The Workhouse?

[Hopeless Romantic]

"And I do think it's time to address a problem that for too long has gone unspoken, the number of children having children. For it cannot be right, for a girl of 16, to get pregnant, be given the keys to a council flat and be left on her own.

"From now on, all 16- and 17-year-old parents who get support from the taxpayer will be placed in a network of supervised homes. These shared homes will offer not just a roof over their heads, but a new start in life where they learn responsibility and how to raise their children properly.

"That's better for them, better for their babies and better for us all in the long run."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/sep/29/teenage-pregnancy-labour-supervised-homes


Jesus! That's a can of worms!

[muriel_volestrangler]

1. It looks as if it's instead of giving them a separate house/flat on their own

ie for those who cannot stay with their parents for some reason. Given they're under 18, that seems reasonable to me. Yeah, I think a 16 or 17 year old single girl could do with some support to cope with a child.

[Hopeless Romantic]

2. sounds like the workhouse to me

how would it be if the BNP had thought of it?

http://www.nickbarlow.com/blog/?p=378

[muriel_volestrangler]

3. There's a fair amount of difference

The BNP want to apply it to anyone under 21, not under 18 (and remember 18 is the legal adult age, in general); they would insist the woman would have to get married, and the husband would have to have a job, to avoid it (note they wouldn't allow girls under 18 to get married, and so they'd force them into their institution), and they also seem to propose cutting any welfare payment to girls and women under 21 even if they continue living with parents (or someone else). And the BNP wants ridiculous dress codes and curfews (and prison for those who break them).

Bringing up a baby on your own when you're not an adult cannot be easy. I think the Labour proposal is still reasonable.

[Hopeless Romantic]

4. Still not happy with this, at all.

Although I take some of your valid points on board.

[TheBigotBasher]

5. I do not see this as reasonable at all.

The funding would have to be found by Local Authorities. Local Authorities already lose an awful lot of money as a result of the subsidy scheme used for Housing Benefit payments of supported accommodation schemes. A large number of those schemes offer little in the way of support to the individual resident, but cost local taxpayers in excess of £200 per week per client.

No extra homes will be built. Labour will look to using the so called "not for profit" companies that quite literally milking the system. The DWP have promised timeand time again that they will reform the subsidy system for supported accommodation. They have not, because they do not want the cost to hit them.

The same will apply. £30 million of subsidy to Local Authorities, giant multiples of that as a cost to Council Tax payers and lost services. For the women in question, what will they get? A room in a hostel, made politically palatable by calling it a "foyer".

[Hopeless Romantic]

6. Yep, & every non-convicted paedo will be applying for jobs helping to

look after em too.

[T_i_B]

7. Expect anyone applying to get the full advanced CRB check

Other issues with this are the quality of accomodation, and whether or not people will actually want these "gulags for slags" anywhere near their neighbourhoods.

Even if the idea is well intentioned, there are a whole load of factors that could make or break the scheme which need to be considered.

[TheBigotBasher]

9. I think that is a bit of a scare tactic.

The terrorist and paedophile have been exaggerated to put in place barbarous pieces of legislation that would never have been accepted otherwise.

The removal of social mobility from the poor and the erosion of civil liberties are crimes as big as Iraq in my own view.

[fedsron2us]

8. These used to be quite common in the 1960s

which were not quite as swinging as some may imagine. Indeed, being a single Mum in that era was no bed of roses since there were almost no benefits to support you and most women in that position were forced to work to keep their children.

I don't think workhouse comparisons are probably going to win the argument on this issue, particularly as the main victims of that institution were the elderly not the young. More pertinent is why these institutions fell out of favour in the 1970s. Personally I think neither solutions is ideal. Institutionalising people is rarely a good way to get them to lead independent lives but then neither is dumping them in council or housing association flats on benefits.

What never seems to be addressed in these discussions is why in an age of readily available contraception so many more young British girls wind up pregnant than any of their European counterparts. Maybe if that issue was tackled then the rest of the argument would be rendered redundant.