There have been queries about benefits.
OK. I was out of work due to sickness (which became disability, much to my utter joy [/sarcasm] after a while.
1. In the 00s - early 10s, if you had a small child, you were not required to be available for work. Full stop. No signing on, all you had to do was complete the IS form. You therefore qualified for Income Support, Child Benefit, full Housing Benefit, full Council Tax Benefit, milk vouchers (enough for a tub of formula or 7pints of fresh milk a week), possibly vitamin drops if you lived near a child health clinic, free prescriptions, free travel to hospital appointments, free dental care. However, any maintenance received from a kid's father would be taken into account and, IIRC, deducted pound for pound from your entitlement. You would also be expected to pay your water rates, gas, electricity and food. If you were short of something like a refrigerator or bed, so could apply to social security via an SF100 form and get either a non repayable grant or a zero percent loan from the social fund, which was paid back at something like £4 a week by deducting from your IS payments. If you were in social housing, your rent would be paid direct to the landlord, if you rented privately, you could opt for the money to be either paid direct to your landlord or direct to you. Landlords were still happy to accept 'DSS' tenants, as the money was good and generally reliable once a claim was set up.
2. If you were working and earned below a certain amount, you would receive Tax Credits. These included 70% of any registered childcare fees and money in respect of the child. When they were called Family Tax Credit (I can't remember when exactly they changed over), the same amount was paid for six months at a time, so if you were working for 16 hours a week at the time of the claim and then increased your hours or got another job that was fulltime, whilst the childminding costs would be adjusted and increased as soon as you told them the average amount had varied by over £10 a week, you were perfectly entitled to keep the higher figure for that six month period.
You were unlikely to qualify for Housing or Council Tax Benefit if you were in receipt of tax credits, as they raised your income significantly higher.
3. With both schemes, a single parent would have several separate income sources, which you could get monthly, weekly, four weekly or fortnightly as you preferred. If one of them screwed up, you would still receive the others, so you were never without at least the Child Benefit, which wouldn't make you rich, but would get you food. In addition, if it was IS or CHB/CTB that fucked up, you could go to your local benefit office or council offices and see somebody who, after a fairly long wait, would be able to sort it out for you.
4. At a slightly later date, the rules around maintenance changed and you were then able to keep every single penny you received from a child's father without it affecting your benefit entitlement in the slightest. Tax Credits changed their name at some point into what they are now. However, they often calculated entitlements based upon what you earned the previous year and wouldn't adjust the figures if you said you were earning more, so overpayments became a real risk and many people found the following year that they then owed a lot of money.
5. The CSA was crap. But if somebody was on benefits or low pay, they'd take from zero to a fiver a week if they weren't responsible for a child in their household. If they had a job or dole money, they were easy to find. From the point of view of the absent parent, buying clothes, shoes or other items wasn't counted as maintenance, they were counted as presents. Receiving IS as a single parent was conditional upon confirming the name of the absent parent and consenting to the CSA claiming from them.
6. Alternatively, if you were unwell at all, a doctor's note was enough to get you put onto IS by virtue of sickness. As long as your GP signed the notes and you handed them in, you got the money.
7. If they completely fucked up, it was a nightmare to get payments started, however, for the vast majority of single parents, once the claim got paid, the money just kept coming in, so you could plan, take out a social fund loan, etc. And the money wasn't bad.
8. There were Surestart Centres, decent funding in the NHS to keep to the targets, schools received absolute fortunes for adopting specialist school status, large scale building programmes were started. So waiting lists were shorter, you could get treatments pretty easily, there were free things such as books for babies, babies Rhymetimes in libraries, toddler groups, etc.
Times were pretty good for the single parent then. It wasn't pleasant relying upon somebody other than yourself for your income, as one glitch could cause your card to be refused at the till and that would be your first indication that something was wrong - and the fear of that was a bloody nightmare (literally at times) - plus, waiting with your kid surrounded by angry addicts and screaming claimants around you as you waited for your turn to try to sort a problem out was horrible. So getting off benefits and at least getting some of your income via work was a lot less stress.
Once the Tories had sole power, things started getting far more shit over a fairly short period of time, depending upon whether you found yourself in an 'early adopter area' where they piloted all the ideas, had all the mistakes and chose to do fuck all about them before rolling them out elsewhere. Usually based upon where they didn't need to garner votes.
OK. I was out of work due to sickness (which became disability, much to my utter joy [/sarcasm] after a while.
1. In the 00s - early 10s, if you had a small child, you were not required to be available for work. Full stop. No signing on, all you had to do was complete the IS form. You therefore qualified for Income Support, Child Benefit, full Housing Benefit, full Council Tax Benefit, milk vouchers (enough for a tub of formula or 7pints of fresh milk a week), possibly vitamin drops if you lived near a child health clinic, free prescriptions, free travel to hospital appointments, free dental care. However, any maintenance received from a kid's father would be taken into account and, IIRC, deducted pound for pound from your entitlement. You would also be expected to pay your water rates, gas, electricity and food. If you were short of something like a refrigerator or bed, so could apply to social security via an SF100 form and get either a non repayable grant or a zero percent loan from the social fund, which was paid back at something like £4 a week by deducting from your IS payments. If you were in social housing, your rent would be paid direct to the landlord, if you rented privately, you could opt for the money to be either paid direct to your landlord or direct to you. Landlords were still happy to accept 'DSS' tenants, as the money was good and generally reliable once a claim was set up.
2. If you were working and earned below a certain amount, you would receive Tax Credits. These included 70% of any registered childcare fees and money in respect of the child. When they were called Family Tax Credit (I can't remember when exactly they changed over), the same amount was paid for six months at a time, so if you were working for 16 hours a week at the time of the claim and then increased your hours or got another job that was fulltime, whilst the childminding costs would be adjusted and increased as soon as you told them the average amount had varied by over £10 a week, you were perfectly entitled to keep the higher figure for that six month period.
You were unlikely to qualify for Housing or Council Tax Benefit if you were in receipt of tax credits, as they raised your income significantly higher.
3. With both schemes, a single parent would have several separate income sources, which you could get monthly, weekly, four weekly or fortnightly as you preferred. If one of them screwed up, you would still receive the others, so you were never without at least the Child Benefit, which wouldn't make you rich, but would get you food. In addition, if it was IS or CHB/CTB that fucked up, you could go to your local benefit office or council offices and see somebody who, after a fairly long wait, would be able to sort it out for you.
4. At a slightly later date, the rules around maintenance changed and you were then able to keep every single penny you received from a child's father without it affecting your benefit entitlement in the slightest. Tax Credits changed their name at some point into what they are now. However, they often calculated entitlements based upon what you earned the previous year and wouldn't adjust the figures if you said you were earning more, so overpayments became a real risk and many people found the following year that they then owed a lot of money.
5. The CSA was crap. But if somebody was on benefits or low pay, they'd take from zero to a fiver a week if they weren't responsible for a child in their household. If they had a job or dole money, they were easy to find. From the point of view of the absent parent, buying clothes, shoes or other items wasn't counted as maintenance, they were counted as presents. Receiving IS as a single parent was conditional upon confirming the name of the absent parent and consenting to the CSA claiming from them.
6. Alternatively, if you were unwell at all, a doctor's note was enough to get you put onto IS by virtue of sickness. As long as your GP signed the notes and you handed them in, you got the money.
7. If they completely fucked up, it was a nightmare to get payments started, however, for the vast majority of single parents, once the claim got paid, the money just kept coming in, so you could plan, take out a social fund loan, etc. And the money wasn't bad.
8. There were Surestart Centres, decent funding in the NHS to keep to the targets, schools received absolute fortunes for adopting specialist school status, large scale building programmes were started. So waiting lists were shorter, you could get treatments pretty easily, there were free things such as books for babies, babies Rhymetimes in libraries, toddler groups, etc.
Times were pretty good for the single parent then. It wasn't pleasant relying upon somebody other than yourself for your income, as one glitch could cause your card to be refused at the till and that would be your first indication that something was wrong - and the fear of that was a bloody nightmare (literally at times) - plus, waiting with your kid surrounded by angry addicts and screaming claimants around you as you waited for your turn to try to sort a problem out was horrible. So getting off benefits and at least getting some of your income via work was a lot less stress.
Once the Tories had sole power, things started getting far more shit over a fairly short period of time, depending upon whether you found yourself in an 'early adopter area' where they piloted all the ideas, had all the mistakes and chose to do fuck all about them before rolling them out elsewhere. Usually based upon where they didn't need to garner votes.
Sorry, bollocks. You'd sell a sideboard (or a Tracey Emin/Vivienne Westwood/or an iPhone) to pay for it. Or dip into your savings from only paying yourself NMW whilst earning significantly more. After all, you aren't travelling to London for filming, shopping, socialising or anything else. Not even paying for school dinners or music lessons/football clubs. And buying food isn't a particularly high priority when there's a vet to pay a basic consultancy fee to. You wouldn't be buying teething necklaces, either. Or paint. Or more shelves. Or more sideboards. If you were actually broke, that is.
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