So, because they've got unfortunate, uncaring or stupid parents, we should just pretend that the kids don't need our help then?
OK, I'm starting to get the hang of this Christianity lark.

Most people do. Some people don't. Accidents happen.

Also, amongst people who choose to have children will be a number for whom the choice was perfectly sensible at the time and then their situation changed. Maybe a divorce, loss of a partner, or loss of a job. What do you suggest they do with their kids at this point? Put them into care?

And finally - no matter how feckless you might consider any given parent to be, the children are utterly blameless. Penalising them therefore seems to me to be a tad harsh.

I think some people are missing the point, if these people on housing benefit apart from pensioners, disabled or people with disabled children are upset about losing benefits because they have an extra bedroom why don't they do what the rest if us have to and work/study hard to get the job that can pay for their extra bedroomed house whether it be private rented, LA or owned.

Me and my fiancé have had to do it, the many years since leaving school/college/Uni of hard work, crap jobs and living on low wages and using contraception to get to the position where we are now to have a good/well paid job, nice house and ready to start a family.

Not everyone's life goes to plan and I know jobs are scarce so why doesn't the Govemment do something about the job situation first then implement this idea?

1) There are few one-bed properties. 1a) There are an awful lot of properties where a second (or third) bedroom is a bedroom in name only.

2) Once everyone has aspired their way into super-duper-paying jobs, whereby they can afford a mortgage on a £250,000 one-bed flat in somewhere as posh as downtown Hackney, who is going to do the low-paid jobs? And why should people doing low-paid jobs that society needs doing – cleaning is just one example – be on such grindingly low pay that they require benefits and then can be penalised for that?

Specific example: can John Lewis – a very successful British company – do without having anyone clean its stores, offices, depots etc? If not, why should it get away with paying its cleaners so little than many cannot live without recourse to in-work benefits, including housing benefit?

This is the perfect illustration of why we need social housing that is affordable. And by 'affordable', I don't mean £125k for a one-bed flat to someone who qualifies as a 'key worker'.

Maybe this is exactly their plan, but to get there they have to claim housing benefit for a while?

I assume you base your judgement on London where as I base mine on the North,

Example : my finances mother worked as a cleaner and brought up 4 children single handed in a 3 bed house which was ex council which she bought herself in the 70's/80's, one of her children was disabled (unable to move anything other than her eyes until the age of 15 when a wonder drug gave her full use and within days was walking and talking and to this day you wouldn't know that fact with the way she is), now her next door neighbour (in council house) is an early 20's single parent with 2 kids with numerous undesirables going round, if my finances mother can manage why can't tr said next door neighbour? If she managed with 4 girls (1 of them severely disabled) in a 3 bed house paid for by herself why can't the said neighbour with 2 same sex kids?

Same can be said about my mother, privately owned 3 bed home bringing up 4 kids single handed working 2 jobs to make ends meet and for what? She could have thrown the towel in and received a lot more in benefits but she didn't because she isn't bone idle.

I have sympathy for some but from my experiences in working in social housing many are either bone idle or playing the system to great effect, some houses were palaces and some you wouldn't let your dog stay there.

Now I have no qualms whatsoever about pensioners, disabled or people with disabled children etc living in 3 bedroom houses as the disabled speaks for itself and the pensioners have earned it and deserve to not be uprooted/moved or punished through taxation, for example ; my grandfather served in WW2 and then spent the rest of his life down the pit and living in social housing, he payed his tax and worked hard all his life, he shouldn't be taxed but in the first example I gave why should this 20 something girl who can't keep her hand on her ha penny and has never worked a day in her life have the same luxury of living in the same house as someone who has worked hard for it?

I was a tax payer, once. I paid something called National Insurance on my full time and two part time jobs that I worked 7 days a week. Now I'm a social failure, oh the shame

It wasn't 'judgement'. It was facts. Housing is a massive cost that at means that many people are going to struggle to get a roof over their heads.



Blimey – that's a lot of people in your family circle who come from broken families – did your parents all 'choose' that? Was your finance's mother irresponsible to have four children?

Do you get that point?

Let's try more.

There is a shortage of jobs. This is a fact.

60% of benefits claimants are in work.

The 1:5 UK households claim housing benefit – and 89% of those are working households.

So let's dismiss the 'scoungers' and 'skivers' myth straight away. The majority of people on any benefits are in work; the vast majority of people on housing benefits are in work.

More reality: foodbanks are on the increase – massively on the increase. And this is the UK. So are legalised loansharks. As I have posted before, I was interviewing a debt counsellor a few weeks ago and I'm not even going to start repeating how scathing she was of these legalised loan sharks.

Your apparent desire that everyone should just go out and get 10 jobs – remember: there's not even one job for everyone of working age.

Many people are increasingly being tied to zero-hours contracts. They have to sit by the phone waiting to be called to a job. If they're unavailable, they'll lose their job. We are seeing an increasingly casualised workforce, with employers using all sorts of means to cut the wages and conditions of the staff on the ground – although never their own, for some strange reason that's hard to fathom.

And this is against a background of income inequality having risen for 30-plus years.

That income inequality – it is bad for the whole of a society. Less equal societies have more crime, more negative health issues, more addiction, less educational achievement – and much more. More equal societies are better across these things and more (if you wish to read about this in detail, read [iThe Spirit Level[/i).

The current situation is not good for society as a whole – regardless of what the divide-and-rule politicians and their friends in the media would have you believe.

On belief – do you look back to what your own relatives went though and think it was A Good Thing? Do you feel nostalgia for it? Or is it a bit like those mothers who take their girls for female genital mutilation because they'd been through it, so why shouldn't their daughters? Y'know: 'we suffered, so can they'?

And let's do another myth while we're at it – his 'hard-working taxpayer' one. Most of us are fortunate enough to not have to work very hard. By comparison with a hospital cleaner or porter, I don't. I very much doubt you work anything like as hard as the grandfather you mention. Or the same hospital porter or cleaner.

Yet it seems that you – and plenty of others – actively want hard-working people in unsexy but essential jobs to suffer. Why? It's not good for society. It's not good for productivity. What is it good for?

As I said, do you really look back at what various members of your own family went through and think everybody should experience a bit more like that?

PS: I've just heard that housing prices in Hackney – this is not a posh area; increasingly trendy, but not posh and still an area of great deprivation – has risen by 11.6%, second only to Kensington & Chelsea, FFS. Rents are on a similar curve.

The average house price in England and Wales is £162,000. On a sensible mortgage, that means a household income of £54,000 per annum. [url=http://www.payscale.com/research/UK/Country=United_Kingdom/SalarySome average salaries[/url.

I get no housing benefits at all and I just get 25% off my Poll Tax.

I just hope for your sake that Ian Duncan Smith doesn't read these forums because if he reads that he'll blow another fuse and dash to a Murdoch newspaper to absolutely deny your facts and replace the skivers and scroungers mantra back into the public domain.

The new NHS Party has been aiming them in his direction already.

If you mean you get a discount off your council tax because you are a single person, don't worry you will be next in line to have that "benefit" removed.

The same argument will apply to you. It will be if you don't want to pay the full council tax for a property of the band you live in, go and buy one in a lower band.

... or go and educate yourself or train to get one of the millions of better-paid jobs that are out there.

Went to a SWP meeting last night. Apparently the revolution is imminent. Is that the same one that was imminent last time I went, 35 years ago, or a new one?

They're too busy smearing assorted members who say they were raped by party leaders to be organising anything else.

Do they have SWP meetings in leafy Hertfordshire?

Well I never.............

Your not talking to Kirkstaller here I know things don't work out but I wouldn't class every single parent family as a broken home, would you class someone with a deceased parent from a broken home? Probably not but then again a family with both parents there could be classed as a broken home depending on how the family life is



Ok



Agree

.

I was self employed from 2010 to 2012 until I got the job I'm in now and after 9 months on the agency I have worked hard enough not only to get taken on but to be offered a managers position.

Whilst self employed I had to go out and find the work, if I didnt get any work one week I wouldn't earn a penny so who pays my rent/mortgage for me?



Was the author of that book on Newsnight the other night? I'll give it a read, I agree with you on that front.





I look back with pride that they had the substance to overcome hardship into the position they are in now, I don't expect anyone to suffer I want people to go out and earn their money, you may know people who are out of work and in hardship and want to work and base your judgemnet on those people, from my experience in working in social housing a lot of them didn't work some never have.




No I never worked as hard as a miner but fitting 1 day central heating is hard graft, well paid hard graft but I went to college for 4 years on £50 a week apprenticeship and worked behind a bar 2 nights a week and at a bookies on a Saturday so that I could learn to become a gas engineer/plumber and earn decent money. Now I'm in a different job where I don't break a sweat, because after I came out of my time I stayed on at college for another 4 years funded by myself 2 nights a week after work to do my HNC/HND in Construction.



I expect the government to provide the opportunity for people to work for a living and not have to rely on state handouts (obviously pensioners, disbabled and carers etc exempt)

If it weren't for the last Labour Governent god knows where I would have ended up, without their Asset Training Scheme I wouldn't have been able to have complete my apprenticeship which was funded by the Government at the cost of £50 a week payed to me which they invested well and now I don't need to rely on them.

Like I said, the benefits system needs overhauling massively to rid the idle from the taxpayers hard earned but first the opportunity to get into work and training must be implemented but somehow I can't see the Tories doing that.

The strange thing is that David Cameron has been speaking TODAY about that very thing, the opportunity to give every school leaver not gong into FE an apprenticeship of some description.

Of course he isn't mentioning how to fund any of this and I suspectr that he isn't going to offer any sort of help at all because he's also spoken of how private businesses have to help out, but it just goes to show that nothing is new in politics and the fact that he was visiting a training college today and had to think of something to say probably had nothing to do with it at all.


Of course - 'twas always done this way when I was a trainee back in the good old 1970s...

Whilst my comment was tongue in cheek - they do. I recall Titan going to one when he was a school at the behest of a friend and one of his teachers was there! He thought the whole bunch of them were deluded imbeciles (which they are). Mind you that meeting was in the seedy Metropolis of St Albans.

I reckon there good have been some gays there as well?
I'm now starting to understand your need for questioning the lads sexuality.

Camoron was visiting MBUK's training facility at Milton Keynes today. Those young apprentices he was seen with were employed by their dealerships and the training will have been funded by those same dealerships too.

It was also announced today that any over 24 year old who is accepted on an apprentice course will fund his own training through loans similar to those offered to students.

As with YTS and all the other smokescreen programmes before, the only "investment" government will be making is what they'd have paid in unemployment benefit anyway

Although to be fair, when thee and me were nobbut young fresh out of school trainees, our company's paid for our training too, possibly the colleges were more subsidised and thus the fees cheaper, but the company paid.

For five years in the case of the trade I was in, from the age of sixteen to twenty one by which time you were expected to be doing the same job as a fully qualified forty year old or you were out on your ear.

And there was nothing wrong at all with that system, it wasn't in the slightest bit broken and yet someone decided they knew better and decided to tamper with it.

Children never 'just happen'. They are the result of a choice. People choose to have sex and when they choose to do that they know that there is the risk of pregnancy even when using contraception (and absolutely nobody of any age these days has an excuse not to use contraception - it is freely available even to those under 16 and discussed throughout school and just about everywhere else).

It really isn't. Some people do choose to be poor: those who serve in a voluntary capacity for example (sustained by grants or charitable giving) but very few do. And while poverty can be the result of a person's choices - stealing from the till and getting the sack for example - most people are not responsible for their poverty. I would suggest that most people are born into it rather than invite it but that is just a gut belief rather than a belief based upon research. However, people are responsible for the decisions they make whether they are poor, middling or rich.


Mockery doesn't become you. However, Mary was betrothed to Joseph and that counted for something in the culture of the day much as betrothal used to have meaning in English culture. While not ideal, if a woman became pregnant during betrothal then all could be forgiven so long as the marriage went ahead and nobody else got involved with the woman.


Jesus did say some stuff about relationships. He made a point of telling the woman at the well that she'd had a few husbands and to go away and sin no more. Oh, and he didn't say that riches will make it difficult to get into his dad's gaff, only that being rich makes it harder for the rich person to do the necessary in order to get there - ie, put his dad above his possessions in order of priority.

That there is such a dilemma indicates how wrong the system has gone. Our benefits system as originally constructed was for the short term help of the unfortunate and elderly. The original author did not want his system to be a long term commitment because he was very aware of how dependent people would become upon it (read it for yourself). That has indeed happened. How to pull it all back? It's a dilemma because there is the risk of harm to children but that doesn't mean that the issue shouldn't be faced and that something shouldn't be done.