A period of family meltdown?

Water

Nice article Peter

James

I met a bloke who works in social care etc and he said it will take 20 years to repair the damage done. What a mess.

Augustus

The judge expects something should be done about "the emerging situation", but there's enough government excess spending going on as it is. Let those who shirk family commitments carry the can for problems of their own creation, i.e. dysfunctional kids and broken homes.

Mr Leatherhead

The cause of increased family breakdown has been clear for some time. It's partly rational, economic response to this Government's tax & welfare framework and a campaign (also promoted by this Government) to put casual relationships pari passu with marriage.
However, the solutions are less clear. Like the old tale of the Irish farmer asked for directions.....I wouldn't start from here!

Jennie

The trend toward cohabitation without benefit of clergy and to shorter-term relationships began in the 1980s, under Thatcher. Laissez-faire family values echoed laissez-faire economics.

Max Kaye

This 'emerging situation' has been emerging for the past 30 years.

Time to link mandatory contraception, sterilisation and/or abortion to receipt of benefits.

Fergus Pickering

How does mandatory contraception work? Is theer a social worker under the bed?

Tom

Just a quick note on the difference between a "broken family" (the term the judge uses) and a broken home a term which some in the comment section are using.

A broken family implies there is no support from grandparents, aunts, and uncles etc, whereas, a broken home simply means single parent, divorce etc. Thus if you are from a broken home it doesn't necessarily mean that you are from a broken family.

Kevyn Bodman

Good heavens, Max Kaye. That's a degree of totalitarianism that would make some Soviet or Chinese communists flinch.

I suggest, and have suggested elsewhere, a complete cessation of all child benefits in respect of children not yet conceived on the day the regulation is passed.

Make people responsible for their own actions; no child curently alive would need to suffer.
But future conception wouldn't offer an income source.

But tax rates would have to be reduced to allow people to spend more of their own money, they'll need that money to support their children.

Charles Murray, in his book 'What It Means To Be A Libertarian' explains how this policy would work.
If state benefits are not payable in respect of children then women are less likely to have sex leading to pregnancy with men who won't support the children.

But stable couples will do OK.

Unfortunately it'd take about a decade and a half to work.
Is there a quicker and better way?

We have a problem; to get where we want to be we have no choice but to start from here.

John Wilkinson

Both parties have been steadily undermining the family since before the 90s by withdrawing financial benefits from it. Talk about supporting the family counts for nothing if there are no financial incentives for marriage.

Verity

Max Kaye - "mandatory contraception" ... You'd trust these female parasites,living off the workers, who have four or five children by three or four different men by the time they're 30 to remember to take their pills? Are you kidding?

Besides, they know their yooman rights.

J. Isaacs

What about Ken "three families" Livingstone, who has told us all to mind our own business about his personal life? One notices he is not calling Johnson "Shagger Boris" at this London mayoral election like he called Stephen Norris "Shagger Norris" at the last.

Nick Kaplan

Sounds sensible to me Kevyn

James

Remind me, where are these examples of successful societies that don’t have a ‘traditional’ family structure? Probably the same as the successful multicultural ones.

Max Kaye

OK everyone, I was wrong about the contraception.... (Fergus: social workers under the bed - yikes - typical of them commies!). So howabout just mandatory sterilisation and/or abortion - after all, they don't have to accept the benefits, right? ;-)

J. Isaacs: I assume (hope) that Mr Livingston's generous salary covers the cost of his various offspring. (It damn-well ought to - it was over £130K in 2006).

Kevin

So, Jennie, Roy Jenkins' permissive society had nothing to do with it then?

Verity

Kevyn Bodman - You say a cessation of child benefits in respect of children not yet conceived on the day the regulation is passed.

But no one is going to let a child starve in Britain. Feckless women would continue to have babies by their "partners" of the week, and government funds would be set aside to pay for the resulting children. It would have a fancy, NuLabour, name and would be presented as something totally different from child benefits. Extraordinary Infant Provision, or something. Labour is not going to lose those child benefit votes.

Jessica

Yes the tories could make a lot of this judges comments but they are too lazy. They should be on every form of media talking about this and getting a lot more attention for the story.

Stan, UK

Is it any wonder this country is in the state its in, look at the very top. KEN LIVINGSTONE has five kids with three different women, non of whom he has ever married, I know Boris is no angel but he has a stable family that has stayed together no matter what.

Ian C

The idea that this is all Brown's fault is not what is being said here, nor should it. What is being said is that this government has given the direction we have been travelling (since the end of WWI in my view) a further kick down the 'anything goes' road that is substantially responsible for the breakdown in thefamily. In other words, governemnt is oblivious to the impact on us as a nation - but it is not exclusively goevrnment's remit to correct this, although if it hadn't been oblivious it would help set the framework for reversal of the trend. We should not try to polticise everything as this blog gas a tendency (a brief perhaps) to do.

London Calling

So its not just the Icecaps and the world economy in meltdown, but also society and the family? Now might be a good time to purchase large quantities of antifreeze to speed everything up even further and put us all out of our misery, anyone got a spare Ark in their back garden?
I don't mind sharing it with the animals...just make sure Ken livingstone's on board, in case we need to offload some weight...:0

Jennie

Kevin, in 1971 (well into the so-called permissive society)unmarried couples living together, or even sharing a room together on holiday, still raised a lot of eyebrows. By the late 70s attitudes had loosened a bit. But adherence to traditional social norms was still quite strong. Thatcher's ideology that people should be allowed to do as they liked, within the law, set people 'free' in many ways.

Pete

It's a problem of our age not of any individual party. However, neither Labour nor Conservative have linked responsibility to benefits in a way that might discourage the feckless from getting in foal; the opposite in fact. We heap housing benefit and family allowance/tax credits in their lap. And as Verity says, no party will let kids starve. Perhaps part of the answer would be to ensure benefit parents are made to do community work for their cash (remove litter, graffiti, broken glass etc. from public places.). Get the idea into people's heads that there will be no such thing as a "free-ride". If you want to feed your sprog then you must actually do something. Secondly, no benefits in cash but in tokens that cannot be used for fags, booze and lottery tickets.
TV too has to take some of the blame for the "underclass' " (dare I use that term?) attitude that sex with anything that walks is acceptable. Look at the soaps (all on in early evening). Nowadays the characters screw around, often get pregnant (don't they sell contaceptives in Weatherfield?) and, when they split with the love of their lives, grieve for a fortnight before bedding their next conquest. What message does this send out? Is there a couple in a mainstream British soap that shows fidelity that isn't mocked and scorned by the other characters?

Familiar Clown

Didn't Lady Thatcher always apportion a great of her efforts in upholding traditional family values?

Verity

Pete- These are good ideas. But the people should be identified. By which I mean, at the moment, anyone compelled to do "community service" turns up (if they turn up at all) in their jeans, t-shirt and trainers and lollygags through the day. Furthering your thought, I would propose a lightweight over-garment -like a flak jacket or something, that has stencilled on the back WORKING FOR MY BENEFITS.

I don't care about them, but it would give the taxpayers who encounter them in daily life a sense of justice. Also, if they slacked off for a fag, someone would be bound to shout at them, "Not working working very hard then, are you, mate?"

It brings the concept right down to the personal and accountable.

In Texas, the work gangs you
see picking up litter along the freeways and doing various other clean-up jobs wear jackets with TEXAS PRISON SERVICE stencilled in very large letters. Citizens can see that the prisoners aren't passengers and have to work for their keep.

Similarly, in the US no money is paid to welfare recipients. They get food stamps and these aren't negotiable for anything but food. They can't buy a Coke, never mind a beer, on their food stamps. They can't even buy a tube of toothpaste or a bottle of detergent. Stores that accept food stamps, by and large, adhere to the rules, because the government, via food stamps, is a big customer and they don't want to get taken off the approved list.

That people in Britain are buying beer and cigarettes and lottery tickets, never mind plasma TVs and - in the case of that Fiona McKeown, taking a family of eight on a six-month "holiday" (from what?) to India, is a grotesque betrayal of the taxpayer.

Jennie

Familiar Clown, Thatcher paid lip-service to 'family values'. Her ideology of individualism and greed is good (the 'me' culture) undermined them.

Roger Davies

I would recommend all those that can to leave the UK as the damage wrought by this inept Gov. will cost us generations of high taxation to repair.
There seems little point in hard working people staying on.

James J

Verity to take your point about Community Service, although I could make it of a number of areas, surely it is about identifying the fundamental purpose of a system? By fundamental purpose I mean that if it fails to meet that purpose it fails. Success in supplementary areas not being able to mitigate that failure.
A criminal justice system that does not reduce crime fails. It does not matter what other areas it addresses.
The reluctance of policy makers to assess areas like community service to see if they fulfil their fundamental purpose is the problem.
It is no use introducing a system that is successful in a society that is pragmatic and then altering it to such a degree that it becomes ineffective.
We use community service to reduce the prison population rather than reduce re-offending.

James J

Verity to take your point about Community Service, although I could make it of a number of areas, surely it is about identifying the fundamental purpose of a system? By fundamental purpose I mean that if it fails to meet that purpose it fails. Success in supplementary areas not being able to mitigate that failure.
A criminal justice system that does not reduce crime fails. It does not matter what other areas it addresses.
The reluctance of policy makers to assess areas like community service to see if they fulfil their fundamental purpose is the problem.
It is no use introducing a system that is successful in a society that is pragmatic and then altering it to such a degree that it becomes ineffective.
We use community service to reduce the prison population rather than reduce re-offending.

Familiar Clown

Jennie - Thatcher's programme was a huge one, but her first priority was to reverse Britain's catastrophic economic recline. A combination of socialism's legacy of dependence, and collapse of traditional values had resulted in burgeoning family breakdown, educational decline, homelessness, delinquency and crime. Consequently, her policies were single-mindedly directed at giving individuals more control over their own lives. If helping people push their latent talents, sense of responsibility, and, dare I use the word, patriotism, equates to an ideology of 'greed is good' and a 'me' culture, then all I can say is that at least that is better than a paler version of socialism stranded on the middle ground of British politics.

Verity

Are you telling me the welfare dependency class, which is immense, would really all be members of the free-enterprise, wealth producing class had not Margaret Thatcher believed in each person's unique individuality?

I smell a rat. The welfare sector has been intentionally expanded hundreds-of-fold by a hardline communist government with the intention of buying voters. Just ask the grotesque Gordon Yuck for ID card production figures in the next Five Year Plan.

Mrs Thatcher privatised the inefficient state bullying behemoths and gave individuals who had never owned a share in their lives, a chance to buy shares. And a chance to buy a council house and invest money in fixing it up. We thought the Sovietesque mould was broken. And then along the corridors of power skittered Tony and Gordon.

Fergus Pickering

Jennie, the ideology that people should be allowed to do what they like within the law is not Thatcherism. It is Utilitarianism. That's Bentham and Mill and all those old-type leftish guys. Liberty, by Mill,is the text.

Jennie

Familiar Clown - but welfare dependency began to increase during the 1980s. Mainly because of lack of suitable jobs, inadequate availability of training, unaffordability of childcare. Welfare benefits were expanded to stop people starving or rioting in the streets. Social problems kept under wraps would lessen the likelihood of the Tories being voted out.

Fergus - are you saying that Thatcher did not believe strongly in people being free to live their lives as they choose, within the law?

Thatcher's ideology was derived from a number of sources. No-one has ever denied that many who are economically very right-wing are, at the same time, very liberal in their social views.

Verity - I agree that the Labour Government over the past 11 years has done nothing to reverse the dependency culture that began in the 1980s. Successive goverments of both hues have found it cheaper and politically expedient to keep the low-skilled on benefits rather than to train them and make lower-paid jobs worth taking. Abolishing the 10% tax rate is hardly going to get the 'welfare dependent' beseiging Job Centres demanding jobs.

Perry

A pernicious, softly, softly approach, aided by Noo-Speak, psychobabble, and a flourishing self-interested ‘welfare’ (sic) industry has sequestered not only a generation and more, but become the norm. The good Dr Theodore D. has noted this well.

John

The solution is to stop rewarding social failure. There is no safety net in Britain. It is a comfort blanket. Is anybody really surprised that "ending child poverty" has led to a massive increase in the number of single parent families? By single family, of course, I mean illegitimate children.

Fergus Pickering

Jeennie, of course I think thet the blessed Margaret thought that people should be free to live their lives as they choose within the law. And so do I and so does everybody who believes in democracy and freedom and all those sorts of things. The Scarlet Letter is more your bag it would appear.

Verity

James J - My citing the Texas Prison system as a template apparently confused the issue.

What I had intended to convey was, people doing enforced "communitiy service" (which makes it sound like volunteer work) should be identified while they're working. We want to see people working for their "benefits". I mentioned that identifying people doing work by command, rather than their own free will, is routine in Texas prisons. Presumably for the same reason. It gives taxpayers the opportunity to see that the system is working in their favour.

Jennie

Fergus, are you saying that I am in sympathy with the themes of The Scarlett Letter? If so, nothing could be further from the truth. I, too, believe that people should be free to live their lives as they please, within the law.

The argument throughout my posts above has been that, as the Right believe that people should be free to live their lives as they please, provided that they do so within the law, then the Right should not start whingeing when many people have chosen to become single parents.

Typical White Person

Verity: You are incorrect regarding the welfare system in the USA.

1) Each state has its own modified set of rules -- some states are far more generous than others.

2) In a state such as California, with high housing costs, a single mother with a son and a daughter is entitled to a three-bedroom apartment for minimal rent if her income is low enough. Many single mothers on welfare have nicer apartments than those who work full-time at skilled jobs. A single mother with a "HUD voucher" can rent any apartment in the county that granted the voucher. She is not stuck in a "housing project" (= government owned slum.) In fact, if she is presentable and has a decent credit rating, she can be in a much nicer neighborhood and school district than the average working stiff.

3) "Food stamps" (it is now a plastic card) CAN not only be used to purchase Coca Cola, they can also be used to purchase Diet Coke, which has no nutritive value.

4) Welfare rules have changed a lot in recent years, and far fewer women seem to be on the bastard-a-year plan. In many places, you can now only be on welfare a certain number of years, etc., and some jurisdictions no longer allow underage girls to get their own apartment. This has gone a long way toward ending the idea that you can go on welfare at age 13 when you have your first baby, and stay on welfare till your last child reaches adulthood (at which point you are probably eligible for disability benefits, due partly to the fact that you are uneducated and too long out of the work force to be worth training.)

5) The tax system now has an "earned income" credit, which effectively gives a yearly government-paid bonus to low-income families who have a working breadwinner. It is very controversial, but it probably does induce low-skilled people to hold a job.

6) Single mothers in California do (or at least they did in the 1990s) receive significant cash payments each month based on the number of children that they had, even after welfare reform was passed at the national level. With HUD housing, welfare, free medical and DENTAL care, university tuition help, and food stamps, combined with no child care costs if you did not work, the average single mother was far better off not working.

7) In most jurisdictions, if you don't have a child, you don't get any cash welfare benefits, but you are still entitled to food stamps and housing vouchers.

8) One of the worst features of the US welfare system, IMO, is that people who have a crisis situation (divorce, etc.) in a high cost of living area face two or more years on a waiting list for housing assistance, while other people who should have moved off the housing assistance rolls years ago continue collecting those benefits. The areas of the USA with the highest housing costs (California, New York, etc.) have the longest waiting lists for housing help. The other bad feature is that people aren't really allowed to transition off of welfare benefits in an honest way. As soon as you save up any money you are thrown off of benefits. This means that people who have finally moved into a nice apartment courtesy of HUD housing will not do ANYTHING productive that would jeopardize this benefit, as if they took a job and no longer qualified for HUD housing, if they lost the job, they would have to wait years to get the benefit restored due to waiting lists.

Bottom Line: Our benefit culture is probably just as bad as yours.

Jennie

The 'poverty trap' or 'unemployment trap' has been around since the early 1980s - and no government seems knows what to do about it, which is why it's still with us.

Working tax credits don't seem to help. What is needed is plenty of stable jobs paying decent salaries, affordable childcare, and restrictions on masses of cheap-labour Eastern-european migrants pushing down wage levels. Fat chance.

Fergus Pickering

Jennie, I tried to apologise for getting the wrong end of the stick butveither myown incompetence of the masters of the blog wouldn't let me. I went on to say something like I don't whinge about single parents but don't see why I should have to pay for their children. The can do as theylike within the law and then pay for it.

Bill Badger

Well done, Kevyn Bodman. Paying child benefit to teenage mums is pure bribery, a waste of taxpayers' money and a desperate start for the young offspring. For far too many people, having children is a tax-free way to a steady income and a council house - complete with housing benefit! Society suffers enormously from its own largesse, as too many kids grow up with kids for parents, no family support and no moral guidance. I have argued for many years that the government should give the population 9-months' notice of the withdrawal of child benefit. That news would quickly spread and penetrate the skulls of even the thickos who breed like rabbits across the land. Put the money into family-support tax relief. The idiotic notion of a governemnt not being "judgemental" about perople's choices of "family structure" is pure tosh. The government should direct the money in ways which best support the nation's interest for stability and social responsibility. A ban on child benefit would work in no time!

Jennie

Apology accepted, Fergus.

Jennie

Am I correct in assuming that most people don't mind married couples receiving child benefit but not single parents? Or do most think that ALL child benefit should be stopped, i.e. if you have children, whether or not you are married, your offspring are your financial responsibility alone and that the State should provide no financial support at all?

As there are still a lot of married parents, it would be a brave government that stopped all State financial support for children!

TomTom

Expansion of universities in the 1960s required expansion of the public sector to employ the graduates in social sciences.

We were promised engineers and got English graduates, they then voted to expand welfare state jobs for them to be employed.

The whole machinery of colonisation of the taxpayer host continued to grow like a strep infection

Caroline

This has been an interesting discussion and I'm going to be fascinated by the responses to Jennie's questions from Bill Badger who thinks that single parents are 'thickos breeding like rabbits' though his suggestion of a ‘9-months' notice of the withdrawal of child benefit’ may have some merit and be worth exploring; and Verity who suggests that those in receipt of welfare benefits should be labeled and shamed rather like Texan criminals. Well researched facts and figures would be helpful.

Jennie

There is also the point that many single parents didn't start off that way. At the time they conceived their children they were in stable relationships, often married. But later their relationships broke down and they split from their partners.

Have these single parents metamorphosed from upstanding members of society into feckless rabbit-types who should either have their child benefits stopped forthwith or be made to clean graffiti etc for them?

George

The current Shannon Matthews 'kidnapping' debacle should be written up and published as required reading for all social workers, judges, teachers and politicians. Karen Matthews - currently in police custody - apparently has 7 children by 5 different fathers. No doubt all of those men went on to father other children in other 'relationships'. So we could be talking about thirty or more children distributed among five different women. All no doubt raised on public benefits - in public subsidised housing. If you were to estimate what Karen Matthews has received in state benefits for housing, childcare and general income support over the last ten years - I suspect you woould be talking many hundreds of thousands of pounds.
The current police investigation has cost over £1 million in police overtime. The ensuing court cases will probably cost another million.

This is justa tiny, tiny window on the gigantic social collapse that has been engendered by politicians and liberal-thinkers since the 1960s. There are now huge housing schemes where the third generation is being raised on welfare benefits and where a 'stable' relationship is one that lasts more than one pregnancy.

Bill Badger

Yes. Jennie, I am suggesting that ALL child benefit should be stopped. Married couples with children should be supported through the tax system; but people MUST know that having and raising children is not the State's responsibility but theirs. If couples then divorce to become single parents that is their choice, and not one to be supported by the taxpayer. Married parents who become single through bereavement clealry enter the category of widow/er, and could be catered for separately.

Bill Badger

Verity, you are a wind-up merchant: Labour losing votes from single girl-mums - you're joking/ You ignore that many are not even old enough to vote. Most of the others we are talking about - it seems to me - would hardly know how to write the necessary X, far less think or care about doing so - for Labour or any other Party.
We're not talking Oxbridge grads in PPE or rocket science. But sadly, all too often, intelligent people are making the choice not to have children even within marriage or a stable relationship.

Jennie

Hold on, Bill Badger, you say that having and raising children is not the State's responsibility. In that case, why do you approve of State financial support for married and widowed parents?

Ann

Jennie - "Successive goverments of both hues have found it cheaper ... to keep the low-skilled on benefits rather than to train them and make lower-paid jobs worth taking" - it is not cheaper but hugely more expensive, assuming you are able to think beyond the moment. This government is too stupid and lazy to be able to do so. It is far cheaper in the mid-term, never mind long-term, to train people so they can generate wealth: you get your investment back fifty-fold in national wealth, and specifically in taxes on that wealth. But when you have useless idiots in power who have never run anything or been properly trained to run anything, and who have no understanding of economics (and/or who would rather have the votes and stay in power then actually do anything that benefits this country), of course they prefer to pay the benefits rather than invest in training. I can't go into details, but I have a relative who works in re-training adults with poor qualifications and believe me, it's an uphill struggle to reach those who need it, with far from enough government support. A lot of the support comes from the private sector.

The idea that Bentham was 'left-wing' is grotesque. Utilitiarinism and the rest of Bentham's credo are not left wing but true liberalism; left wing is the opposite of liberalism, it's about coercing people into a pattern/mould.

Ann

No, Jennie, single parents have not 'metamorphosed', but they should still put something into society in return for the benefits they get from it. That's called a fair society.

Jennie

Ann, you have misunderstood my second-to-last post before this one.

I was responding to the many previous comments on this thread, which I have been following and contibuting to from the start, by commentators who appear to think that 'single' parents are an amorphous mass, and of a very different calibre to married parents, i.e. such commentators appear to regard married parents as responsible, whereas single parents are 'feckless'.

My point was that many parents who are now 'single' began their parenting careers as married but subsequently became 'single' parents through divorce or separation. And I was posing the question, do those who decry 'single' parents think that, simply by virtue of divorce or separation, these formerly married, assumed-responsible, parents have become 'feckless', etc, etc.

In other words, I am saying that there are several types of 'single' parent. To classify them all, as many do, as the feckless underclass who breed like rabbits and should have their child benefits withdrawn is tunnel vision of the narrowest, to put it politely.

Mark Solomon

The permissive society isn't the problem and there is no way there are any votes to be obtained in promising to turn back the clock, it can't be done. But allowing people to be free to do as they wish without stigma in their personal lives is one thing (and part of the freedom ideology supposed to be at the heart of modern Conservatism) - it is quite another for the government to support bad decisions financially, which is what is being done. The whole benefit and welfare system provokes and assists the breakdown of families and the avoidance of personal responsibility. Yes, people should be free to marry, not marry, have as many children with whoever they like and live with whoever they like, but there is no reason for the government to encourage or subsidise a lifestyle that will cost us all in the long run. People with little money DO make decisions based on the benefit system and currently they make the wrong ones and are penalised if they do the right thing. Fixing this won't cost money, in fact it will save it and with the added benefit of getting the state out of people's lives, which is something the Conservatives should be keen to do and is precisely why Labour cannot and doesn't want to fix the problem as someone paid by the state - whether as a civil servant or a benefit recipient, it's all the same, becomes a Labour client voter.

An end to all this extra support to single mothers above and beyond what married mothers can expect; no benefits at all to anyone who has never paid NI; no more supplementary benefit or child benefit. In this way the UK would only be imitating other European countries anyway and the whole issue could be sold as 'Freedom and Fairness' an appealing electoral basis for any Conservative.

Perry

Hear, Hear! TT, MS, and others

Jennie

I thought that the Child Support Agency was supposed to ensure that absentee parents helped to support their children, thus removing, or at least reducing, the financial contribution that the State has to make.

Is the CPA not doing its job?

Caroline

No Jennie, the CSA is not doing its job, and never has from the day it was conceived by the Tories as another of their questionable and botched reforms, overseen in this case by Alistair Burt, who really should have resigned over its failure, but these politicians eh? Anyway, the CSA doesn’t work despite having had more refurbs than Dave’s kitchen, and they really should stop polishing that turd.

Now here’s the bottom line. You can be an anti-social, dangerous and ignorant, thick as pudding, hard drinking, drug taking (no names) dangerous driving utter prat. And even up- the- duff due to illicit/unsavoury relationships or casual one night stands is acceptable. If you can afford a good lawyer and abortionist – it’s not a problem. It’s a financial issue - not a social or moral one don’t you know? No funds? A bit awkward then, to have behaved exactly like those who have.

You’ll find some welfare answers here – it’s a very enlightening discussion forum, though some anxiety was expressed about Dave insisting that a single parent will be back in the workplace by the time the youngest child is age four. I’m sure that Dave would be baffled by this worry, and be quick to tell you that Sam went back to ‘work’ when their kids were infants – after all if she can manage her work/social life balance with only half a dozen live in staff - why can’t you. ;0) Good luck.

http://conservativehome.blogs.com/torydiary/2008/01/tories-to-imp-1.html

http://conservativehome.blogs.com/torydiary/2008/01/well-make-briti.html

emma

One year ago, after 20 years of marriage, my husband died suddenly from a heart attack. He was the family's breadwinner and we have two young children. The widowed parent allowance is a vital part of our much reduced income because I continue to be utterly devastated and sick with grief (plus one of my children's attendance at school has dropped away due to the pain of grieving). The WPA allowance is taxed and counts as income when claiming child tax credits. However, if my husband had divorced me, then the maintenance payments do not count as income - they are not taxed and they do not count towards a claim for child tax credits. Therefore, if Heather Mills receives, say, £1mill in maintenance payments, she can still claim the full amount of child tax credits.