Life outside the family

With so much in the media about the credit crunch and financial collapse, one question keeps coming back to me, and it doesn't seem to be one the politicians are interested in. It's that you only ever hear about families being hit hard by financial difficulties.

Now, I happen to like families. In an ideal world, it would be nice if evey child could grow up with parents who loved and cared for him or her. It would be great if men and women fell in love, got married, and lived happily together ever after. And undoubtedly, if you've got children to think about it adds a whole new level of anxiety to financial pressures. But my point is that not everyone lives in a family, but everyone is being hit by higher prices and bills, and not everyone is getting help. There are some good reasons why person A should get help and person B shouldn't, but to me a lot of it seems quite arbitrary.

Unfortunatly we don't live in an ideal world, but in this world, where families break up and many people live on their own, are single parents, or live in shared houses. Not just students, but young working people share a house with one or more other people. It's cheaper, it's probably more environmentally friendly and it provides some of the support of a family while still preserving the independence of individuals. I live in a shared, rented house. Out of the four of us, two are currently employed (one part time, one full time, neither of us earning huge amounts), one is unemployed and the fourth a student.

Because we live in a good sized house, we pay the same amount of council tax as a family, but because we're young and not a family we're not eligible for the same help (eg tax credits) we would get if we were. Because two out of the four of us are working, we don't qualify for other forms of help because council tax is based on the model family of two adults living in each and every house in the country (in other words, based on something that is largely a myth). The system is too inflexible to cope with our "unusual" household- or even to issue us accurate bills, it seems. We pay the same for heating and fuel bills as we would if we owned our home, but are not able to take advantage of the schemes to help with insulation and double glazing, thus reducing fuel bills, as we would if we owned it. Maybe we could pressure our landlords to do so, but what incentive do they have? It doesn't directly affect them.

Because we're young and unmarried (and don't have kids) it's assumed that we can look after ourselves without any other help. The thing that annoys me the most is perhaps the difference in the minimum wage- why should you be allowed to pay a 21 year old less than a 22 year old, if both are doing the same work and both are living independently? Why is someone who's over 25 able to claim tax credits, but not someone under 25?


This has turned into a bit of a rant, and I don't think it'll be the last on this topic. Last night (just as I got home from work) somebody from the Office of National Statistics turned up to ask lots of questions about who lives in the house, what jobs do they do, etc etc. It took several minutes to explain that this was a shared house, where none of us were related or in a relationship with each other, but not a student house. It took even longer for his computer system to get to grips with this. And as for the fact that two of the people who'd been there last year had moved out while two more moved in and two stayed the same...it was complicated, to say the least. It even asked if I was a baby less than three months old...sometimes I wish I was. Life would be a lot simpler!