You're absolutely right, but I don't think that even the childless would think that government (or council as it would undoubtedly end up being) crèches are a massive drain, I wouldn't be in favour if they couldn't be proven to be a net benefit.

As I say, the thing is, it's actually really hard to prove whether a child is cost or benefit to society as a whole, at least in anything other than a very vague statistical way. I doubt anyone minds some help being given to couple with children - you don't hear a lot of complains about the fundamentals of child benefit, merely that it's not means tested, plus the nursery voucher scheme didn't get a lot of grief. However, as you well know, the cost of full time child care is, well, a crap load of money. I know couples where the child care more or less swallows one parent's entire take-home pay. You can't have the government effectively paying the same as the wages of a portion of the population as some sort of child support benefit, that's just nonsensical. Having somebody go to work and pay say 40% of their wages in tax & NI only for the government to give them roughly the same as that back to pay for child care makes no sense. The government would be better off just telling people to stay at home with their children, it'd have less work to do.

To be honest, as far as I can see, the government gives people with children about as much help as it can afford to/can get away with.I honestly wouldn't expect them to find any more any time soon, nor is there really any political incentive to do so.

Jon

Yep, thousands, tens of thousands. Especially from East Europe and Turkey. Before the EU borders opened, it was Italians, we have a huge Italian community over here.

You get unemployment benefit for 12 months after losing your job, which helps you maintain your house/car, whilst you look for a new job. If, after a year, you haven't found a job and you have a mortgage, you basically have to sell the house and move into a rented flat and use some of the capital to live from, to this you will get Hartz IV, which caused all sorts of anger, when it was introduced in the 2002 and the current reform has been active since 2005.

With Hartz IV, you get a few hundred Euros a month, plus child benefit, rent paid for etc. It isn't much and puts you pretty much on the poverty line - although most are on the poverty line, because they still buy cigarettes, alcohol and drugs...

I'm talking about government/council crèches, though, not tax breaks or money.

If the government is paying for something instead of the parents paying for it, that's functionally identical to a tax break or money. It's a 'benefit in kind'. It ends up with the government having less money and the parents having more. It may well end up being more financially efficient because the government can bargain harder with the childcare providers (who, frankly, are taking the piss with the prices they charge most parents) and you can also offset the extra tax earned by one more parent being able to work against the cost of service.

Jon

To be honest when parents lived closer to family there was a family support network that helped provide care for kids. They were called grandparents. That plus many kids were latch key kids or had a parent at home. No or little need for creches.

Indeed. If you look at the world as a whole, you can see that it's very unnatural behaviour for young couples just starting in life to try and live without the support of their extended family.

Even in Britain, you only have to go back to my father's time and it was quite normal for a young couple with their first child to be living in cramped conditions with the grand parents. They moved out when they'd saved enough for their first place, and then probably close enough for regular baby sitting and Sunday dinner together.

The very old and the very young both need the support which naturally comes from family, but people expect the state to replace the family and then complain about the "nanny state"...

No one's got a problem with with the state providing services such as social housing or healthcare; they do, however, take exception to be told how to live their lives. And quite rightly so.

Yes but the government feel that it is wrong for someone on benefits to live in a nice house, paid for by the state. This even impacts the disabled, who now have to live in the bottom 30% of properties. Talk about creating ghettos. So even the disabled are being told where they can live. If the area where they live and grew up becomes "gentrified" they can now be forced to move out of an area they may have lived for years.

That is another part of the German system, the parents are responsible for their children, if they are unemployed, to a certain extent and the children are responsible for the parents, when they are old and infirm and need care.

The state can require the parents to pay a certain amount towards the care of their adult children, based upon their income.

My wife I and were both looked after by our grandparents, but unfortunately my parents live in France and both my wife's parents still work.

What about brothers or sisters? A social support network can be useful, but with lousy pensions even grandparents might still be working nowadays.

Sister works (though is pregnant) and brother is 11 years younger and just left uni. As i said earlier, it's my decision and I'll manage. Just think it could be made easier without too much effort on the government's part. Why not swap speed cameras for government crèches? They're both job creation schemes, but one would serve society more than the other.

Government funded creches are far more beneficial to society than speed cameras, which are primarily a money maker anyway.

Another random fact: women didn't start going out to work until after the war. Suddenly, 100% employment required twice as many jobs.

If you go back a few generations, working class women mostly worked at home doing what was effectively piece work such as spinning or sowing. Work that could be done between feeding the baby and other household chores.

I'm not saying it's wrong for a modern British family to aspire to a rich life style, but it would be good if people would stop every once in a while to realise just how incredibly well off they really are compared to over 99% of people that are living or have lived on our planet. It's really conceited to whine about only being able to afford certain luxuries while the vast majority of the world population has to work far harder just to survive.

No one on this thread has actually whined about it as such, but you do hear it all the time. Usually from the laziest people who also complain about "immigrants taking our jobs".

Those 99% of people worse off than you or I aren't all in third world countries either. America, the land of opportunity, is also pretty savage on the ones that don't win the life lottery.