Couple on £7000 a month benefits……….

Those poor little children, I do hope they are fostered together and receive the care they so definitely need.

I'm appalled they were receiving £7000 in benefits a month.

I'm slightly cynical they were receiving that much.

The whole set up sounds like the house from hell, though, and the family was known to be problematic.

The fact that the title of this thread is all about how much money they (allegedly) got belies where people's concerns are.

The problem with this pair is how the children and dogs were treated, not how much they got in benefits.

Where were social services? Surely, it must have been bad before lockdown?

They had been informed, but...

I don't know where to start with this one (but not with the amount of benefits 🙄).

A family headed by adults with low IQ, children not attending school, 35 dogs, a filthy house - all of these things should have been red flags, and SS should have been involved.

Why weren't they? Is it because of idle social workers who don't care about their clients and are only in it for the massive salaries, or is it because of years of cuts to the budgets that could have protected these children, and a general trend for demonising of the poor instead of helping them?
You decide.

I don't really care how much money they were getting, the neglect is what matters. Two things have contributed to this, the lack of proper funding for social services and the Covid lockdown. One of those couldn't be helped, the other is a deliberate policy that will see more cases slipping under the radar , and next time it might not be just a dead dog.

The newspaper has mentioned the amount of benefits, of course.

It may be true, but surely it's the least important factor?,

This family will have been reported numerous times, by neighbours (37 dogs in a house with eight children) and schools, although families like these are notorious at evading scrutiny from authorities. Social workers are not idle; they are inundated with an overload of cases particularly since lockdown, and strangely, a dearth of
people prepared to enter the profession. Someone hopes the children will all be fostered together; how many foster parents would be able to accommodate eight children at once?
There is an animal rescue 'sanctuary' near where I live, with dogs housed in the bedrooms of a council house, run by a family known to the police and social services and recently moved into the vicinity for yet another fresh start. When the neighbours (thirty years residence) complained about the noise, the mess and the squalor the advice offered to them was to apply to be rehoused. The 'sanctuary' remains.

Screw the benefits

This is an awful case of child and animal neglect.

Those poor babies, I hope they find families to love them

Agree that the money is the least important factor, interesting though, that the newspaper considered that their readership would consider it to be the most important.
Should this make us think about what sort of priorities our mainstream media think we have? What sort of people they think we are?

Have to say I was more appalled by the neglect of the children and animals than I was about the amount of benefits they were receiving. However, now the children and animals are safe, I am wondering how, or if, they received this amount

Social workers are not idle; they are inundated with an overload of cases particularly since lockdown, and strangely, a dearth of people prepared to enter the profession.

In case it wasn't obvious, I wasn't suggesting that they were, just pre-empting the inevitable digs at the SW profession.

I agree that the welfare of the children and dogs are the priority here but once that has been sorted, an annual income of £84K if that was the case, needs investigating.

I think the benefits included the £1600 a month rent. (Think it was that amount)

I can't fathom the idea of an amount to keep that many people, so who knows?

The amount of income (£84,00 pa) is relevant though. The appalling neglect cannot be blamed on poverty, and as neither parent appeared to work, they had all the time in the world to care for their children properly. (There were 35 dogs in the house, not 37.)

SW's are all too often damned if they do and damned if they don't.

I thought there was a limit to the amount of children that parents could claim for? Is the figure of £84k even possible?

They may have been fully entitled to that amount of benefits depending on their rent and any medical conditions or disabilities.

What needed to be investigated is why they didn't use that money to care for their 7 children and their animals.

It has been investigated and both are now in prison.

Universal Credit can include a payment for each dependant child but even so it does sound excessive.

These cases are very rare ,thats why they make the news .Its not the norm for any benefit claimant to receive huge amounts of money despite the right wing press trying to peddle it as the truth.
Most people on benefits are struggling to make ends meet ,as the rise in FB use shows

Yes, of course the children's welfare comes first, although as their ages ranged from 4 - 17, I am not sure I would describe them as 'babies'

But that does not mean we should ignore the other aspects of the case. This family had been living in this squalor for years. Did no one really not notice, did no one complain to some official, about the number of animals, even if they did not notice the state of the children. 9 adults and 35 dogs in a three bedroomed house.

I have googled the case and read the police and local paper reports and they all seem clear that the families £7,000 a month income came from benefits.

It would be interesting to know how that was calculated, even assuming all the children were on disability benefits, it still seems difficult to understand. To qualify for the higher rates the child would need to be very seriously disabled and surely that would require a significant involvement of GPs, nurses, carers and could any of those possibly have gone into the house and seen the neglect and squalor and done nothing. It seems unlikely. And what was the money spent on, since it clearly was not spent on the children, dogs or house?. There has been no reporting of drugs in the case

Perhaps,with disability payments, too.

It needs to be remembered that in itself, it is available to anyone who fits the criteria, whatever the circumstances.