One in five children live in jobless households
James Forsyth 11:31am
The Guardian reports this morning that, “One in five – two million – British children now live in households where neither parent has a job.”
This is an incredibly worrying statistic. The evidence suggests that worklessness is corrosive and soul-destroying. A child growing up in a workless household will, for obvious reasons, tend to have limited ambitions and opportunity. Obviously, as the economy recovers this number should go down — the recent rise indicates that many of these parents have been laid off in recent months. But even before the credit crunch really kicked in, there were more than 1.8 million children living in workless households.
Welfare reform must aim to make work pay by massively reducing the marginal tax rates that people moving from welfare to work face. But the country also needs policies to stimulate job creation. There are already strong idnications that the Tories will cut corporation tax significantly in their first budget, but they also need in their first term to slash the tax on jobs—employers’ National Insurance contributions. The Tories have already said they will prioritise reversing Labour’s planned increase in this tax and that they will exempt new businesses from having to pay it on their first ten employees, but they need to go further and start really reducing it over the course of the next parliament.
Hat Tip: Left Foot Forward
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The Puppet Master
November 3rd, 2009 12:06pm Report this commentAnd immigration continues at 500,000 a year? When the riots finally begin it is going to be carnage.
Billy Blofeld
November 3rd, 2009 12:11pm Report this commentThis issue is as worrying as the legacy of the deficit or Iraq.
Labour has completely failed the people it supposedly stands up for.
davidke
November 3rd, 2009 12:20pm Report this commentDoes anyone in any party know how to create jobs except in the public sector ? I'm sure I don't.
Chris lancashire
November 3rd, 2009 12:57pm Report this commentDavidke: You are right, no government of any colour can create jobs other than in the public sector. What any govt can do is to create the conditions for private sector expansion and thus job creation. Reducing Corporation Tax will help (more money left for capital investment), reducing NI will help (less disincentive to employ). Piddling about with training grants, Development Agency initiatives and the like doesn't help.
Austin Barry
November 3rd, 2009 1:02pm Report this commentThe welfare that welfare payments protect is not that of the recipients but of the rest of us. We reduce them at our peril.
I do hope that the COBRA meetings have established robust procedures for when it all finally and inevitably does kick off in the multi-tribal Favelas of Inner London, Leeds, Birmingham etc. etc.
No doubt our masters will watch in disbelieving horror from the usually complacent heights of Primrose Hill and Hampstead Heath as the flames engulf the city and reveal the Hobbesian reality that, for the moment, lies dormant.
Still, perhaps this catharsis is what we need.
salieri
November 3rd, 2009 1:03pm Report this commentWhat is also incredibly worrying is the rest of the article: the disingenuous drivel this government churns out about "eradicating child poverty". It could achieve this goal (without throwing yet more billions at it) by altering the definition of 'poverty' so that everyone was above the line. But of course it can never do this because the threshold is based on average income (as well as an arbitrary percentage of that average). If poverty is a relative concept, it must always exist. Nothing in the Convention on the Rights of Children can alter that inconvenient truth.
The study in question might usefully have analysed how many of these jobless parents are jobless by choice. But that would be to think the unthinkable, wouldn't it?
Dennis Churchill
November 3rd, 2009 1:04pm Report this commentDavidke
Start by stopping immigration where there is no skill shortage and only allow short-term (one-year) work permits in other areas. Then make welfare payments dependant on a minimum of three months’ work per year in the private sector unless prevented by disability, confirmed by an independent Occupational Health adviser paid by the government or being the sole carer of children under 5years’ old.
Then issue these short-term work permits to all existent non-EU immigrants and see they return to their countries after they expire.
Tankus
November 3rd, 2009 1:08pm Report this commentWell , Gordon the magnificent did promise that he would reduce child poverty in the UK, if not the world .!
So it was a given that it would get far worse.
TomTom
November 3rd, 2009 1:15pm Report this commentSome households have noone of working age; some households are asylum-seekers with no skills but benefit claimants - see Somalis for example. Others do not speak English as they are imported as spouses from The Subcontinent.
These general figures carry too much baggage and do not reflect the diversity of the situation. It is uneconomic for any household with an income <£15,000 to work for a living and pay Tax and NIC.....the Basic Income guaranteed by the Welfare System has no redundancy threat nor any short-time working and has an excellent credit rating as income from benefit is regular and guaranteed.
The simple fact is that it is the 40% taxpayer who produces most of the tax revenues and the marginal workforce which is by definition better off living off those taxes. Further Tax Credits show up as reductions in Income Tax Revenues as more low paid workers enter the workforce
JohnAnt
November 3rd, 2009 1:27pm Report this commentMillions of children grew up in jobless households in the 1920s and 1930s. Many of them became industrialists, academics, inventors, great writers, politicians, army officers, administrators, lawyers, accountants. Because the educational system - the grammar schools, Oxbridge and other University scholarships - gave the ambitious and able an opportunity to learn and show they had learnt.
Now after the dismantling of that system, they stand a cat in hell's chance.
2trueblue
November 3rd, 2009 1:37pm Report this commentThe Labour party killed aspiration and created an enviornment where people were penalised if they tried to help themselves. Even children in schools were denied the right to compete.
We have had more initiatives announced over their terms in government with no delivery.
What a truely nasty ,unprincipaled, unpleasant bunch of people we have had to endure in government for thepast 12yrs. Will no one rid us of them?
Fergus Pickering
November 3rd, 2009 1:47pm Report this commentIt is not an incredibly worrying statistic. It is an all too credibly worrying statistic. Will you journalists stop talking like lady luvvies and using incredibly to mean very? If you did I would be incredibly pleased.
Talia
November 3rd, 2009 3:33pm Report this commentOne (in five children) LIVES in jobless households.
Verity
November 4th, 2009 1:34am Report this commentTalia, the press release was probably written by a Somali "asylum seeker".
Roy Smith
November 4th, 2009 3:47am Report this commentNowhere else in the animal kingdom do we know of life forms that self-destruct as badly as the English speaking peoples are doing at the present time. They are turning inwards on themselves. They are not trying to defend what is morally and physically correct for the advancement of their tribe in the world. They are too busy trying to be the fairy godmother to all the far flung lost bodies of the world who haven't any affiliation with home base. Is it no wonder there are problems. Scientists knew 200 years ago that pushing too many caged animals together in a confined space something has to give. For one thing, they start eating one another. Our . . . space organisers, do not know what they are doing. They should start by studying animal behavior not religious drafts or political nonsenses.
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