[Josy]

Originally Posted by Toy Soldier

That's not how it works though, the vast majority of those benefits will be child tax credits / child benefits which you still get if working, and probably more as with someone working there's then working tax credits. Housing benefits also scale with income, getting a job doesn't mean losing it (necessarily) unless the job is a high paying one. So long as it's 16 hours a week or more, a household will ALWAYS be better off to some degree if working.

That said, with that much coming in, the difference of a few hundred pounds a month might seem "not worth it" to many. The benefits cap should largely have addressed that, though. The 26k cap effectively caps families at 4 children, having more won't increase anything. I also suspect it might be pretty much impossible to raise 10 kids on 26k per year. I find myself occasionally broke on more than that with just two .

Figures released under the Freedom of Information Act show that there are 190 families with at least ten under-18s where one or both of the parents gets an out-of-work benefit.

These families are eligible for £61,183 a year in state support – much more than they could hope to earn if they entered the job market.

A family in work would have to earn £93,000 to be left with this amount of money after tax.

The statistics illustrate the extent to which enormous handouts condemn such families to a life on benefits, because it would not be worth their while to take on work.

This was in 2012, the figures will no doubt have changed now but it still proves the point of my post.