Express.
HARD-working taxpayers are subsidising the rents of big jobless families to the tune of almost £1billion a year.Benefits should be a safety net for the able, a necessity to the sick and disabled and a comfort to the elderly in their twilight years, not a means to support those who want large families but not work to keep them. It should not be down to the state via the taxpayer to pay out to those who haven't paid in. If you have as the rest of the news article claims, eleven children then that's your problem if you don't work to support them, not mine. I'll grit my teeth and help support the first two (for population maintenance) but after that you're on your own if you choose to have any more, you can hand them over for adoption if you can't manage or get a job and get ancillary benefits by working to assist you that way (again only for your first two)
The full price of paying for unemployed parents who choose to have large broods but cannot meet the cost is laid bare in new statistics.
The Department for Work and Pensions figures reveal that keeping 140,000 households with four or more children in homes many workers would struggle to afford is costing the public purse £916million a year. And eight households are still getting an astonishing £1,100 a week to cover their rent despite the coalition Government phasing in a £500-a-week cap last year.
Being on basic benefits if you haven't paid in ought to be an incentive to get off them by working, if you've paid in, you should get more for the first six months then it's back to basic. Same for a pansioner who has never worked, they should get a basic pension whilst someone who has worked all their life gets the enhanced one.
Common sense would dictate that if you do pay in you get more and better, sadly when it comes to common sense, those at the top who lumbered us with the system don't ever appear to have had it.
5 annotations:
Great piece ! And it reflects my views entirely.
I've always said there is only one way to solve this, and that is time limiting benefits. You can't just cut them, because the usual suspects will round up every hard case they can and make hay with it in the media. Look at how the 'Bedroom Tax' situation played out. If you attempted any more radical cuts it would be like a warzone.
Whereas a time limit affects no-one in day one, so there are no hard cases to parade in front of the media. And if you make it reasonably generous, say 10 years over a working lifetime, no-one in 10 years time can complain when they get chucked off the dole, as they'll have had 10 years to get new qualifications, find work, move if necessary, genrally sort their lives out, etc etc.
It would be a slow process of change, but eventually people would realise that if they use up all their 10 years in their 20s having loads of free kids while on benefits, they'll have to spend the next 30 years scraping a living themselves with no assistance, before getting a pension. That will be a powerful incentive to behave more sensibly throughout their lives.
The only trouble with my policy is that it would require a political consensus to implement - it would have to be continued over a long period of time to make it work. Which pretty much means it'll never happen of course.
Spot on!
First two? They can pay for those too as far as I'm concerned.
Firstly, alter child benefit so that it is a relief from income tax and not a payment, and pay it only for the first two children (or one multiple birth). This would make it useless to the unemployed, so breeding like a rabbit would be unattractive to them.
Secondly, time-limit benefits and relate them to money paid into the system, as measured by income tax paid. Something like £100 in pays for £500 out or something like that.
This means that a newly arrived immigrant, or for that matter an eighteen year old school leaver are both entitled to nothing, as they've paid nothing in. Instant discrimination but EU-legal as it applies to everyone.
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