The £5m single mother: Taxpayers face extraordinary benefits bill to support a single broken family

Published 31st Mar 2010

A single broken family can cost the taxpayer more than £5million to keep, a devastating analysis of the benefits system shows.

The scale of spending on benefits, care and attempts to help a mother and her children would swallow a big lottery win, according to the figures drawn up by local authority chiefs.

The extreme case study - which would not apply to most lone-parent families but to a significant minority - suggests that ordinary people are paying a vast price for 'broken Britain' and its legion of families whose every requirement is paid for by the state.

The £5,782,894 price tag comes on a family led by an abused single mother - herself brought up in care - who has three children.

The case study assumes that neither the mother nor the three children ever work, and the children, like the mother, spend long periods living in state care.

It puts the cost of providing for the mother - who they called Lizzie - at £805,000 up to the age of 18.

Lizzie then costs almost £100,000 for the following two years, during which there are attempts to help her find a job.

She has three children, each of whom spends nine years of their childhood either in council-run homes or with foster parents.

The cost of supporting a workless Lizzie from the age of 20 to her retirement at 65, plus the three children, is calculated at just under £4.9million.

Leaders of Barnet Council in North London, who drew up the example, say - although extreme - it is an illustration of what the state spends on a family in total breakdown.

The analysis also makes the point that where the head of a family has never worked, there is a 'very high likelihood' that the children will not work either. The costs do not include the price to the taxpayer of education or health services.

They also do not take into account police and criminal justice costs of a family involved in antisocial behaviour and crime.

Mike Freer, former Tory leader of the borough, said: 'There are 300 families in Barnet who cost £ 16million a year in services, more than £53,000 a year for each family.

'That figure includes social care and housing, but it does not count Benefits Agency payments, or health and education, or police spending.

'This is the cost when things go wrong. We need to steer these families-back into health and back into jobs, and early intervention is the cheapest and most effective way.'

The £5million cost of a dysfunctional family was revealed in a paper produced for centre-right think-tank Centre for Policy Studies by three Tory council leaders.

Colin Barrow, of Westminster, Edward Lister, of Wandsworth, and Hammersmith's Stephen Greenhalgh said every council was familiar with cases such as Lizzie.

They said: 'The lifetime costs of welfare benefits can run into millions of pounds for one person.'

They called for powers to pay benefits, give help on employment, run social care services and carry out beat policing to be handed down from Whitehall to town halls.

The figures emerged as the two main parties prepare election campaigns around how to repair ' broken Britain'.

Labour has redoubled its pledge to eradicate child poverty by 2020 on the basis that family breakdown, worklessness and crime are a result of deprivation.

Tories have promised to give tax breaks to married couples in the belief that the collapse of the twoparent family is one of the central causes of anti-social behaviour, unemployment and crime.

Source: ' Daily Mail '

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