be cut in April anyway. It will only cover lowest 30% of rentals in an area and nowhere over 3 bedrooms (even if like us you need more becuase you ahve disabled children not because you are anti sahring)- not that we get HB anyway but who knows what lies ahead these days. I want to know someone in London gets as much for food for their child as someone in Newport where i live and where living is cheaper.

We talk endlessly about the £26k cap that very few people get. Why not discuss what happens to those who willf all through the net- a net where the holes are being amde much* wider. most of whome will be the vulnerable. What about the little-known MINIMUM income? Anyone know what that is? £2k. Per family. Per annum.

That's my biggest worry personally*

dreamingof perhaps

But who is to say it is once?

private tenancies don;t last very long, espeically cheapest ones; it could well be every six months for ever. The people who move won;t get LHA housing; the places they move to have residency criteria and many will already have exceptionally long lists- here it is around thirty thousand people.

Also if anyone thinks moving lots of people will encourage employment- really? Why do people think the cheap areas became cheap? think Merthyr etc? Becuase there were already no jobs there. It creates ghettos where people are even less likely to find work (feasibly people who ahve worked all their lives, and were amde redundant- staying in Wales where do we think the Peacocks HQ staff will end up?).

Add to that once your child turns 12 you can be made to take a job 90min communte away also - that's three hours travel a day with a 12 year old at home.

There is also room within the legislation - IDS was very excited about this - to be abel to increase the ammount of hours people had to work (this does include getting a second/third job and the 90 min commute for each) so they could be 'incentivesed' out of UC.

peachy i can see your argument. But if the person isn't working anyway and is deterred from getting a job because they can't earn as much as they get on benefits what difference would moving to an area make in reality to their employment? they are likely to be unemployed either way. At least if they live in a cheap area the taxpayer doesn't have to fork out so much and it perhaps acts as a deterrent for some for long periods of unemployment.

oh trickle - you will have me crying in a minute!! you expect someone who works hard every day in a job they don't like to be sympathatic to someone who has to commute for 90 mins!!! many people have to travel and I've had to commute for much more than 90 mins before (though admittedly not every day).

kitesurfgirl and what planet do you live on?? Good for you if you managed to find 4 jobs side by side.. that doesnt exist where I live. I would happily do a cleaning job if I could find one! or would you suggest my autistic son looks after his sisters then so I could do these jobs

I work p/t in asda for 5 hours a week and had to reduce my hours to care for my son and his sisters being a scrounging single mum and all.

The only hours available to me in asda where I work were evening shifts and I couldnt go on days as no vacancies so what am I supposed to do??

There are relatively few jobs and people will do cleaning, you would be surprised, but when you take into consideration very few school hours jobs (retail is often evenings/weekends, p/t) and no DECENT AFFORDABLE FLEXIBLE CHILDCARE then you have no chance.

dreamingof but the majority of people this affects WILL be working or planning to - mwhat makes you think the earnings level is a bigger detrrant than simple lack of jobs in a struggling economy?

80% of people claiming HB are NOT unemployed

people forced to move away are likely to be TAs, carers in nursing homes, childcarers, Tesco employees....

and if you think MW covers commuting- really? Plus where I am tehre isn;t even a bus to one of the closest two cities (Bristol), let alone a train station at all. Even before you look at bridge tolls at £6 per day

So dreaming youa re OK with those already in cheapa reas having to take influxes of large numbers and seeing a cut in their acces to already overstreched serices even if they themselves work yes? because I can;t understand why smeone who is in say MArgate and has worked all their life should be forced to see less access to housing, schools and services- yet with 200000 people armarked for those areas and B&B accom how could it be otherwise?

face it people. We are fucked.

unless you happen to be earning loads and loads of money and this wont affect you in the slightest (and you have no foresight or imagination to see how its going to be for loads of us plebs)

There is also the fact that it won't necessarily save any money, given the costs of B&B accom and the shortage of cherap housing that exoists everywhere meaning many people will end up in just that form of home; lus taking carers away from dependent people etc.

Do you know for example that whilst I as a carer for my son would be exempt, someone caring for their elderly Mum who lives in another home but gets daily support just to cope is not? that social services would be amde to pick up the tab for thatc are instead, often a difference of tens of thousand over a year?

uite sheep (long time no see!)

Although when nursing home costs and supermarket costs and Nanny costs and nursery costs rie becuase tey cn;t find people who can afford to live in places like London for MW any more, everyone will notice.

Sis employys thirty people at the chain of nurseries she amanges; only herself, her Big Boss and three others are on over MW. This is a costly aplce in Somerst, how many will hang around if tehy have to move? yet she already sztruggles to find qualified people as it is.

(although sister's DH's argument is that we should address the deficit by killing dependent disabled people; yep he said that in front of ASD but able to understand ds1. Nice. And people wonder why I keep passports ready and feel scared!)

peachy - so would a tesco employee, for example, have over 26k in benefits a year if they lived in london say?

agree i can't imagine people in margate would be happy with big influx of people. I can't imagine the people in london were keen on the large influx they've had over the years either and i can't imagine that people living in really large expensive houses in costly areas are happy about having people living on benefits as neighbours whilst they themselves struggle to make ends meet and work really hard.

life is a shit sometimes.

dreaming- possibly, if they worked PT and had several kids or and expensive rent yes

Of course low wages may mean it isn't affordable to commute long distances or isn't physically possible because of poor transport. But tbh commuting up to 90 minutes 1 way when you have teenage children really isn't an enormous deal. No one wants to commute this distance - but plenty do.

peachy - Sadly social services are unlikely to pick up the cost of caring for an elderly person currently being looked after by someone not living with them.

90 minutes commute isn't desirable. It would certainly put an employment offer lower down vs. other offers on the table, if any.

But plenty of people have to do it, I have, because benefits should be a safety net for temp. unemployed or those too ill to work. Saying that you don't feel like commuting for 90 minutes after you've exhausted all other options (looking into all types of work, alternative transport) is surely a choice - a choice that should be reserved for people when moving between employers. Not "I think I'll just claim benefits instead."

At the momemt my door to door commute is about 1.20mins dependant on traffic (can vary a lot - can be just over an hour when i go in early, or up to 1.5hrs if i hit roadworks or jams). It's not nice, but... how else am I supposed to pay the household bills? It's not like we're living in luxury, I'm talking about an inability to pay mortgage, council tax and utilities if I don't work.

You'd be fine with someone with a 12 year old working two different jobs that ended up being 90 mins from their home in different directions?

I'm not so worried about people who have one job, 90 min commute with teenagers, but with two or three jobs with long commutes these parents may not have time to parent. I hate to think of kids being forced into that kind of pattern because their parents have low waged insecure jobs. It wasn't good for me and it won't be good for them.

Children need more than just parents who work bloody hard to provide a roof and food.

I make no apologies for being left wing and a bit soft, but I've known true 'sroungers' people struggling to make ends meet and doing thier best and people who are well off and have no money or job worries. Each persons world is so far removed from the others it's easy to let myths and fear override the reality of what is for some people an unfair hand they have been delt. The true 'scroungers' I have met in my time would be totally unemployable - you wouldn't want them in your place of work. I'm not sure what the answer is to all of this - but I'm quite sure it isn't 12 year olds alone at home and teenagers that rarely see a parent - it certainly won't help with social mobility, anti-socail behaviour, child development or a whole host of other things I believe would lead the the entirety of society being a little bit safer and (god forbid) happier.

Um trickle...my parents both worked over a 90 minute commute away when I was 12/13. When we were younger we would go to my grandparents house but it meant they would have to collect us which meanest we were even later home so when we were happy to do so we went home to our own house. We came home from school at about 4.30 and they usually got in after 7. We watched TV/started homework and usually had dinner started for my parents coming in. My younger sister and I certainly weren't traumatised by it and my parents both had jobs that supported us, put food on the table. clothes on our backs and a roof over our head. That is the reality for most people. Why should someone be able to choose NOT to do that because they can just get a handout instead? I'm sure my parents would have LOVED not to have had to commute so far for work but they did it because they had to.

And before anyone says anything more about that 90min communte, I've done it - but it was one job and it wasn't minimum wage (slightly above) and I didn't have children to worry about. I too paid my mortgage, council tax, bus fare and household bill with my wages and little else.

My sister and I both went on to university btw so no delinquents with antisocial behaviour and development issues here.

£26.000 seems to me a lot of benefits, unless you have 10 kids. Can someone explain who that average claiment would be who gets £26.000 or more and why they couldn't live on that.

"we would go to my grandparents house"

And that in a nutshell is the point about not relocating away from your social networks in a nutshell.

If your parents had relocated, they wouldn't have had the childcare and might not have been able to do those jobs.

I'm not saying everything's hard and fast rules about this, just that it's all connected. If you snip this thread here, that one way over there suddenly unravels.

I'm pretty sure most of the children in my class were in similar situations too tbh and we were in a grammar school in a rural area. It was probably like that because we were in a rural area - most people had to commute to the closest city for work.