Kilburn Unemployed Workers Group — the Kwug Blog

LORD FREUD INSULTS SINGLE PARENTS – AGAIN AND AGAIN

Guest blog by Revd Paul Nicolson of Taxpayers Against Poverty

Lord Freud should examine the reasons why there are single parents before he calls them a “burden on the taxpayers” in The Times article shown below. .

They are doing the hugely important and constructive job of raising children.

They cost a fraction of the damage done to the taxpayers by the near collapse of the banks in 2008.

Some single parents are widows or widowers, some lost a husband at war in the services,  others are left with the children by irresponsible men, some are the victims of rape, others set out to be married for life but financial woes inflicted by governments since the 1980s put pressures on their relationships few marriages could survive.

A fair society, unknown to the bureaucratic limitations of Lord Freud’s mind, includes single men and women doing their best  for their children. They are now doing that under the intolerable circumstances of unfairly imposed austerity.

It is the duty of taxpayers to support single men and women and their children if they cannot support themselves.

‘Family breakdowns cost us £46bn a year’

Katie Gibbons

Last updated at 12:01AM, March 5 2014

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/politics/article4023479.ece

The social cost of divorce and family breakdown in Britain is“far higher and its impacts far deeper” than the multibillion-pound benefits bill, a welfare minister has warned.

Lord Freud, parliamentary under-secretary for work and pensions, said that the £9 billion cost of lone-parent benefits and collecting maintenance payments was just a small proportion of the full cost of separation. He estimated that it could be costing the country up to £46 billion a year.

The Conservative peer called for marriage to be “put back into its rightful place” and said that unmarried parents bringing up children were four times more likely to separate than their married counterparts.

Speaking in the Lords, he also said that the Government should actively attempt to reverse what he called “major structural changes” that turned society away from marriage and towards cohabitation.

Lord Freud’s £46 billion estimate, based on data gathered by the Relationships Foundation think-tank, amounts to £1,541 for every taxpayer. It includes spending on children in care and a proportion of the costs of the health, education and criminal justice systems.

“It would be easy to put a financial cost to society from family breakdown, but the social cost is far higher and its impacts far deeper,” Lord Freud said in an article for The Daily Telegraph. “On the face of it, we pay around £8.4 billion annually to lone parents in benefits and around £500 million a year running the Child Support Agency that administers more than a million child support cases.

“There are an estimated 2.5 million separated families with 4.1 million children — and one million lone parents claiming housing benefit in the current financial year. But it is a sad fact that 700,000 children living in lone parent families were in relative poverty. That is why this Government is working to fix the problem that previous governments left behind.

“I make no apology for stating that we have a clear duty to try our best to ensure that stable families are in place, so we can ensure stable futures for children.”

Challenged on what the Government is doing to promote marriage, he said the number of couples cohabiting had doubled in less than a generation to 1.2 million, and pointed to the Government’s Family Stability Review, launched in December.

“It will take an enormous amount of effort to start putting marriage back into its rightful place,” he said, “and that is exactly one of the things that we are looking to do with the Family Stability Review.”

Swheatie adds: 

Q: "What do you get when you put an investment banker who knows nothing about the benefits system in charge of 'welfare reform'?

A: "Lord Freud and all his bullshit!"

Lord Freud does not seem to realise that really supporting families costs a lot more than £46bn a year, and much of the shortfall is borne by the families themselves. But then again, Lord Freud owns a £1.9m house plus a mansion in the countryside and so when reality hits poorer people who are displaced by his policies, he can afford to be out of town.