Monday, Jul 23, 2007
And guess who's paying for this...
This Is Money: Jobless couple with 12 kids get £500,000 home
It's the type of highly-desirable family home that is well beyond the reach of many middle-class professionals.
A detached period house, with eight bedrooms, a garden, its own driveway and all set in a leafy residential area of well-to-do Newbury, Berkshire.
But unemployed Carl and Samantha Gillespie - together with their 12 children - have been able to move in without paying the slightest heed to Britain's sky-rocketing house prices.
In fact the couple have been given the keys without lifting a finger in work.
It has been revealed that the couple - neither of whom work and who receive an astonishing £44,000 in benefits a year - have been housed in the £500,000 property by their local council.
Posted by little professor @ 11:50 PM (179 views) Add Comment
28 Comments
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1. nopensionnohouse said...
Reading this makes me feel sick.
2. david20040_0 said...
"""West Berkshire County Council gave them the keys after their previous council home burnt down in a blaze sparked by one of the couple's children.""""
The last job I had was in 2000 or 2001 when I was working at ASDA earning £300 to £350 a month.
"I did this for ten weeks and at that time my housing benefit was cut from £1600 to £800 a month so it just didn't make sense for me to carry on working."
This is what happens if you vote Labour
3. Gone West said...
Looks a crap house for half a mil. Don't blame them, blame the system. They are at least clever enough to figure out it doesn't pay them to work in socialist Britain. All Hail Comrade Broon!
4. Sofar said...
I don't feel too bad about this. The cost of bringing up 12 children is not going to be cheap and will be time consuming if done properly, which they seem to be aiming to do. I feel much worse about the super-rich avoiding paying tax than this particular family possibly taking advantage of the system.
5. Orwell said...
Well they were voted for.....
6. paul said...
"The couple then had seven of their own: twins Parris-Jordan and Kesla Blu, eight; twins Mason and Peaches, six; Logan, four, and the three-year-old twins Skye and Kalifornya."
Swift introduction of breeding licenses. It's the only way.
7. Averageguy said...
I'm sick of this welfare state.
"I was born to have children, it's what I am here for."
Well, I'm obviously in the wrong profession. I'm an engineer, I can't afford a house even with my wife working full time and we won't be having children any time soon if the housing market continues the way it is doing.
This country hits the people who work hard and pay their taxes (although we don't have any choice) and rewards the people who don't work and dodge the tax system
8. Bereasonable said...
What has this to do with the subject matter of this blog?
9. paul said...
"What has this to do with the subject matter of this blog?"
Who cares?
10. Mark said...
why do i pay tax???
11. dohousescrashinthewoods said...
This kind of journalistic vomit is the bread and butter of prole-riling free rags / The Daily Mail.
Keep people running around, furious about a spurious one-off and you can pretty much do anything you like.
It's the basic comjuror's trick - misdirection. As someone pointed out on this blog, getting as many people as possible riled about immigrants and chavs keeps them het up about them as the source of their ills, whilst the rich, white, indgenous few (that we ironically aspire to be) quietly rinse the population with credit cards, mortgages and wide screen tellies which, were they to buy similar themselves, would come out of interest earned, not bought with interest on top.
Who - really - is the source of your problems? Is it 21 immigrants, living in a shed, cleaning up after you at the office? Or is more likely the fact that you went out and bought widgets you don't need because you were taught to want them by white, middle-class people working for white richer people and now you can't afford the next widget because of all the interest you are paying to people just like you to whom you unthinkingly chose to surrender your freedom?
This is nothing new, indded it's no different to how Hitler took control in Nazi Germany by spuriously blaming Jews. In the words of Sophocles, "The keenest sorrow is to recognize ourselves as the sole cause of all our adversities" but it is the start of living.
(magnanimous rant over)
12. Downsized And Waiting said...
thanks, dohousescrashinthewoods, for putting that into perspective.
13. sovietuk said...
Maybe this is a new reward for boosting the population. Why have coach and plane loads of immigrants ferried in when the domestic greenhouse can be used? The couple clearly had many years of fun building up their family and to top it off a £70k gross salary with afree house. Sounds excellent, sod trying to build up a business or working hard in your job just take a detour via ann summers tonight and get cracking!!
14. inbreda said...
I agree with sofar.
Rich tax dodgers are far more insidious than this family who after all are making the sensible decision. In the UK today it is really not worth working with any intention of ever being able to do anything like buy your own house. Thanks New Labour.
15. monty said...
dohouses,
I'd agree with you about the media's propensity for misdirection but the Daily Mail makes quite a valid point here. It's a great counterbalance to all the homeless nurses and firemen that the BBC has interviewed in support of Gordo's new housing policies. Of course the nurses and firemen need housing but here's what happens when someone looks at the numbers and finds that it pays them not to work. They're not the only ones either.
I think you're being a little too hard on the poor bedraggled middle classes here. They are merely using the credit rope provided to construct rather elaborate privet-hedged nooses. There is only one cause of inflation and that is the printing of money. Everything else is misdirection.
16. d'oh said...
Whilst I agree with dohousescrash that this is a complete misdirection, I have to say that this is just wrong. Why should taxpayers support rampant, irresponsible fertility? 12 children is taking the mick. There are too many people on this planet already. In past times, families like this would have starved. (Righto, got to go and polish my jackboots now...) Just flabbergasting. My partner and I cannot afford to go to work and having children would be a real financial strain...and we haven't been out to dinner in a year, nor will we have a holiday away from home this year, so it is not as if money is frittered away.
17. shipbuilder said...
D'oh - you say that you agree with dohouses.., but then you simply go on to follow the misdirection and your comment about families like this starving is pathetic. Who is the real enemy here? The family or the system that ensures that you are struggling while your employers are in a position to retire in their 30s or 40s should they so wish, with a nice little BTL portfolio to keep them ticking along? What if even one of those 12 kids became a multi-millionaire? Are you happy that that family has 'contributed' then? Would it be better that they had starved? Whose fault is a society where a working wage is below the minimum provided to live? Does it make sense to cut the minimum required, or raise the wage? It's not as if they can't afford it - how many companies have posted record profits recently? The tone of this piece suggests that it would be better that this family struggled, that their kids run around the streets with no future rather than us pay money for them, revealing the truth that the Evening Standard's concern is nothing to do with morals and everything to do with unadulterated greed. The solution is construct a society where an average family can afford a family home without both parents working 12 hour days - will pointing the finger at the chav family next door achieve that?
18. rich said...
@inbreda
I have to disagree. I don't agree that it's "sensible" of the parents to scrounge off the state just because that's what gives them the largest short-term cash payment. To call that sensible is to ignore the benefits that working for a living gives to health, the local economy, mental health, financial freedom, community, and the children's chances of becoming anything other than a scrounger.
You could argue that they can't be expected to understand all those implications, but not in the same breath that you call them sensible.
19. Tick Tock said...
Familys such as this of course once lived in council houses. Remember them?
Given that any State that prevents a man building his own shelter (and prices him from owning one) has an obvious obligation to provide the most basic of human needs, and given that 'Social housing' has been reduced to the level that it has, this situation is both inevitable and unpreventable (without the introduction of Paul's breeding license of course!)
Whatever ones personal views regarding the wisdom of having such a large family in such a situation, a Governments responsibility to either provide shelter, or allow such dwellings to be built by the individuals concerned for themselves, surely is clear. Social housing is what allows a 'home owning democracy' to function even though it is an inadequate system for the many. Without it you get situations like the one in this article.
Raising a family is a huge contribution to society if those children become responsible tax (and pension) paying members of society later. Doesn't our low (financially enforced) birth rate already require us to import cheap labour from abroad? Does anyone really think bringing up 12 kids would be an easy job? Or that the benefits that they receive provide a luxuarious lifestyle?
20. nopensionnohouse said...
Dohousescrash.
I dig what you are saying. Really. But where is the incentive to:
1. Go to school and pass your exams
2. Practice safe sex
3. Learn an honest trade(s)
4. Earn your spurs doing the honest trade(s)
5. Work hard to provide for your self and your new family
6. Save for a decent deposit.
7. Get married and get a house.
8. Make babies.
9. Live happily ever after.
Instead we have these incentives:
1. No point in learning cos it’s boring
2. Get everything on tick – forget delayed gratification
3. My house earns more than me so why bother
4. Oh, wait I can’t afford a house. Better have a baby ASAP so they give me one.
5. More babies = more money & bigger house.
6. Going to work = less money and a smaller house.
So I have a problem with rich tax dodgers AND sponging families like this one who set fire to their house when they want another one.
It’s nothing personal… only that I have been paying (dearly) into the system all my adult life and seem to be the only demographic that doesn’t get anything back!
I’m all for helping the less fortunate. I just think it’s unfair to give others an advantage at my expense.
Where is my incentive Gordo? Oh, yes. If I’m late paying tax or VAT you will fine me. That’s my incentive to budget well. Have to keep the CCJ’s away incase I eventually get to need a mortgage. There’s another incentive right there.
21. tipping point said...
Its a complete reversal of survival of the fittest. The more qualified and industrious you are the fewer children you have. And people wonder why Britain is falling behind the rest of the world. Thank God for hard working university educated eastern Europeans,
22. mrmickey said...
We bribe the underclass with "bread & circuses" to avoid civil unrest then import cheap slave labour to keep inflation down. Eventually the middle classes will collapse under the tax burden required to keep the welfare state going. No more "bread & circuses" no more NHS, people will then be thrown back on their own resources and the feckless and weak will be no more.
23. Added said...
i do wish people would stop whining about people being incentivised to have lots of children and live off the state. If they believe that they should go and do it. I, and most, would prefer to work and not have 12 children, regardless of the finanical bonuses. Yes the state may be generous in isolated examples. But that is all. And the idea that education is not given an incentive is laughable. Probably easier to get and service the debt from that than 12 children.
24. Ticktock said...
Ref - people will then be thrown back on their own resources and the feckless and weak will be no more
....the feckless and weak of course being the middle, and not working class. Do the Middle Class really fancy their chances at becoming working class again (not that they were ever really 'middle class', just higher privlidged servants with bigger egos and greater debt!)
Welcome to the Jungle.
25. tipping point said...
And don't think that the cost ends with housing and benefits. With such role model parents the cost to the state will be passed on from generation to generation.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6912216.stm
26. nopensionnohouse said...
Added, actually it’s not as isolated as you suggest. My best mate got divorced after his wife had an affair.
They were a low income family. He’s a car mechanic and she worked at Sainsbury’s. The point being – ‘happily’ paying taxes.
There are two kids involved. He pay’s his way and she claims some benefits.
She’d love to go back to work but says her benefits would stop…. And actually make her less well off as well as not being able to be with the kids.
It’s a no brain decision.
27. d'oh said...
Shipbuilder - That this article is typical media misdirection and stirring is a statement I agree with - it is a sideshow and completely off topic. However, since the topic had been raised, there is nothing wrong with questioning the attitude of individuals involved. It says something deeply depressing about social attitudes in this country, which is expressed one way in the "chavs" and another way in the "chav nots". Just because the environment exists in which someone can have 12 children and do okay without working, it does not mean that someone should. Moralistic, I know. The point is, I wouldn't do it. Neither would a lot of people. That someone can do it, is on the one hand a good thing (i.e. people shouldn't be able to starve in a modern society) but also indicates a basic ethical failure on the individual's part that should be deplored. One doesn't just "have" 12 children by accident. In a rougher society, people who made these decisions were/are punished by harsh reality. I don't want a society where such a harsh reality is the norm, but am depressed by the fathat people feel that they should be able to "just have babies" and have everyone else pick up the tab. The welfare state is there for people who fall on hard times, not a way of life.
Turning to the structural issues you raise - What is clear from this article is that the structure of welfare and wages has not been thought out well enough to reward people for working. In this particular family's case they actually lost money in doing so. Part of the problem is the lack of variance between the minimum wage and what is actually required to live. If the minimum wage was high enough it might be that this couple would have chosen to have fewer children and a better quality of life. When I was a lad :-) people who worked in supermarkets packing shelves or on the tills (in Australia) earned a significantly better wage than those who were on social security (in fact 23 years ago, the hourly rate for that sort of job in Australia was about the same as the initial minimum wage that was introduced here in the 90s), but both sets could survive in varying degrees of comfort. Those that worked in the supermarkets had a better quality of life. By having this variation, it was possible to reduce benefits by 50 cents in the dollar earned and still have a rational wage/welfare system. My mother, who was a single mum, did just that. We were poor, but my mother was rewarded for working.
I was shocked when I came to this country when I saw the wages that some people were earning (before minimum wage and after too) and discovered that working was penalised pound for pound in the benefits system - completely illogical as working costs money - and of course no one is going to take a part time job if they lose all their wages. Britain is an I'm all right Jack, dog eat dog society, and it is ugly that treats some of its members with complete disregard and disdain. No wonder there is an underclass. It's not what I grew up in, (though, sadly, Australia is heading this way too), so perhaps it stands out to me more than those who have slowly been brought to the boil by being born into the culture.
28. shipbuilder said...
I completely agree with you, d'oh. I have a feeling that we in the UK are victim to an unfortunate timing of events over the last 20-30 years. Successive Tory governments have robbed us of any feeling of community and responsibility to each other - the 'I'm alright, Jack' attitude so ingrained today. This has been followed by a Labour government that ironically further fosters these attitudes, but had also attempted to lift many out of poverty via increased benefits. The combination of these two factors has led to a generation where there is no incentive to work and no sense of responsibility to others. Blaming this family and others is actually counterproductive as the root cause is not addressed.