nail the hit head you the on.

Barmy..But if a person is earning £5 grand a year more than me.Why should i pay to keep his kids? I already do that by paying taxes for schools,free perscriptions, child benifit...etc.


A child in poverty with a father thats earning £20k a year??? Do me a favour Thats not poverty,my friend.

My parents brought me and my brother up in relative comfort ,and my parents at the time were earning a lot less than that.Even with inflation and the cost of living, i would say it would have been equivelent to about £14k in todays money (The figure at the time was probably about £8-9K).With good housekeeping and sensible spending we survived very nicely,had plenty of clothing,enough christmas and birthday presents, plenty of outings,and a two week holiday each summer.

When the government were pressed recently regarding its figures for the amount of households living in poverty.It admitted that it included families with TV's/Satelite dishes/Cars/Computers. Not just one of those things,but it still classed families as living in 'poverty', that had ALL those things.

Poverty is not having cloths to go to school in, not having enough to eat, not having a roof over you head.My parents as children went through all those situations. So don't dare tell me a that a man earning 20K a year, can't provide for his family,without me proping up his wages.



Is this fair?: My brother works in the city but only earns about £25K a year.His job is quite stressfull,he works long hours and spends nearly £3k a year in travel costs.He has two children and currently get no tax credits.

My cousin works as a delivery driver.He earns £21K a year.He's on job-and-finish,so i would say he probably works about half the hours my brother does.He lives in the road next to his firm, so has no travel costs.He has two children and currently gets 4K a year in Tax credits.So the government has decided that he is entitled to earn the same as my brother even though he works less,and has less outgoings.Crazy.

Because the nations children are a benefit to all of society, therefore all society should pay for them. Don't forget that YOU recieved a free education, free prescriptions and your parents child benefit - like today's children YOU are now a tax payer and one day THEY will be taxpayers helping to pay for the next generation of children.

The child credit element starts to taper off after household income excedes 13,480, at a rate of 37p of credit for every £1 earned. The family element at 50,000. so the family with £20,000 income gets less credit than the one on £5,000.

By tapering the credit rather than simply having a cut-off point you actually encourage people to work more because they willl still have an increased income even while the credit falls away. It solves completely the problem of the poverty trap.



Good for you and good for them.



Are you saying poor people shouldn't be able to drive or watch TV (one of the cheapest leisure activities there is)?

Few people in the UK live in absolute poverty - but many live in realtive poverty - the tax credit system has done much to help lift people some of the way out of poverty - is is nothing but commendable.



You are talking about absolute poverty. the government defines poor children are those living in households whose income is less than 60% of the median.

A single man earning 15k a year is going to have a LOT more disposable income than a family with an income of 20k.



a. your brother is definitely entitled to the family element of child tax credits, unless his partner is earning over 25k herself.
b. tax credits are based on earning - not lifestyle. Your brother chooses to live/work a long distance apart - that is personal choice.
c. your cousin should only be getting around £1,150 of tax credit at that level of income. Your calculation is wrong. Even if he was earning less than 13k a year he would only get £3,925 for two kids.

Barmy. I can only go on the fugures i am told. My brother says he get not tax credits .(his wife gave up her job when the kids were born).

Thats like saying, its someones choice to accept a low paid job, or to work only 30 hours instead of 40. My brother had been relocated three times since he joined his bank. Each time he has been moved further away from home. He either had to accept the relocation or lose his job. Some choice.

Interesting debate lads,

The whole relative poverty v absolute poverty debate I think is an interesting one,

basically The state should help people escape absolute poverty and then the rest is up to the individual to a large extent.

I agree that if you have a a good amount of the following then you are not poor;

Car/holiday/DVD/video/TV/stereo/ipod/designer leisure wear/satelite or cable TV

I believe the following are essentials;

Food/shelter/water/warmth/clothes and a form of communication and a form of companionship.

These lists are not exhaustive and open to debate but we should remember the socities that are lacking some or many of the essentials.

We are lucky in this country as real poverty has largely dissapeared.

Too many people talk up the problems in this country but its great really and thats from someone who is strapped for cash and who's house looks a mess.

Well you should tell him he IS entitled to family element (545 pds/year)

or with his skills and qualifications look for a new job. My point is that credits are and should only be made on earnings - not lifestyle.

But it is used for lifestyle rather than earnings.It is a lifestyle choice to have children.Lower paid workers are being rewarded for having children.So it is not based on earnings alone, because couples without children do not get Tax credit.It IS based on lifestyle, not just what you earn.

Lower paid workers are being financially rewarded when they have kids. Other workers are not rewarded when hey have kids.That is an anomaly.

My Brother has plenty of savings, mainly because his wife used to be in a well paid job before she became a full time housewife.He's just bought a house for over 1/4 million pounds.He's recently purchased a new Audi A2 for £14000.He's taking the family to Disneyworld soon for three weeks.Should he qualify (through family tax credits) to take money off other tax payers,some who earn a lot less than himself?

and that was a public announcement for the "and my brothers about to get burgled any day now i have splashed his details all over the net" party

what ya doing mate - pulling by proxy?

If people don't know who i am.How the hell are they going to know who my brother is.

P.shay... I'm sure i could pull you without having to mention my brother.

No. Lower paid workers are being given the means to help them ensure that the kids do not live in poverty.

Kids who are taken out of poverty are MORE likely to do well at school, MORE likely to become a skilled worker, LESS likely to resort to crime, LESS likely to become a teenage parent, LESS likely to become a habitual drug user.

Child tax credits are beneficial to ALL of society - it is not a REWARD to the less well off, it is an investment in ALL of our futures.

klf now i know youve got a rich brother youve got more of a chance chicken but.. only if you are... the lovely doctor mike
..

If you think encouraging and financially rewarding working class people to have more kids will lower future crime rates, then you believe that.

I'm not saying that low paid workers should not get tax breaks in order to live more comfortably.I'm saying that awarding money to people based on if they have children (or depending how many they have) is counter productive to society.

We already have a situation where it is financially rewarding for teenagers and the unemployed to have children. It guarantee sthem an immediate council house and being paid benifit (no questions asked) until the child is 16.Now we are paying lower paid workers to have more children(those that tend to live in the most crime ridden and socialy deprived areas).

Also, most of the people receiving tax credits are not in poverty anyway or anywhere near it.Many millions of self employed workers declare £18-20 grand a year income and then receive plenty of tax credits, when in reality they probably take home double that anual figure.Fair enough pay tax credits to those on very incomes,less than say 15K a year,but to still pay tax credits to people on 25K a year is ludicrous.Don't forget we have a system in place of helping lower paid workers through taxation already.The less you earn the less percentage of tax you have to pay.

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(edited to fix typographical errors)

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Don't you mean grammatical errors. Typographic errors would be like not choosing the right font, or maybe typesize, or perhaps deciding against a single column layout.

But if you did mean typographical, I'm well impressed with your level of detail.

Sod off Handjob, the 2005 Pedant award is MINE!

a. there is NO proof that working class families are having MORE kids than they were b4 tax credits came in - if there has been research on this I have been unable to find it so it is UNPROVEN, and also I suspect nothing more than prejudice on your part.
b. you (deliberately) misrepresent what I said. I said raising children out of poverty will make them LESS likely to be criminals. The link between poverty and crime is well established and researched - reducing child poverty WILL help to REDUCE crime.



I am saying that raising the incomes of families in poverty will help not only those children but also all of us as a society. the UK - the 4th largest economy in the world and yet 1 in 3 of our children grow up in poverty. That is something to be ashamed of and as a society we can and should do something about it. Any other attitude is based on total selfishness.



And as I have already illustrated - raising today's children out of poverty will make them LESS likely to become unemployed or become teenage parents. We have one of the highest rates of teenage pregnancy in western Europe - and one of the highest levels of child poverty - there IS a link! to solve the problem of teenage pregnancy - give the teenager some hope of a better life!!!

And we are not paying people to have children - we are supplementing their incomes to the tune of £1,690 per child per year - if you think that comes close to covering the annual cost of bringing up a child, think again!!!!! Just recently research was released showing the average cost of raising a child to be £166,000 over 21 years. That's £22 a day!!!! Child tax credit per kid equates to £4.63 per day. The credit is not an incentive to have kids because it is not enough to cover the cost of each additional child.



This is a different issue - I agree with you - tax avoidance by the self employed should be sorted out - I have no problems with that.

But fraud by some does not make the system bad - the system is good.

and someone on 25k per year does not get a lot of tax credit - only £545 a year, which is less than they would have had in additional income under the old married-persons allowance. It barely covers a days childcare a month!

[quote=Handjob,Dec 10 2005, 06:57 PM]
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(edited to fix typographical errors)

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Don't you mean grammatical errors. Typographic errors would be like not choosing the right font, or maybe typesize, or perhaps deciding against a single column layout.

But if you did mean typographical, I'm well impressed with your level of detail.

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Well actually I was referring to fucked up quotes. I think that is typographical

for what its worth i think a few of you are missing the point

helping eleiminate child poverty could be done in a generation by massively improving the schools in the worst council estate and inner city areas (wouldnt take much in my view), change the tax/benefits system so that teenagers are not encouraged to do as their parents did and have kids to get a council flat, and rather help them escape through education, encourage some geographical mobility

proping up the failing culture in the worst council estates in the name of "fighting child poverty" does not help anyone, rather than financial injections in the form of various hand outs just encourages these places to carry on from generation to generation

you have to ask whether you want the kids born in these places to have a chance of escaping or not

Actually children of all abilities suffer a dip in performance when they first enter secondary school and yes that is what the focus on KS3 is designed to address. (Incidentally if you have seen research to say the dip is worse amongst the top 5% of students I'd be interested to know where it came from as so far I haven't been able to find any. It would be mist useful)

There is a certain amount of box ticking (and backslapping) going on with regards to primary education but on the whole the Government has managed KS1 and KS2 pretty well.

I think they mistake the are about to make is by simply employing much the same model in an attempt to improve results at KS3. I think the real question we need to ask is do we need KS3 in its existing form at all?

There are a number of radical exciting and interesting (Now there's three words you wouldn't expect when discussing education) initiatives going on in learning communities around the country with heads and groups of heads tearing up the national cirriculum at KS3. Many are going on to achieve some quite startling initial improvements (not just in results but attitude and attendance etc) across the board. (Dorchester Area Schools Project for example)

At the moment KS3 only teaches our kids how to pass tests.

I think you mean the 2005 Pedant Award.

From our experiences last year, KS2 focuses a hell of a lot on exam technique, too. KS3 is also definitely quite results-focused so far, but I don't object to that. I think it's useful for kids to understand why they didn't get the mark that perhaps they think they deserved, and to indiate how they could score better next time. Exam-taking is a skill, and a useful one.

Funnily enough, we had a meeting with D's teachers on Monday and the subject of the "Year 7 Dip" came up, but I think in terms of the gifted and talented kids the concern is that some of them don't actually recover from the dip, and their long-term performance doesn't match what those early tests indicated it should be.

In terms of where my information comes from, I am only going on the meetings and discussions we've had over the past year with the teachers at the old school and the new one. D's been identified as falling within the top 2% of ability for English, so we've had a few of them.

J C - Personally I think there is too much early years testing but then if it weren't for tests we'd never know we had such smart kids eh!

We have a different system here (Three tier) so our dip occurs around year 5 and surprisingly doesn't seem so profound when the kids move school again at year 9.

I still can't see why the dip should be any worse in higher performing children.

I've just read a publication that might interest you (in terms of D) called something like "Gifted and Talented a guide for parents and teachers" it's by Louise Porter and available from the OU. (I can't give you the full title as Mrs Me has it.)

It's proved quite useful to me and I suggest worth a look as long as you don't take it all literally.

I feel compelled to say something of value now, after a series of lightweight remarks (I noticed that 54% of my posts are in the chat section- idle chat at that- and I'm determined to be seen as someone who occassionally makes a point of note.

One thing though, what's this got to do with Michael Portillo- I'm sure he may never have seen the inside of a state school.

Well my point is. I've always thought the problem with primary education is that kids are still mostly stuck with one teacher for a whole year. And sometimes that teacher is a duffer. Also, sometimes a kid and a teacher have a bit of a personality clash and again a year is a long time.

Regardless of keystage tests, having a duffer for a year can do a lot of damage. Maybe teachers could move around a bit more in the school. Also, still don't get why our kids aren't learning a language properly before 11. Seems like 11 or 12 is often too late.

Well, back to idle chat for me.