Just been on a course about new benefit system

[buggyRunner]

Christ it's a big shake up.

I say this as someone who won't be personally affected- it is harsh.

Basically if you claim any benefits other than child benefit you're probably going to have a loss.

Orwellian, there are over 2.5 million people claiming JSA chasing 450000 jobs.

Also most of those jobs are done by single people with no dependents (well, no dependents in this country - although they are often sending money back home of course).

Therein lies the reason. Single people can live in a hostel/bedsit/houseshare to reduce overheads and make a low-paid job worthwhile. It's less easy to do that when you have a partner and/or children in tow.

I also think it's worth accepting that we are never going to have 100% employment. We never have. There are always going to be people who do not work. Some through illness/disability, some through circumstance, some through poor education/intelligence, and yes, some through choice.

It's impossible to distinguish between 'deserving' and 'undeserving'. Successive governments throughout history have tried and failed, succeeding only in hurting as many innocents as feckless. Those who fail to examine history are condemned to repeat its mistakes.

The question then becomes 'how does a humane, civilised society treat its most vulnerable citizens?' Are principles and ethics to be reserved only for times of plenty? Or, in times of need, do we all accept greater pain in order to ensure our most vulnerable do not sink (i.e. more taxation instead of budget cuts).

I thought this thread was still about the changes to child benefit so that it only covers the first three children

Read the OP it wasn't about child benefit at all!

See this is what makes it all so tedious on these threads-people that don't know what they are talking about and who don't have the first clue come on with so much to say.

Well, that's the rub isn't it, Dahlen. They don't want to be charged a couple of hundred quid a year for the privilege of living in a safe & healthy society. I bet these are the same people who say they'll never go back to India or Egypt for their holidays because of all the beggars. Bloody inconvenient, all those destitute folks getting in the way, and don't touch them darling! They haven't washed their hands!
It will happen here.

? 69,460 children (or expected children) are living in homeless households ? three quarters of the total 'accepted' (registered with local authority).
? An increase of 44% in households who are homeless after repossession to 1,520. But this is still a relatively small part of the whole. The biggest proportion, 20%, are those who can no longer stay with a friend or a relative.
? In the last three months of 2011, 12,830 households were 'accepted' as homeless, up 18% on the same period the previous year
? Increasingly, people are being put up in bed and breakfast accommodation ? which is up 37% on the previous year after years of declines
? Decrease in the use of accommodation leased by the private sector to local authorities, by 6% from 27,730 to 26,080 households. In fact, 8,540 households are homeless because their short lease came to an end, up 39% on 2010
? Birmingham has the highest numbers of homeless people, with 925 households - but the highest rate in England is in Waltham Forest, north-east London, where 2.55 households per 1,000 are accepted as homeless, compared to an England figure of 0.59. Across London, homelessness is up by 27.4% (2011/2010)

There are an estimated 12,000 living in squalid London sheds.

At the moment, incompassionate posters, these numbers are mostly made of the people you praise for working at NMW or less, without benefits. Many of their children live with them in a single, uninsulated room without proper sanitation. This is what you admire, apparently, as long as you get your services cheaply and promptly. Do you really feel proud that you won't pay enough for workers to be able to house their children properly?

When people begin falling through the welfare net in hundreds of thousands, our homeless will be joined by the sick, the mentally disabled, the shell-shocked, the depressed, the crippled and the elderly. Plus their children. Just to save you a bit of tax, and save international corporations a lot of tax.

I know quite a few people with cleaners. None of them earn anywhere near £100,000 a year.

How do you propose to cut £190 billion from our budget without somehow affecting the poor?

Niceguy, why do you keep banging on about cuts without looking at ways to increase income?

Why do you ignore posts like Couthy's which ask whether other, reasonable-looking alternatives have been considered?

And where was this money "spent"? You were quick to ridicule my insurance/embezzlement analogy but have done fuck all about my replies.

As we 'speak' on lots of other threads, I don't perceive you as thick or even particularly elitist. Could you please explain why you've bought the coalition's half-baked ideas so completely?

GB - They don't want to be charged a couple of hundred quid a year for the privilege of living in a safe & healthy society

if paying a few hundred pounds a year fixed the problem, it would have been fixed long ago.

www.google.co.uk/publicdata/explore?ds=z8o7pt6rd5uqa6_&met_y=unemployment_rate&idim=country:uk&fdim_y=seasonality:sa&dl=en&hl=en&q=uk+unemployment

unemployment is 8% now. it did not go below 4.5% in the any of the booms since the 1980s. and of course in the booms, may people came to the UK to work and successful entered employment here, while others remained claiming. this is not a problem that raising taxes can solve, because when there were jobs, they were not taken by people who could claim instead.

Garlic there is no point arguing with those who align themselves on the right, they spout their spurious shite with nothing resembling a fact to back up their poorly thought out excuse for an argument. Indeed, when you prove them wrong with the simple application of facts they tell you you're wrong, and why. When pressed for proof of their 'argument' they go strangely quiet.

Iain and Duncan Smith (I refuse to believe that much hate for the poor exists in one person) know the consequences for the poor and disabled. They just don't care.

when there were jobs, they were not taken by people who could claim instead

Surely the question is why? Why aren't people taking jobs?

Ruling out disability, circumstances etc and choosing just to concentrate on the lazy, feckless spongers that everyone loves to point the finger at, the question is still why?

No happy, healthy person reaches the age of 16 with the sole aspiration of joining the dole queue. That particular aspiration (or lack of) is created.

Quite often 'feckless spongers' have become feckless spongers because of poor parenting, postcode lottery schooling, poverty, disenfranchised communities, etc. If you want to eradicate this sort of mentality, you need to plough money into social services, education and community - all areas that are being cut back on.

Cutting benefits will simply disenfranchise these people more and result in increased poverty, greater demands on the NHS and increased crime, not to mention the very real risk of civil unrest as we've already seen and which is predicted to happen again.

Think about it. If being a feckless sponger is so easy and comfortable an existence, how come none of us want it for our children?

It's because we recognise that a happy, well-rounded life comes from having hope that things will get better, having goals and dreams and the ability and opportunities to pursue them - all things denied to people brought up in homes where the parents lack the skills to work, where the drug dealers are the only ones with no money worries, and where the people working hard on NMW regularly have the bailiffs at the door. Oh and where the bankers and politicians commit offences that are 1000x worse than your average benefit fraudster yet don't even lose their jobs in many cases (or if they do it's with a big payout). Yeah, it's a dream life at the tax payers expense.

dahlen you need to plough money into social services, education and community - all areas that are being cut back on. i agree.

Labour spent thirteen years throwing money we didn't have at free this and extra that and help yourself to some of this.

We've got more " feckless spongers" after their policies than ever before...

Dahlen

No happy, healthy person reaches the age of 16 with the sole aspiration of joining the dole queue. That particular aspiration (or lack of) is created.

Agree with this. The problem is poverty of aspiration, not financial poverty.

Quite often 'feckless spongers' have become feckless spongers because of poor parenting, postcode lottery schooling, poverty, disenfranchised communities, etc. If you want to eradicate this sort of mentality, you need to plough money into social services, education and community - all areas that are being cut back on.

You see you then go right back on what you said above and claim that it's lack of money that creates 'spongers'? OK, exactly how much money makes the spongers stop? The reason I ask is Labour doubled welfare spending, and the number of spongers went up.

Cutting benefits will simply disenfranchise these people more and result in increased poverty, greater demands on the NHS and increased crime, not to mention the very real risk of civil unrest as we've already seen and which is predicted to happen again.

We've already seen, in the Tottenham riots, what a colossal sense of entitlement to other people's earnings does. Although IIRC those Tottenham rioters weren't stealing food and clothes but trainers and electronics.

The problem is social. That means that central government intervention can't help. Money isn't the problem, it's the mentality of the people that do it that's the problem, and the cure has to come from the people themselves.

Tilly, the percentage unemployed means nothing without looking at job availability. Vacancies are plummeting.

There were 457,000 job vacancies in the three months to April 2012, down 7,000 on the three months to January 2012 and down 12,000 on a year earlier. (ONS)

Lower unemployment during a 'boom' simply meant there more jobs available.

Unemployment will continue to rise. Not because of "feckless scroungers" but because there aren't enough jobs.

There are already more than 10 jobseekers for each vacancy. Cutting off their money won't make 10 times as many jobs appear out of nowhere. If anything, it will make jobs disappear due to reduced economic activity.

Where is the economic stimulus?

Dahlen
Think about it. If being a feckless sponger is so easy and comfortable an existence, how come none of us want it for our children?

It's because we recognise that a happy, well-rounded life comes from having hope that things will get better, having goals and dreams and the ability and opportunities to pursue them - all things denied to people brought up in homes where the parents lack the skills to work, where the drug dealers are the only ones with no money worries, and where the people working hard on NMW regularly have the bailiffs at the door. Oh and where the bankers and politicians commit offences that are 1000x worse than your average benefit fraudster yet don't even lose their jobs in many cases (or if they do it's with a big payout). Yeah, it's a dream life at the tax payers expense.

I have thought long and hard about this issue. I think you need to look at it from an evolutionary perspective.

Let's take two different people. Woman one is yer run-of-the-mill working or middle class woman who went to school, worked hard and never took a penny from the state. Woman two is yer stereotypical Waynetta Slob who's never worked a day in her life.

One has two children at the age of 30(ish). Her two children go off to university, and have their own (two) kids at about the same age. So this one woman has passed her genes on to two children and four grandchildren (6) after 6 decades.

Woman 2 has four children, starting at 16 and going through to 25. Her four children do the same thing, each having four children. However, because she's having children earlier, after 6 decades she's got 4 children and 16 grandchildren (20) plus a batch of great-grandchildren on the way.

Now in this theoretical exercise, who is the bigger evolutionary success here? It's clearly woman two, who has 20 sets of genes out there instead of 6.

So from a genetic point of view, woman 2 is doing the 'right' thing. She's ensuring the survival of her line and she's doing a better job than woman 1. Her life might be a bit grim from the point of view of people like me but she's done what we're all basically here to do, and done it better than most of us.

I don't think that enough people look at this problem from the point of view of evolutionary biology.

Flatpack - that is a very good anthropological take on the benefits system! In 50 years time I wonder what the country will look like in terms of social and cultural makeup. It will be interesting if spending keeps going up and up on welfare then perhaps we will get to a point where the majority are not bothering to work or save for a pension because they think they will get it all paid for by the state. The few remaining workers will pack it in after their tax and NI rates become unbearable and then nobody will be working in this country. We will have to ask other countries for foreign aid for ourselves.

I've got to say your evolutionary post tickled me, Flatpack.

Evolutionary biology is indeed a strong force, though clearly not strong enough to motivate your Natalie Nice to have as many kids as Waynetta. I wonder why? Perhaps because cartoon stereotypes aren't really all that illuminating

At the other end of the scale I could give you Angelina Jolie with her six DC, Queen Elizabeth with her four, Heidi Klum (4), Sarah Palin (4), Marie Osmond (8), Nicola Horlick (5), and quote Forbes: "there's been a significant increase in three- and four-children families among the top-earning 2% of households".

As Forbes also says, the influencing factor is disposable income. Waynetta doesn't have much disposable income so her brood is clearly not the result of a measured financial decision. It's more likely that, like lots of Natalie Nice's middle-class friends with larger families, she's not very good with contraception and gets a sense of personal fulfilment from her family. On Mumsnet of all places, I shouldn't have thought that too hard to believe :)

I suspect that if she found her money the same or even less every time she popped a sprog, she'd quickly acquaint herself with contraception.

Most people with large families are either comfortable or " poor" IME. Everyone else has to cut their cloth accordingly.

flatpack: You see you then go right back on what you said above and claim that it's lack of money that creates 'spongers'? OK, exactly how much money makes the spongers stop? The reason I ask is Labour doubled welfare spending, and the number of spongers went up.

I think you missed my point. I think the spending should be going into schools, libraries, sure start centres, maternity services, free extra-curricular clubs for children so that membership fees aren't required, free buspasses for children so that they can get to these places without relying on parents. That sort of thing.

Can we please remember that both Natalie Nice and Waynetta Slob required male partners to create their children. Any incentive to stop the poor reproducing smacks of eugenics needs to focus on male attitudes to creating offspring as well as female access to contraception.

Garlicbutter, I would imagine most of those rich people with many children are not relying on the state for any help and probably use mostly private healthcare, schooling etc (please no comments about the Royals as they are a case unto themselves and deserve another thread on the rights and wrongs of the monarchy). People who are supporting themselves have every right to use their earned money as they see fit.

I actually don't have a problem with anyone having as many children as they want. I do have a problem with people having as many children as they want but expecting the state to pay for them (particularly having children when they are already on benefits and know they cannot support them through their own hard work). Have 3024809 children by all means, but don't expect other taxpayers to pick up the tab (not aimed at you or anyone on here but on workless families who have more children than they can support themselves).

I disagree with giving people the responsibility to choose how many children they want to have without giving them responsibility to support them.

garlicbutter

I've got to say your evolutionary post tickled me, Flatpack.

Evolutionary biology is indeed a strong force, though clearly not strong enough to motivate your Natalie Nice to have as many kids as Waynetta. I wonder why? Perhaps because cartoon stereotypes aren't really all that illuminating

I admit that it was a simplistic stereotype, but I used it to explain my view that we are far more driven by evolutionary biology than most people realise. Further, I don't think that the systems created by government take advantage of (or even take in to account) many of those evolutionary drives which we don't even recognise we're doing.

Take parks, for example. Now, when you walk through a path, even though you don't realise you're doing it, your brain is constantly plotting the most efficient route between your current location and your destination. That's why you always see worn patches at the junction of paths in parks. My local hospital has just put in a zig-zagging path between their car park and the main building. So what's happened? People ignore the zigs and zags and walk straight across the grass.

It's just how we're built, like when you shop for fruit and automatically pick the reddest apples and tomatoes, and your eyes can spot tiny differences between them, or when it's pitch black and you hear a noise you don't recognise and your body kicks in to 'fight or flight' mode.

But don't think I'm talking about people as automata who merely respond on instinct. The case of so many couples who have put off a family until later are a case in point. Biology can be ignored, guided, tamed - up to a point. The problem is that we're seeing Natalie Nice tame her biology in order to give her small brood the best chance, while Waynetta Slob doesn't - and we're paying for Waynetta to make that choice.

At the other end of the scale I could give you Angelina Jolie with her six DC, Queen Elizabeth with her four, Heidi Klum (4), Sarah Palin (4), Marie Osmond (8), Nicola Horlick (5), and quote Forbes: "there's been a significant increase in three- and four-children families among the top-earning 2% of households".

As Forbes also says, the influencing factor is disposable income. Waynetta doesn't have much disposable income so her brood is clearly not the result of a measured financial decision. It's more likely that, like lots of Natalie Nice's middle-class friends with larger families, she's not very good with contraception and gets a sense of personal fulfilment from her family. On Mumsnet of all places, I shouldn't have thought that too hard to believe

Statistical outliers like the super rich are, IMO, not an awfully useful way of looking at the majority. They might as well be on another planet for all the difference their decisions make.

I think the point I'm trying to make here is that the system allows Waynetta to make the choice between four children and two children. I think that it makes it too easy for her to choose four children. Why should she automatically get a bigger house because she's got more kids? Why should she receive more money? Do you remember this [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-16812185 from the BBC?]] Seven children. Neither parent work. They've got Sky+, they can afford beer and fags, they're spending £120 a month on phone bills.

Now I do agree that a nice fulfilling family is a great thing. But I also question why the taxpayer should pay for fulfillment. I think it's wrong.

Dahlen - A Tory MP (so probably a vampire to boot) is advocating reducing child tax credits/child benefit and instead pumping the money into spending on early years education, childcare etc. What do you think about that idea?

Dahlen makes an excellent point about feckless sires!

You can't go round basing everything on "people you know". Well, you can, but it's irrational. If I were to base this part of the conversation on my acquaintance with Mumsnet, I'd be setting national policy according to my perception that most women with children are middle-class, have 4 or more DC and their partners are unfaithful. (Which may well be true )

I have just been trawling the DWP's figures to see if I can conclude anything from their data on family size & income group. Unfortunately they haven't looked at it this way, so I'd have to do coefficients of the data they have published. And I'm wasting my time here, aren't I ...