So, because they've got unfortunate, uncaring or stupid parents, we should just pretend that the kids don't need our help then?
OK, I'm starting to get the hang of this Christianity lark.

Most people do. Some people don't. Accidents happen.

Also, amongst people who choose to have children will be a number for whom the choice was perfectly sensible at the time and then their situation changed. Maybe a divorce, loss of a partner, or loss of a job. What do you suggest they do with their kids at this point? Put them into care?

And finally - no matter how feckless you might consider any given parent to be, the children are utterly blameless. Penalising them therefore seems to me to be a tad harsh.

I think some people are missing the point, if these people on housing benefit apart from pensioners, disabled or people with disabled children are upset about losing benefits because they have an extra bedroom why don't they do what the rest if us have to and work/study hard to get the job that can pay for their extra bedroomed house whether it be private rented, LA or owned.

Me and my fiancé have had to do it, the many years since leaving school/college/Uni of hard work, crap jobs and living on low wages and using contraception to get to the position where we are now to have a good/well paid job, nice house and ready to start a family.

Not everyone's life goes to plan and I know jobs are scarce so why doesn't the Govemment do something about the job situation first then implement this idea?

1) There are few one-bed properties. 1a) There are an awful lot of properties where a second (or third) bedroom is a bedroom in name only.

2) Once everyone has aspired their way into super-duper-paying jobs, whereby they can afford a mortgage on a £250,000 one-bed flat in somewhere as posh as downtown Hackney, who is going to do the low-paid jobs? And why should people doing low-paid jobs that society needs doing – cleaning is just one example – be on such grindingly low pay that they require benefits and then can be penalised for that?

Specific example: can John Lewis – a very successful British company – do without having anyone clean its stores, offices, depots etc? If not, why should it get away with paying its cleaners so little than many cannot live without recourse to in-work benefits, including housing benefit?

This is the perfect illustration of why we need social housing that is affordable. And by 'affordable', I don't mean £125k for a one-bed flat to someone who qualifies as a 'key worker'.

Maybe this is exactly their plan, but to get there they have to claim housing benefit for a while?

I assume you base your judgement on London where as I base mine on the North,

Example : my finances mother worked as a cleaner and brought up 4 children single handed in a 3 bed house which was ex council which she bought herself in the 70's/80's, one of her children was disabled (unable to move anything other than her eyes until the age of 15 when a wonder drug gave her full use and within days was walking and talking and to this day you wouldn't know that fact with the way she is), now her next door neighbour (in council house) is an early 20's single parent with 2 kids with numerous undesirables going round, if my finances mother can manage why can't tr said next door neighbour? If she managed with 4 girls (1 of them severely disabled) in a 3 bed house paid for by herself why can't the said neighbour with 2 same sex kids?

Same can be said about my mother, privately owned 3 bed home bringing up 4 kids single handed working 2 jobs to make ends meet and for what? She could have thrown the towel in and received a lot more in benefits but she didn't because she isn't bone idle.

I have sympathy for some but from my experiences in working in social housing many are either bone idle or playing the system to great effect, some houses were palaces and some you wouldn't let your dog stay there.

Now I have no qualms whatsoever about pensioners, disabled or people with disabled children etc living in 3 bedroom houses as the disabled speaks for itself and the pensioners have earned it and deserve to not be uprooted/moved or punished through taxation, for example ; my grandfather served in WW2 and then spent the rest of his life down the pit and living in social housing, he payed his tax and worked hard all his life, he shouldn't be taxed but in the first example I gave why should this 20 something girl who can't keep her hand on her ha penny and has never worked a day in her life have the same luxury of living in the same house as someone who has worked hard for it?

I was a tax payer, once. I paid something called National Insurance on my full time and two part time jobs that I worked 7 days a week. Now I'm a social failure, oh the shame

It wasn't 'judgement'. It was facts. Housing is a massive cost that at means that many people are going to struggle to get a roof over their heads.



Blimey – that's a lot of people in your family circle who come from broken families – did your parents all 'choose' that? Was your finance's mother irresponsible to have four children?

Do you get that point?

Let's try more.

There is a shortage of jobs. This is a fact.

60% of benefits claimants are in work.

The 1:5 UK households claim housing benefit – and 89% of those are working households.

So let's dismiss the 'scoungers' and 'skivers' myth straight away. The majority of people on any benefits are in work; the vast majority of people on housing benefits are in work.

More reality: foodbanks are on the increase – massively on the increase. And this is the UK. So are legalised loansharks. As I have posted before, I was interviewing a debt counsellor a few weeks ago and I'm not even going to start repeating how scathing she was of these legalised loan sharks.

Your apparent desire that everyone should just go out and get 10 jobs – remember: there's not even one job for everyone of working age.

Many people are increasingly being tied to zero-hours contracts. They have to sit by the phone waiting to be called to a job. If they're unavailable, they'll lose their job. We are seeing an increasingly casualised workforce, with employers using all sorts of means to cut the wages and conditions of the staff on the ground – although never their own, for some strange reason that's hard to fathom.

And this is against a background of income inequality having risen for 30-plus years.

That income inequality – it is bad for the whole of a society. Less equal societies have more crime, more negative health issues, more addiction, less educational achievement – and much more. More equal societies are better across these things and more (if you wish to read about this in detail, read [iThe Spirit Level[/i).

The current situation is not good for society as a whole – regardless of what the divide-and-rule politicians and their friends in the media would have you believe.

On belief – do you look back to what your own relatives went though and think it was A Good Thing? Do you feel nostalgia for it? Or is it a bit like those mothers who take their girls for female genital mutilation because they'd been through it, so why shouldn't their daughters? Y'know: 'we suffered, so can they'?

And let's do another myth while we're at it – his 'hard-working taxpayer' one. Most of us are fortunate enough to not have to work very hard. By comparison with a hospital cleaner or porter, I don't. I very much doubt you work anything like as hard as the grandfather you mention. Or the same hospital porter or cleaner.

Yet it seems that you – and plenty of others – actively want hard-working people in unsexy but essential jobs to suffer. Why? It's not good for society. It's not good for productivity. What is it good for?

As I said, do you really look back at what various members of your own family went through and think everybody should experience a bit more like that?

PS: I've just heard that housing prices in Hackney – this is not a posh area; increasingly trendy, but not posh and still an area of great deprivation – has risen by 11.6%, second only to Kensington & Chelsea, FFS. Rents are on a similar curve.

The average house price in England and Wales is £162,000. On a sensible mortgage, that means a household income of £54,000 per annum. [url=http://www.payscale.com/research/UK/Country=United_Kingdom/SalarySome average salaries[/url.

I get no housing benefits at all and I just get 25% off my Poll Tax.

I just hope for your sake that Ian Duncan Smith doesn't read these forums because if he reads that he'll blow another fuse and dash to a Murdoch newspaper to absolutely deny your facts and replace the skivers and scroungers mantra back into the public domain.

The new NHS Party has been aiming them in his direction already.

If you mean you get a discount off your council tax because you are a single person, don't worry you will be next in line to have that "benefit" removed.

The same argument will apply to you. It will be if you don't want to pay the full council tax for a property of the band you live in, go and buy one in a lower band.