... to feel angry about single mother of 11 getting new house built for her!!

I totally agree with you Joan especially your last line. It is not the children's fault that they are here is it? Would we really like to go back to a time (not so long ago) where some families lived 10 to a room and little children begged in the street without shoes and didn't know what it felt like to go to sleep with a full tummy. My late grandad was brought up on the dockside. He shared shoes with his younger brother and slept in the same bed with 6 of his siblings ( there were 13 of them altogether). Some of the books written by Catherine Cookson are not very far from the truth.

Agreed, joan. And gillybob, I imagine a good number of us had grandparents from large but poor families who, nevertheless, worked their socks off (if they had socks) to make ends meet, and fought in two wars as well.

Come on, jura, facts! It's all very well to blether on about dependency in other countries from the security of that with the fourth (or sixth, depending which list you look at) richest country by GDP per capita, mostly from other people's tax avoidance/evasion (whichever), in the world.

Discuss.

UK, btw, is twenty-second according to IMF, and twenty-seventh according to UN.

The assumption that there were eleven different fathers was wrong - perhaps she is owed an apology! Too quick to rush to judgement, Janthea?
If the Swiss banks should ever open their books I wonder if some surprising people in the public eye might turn out to be tax dodgers

It would be interesting to find out what the real statistics are in the UK regarding family size. How many "families" with 2 children, 3,4, etc.

If such figures are available I wonder how many of these huge families exist, not many I would guess.

What an eye opener that would be Greatnan

Last time I checked government statistics on family size, gillybob, the 'average' number of children per family in the UK was less than two. That's including the families like Heather's that have a lot more. They really aren't making a huge difference to the rest of us.

Another interesting thing I read about her case is that she hasn't always been on benefits, but only for the last five or six years. With that number of children, I expect she needs to be a full-time mum. She appears to be a good mum. It's disgraceful how the gutter press has barged into her life just because of a council decision to rehouse her family.

It seems to be allright to wreck a poor person's life with intrusion and slander, but we can't possibly criticise the disgraceful way bankers carry on and limit their greed or the country will collapse!

Bags I can't answer for jura but I know a little about the system in the NL. If you have been working long enough and lose your job you get 70% of your salary for about 6 months and then the payment gets very low, according to my friend it is too low to live on. This does sound like enough support for the unfortunate with a built in incentive to get another job.

I supsect that the percentage of people cheating on their tax is about the same as the percentage cheating on welfare, human nature is the same at all levels. I therefore suspect there is also a percentage of Gransnetters cheating in some way too . Now before the avalanche of protestations, how many have paid in cash for a service knowing/suspecting that it is to avoid putting it through the books? How many have paid a cleaner in cash? I don't want an answer, no public confessions please.

I confess I have paid a casual gardener in cash - £40. I got a receipt with VAT number on it, so maybe it was legit - don't know.........but even if I shelled out a couple of thousand a year, it would go nowhere near the billions of avoided/evaded tax that corporations and wealthy individuals don't pay

Having the incentive to get a job is not much help when there are no jobs you can get. If, say, a middle-manager is made redundant at the age of 55 his chances of re-employment are very slim - I remember reading of one such man who had sent off several hundred applications. He may still have a mortgage to pay. Should he be allowed to starve, or lose his home? Tlmes have changed and the welfare state is needed more now than it was when many of us were working.

It isn't illegal or in any way wrong to pay a cleaner or anyone else in cash. It is a persons individual responsibility to declare their income and then, if they earn over a certain amount, pay the appropriate tax on it.

Having said that, I think it's perfectly true that every community or group is likely to have some members who will, at the lowest level, take advantage of loopholes, and at the worst will actively defraud.

when - you did nothing illegal in paying by cash - the onus was on the gardener to declare it.
The figures Bags has found for us means Britain is not producing enough to children to maintain the population and there is a minimum number of working age citizens needed to support each retired person - so we need more large families. Fortunately, some immigrants are making up the shortfall.

I expect you're right about human nature, mal, but somehow I find it easier to forgive the have-nots than I do forgive the haves. I expect that's human nature too.

And yes, not having enough to live on is not an incentive to get a job if there are no jobs available. It also costs quite a lot to job hunt, what with travelling for interviews, having smart clothes, etc. If you haven't enough to live on, how are you supposed to job hunt properly?

What happens to the people in the Netherlands who don't manage to find a job? I presume there are some?

Yes, I know Greatnan. I was thinking in terms of colluding with tax avoidance by knowingly paying cash to someone so they can avoid paying tax. I am fairly sure that a lot of casual gardeners supplement their benefits by doing odd jobs and not declaring the income......but are we really bothered about people showing willingness to do some casual work every now and then, in comparison with wholesale tax evasion by the rich and powerful? I'm not!

Let's get the missing billions paid into the coffers, and we will find that we aren't in the financial mess that politicians would have us believe we are facing, and a meaningful programme of social housing development would provide plenty of work for the unemployed.

Just looked. NL unemployment rate is similar to UK's. we don't hear about people starving on the streets of Holland though, do we, so I guess there's a compassionate safety net of some sort similar to ours, as there is (or should be) in all properly civilised countries.

Bags my Dutch friend told me that there are jobs if people are prepared to take them. She probably knows as she has a 'difficult' son who gets a job and then either gets bored and leaves or gets sacked but he always seems to get another one when he wants to. He doesn't have any qualifications.

We keep hearing about people who have sent off hundreds of job aplications but I wonder what they were like. Perhaps they need help with their CV and/or how to behave at an interview? Maybe they need to manage their expectations? I have helped some young guys locally with their CVs and applications and now they are happily working. I suppose I don't understand because everyone I have ever helped has got a job and some of them have had very difficult backgrounds including an alcoholic with not even one GCSE and no track record. Maybe more resource should go in this direction.

Well, the fact remains that the Dutch unemployment is similar to the UK's. I don't know how to explain that bare fact if there are jobs if people would but take them.

My brother has been unemployed for a long time as the result of a road accident which caused him to have slurred speech and some minor lack of physical coordination. Such physical disabilities do not go down well with the high-profile accountancy firms he worked for before the accident. He applied for lots of jobs over several years. He said it was like having a full-time job doing the research and writing the applications and so on. He even did a two-year further course at a Japanese university to improve his chances, even though he was already highly qualified. I think he has given up now.

He doesn't claim any benefits and never has. He lives on what he managed to save beforehand and has some help from our mother, whom he helps with paperwork and other practical stuff since she is now blind. He also does some voluntary work for CAB. It is that in particular that gave him a sense of purpose again.

When did the Daily Mail last publish a story about someone like that?

Bags they just don't! I wasn't meaning to imply that everyone could get a job if they wanted to but that I do think if more people were given the right help they might well do so. I worked in European finance and we would have taken on someone with the right qualfications and experience with a disability, indeed I did. Surely the speech problem would only be an issue in a client facing environment and a mobility problem would not be an issue at all provided he could use a computer. What a great shame.

About people who cannot get a job.

There are plenty, and ageism is a huge cause of this. My husband thought it was ageism in his 50s after he was made redundant. Turns out it was something more sinister.

It was 1993 and there was a federal election. The Tories (called Liberal Party here) were expected to win, and the boss of the firm, president of the local Liberals, brought in his local candidate to address the workers. My husband, a Labour member, brought up the arguments for voting Labour in the discussion afterwards. Labour won the election. The boss never forgive my husband - there was a round of redundancies and he was included. Everyone was astounded as he was terrific at his job and trained all the juniors. They loved him.

He applied for so very many jobs but never got one. We had to sell the house as we could not keep two lads, aged 12 and 15 at high school, pay the mortgage and everything else on my one clerical wage. There is no unemployment benefit when the spouse has a job. 2 years later he got a call from the former personnel manager. She confessed to him that the boss had had him blacked, and ensured that every prospective employer was told he was a left wing radical.

He was no such thing. He had simply contributed another point of view in what had become a legitimate political forum. He was not even in the union at that time, because it was a bad union.

Shortly before that phone call he ended up in hospital - some shrapnel from a wound when he was in Special Boats, a branch of the RN - had gone bad and formed a cyst that was threatening his spinal cord. He was in a lot of physical pain to add to his mental anguish of unemployment. I made a decision that he must give up job hunting and go to university, something he had always wanted to do. He laughed and asked how. But I knew how - Open University was available to everyone and was almost free. He did so well in the first year that the prestigious University of Queensland gave him a place and he qualified in Political Science a few years later, and ended up working for a State Government minister.

The job only lasted about a year and a half - the Minister trod on the wrong toes and got moved sideways to America as a trade commissioner.

Such is life.

But there you are - unemployment gets the strongest fighters sometimes.

I would be interested to hear which agency you were working for, movedalot, when you were so remarkably successful in helping people to get jobs.

Greatnan where did you get the idea I was working for an agencY?

I assumed you would not have had many people coming for your help in your private capacity.
Was this success recent - i.e since the unemployment figures soared?
I can assure you that at least one person I know, who is highly articulate and has an MSc in his chosen field, has been unable to find even voluntary work. I doubt if anybody could make a better job of his application letter and CV.

Sorry Bags, about the blethering ... and about not replying sooner as I've been really busy.

Switzerland does appear to be very rich from the outside, and yes, there is a lot of money around, but not for the average Swiss. The Banks are indeed doing well, most of them now owned by multinationals and benefiting rich people all over the world. The fact the Swiss Franc is so high at the moment is a disaster for the Swiss - who have to try and export very high quality expensive products to keep the businesses going- the higher the franc, the more difficult exports - especially with very cheap Chinese, Taiwanese, etc. competition. Businesses are closing, both large and small - and huge multinationals moving out (like Novartis) leaving 1000s unemployed behind. My area of Switzerland has 10% unemployment, and 25% immigrants.

Unemployment benefits are only available to those who have worked for at least 12 months in the previous 24- nobody else. And unemployment benefits are for a maximum of 18months for those between the age of 24 and 55, and 2 years for those over 55. My dad lost his job as a watchmaker at the age of 64- after working full-time from the age of 16 in rude health. He had to sign regularly and then was told he had to go and work on the railway sidings, breaking stones, as there was nothing else available. The fact he was a trained watch-maker was irrelevant. He had to take the job or lose benefits. Tough - yes it is. Here you have to accept a job even if much less than your previous job - if after a while nothing else is available. So people do anything they can to get out of unemployment, by hook and crook. If they don't, they do get looked after by the 'social' but at the lowest of the low rates of survival- nobody in that position will be able to get more benefits than if they were working, which is often the case if the UK (with the 'I wouldn't get out of bed for that, I get more on the dole' mantra). Not saying it is right - but it certainly does 'concentrate' the mind. I know many young people in the Uk who have totally unrealistic expectations and will not even thin of accepting a job, in one case, unless it is as a dancer, and in the other, an aromatherapist. They flatly refuse anything else, and live in London at great tax payers expense - which drives my 2 daughters, who work so hard, crazy!

If a 55 year old loses his job through no fault of his own - then of course he needs supporting, as he would not have deliberately put himself in that situation. Although, if he does own a house which he can't afford to keep going, may well have to downsize or live in affordable housing- he couldn't possible expect the tax payer to keep paying for his expensive luxury home, surely.

Selling a house is very difficult in the UK at the moment and costs money. Not everybody lives in a 'large, luxury home' but even smaller mortgages are not payable for many people. The banks who caused many of the problems are often very unhelpful when borrowers get into difficulties.
Unless you have been in the position of being made redundant, feeling humiliated at having to apply for benefits for the first time in your life and then facing the prospect of having to sell your home, possibly at a loss, it is easy to pass judgement.
I have not been in that terrible position but I can use my imagination and feel sympathetic.

Greatnan have you heard the expression that assumed makes an ass of u and me?

Yes, I've been doing it for years and am currently helping someone. Lots of people, you would be surprised at how good news travels. Random acts of kindness are not so rare you know.

Shame there is no 'edit' here - of course I am talking about people who have large luxury homes- the tax payer, who most often does not own a luxury home, should not have to pay for people to keep luxury lifestyles, should they?