Benefits culture: Six children and £675 a week
Melanie Nicholas and her partner Andrew Ballinger have not worked in 20 years. Neil Tweedie witnesses the benefits culture at first hand in Rhyl
By Neil Tweedie
Published: 8:31PM BST 08 Oct 2010
https://teakdoor.com/images/imported/2010/10/330.jpg Melanie Nicholas with McKenzie, youngest of her six children Photo: Jay Williams
Rhyl in October: hardly a scintillating prospect. To the north, the dull grey of the Irish Sea merges with the dull grey of the sky in what passes for the horizon. Onshore, there is more grey, mainly in the lives of the people who inhabit the more rundown parts of this tired resort.
Rhyl was never exactly the pearl of the North Wales coast, that distinction belonging to posher Llandudno to the west, but it was a lively place. Now the funfair is closed for good and the seafront, although tarted up (regenerated in town hall speak) at great cost, is deserted. Out of season, you say. Rhyl, though, is really always out of season.
Still, it enjoys a certain distinction. The western part of the town centre has more benefit claimants as a proportion of the working-age population than anywhere else in the United Kingdom – except for a bit of Rochdale. As of 2008 there were some 900 people of working age in Rhyl West council ward, and 68 per cent were living on benefits. A natural place to come, therefore, when hunting that latest form of politico-media prey: the feckless and fecund benefit claimant.
Now that the bankers have returned quietly to the bosom of their bonuses, the big guns have turned again on the other end of society. According to Jeremy Hunt, the Culture Secretary, people without jobs should not expect the state to fund excessive numbers of offspring. If one can’t afford a child, one shouldn’t have one.
George Osborne, the Chancellor, has chimed in with a proposal to cap benefit payments at £26,000 a year per household, equivalent to the average income of a working family. Some 50,000 households could be affected by the change, planned for 2013. Benefits included in the calculation are job seeker’s allowance, income support, housing benefit, council tax relief, child benefit and child tax credit.
None of this sounds good news to Melanie Nicholas, who is 38, from Rhyl, and mother to six children – Damien, 19, Grant, 14, Paris, five, Katie-Leigh, three, Jaret, two, and McKenzie, nine months – by two partners. Save for a brief period behind a bar when she was a teenager, Miss Nicholas has never had a job. The same is also true for her partner, Andrew Ballinger, 35 years old and father to the five youngest children, who collided with paid employment only once, as a bricklayer at the age of 18. Miss Nicholas underwent major heart surgery as a baby and cannot perform manual work. Clerical work, she says, would also be beyond her because of factors like office dust. Mr Ballinger cites his inability to read or write as the main reason for his inactivity.
The couple’s income would be regarded as enviable by most British wage earners. Each week they receive £240 in child tax credit for the five children remaining at home, £70 in child benefit and £90 in income support. Due to her heart condition, Miss Nicholas receives £75 in severe disability allowance, an income support disability premium of £35 and a mobility payment of £50 a week. That’s £560 a week. On top of that, they receive about £115 per week towards the rent of their five-bedroom house. Total weekly income: £675 per week. Oh, and there is council tax relief as well. But Miss Nicholas has “no idea” how much that is.
“I didn’t want a big family, I wanted a boy and a girl,” says Miss Nicholas. “I was using contraception but it still happened. I was told after my first two boys not to have any more. Then I got pregnant with Paris.”
Mr Ballinger does not feel the need to apologise to wealthy politicians: “It’s all right for them in government. They can have as many kids as they like cos they’ve got the money.”
But should others have to pay for their children from their taxes? Both are silent on that issue. So what about their income: is it adequate?
“I don’t know, to be honest,” says Miss Nicholas. "I think our money is alright for us. It gets us everything we need. It’s enough to get food and pay bills and buy nappies and things for the baby. We are quite comfortable but not extravagant. We don’t go out or buy drink or fags or drugs, like some people do. I don’t drink or smoke – Andrew smokes.”
The couple do not run a car and have no debts, save for a social security loan costing them £43 a month, due to be repaid in full next year.
“With child benefit, I don’t think it should be given to people who are working. I don’t at all,” says Miss Nicholas.
But at least those people have paid into the system, haven’t they? Again a long, bemused silence.
Miss Nicholas is not some ''case history’’, painstakingly sought out to prove a point. She and her partner were simply there, picking up their baby from the Oak Tree children’s centre in Rhyl. Her heart condition no doubt limits her options in terms of work, but the disconnect between the couple’s experience and that of working families is stark.
However, for Alison Garnham, chief executive of Child Poverty Action Group, the attack on claimants with big families is really just bullying. “The bankers who are most to blame for this crisis are getting billions in bonuses again, yet it is children in poverty who are paying the price,” she says. “Forcing children into destitution on the arbitrary basis of how many brothers and sisters they have is abhorrent. The numbers of very large families have declined tremendously over recent generations so why pick on these few children and mark them out as deserving destitution.”
Estrangement from the workplace is an undoubted problem. Figures for the three months to June of this year show that 5.4 million people aged 16 to 64 live in workless households, a 26,000 increase on last year. Just over 16 per cent of children live in homes devoid of a wage earner.
Donald Hirsch, of the Centre for Research in Social Policy at Loughborough University, is another who cautions against the demonisation of benefit claimants who dare to reproduce. “The notion that you are going to be better off by having an extra child is bizarre,” he says. “I suggest that people who allege this should try living on benefits.
“People usually end up on benefits because they have lost their job or their partner has walked out on them. It is not a case of people saying, 'I am choosing to spend my life on benefits, this is the way I have chosen to live’.”
Nor does he believe benefits are excessive. “An out-of-work couple with four children gets almost exactly £350 a week to live on, not including council tax benefit and housing benefit. If they have council tax of say £20 a week, they’ll have their benefits capped if their rent is more than £130 a week, making the total up to £500 or £26,000 a year. I’m not sure how many places in the country you can rent a house big enough for six people for £130 a week in the private sector.
“Our research has looked carefully at what such a family would need to reach a minimum acceptable standard of living, defined through research with members of the public about what needs to go into a weekly household 'basket’. We reckon they would need £517 after rent and council tax, so the £350 leaves them well short of what they need. This puts into perspective the idea that people are getting plenty to live on through benefits.”
In any case, a reduction in the cost of supporting jobless working age adults is unlikely to make a serious dent in the national deficit. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation calculates that only five per cent of the welfare budget is spent on them, the bulk being taken up by pensions and disability payments.
Tom MacInnes, research director at the New Policy Institute, a think tank, says: “The 'offence’ caused by those people is not in proportion to the saving that would be made [by cutting their benefits]. The effect of the policies, including cuts to housing benefit, looks like homelessness for some families. But will the state actually allow those people to become homeless? Someone will have to pick up the pieces, probably at local level. So you wonder if this is all largely rhetorical.”
In the case of Melanie Nicholas, the problem may be academic. Mr Osborne suggests that those claiming disability allowances could be exempt from the £26,000 limit. For the moment at least, Miss Nicholas will be spared the horror of a full council tax bill.
Benefits culture: Six children and £675 a week... - Telegraph
