Families on Benefits ‘£18,000 Better Off’ Than Working Neighbours
New analysis by the Centre for Social Justice finds that families on modest incomes will be £18,000 worse off than parents on benefits after Rachel Reeves scrapped the two-child cap in the Budget. The Mail has more.
A salary of around £71,000 a year is now needed to match the benefits income for some bigger families, a think-tank has warned.
Calculations from the Centre for Social Justice have laid bare the impact of Labour’s decision to axe the two-child cap.
Rachel Reeves has been trumpeting the £3 billion a year move in the Budget, insisting it will slash child poverty.
A family with one adult full-time and one part-time worker would take home roughly £28,000 after tax, according to the estimates.
But that is £18,000 less than the welfare income now available to an equivalent three-child family outside work on combined benefits.
The CSJ – chaired by Tory former Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith – said: “Matching that level of support through earnings alone would require a pre-tax salary of around £71,000.”
The split for single parents is even starker, the think-tank’s report said.
A parent with children on combined benefits would be expected to receive roughly £38,000 per year. That could rise to £43,000 if the adult themselves is receiving health benefits, according to the CSJ.
That is some £22,000 more than the take-home pay from a full-time job on £20,600.
Worth reading in full, as is the Centre for Social Justice’s ‘Benefits Budget’ report.
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“Child poverty”
What a crock of crap.
Poverty of parenting not money.
Yes I am sure that can happen – that’s life, sadly for the kids involved.
It’s just a handout to labour supporters who have large families – could the majority of them be møslems?
“Sustainable”
For Labour, this is a feature not a bug
Timely really, what with net zero and everything soon there’ll be no more working families anyway because there’ll be no more jobs.
So everybody will be on benefits! What a result!
I’d love to see the figures that the CSJ have based this claim on. I’m neurodiverse and have a long term mental health condition, I get just under £10,000 a year in benefits plus about £3,700 in housing benefit. 2 children will result in a total of £2215 a year in child benefits so almost £14,500 a year plus housing benefit. I question how they came up with a figure of £38,000 a year. Obviously the vast majority of people with children who receive housing benefit will get far more than £3,700 but even if they got £15,000 a year the total amount they get would be less than £30,000 a year. It might be the case that a small minority of families get £38,000 a year if they’re able to claim PIP and other benefits I can’t get but I doubt the majority get anywhere near this amount, and even without housing costs £14,500 isn’t going to go far with 2 children in a household. The problem isn’t that a lot of families are getting too much in benefits in absolute terms it’s that working families don’t get paid enough. Obviously if the minimum wage increased significantly this would… Read more »
The problem for working people is having to pay for people who don’t.
benefits were supposed to tide you over until you got a job, not become a lifestyle choice.
It depends what you mean by “make work pay”. If you mean make the lowest paid jobs pay more than you get in benefits then that’s a somewhat artificial measure since the level of benefits is largely a political decision.
On a more general note people would make various arguments about how to make our country more prosperous, among them: lower taxes, spend less on inefficient public services, ditch Net Zero, cut red tape, stop importing low skilled workers and immigrants who don’t work at all etc.
It is remarkable that you are able to write and express yourself so articulately but are apparently unable to market this skill on the labour market. This seems like a sad waste of human resources.
“The difference between a Welfare State and a Totalitarian one is—–a matter of time” –Ayn Rand.