Hail Taxpayer, full of grace

Do not be afraid.

The Independent has its entitlement-detectors turned up to eleven this week

Promiscuous scroungers or loving parents? Teenage mums fight back

They are labelled promiscuous, branded as benefit scroungers who have fallen pregnant in order to bag a council flat, cruelly nicknamed "pram faces" and mocked by everyone from their peers to politicians. But do the country's teenage mothers deserve such a bad reputation? This week a group of teenage mums will meet the Prime Minister to argue otherwise.

They are offended by what they see as the widespread negative portrayal of teenage motherhood – particularly Gordon Brown's proposal last October that teenage mums need to be placed in supported hostels and taught parenting skills.

Aside from the obvious cheap quip that being scorned by Gordon Brown should be a badge of pride, you will perhaps notice from the start something missing from this tale of woes and being misunderstood.

A handful of these young women interviewed for The Independent on Sunday say they speak for thousands of others in their belief that Britain's young mothers should be treated with more respect.

There’s not hint of irony there.

Remember ‘thousands’ here represents each week thousands of: basic Child Tax Credit at £60 per week plus another ten pounds per extra child (remember, bad luck can happen to the same ‘young woman’ more than once) plus up to £70 per week if you are fortunate enough to get a child registered as disabled. (See later for this bit of cruelty of mine.) Then there’s £20 for your eldest child and £13 for each subsequent one as Child Benefit. Thus for someone working less than £16 hours per week there’s £50 to £64 per week Income Support. Plus the whole of your Council Tax paid plus locally calculated rent for a 2 bed roomed privately rented house or flat per week. That’s a flat or house all to herself and her child(ren), and here in Castle City that’s £120. For Haringey in London it’s £230 to £350 per week.

Oh, there are odds and sods of free school meals and dental care and so on, and all the hidden costs of advisers and helpers and their pensions and phone bills and training and so on – public and ‘private’ alike - but you’re still looking at a weekly bill of £266 per week for single mother with one child in cheap and cheerful Castle City including the lowest rate of Council Tax Benefit with Single Person’s Discount of £16 per week (Castle County is relatively cheap), unless she’s lucky enough to have a disabled child, in which case there’ll be Disability Living Allowance worth up to £120 per week and other bits and pieces. £266 x 52= £13832 per year. And she doesn’t even have to pretend to look for work till her youngest child is seven.

Times thousands. That’s more than a shop assistant or call centre monkey can get at minimum wage for 40 hours per week - £9920 less National Insurance and you’d still have to find money for rent and any council tax (which any landlord will have added to the rent in a shared house.)

That’s a rent-free holiday worth £96,824 over seven years and then she’ll just have to show she’s looking for work and maybe it can go on a decade or so longer…unless she has another child, or two, or ten, and in that cases everything spirals up.

If our girl was under 25 and had no child and was unemployed, she’d get about £120 benefits in Castle City all told and have to live in a room in a house and share bathroom, kitchen, and sitting-room, and be obliged to go on training and ‘prove’ she’s actively looking for work.

Pages 14 and 16 of this will get your pulse rate up to a healthy 120 per minute.

And there aren’t merely ‘thousands.’

The country's teenage pregnancy rate is the highest in Western Europe,

I can’t imagine why.

And it’s not like the boys are all that attractive…

…with 42,900 girls under 18 becoming pregnant in England and Wales in 2007, and 4,050 in Scotland in the same year.

Plus, when you’re older you get even more help and as you don’t get called a teenager any more so the pro-baby ranching journalists can ignore you and your ‘thousands’ of sisters.

While this is frequently cited as evidence of social breakdown, many believe there is no need to despair.

When quite clearly it’s a sign of a healthy attitude to sex and marriage.

"They are much maligned. Some sections of the media whip up opinions that are extremely negative, and there are so many TV programmes that prey on the image of teen parents," says Hilary Pannack, chief executive of the sex education charity Straight Talking.

Wow, at last something I’d like to watch on the TV.

I must be missing all those soap operas and drama series showing vodka’d up girls doing it in their mums’ flats and then showing the boy (if he features at all after The Conception Scene) leaving within a week or two either side of the birth, and then showing the disgusted viewers all the form-filing and the Thursday Post Office payout of all those ten pound notes, and all the helpers saying it’s alright and have you thought of applying for X?…

Nah, I haven’t seen such unsympathetic coverage either, which is why I don’t watch much broadcast television programmes, so it’s back to the Sarah Connor Chronicles for a more positive view of single motherhood for me.

"I don't believe the majority of teenage parents are any worse than the rest of us.

And you know, I imagine most teenage parents aren’t ‘any worse’ than people who work for Straight Talking, which describes its mission thus:

One of the main aims of the Government’s Teenage Pregnancy Strategy is to halve the rate of teenage pregnancies in the UK by 2010. Progress is being made towards the targets set but is slower than anticipated and the number of teenage pregnancies in certain areas remains high. A second aim is to enable teenage parents to move forward into education and employment and reach their potential. Straight Talking, with its peer education in schools and training programme for teenage parents, responds to both Government aims.

No, I should say that pregnant teenagers are likely to be every bit as not-worse as those enlightened folks at ST.

Oh, and Hilary thinks that texting the school nurse to order the morning after pill is great idea (I think it should fit in between Intermediate Excuses and Rationalization and Climate Change Studies on a busy school day) but of course, more education is needed.

Sex education’s working fine so far, isn’t it?

And halving teenage pregnancy by 2010- that’s a lot of bedrooms and hatchback rear seats the Government will need to lurk in.

Ninety-five per cent of teenagers who come to us go on to do further education, and some of them are doing degrees and MAs."

Like, wow.

Except, if you’d seen as many scrawled and barely legible handwriting of single-mother students asking for advice about benefits as I had, you’d wonder what these degrees and MAs were in.

Somehow, however, I don’t think that the teenage mothers who bother to visit a ‘charity’ and who seek further education are the real problem.

Although the Government has failed to meet its 1998 pledge to halve teen pregnancy by 2010, teen pregnancy rates have fallen by 12.6 per cent during that time.

While some may be optimistic about the achievements of young mothers,

It’s comedy hour…

"I was just about to do my GCSEs when I found out I was pregnant. A lot of my mum's friends gave me disapproving looks when I said I was pregnant, but I decided that I was going to keep the baby. I felt that I'd got myself into the situation and thought that I should just deal with it. I took a year out and now I'm in college full time, studying health and social care. I'm planning to be a nursery teacher, so I'll be studying for a few years more.

It’s an educational opportunity as well as a career move.

My life completely changed when I had Dontaye, but it didn't change for my boyfriend. That is one of the reasons we split up; he just wanted to carry on living his life like before.

The ghost at the feast is father dearest, but no biggie. Mum’s got you to look after her and make a childcare baby professional of her after her stint as a ‘Mum.’.

If I didn't have Dontaye I don't think I'd be at college at all. I didn't have any focus before he was born; he guides me.

Gone are those old-fashioned notions of parents guiding their children. In the Third Millennium, the child is parent to the mum.

"I am training to be a peer educator with a teenage pregnancy charity.

I swear on my mother’s grave I didn’t make any of this up.

I want to show young people what it is really like to be a teenage mum. In schools they tell you how not to have a baby,

So the condom fitting lessons obviously work just fine…

…but they don't tell you why not to.

Do you know, once up a time, I think they probably did tell you why not to. I’m also sure that Hilary Pannack would be way against any of those old-fashioned reasons for not getting pregnant while unmarried being taught again in schools. Might be judgemental or negative or something.

People think you get a council flat and lots of benefits, but that is just not true. I still live with my family, but as it is a small house the baby's crying wakes everyone up. So I'm planning to move into a supervised hostel for young women in March.

Which means tax-supported housing and lots of benefits.

"I'd like to go on to university and be a teaching assistant.

It’s an educational opportunity as well as a career move.

There are lots of young women who give up their whole lives when they have a baby. Tomorrow I'm going out for a friend's birthday and it'll be the first time I've been out since my daughter Justyna was born, four months ago. There is a lot of stereotyping that goes on. People who see a pregnant teenage girl think it is a one-night stand, but lots of girls are in relationships."

Before I mock the afflicted; the halt and the lame some more, I’d like to point out that The Independent’s writer is so far up her, well, dependency culture back passage that she doesn’t see any of this.

She just can’t see it. Everything’s just fine. The Exhibit Unfortunates whom this ‘charity’ has wheeled out are there because Ms Shields really believes in the feminist myth of women doing it for themselves and the amoral nature of sex and the general okayness of oceans of cash going to replace the (admittedly useless) ‘fathers’ of these children. As long as some girls are going on to work for the Local Education Authority or fake charities as examples of ‘Why schoolgirl pregnancy is wrong, and here I am to show you that you can still get a tax-funded career and a wage out of it’, then the underclass breeding cycle is just a profitable and job-creating adjunct to middle class liberal lifestyle, and everyone else can just shut up and jolly well pay for it.

Now for some real reality, from my life. Here are three heavily-disguised examples from one busy week at work: last week, as it happens.

The lifelong single mother on benefits in a Housing Association flat who calls into the office upset as the payment of some of her benefits have been suspended because The Housing wants to know when her teenage daughter moved out and when her Child Benefit ended for her (both of which will effect the help she gets with rent and Council Tax).

She can’t be bothered to write in to The Housing with this information or to give my office a number to phone her back on when mobile has limited credits on it and cuts out mid conversation, but it’s probably going to be okay because little Epiphany (aged 17, who is moving out to be with Mum’s forty-odd year old former partner’ who’d been staying with her and Mum in their publicly funded house) is, we will be delighted to hear, in a blessed state.

The likewise ten years (and counting) publicly funded single mother who wonders what help her doubly-disabled daughter living at home will do to the household welfare in autumn. This thirty-something ‘mum’ has been receiving two lots of Disability Living Allowance for 17-year-old Rachelle-Danni. But their prayers have been answered (one assumes by Immaculate Conception) for above Castle City’s most husband-free suburb a star will shine in September. No mention needs to be made of Rachelle-Danni’s qualifying disabilities at this point because something’s obviously working just fine.

The cheerful older mother who rings me up and asks what help her young Tracy will get if she rents a private three bed roomed house and can we persuade The Housing to pay the housing benefit directly to the landlord (contrary to government policy which is to encourage tenants to keep hold of the money until slum-lords fix leaking roofs or unsafe heaters) beause 'She's useless with money.'

‘Poor little thing, she’s pregnant again and she's already got two. She needs your help and she’s only 17.’

Not a council house in sight, you’ll notice, but then it’s us Right-wingers who invent myths of welfare dependency and stereotyping and all that jazz..’

Possessions

The Brother phones me up.

His little sister Pixie is shrieking in the background but she’s just too vulnerable to come to the phone right now.

The Brother speaks as he no doubt ‘writes’ on the numerous forms and letters with which he fails to provide usable information to The Social for his own benefit claims; with that wind-tunnel-vowels-into-puddles-of-scummy-consonants vortex mixing non sequiturs into an all-you-can-blag buffet without gaps or pauses for breath or to trying to establish understanding or to identify himself or me or any inflection other than slowly rising angry tones which tell you from the start that under no circumstances is he going to listen to anything at all that you say until he’s said his piece and put you in your place because saying it is all: The Word shall set him free – or at least Pixie’s rent will soon be free, he hopes, and so growling and interrupting my polite greeting is just the ticket to ram home the fact that he’s been terribly inconvenienced by having to sacrifice precious time from his busy schedule working at the Wii-face to say just how disappointed he is that some other servant of the State is remiss by dint of not immediately reaching into the big old barrel of twenty pound notes that we all keep by the phone to send to Pixie so that she can go on living in the flat she recently rented at (it turns out) about forty quid per week less than The Housing are prepared to give her and which doesn’t leave her with ‘anything to live on': it’s about fifty pounds actually but who’s counting?)

Succinct Town is not a suburb of Castle City.

This is how the steamroller of the Welfare State tries to roll forever and take over the universe.

Pixie has rented a home of her own. Moving out confidently to make her way in the world like the social entrepreneur that she is, she’s decided that it’s long overdue that she left her Mum and her latest boyfriend’s house, and no doubt a gaggle of diversely-surnamed little half brothers probably monickered Jo-Boy, Tyson and Jakub who have been getting on her ‘pecs since they discovered just how high a decibel level they could generate for her and the neighbours’ listening pleasure without Him thumping them or Our Mum cutting them briefly off from her thin, cool, struggling stream of highly conditional but nevertheless genuine love.

She’s found a nice place to rent privately in Castle City’s economically obsolescent outskirts which is conveniently far away from the highest concentrations of needle-carpeted rookeries just as most of her school friends have done in recent years to put down roots and to blossom into mothers; sometimes within weeks of signing the lease.

Only she hasn’t read the small print.

To be fair she probably hasn’t read anything that didn’t have the word ‘celebrity’ in the first paragraph or that has ‘Fits sizes 16 to 18’ printed on it since she finally learned at about twelve how to read at all, but what she hasn’t done at any time during her daydreaming is to speculate about the consequences of signing a legally-binding contract but not being able to pay all the rent with someone who works out of the back of a taxi company’s office where his pit-bulls sleep except on overdue-collection days and who never gives receipts and who holds onto the rent book throughout the tenancy. He’s not been getting enough rent and has been Having A Word. Sharrylleanne and Nicole and Kimberley-May get every single penny of theirs paid okay and they were all mates at school together so why not Pixie?

This last is, approximately, what The Brother wants me to answer. You’ll have guessed by now that he wants me to answer it just so he can tell me I’m wrong. He intends to bully me into persuading The Housing to go to their Bumper Barrel O’ Twenties and do that whole All Creatures Great and Small thing with some Housing Benefit clerk playing James Herriot and the taxpayer representing the archetypal breach-birthing cow or the aardvark that’s swallowed (but which just can’t quite pass) an ocarina. It’s ironic that I have to explain the facts of life to a man who utters synonyms for the act of generation as every third word, but there you have it: there are a million stories in the naked city but only one verb.

I try to explain, but to save wear on my PC’s ‘f’ key, I’ll not quote our dialogue at length here; nor his many and essentially fertile interruptions, nor detail the Cloverfield soundtrack-bassy thumpings from Pixie’s room around him that are so loud that it seems her bed or sofa must be being repeatedly flung up into the air and then cast down onto the carpetless floor as if by some malign supernatural force.

Single people under 25 are not expected to live alone in four-roomed flats solely at the taxpayer’s expense. They are entitled to Housing Benefit at the shared accommodation rate, which is about half the rate allowed for a single unemployed adult living alone. Pixie should have got a shared house with a room of her own and a kitchen, living room, and bathroom in common with a couple or three others by this logic. Up to 25 you’re supposed to muck in like students. But Pixie is a rugged individualist who needs her ‘space’, according to The Brother.

Anyway, she has single friends at about her age who get all their rent paid. Do they have children? Some of them. There you are; ‘families’ have bigger needs and get more benefit. But, argues Brother Rumpole, some of the friends are alone, under 25 and ‘on the sick’ like Pixie and they get all their rent paid even though they aren’t parents. I explain that, yes, more of their daily spending-money benefits income will be excluded from means-testing help with their rent. If they get health or disability related benefits the system disregards certain food-and-bills benefits and adds disability premiums. There’s a core subsistence level that the government calculates for individuals or families according to their health, age, and mobility and to the numbers, ages and sexes of any children. The sicker you are, the more your spendable benefits are excluded from this matrix of subsistence 'needs'.

In the background, Pixie’s bed (or sofa) has ceased it bungee-thumping, and she is shouting the plaster off the walls with a deep, chthonic boom you wouldn’t think a (human) female chest and voice box could make. Perhaps she’s floating above the bed now.

The system allows proportionately more of the food-and-electric-and-mobile-phone benefits to be excluded from Housing and Council Tax Benefit calculations, with the mother of all exclusions on those who have the higher rate of Disability Living Allowance for both ‘Care’ and ‘Mobility', as they generate very high disability premiums. There’s nothing wrong with the logic of means-testing: the more knackered you are; the more fate has hammered you down in mind and body and the less you can reasonably be expected to do to provide for yourself. I suffer no pain at all at the thought of paraplegics or the blind getting extra help so that they can rent more expensive ground floor suburban flats that allow wheel-chair access or that permit guide dogs to be kenelled there.

Oddly enough I rarely get elderly paraplegics or the totally blind yelling at me, though occasionally they are sincerely grateful if I point out that they’re missing a trick and they find themselves better off after my advice. Poor old gimmers: they just don’t have the proper attitude some of them, unlike their juniors and betters.

The problem, of course, is that government ‘logic’ doesn’t take into account Ingenuity, Indolence and Greed or any other Hawkwind songs. Not everyone who wants to escape a life of getting out of bed early five days a week to work amongst unfriendly strangers is fortunate enough to be totally broken.

‘How do you fecund expect her to live on fecund nothing at all when she’s fecund sick?’ inquires The Brother sweetly. It’s tempting to reply that until a few magical moments ago I had been entirely unaware of her very existence and that therefore I had had no expectations at all as to her viability, but I know that that’d be a sacking offence - unlike say squandering trillions on a housing bubble - and so I hold my tongue.

He mutters something to the wailing voice behind him and the line crackles as she howls her disability qualifications at him to pass on to me. A positively First Century Galilean sound they have; what with her troubles and her attacks. And her ‘issues.’ How thoroughly the underclass has adopted the pusillanimous vocabulary of the victim-generating middle classes. But in the end it turns out that whatever it is she has wrong with her, the Department for Work and Pension’s top specialists have tragically only been able to award her the lowest level of ‘disability’ which means that The Housing have rightly taken most of her spending money benefits into account and haven’t been able to ignore the fact that she’s under 25 and single and renting a starter home at a cost and in a neighbourhood that’s more suitable for a hard-working, tax-paying family; the poor bastards.

There is a brief period of negotiation like that in August 1939 during which The Brother offer me an enticing banquet of illegal (and on one occasion physically impossible) alternatives to me doing my lawfully contracted job. Most of these choices are variations on the theme of me telling some fellow lickspittle from The Housing to ignore the various Housing Benefit Acts (note the date of that first one! Who knew that it was all Her fault?), and by forgetting all that Whereas and Notwithstanding stuff to make with the Barrel of Cash already and no messing about as he’s got Lego Star Wars to win.

You can wear this kind of person down. Pixie is doing half the job anyway as I can hear her ever shriller and ever more abusive howling begin to erode his shallow half-brotherly ability to give a shit. I’m imagining pea soup vomit spraying horizontally and maybe Pixie looking over her shoulder: right over her shoulder at 180% from straight ahead right now. I urge him to repeat to her that the law of the land won’t allow The Housing to give her more than her fifty quid or so, no matter how much she yells at him. He demurs and asks me once more why she can’t have more fecund cash (as if asking again and louder will change the world) because she’s on the sick. But not sick enough I explain. Again. She’s got something that the Welfare State considers to be dealable-with by a few extra pounds a week (or millions nationwide, let us not forget) and that’s it. She’ll have ‘panic attacks’ or be obese and unwieldy or be a moderate self-harmer or otherwise less than calm and gymnastic in enclosed spaces like factories or offices or supermarket warehouses, though I’m guessing that pubs and convenience stores and night clubs might therapeutically count as the open air.

But that’s the truth – she’s only got something trivial wrong with her, physically, but I'm expecting changes around these part. After all, if you pay folk if something happens then some people will assure that that particular something will indeed happen. That's market forces for you. If you pay peanuts you get monkeys. This is what that saying means: not that low wages produce poor workmanship, but that people will answer demand in ways that complement the demand. If you pay peanuts you get monkeys; if you pay bananas you get gorillas; if you pay with the coins stolen in a mausoleum at midnight on Halloween from the skeletal eye sockets of unpunished and unshriven embezzlers you get accordionists. Once she learns today’s lesson, I confidently expect her condition to get worse if she can squeeze it past the doctors.

‘So you’re saying if I broke her leg, she’d get more benefit?’

And you’d get a medal, or deserve one, I think.

Eventually, worn down between the brick wall of my persistence and cunningly-hidden indifference to his grief on one side and the Gadarene squealings behind him on the other, he goes off the line in the sure and certain knowledge that, while she can’t have any more benefit per se without becoming a mother or growing sicker and more disabled (both obviously very attractive career options) she can apply to The Housing for temporary relief whilst she looks for somewhere that she really can afford. She won’t look, of course. Even if The Housing do agree to pay a temporary top-up for up to six months and it goes straight to the landlord’s bank account to appease his wrath she’ll still not search for anywhere else to rent despite her present panic. She’s going to be too busy with her personal and relationship problems and rowing with her whole family to go house-hunting any time soon. So in eight months or so after the top-up has ended forever, her underpaid and out-of-pocket landlord’s pocked face will lose its film-star charms and he'll become all insistent again. Pixie’ll do a runner to another part of Castle City or to one of its exotic neighbouring mill towns leaving debts to the landlord and The Housing alike, but then it’s amazing how nimble you can be even with her disability when you need to carry a bed and a fifty-inch plasma TV screen down three flights of lightless stairs.

She’s hoist on her own petard.

Two petards.

First petard: she’s never ever given any consideration as to whether The Social and The Housing really would provide her with what she wants as much as abundantly as she wants it and as soon as she needs it for the Lord will provide. Her Mum’s on the sick with kids and she gets by and her friends with babies have their own places and they get by and some of them just like her are on the sick and they get by, and so somehow she has slightly distorted the nature of Welfare State and the grimmer reality that underlies it into some warped version of the allegory of the lilies of the fields and the fowls in the skies, African or European.

Second petard: she’s not used the masses of information that have always been available to her. The Housing will have written to her once her too-small help with the rent was awarded and so she would have been able to see from the start that she wasn’t going to be able to manage. Therefore she didn’t need to wait for the landlord to come a-calling or for The Brother to get out so he could shout at me. If she had had any self-possession at all, she might have phoned The Housing in advance of signing the lease and asked what she’d get if she moved into her lovely new home alone – and not rented it when they told her. Every building in the Welfare State is plastered with posters and signs and almost all correspondence has letterheads and warnings and rights and duties and exhortations to call the authorities at all kinds of local call centres or drop in advice centres before everything goes horribly wrong: we’re waiting for your call. But she’s slightly distorted all this potential help and advice to mean ‘Please ignore this letter and just get back to feuding with your mother and schoolmates and don’t bother your pretty little head with thoughts of…well, anything at all really, until The Man Comes Around, and then who you gonna call?’

Two slightly distorted petards.

And the moral of the story is?

The myth of Right-wing myths about welfare mothers and doley scroungers.

The Left says that girls don’t deliberately get pregnant to qualify for benefits and accommodation of their own, and I’m sure that a sizeable minority of them do so (I’ve heard some admit as much). They also deny that others invent or exaggerate their ‘disabilities’ for the same purpose. But there's another much wider carriageway on the welfarist road to Hell. A majority of the young people whom I meet and who have the biggest beefs with the system do so because they assumed right from the start that they’d be getting it all straight away...and with no expiry date, world without end. They'll do their individualist thing regardless: petty crime, or truancy, or unprotected sex or making tenancy agreements with slumlords and they'll expect it to be alright because the system is all about always making it alright. They are so poorly educated and incurious and accepting of their ‘rights’ that it never occurs to them that it’s not going to be perfect from the start. Guess where that puts getting jobs and responsible parenthood in their hierarchy of priorities? Talk about The Imp of the Perverse: this is the Demon of the Irresponsible.

Multiply the costs of all this by fifty-two to get the annual spend per tousled head and then by several hundred thousand nationwide to figure out where all the policemen and body armour and hospital cleaning crews and physics equipment in schools have gone to this year.

When things go wrong, they intend to fall back onto their cosy beds and let it all get sorted out.
You, dear reader, are the bed that they expect to fall back on when Life happens to them.

Kind of puts that whole bed-bucking thing into context, doesn’t it?