The benefits cap
Tuesday, January 31st, 2012 | Religion & Politics, Thoughts
There has been much discussion about the benefits cap recently – on one hand you don’t want to put families into poverty, but on the other hand you can argue it’s perfectly reasonable to expect a family to live on a £36,000 salary – especially given the alternative, often a minimum wage job, pays only a third of that.
One of the biggest portions of this benefit is child benefit and the argument is made that this is required because parents cannot afford to go to work because of the prohibitive cost of childcare.
One solution to this problem however, would be rather than spending all the money on child benefit, to spend the money on free, or at least heavily subsided childcare.
This would mean that parents could get access to affordable childcare and therefore be free to work. It also means that lots more jobs would be created.
Of course you could argue that if you’re going to spend money paying people to look after children, you might as well just have child benefit so parents can stay at home. But this doesn’t stack up because it’s far less efficient to have everyone staying at home looking after a small number of children.
There has been much discussion about the benefits cap recently – on one hand you don’t want to put families into poverty, but on the other hand you can argue it’s perfectly reasonable to expect a family to live on a £36,000 salary – especially given the alternative, often a minimum wage job, pays only a third of that.
One of the biggest portions of this benefit is child benefit and the argument is made that this is required because parents cannot afford to go to work because of the prohibitive cost of childcare.
One solution to this problem however, would be rather than spending all the money on child benefit, to spend the money on free, or at least heavily subsided childcare.
This would mean that parents could get access to affordable childcare and therefore be free to work. It also means that lots more jobs would be created.
Of course you could argue that if you’re going to spend money paying people to look after children, you might as well just have child benefit so parents can stay at home. But this doesn’t stack up because it’s far less efficient to have everyone staying at home looking after a small number of children.