Angry at scrapping of 2 child limit

[BearBuggy]

I know there are a few families that find themselves in rotten circumstances and this isn’t aimed at them . However I live in an area where having children to continue to receive benefits was the norm and only now the cap is in place has that stopped.

The Scottish government has now announced it will be scrapped. I am so angry I’m paying towards people breeding children they can’t afford. I didn’t vote SNp this time because of this, as did many of my friends. They lost heavily in my area but still seem to not care what the tax payer is saying.

Wow
@RandomWordsThrownTogether coil fitted !! Any suggestions for the men there or is this one just up to the women ??

Surely if the parents won’t then they should. Like all adults.

Spot on post
Especially the issue of full time workers being worse off.
Another issue is getting to that upper tax threshold only to realise you are worse off. I have friends that cut their hours because they would have less take home once they reached a certain level. Why work and not see you kids for nothing.
Thats not good for society and not good for growth

A one tax fits all across the board would encourage more people to work more hours and somehow the benefits system needs to do exactly what Labour said they would do
Make Work Pay!

I understand why the Scottish govt have made this decision.

However I am one of six. We were all born in the days of Family Allowance, the precursor to Child Benefit. F was in an unskilled job. We were cold, poorly dressed, there was never enough of anything. Excluded from every school trip, never went swimming or had a bike, we couldn't take part in any activities with the local kids. Three of us to a room, no privacy, one bathroom between 8, a bath once a week.

When she was 45 my F tried to persuade my dm to have baby no. 7 so he could give up work and live off the family allowance. Thankfully she refused. By then the pill was available and she took it in secret. She used to keep it in the washing powder. He saw us purely as a revenue stream. Life was not fun.

So I don't agree with the Scottish govt. Their decision while well-meaning, will just result in more unwanted miserable children.

Why doesn’t it make financial sense to work anything other than the most basic hours

what would you propose for it to make financial sense

I grew up in a single-parent household with three children, surviving on benefits. All three children are contributing members of society-- as indeed was our mum by raising three children. Parenting is work, and someone needs to do it to keep society ticking over.

This is such an interesting discussion. People feel strongly on both sides of this question and I've read so many interesting case studies of people's actual lives.
I saw an economist once say that richer people only resent paying tax if they can't see that they get anything back from it. For example they pay huge actual sums of money but only a little per cent of their actual income, but still can't see an NHS GP. He said to get over this rich people need to think of tax as similar to the fee they pay for netflix they don't watch all the shows but its still value for money.
Tax is a part of the broader subject of economics of course which I really enjoyed at A level. A subject not on our national curriculum and rarely taught at GCSE outside private schools. And yet the basics covered in economics come up again and again in my real life. Personally as a secondary school teacher I think it should be on the Curriculum only second to English and Maths!

Do yous think it's going to replace the Scottish child payment? You can already claim for all children on that. Would seem bonkers to have both going. The Scottish child payment is more than child benefit not combined with uc child element though. Seems it would be a fair chunk of money. I honestly don't think this will happen.

I find your opinions frankly alarming, money should not be a barrier to a family large or small. The reality also is that we have declining birthrates in traditional British communities so if anything we should be encouraging people to have children otherwise you'll find that the cultural demographics of the UK will look very different in 60 years.

Lots of professionals are leaving it way to late to have children so while they have money they are lucky to have one child by the time they are 40.

I don't live my life judging how other people live there lives but there is one thing that old age has taught me is children don't deserve to be caught up in the politics. The fact that parents choose to have ten children and don't have the means to support them isn't something I'll judge them on...what matters more is how they are raised. Those children might go on to do something brilliant who knows.

I'm from a catholic community and we don't use birth control...never have. I have 6 children and thankfully I've managed to support them all my life. But not every family is the same and I wouldn't want to impose some political statement on families that impose some eugenic limit on how many children they can have....that's the sort of thing Hitler did ,,,

The problem with the UK isn't the welfare system is it's declining economic outlook. Industrial decline in the North and Southern focus has meant that many towns are now jobless hotspots. If you can find a job in Greggs you are lucky. I think pining after our industrial past is nostalgic dreaming and we should focus on renewal. Moving the houses of Parliament to Leicester, Nottingham or Birmingham would help shift the focus to the Midlands which is in Newcastle of growth.

It would focus transport links, bring in money and business....

We need to get our youngsters interested in robotics, computer science and space engineering. We need more qualified people in virtually every sector. You can't do any of this without children.

Immigration needs to be stopped and where there are skills gaps we should be helping people train to fill the gaps...no more importing people

Yes. And food vouchers don’t work, the local drug users just sell them for lower than face value to finance their next hit.

Great comment, hope the people who resent their own people getting help and would rather have the whole world move here to "fill the gap" or whatever are happy with their grand daughters living in a country run like Afghanistan.

And remember not everyone who's broke was always broke you could be one day away from your husband leaving you and financially screwing you and your children over remember that people. Because I've seen it happen to people.

You can't seriously believe it's societies job to pay women to stay at home and raise children?

Parenting is social work, not paid work. Like all the other personal work people do like cleaning their house and cooking for their families and doing laundry. Most mothers have jobs and raise their children. If all the mothers in the country quit their jobs to live off benefits the economy would grind to a halt and the benefit bill would be massive.

Being a mother is not a social duty so great the rest of society should pay you to do it.

But imagine that you're paying ten times more for netflix than your neighbour is... and you don't even get to watch the films. Your neighbour gets everything, but you're only allowed to watch a medical drama on a Tuesday afternoon. Which is sometimes canceled.

Do you think you'd still see Netflix as good value?

Or do you think you might feel a bit pissed off and aggrieved?

Most people see tax as a necessary evil. But the social contract in a democracy is that tax is meant to be about the government taking some of our money and using it to run services for us. That's no longer happening. It's mainly redistribution now. Redistribution which seems to be making things even worse.

Well, someone's got to have kids.

Increasingly women are choosing not to because they don't want to do this "social work". Maybe the future is growing babies in artificial wombs, but who will then pay to raise them?

We have too few children nowadays not too many. Partly that's a good thing - we have a higher bar nowadays in terms of what children are seen as requiring. It's not enough to throw them a few scraps of food and their older siblings' hand-me-downs.

Eventually we will end up "paying" women to have children in some way or another because otherwise, now they have freedom of choice and it's socially the done thing, many women aren't going to continue freely incurring the penalties of motherhood without significant inducement.

Why does it mean you look down on people when stating the obvious? I couldn't afford more than two, so didn't have a third. I certainly don't feel looked down on because of it.

It's perfectly possible to have children and work. The majority of women do it. Also it's not the sole responsibility of mothers to raise children, fathers and grandparents do a lot of the work too. It's one thing to be at SAHM for a few years when having young children but quite another to live on benefits your whole life because you had a child so you see your work as done.

It's not enough for your sole contribution to society to be reproduction. Child rearing doesn't fund public services, pay the benefit bill, fill the pension pots etc. To claim that society should keep you for life because you had a child is ridiculous.

No, child tax credit is more than £16 per week per child.

@SerenePeach It may be perfectly possible to have children and work, but it's hard because, regardless of the "help" that others may give, the greatest burden for balancing everything still falls on mothers. Being a working mother, especially full-time, too often means doing it all, not having it all.

Increasingly women are deciding they don't want that. And guess what, they're not dropping the work part, they're dropping the children part.

If society doesn't make having children a more attractive prospect for women, then there will be less and less with all the unattractive demographic consequences that brings.

I am the only one of my siblings to have children. I'm also in a minority in my friendship group - of my close friends at university, only 2 have children. The rest, a measly £25 a week certainly isn't going to convince them. They spend much more than that on eating out and on the dog walker. All they see when they look at working mothers with children is an endless round of stress, compromise, unfair division of labour, sky-high childcare costs and very little free time or money.

My own view is that, if we want to boost birth rates, we're better focusing on families with two kids and persuading them to have a third and removing the child benefit cap makes sense in this regard.

Not disagreeing with your general points but the skills gap isn't the issue with immigration. It is the unskilled, low paid dirty jobs that migrants are filling because many British people won't/don't want to do them. We need to get young people (actually all people) willing to do any job, including becoming carers, cleaners, security guards, picking fruit/veg, long hours on minimum wage etc, as well as the glamourous well paid careers that you mention. It's easy to complain about migrants taking jobs when those jobs are good jobs, less so when the jobs are shit.

I agree with most of that, but the answer to a low birth rate is not more benefits or to increase the number of entire families living on benefits. It is to make working motherhood better through childcare provision.

The two child benefit cap doesn't stop child benefit it stops the child element of universal credit, they still get child benefit. A working mother gains £25 per week per child, not a lot. A mother living solely on benefits gets far more than that because each child increases all the other benefits she receives also, unless she continues having more children once she is past the cap. The introduction of the cap was done to make benefit funded families consider if they could really afford a third child in their circumstances like working parents have to. Many working parents can't afford a third so why should benefit funded families be able to have a third on everyone else's dime? Having children is not a career. It was seen that way in the 90s which is why the two child benefit cap was introduced in the first place.

Since there is no evidence that the cap reduces the likelihood of benefit claiming families producing extra childen all the cap does is put children in poverty

It had no measurable impact on the birth rate of the target demographic

In other words - it sounds a good idea but doesn't work and just harms those children

Because to get off benefits and make it worth your while you'd need to earn about 35k.

So instead people do enough to come under the thresholds like lunch supervisor.

The problem is this only works while your kids are the age to receive support.

It sets up people (mainly women) for poverty for life.

I have lots of friends who have had reasonable jobs and the potential to progress but why juggle full time work when you come out with the same working 12 hours a week?

You can all pretend that people didn't have kids for the benefits of that it hasn't changed but you clearly don't live on these kinds of estates - or get buses. It has changed. The system isn't perfect but it's an improvement. I see this as a step backwards.

I think people talking about 20 quid a week are naive as to the level of benefits people are receiving.

Surely this only works if you rent and don't have a mortgage. There are benefits which pay mortgage interest but that wouldn't be enough really. And a council house in london is like gold dust.

Given how high private rent is for little houses in suburban towns, my mortgage of 1282 isn't too far off. But I couldn't live on benefits..in fact dh and I even felt our old income of 121k wasn't quite sustainable in the long term and needed increases

People talking about 20 pound a week are just completely ignorant of the entire discussion seeing as it's child benefit that is about 25 a week for the first child and less than that for subsequent children. Child benefit isn't capped it's child tax credit/universal credit that is capped. There's been SO many threads on this issue and the amount of people spouting their opinions on this issue when they don't even understand that it's not child benefit that is capped at two is shocking.