Body & Soul1 min ago
These Parents Say They Can Only Afford One School Meal A Week
Parents of an eight year old, the mother as far as I can tell, doesn't work, and the father is a self-employed wholesaler. Along with other items for sale, he buys mainly fruit and vegetables in bulk before selling them on - but there is a limit to what small local shops are prepared to pay, so as costs rise his profits decrease.
My advice to him would be to abandon the one man band and get a job - and what's wrong with the child taking a packed lunch to school every day and having a cooked meal at home in the evening? The one school meal she does have is pizza and chips on a Friday, so hardly imperative for the benefit of her health. I find it very difficult indeed to sympathise with this family. What say you?
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My advice to him would be to abandon the one man band and get a job - and what's wrong with the child taking a packed lunch to school every day and having a cooked meal at home in the evening? The one school meal she does have is pizza and chips on a Friday, so hardly imperative for the benefit of her health. I find it very difficult indeed to sympathise with this family. What say you?
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Answers
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//i say you're being extremely judgemental based on very limited information//
Answers to a question like this will be, by their nature, judgemental. It would be equally judgemental to say “The poor things, they’ve done everything they can and prioritised their spending as well as can be expected, but they’re still skint.”
In the short term the parents need to consider their priorities. Whatever their circumstances, they receive £21.80 per week in Child Benefit to assist with their child’s upbringing.
“Each meal at her school, Dixons Marchbank Primary, costs £2.10.”
So she can have a meal every day and they would still have £11.30 left over from their CB.
In the longer term (i.e. next week) the father needs to look for some employment that will pay more money than he is earning buying and selling.
//Yes, the father could change jobs...but are there any in deprived areas?//
There seems to be plenty of unskilled jobs in the Bradford area:
https:/
//do we know whether or not shutting down his business would be financially better than taking a minimum wage or zero-hours job?//
Most of them pay £10-ish an hour (there’s no necessity for it to be a zero-hours contract) so £350 for a 35 hour week. Since they currently cannot afford £2.10 a day to feed their daughter I would say £350 a week must be an improvement on selling karzhi rolls for 20p profit.
If the mother doesn’t work (which seems likely due to their impecunious circumstances) she should consider getting a job which will fit in with school time or perhaps a WFH job – the first one on this list, for example:
https:/
These are just examples I found without really trying.
//have you travelled by public transport . the cost of this has risen above all sense,//
A First West Yorkshire single ticket from Bradford to Leeds costs £2. So £4 a day (less than half an hour’s pay). No doubt season tickets will be cheaper and the number and variety of jobs in Leeds will be far greater.
There are a few other aspects to this which make interesting reading:
//…while the cost of the family's weekly grocery shop has almost doubled.//
Why has it? Nobody else’s has. The items showing the biggest increases are milk, butter, margarine, flour and olive oil (all by around 30%). So even if you lived solely on those, your grocery bill would not have almost doubled.
//…although looking at it again it's tagged as "young reporter"//
It was written by Branwen Jeffreys, the BBC’s education editor.
If there is truth in this article and they really cannot afford £2.10 a day for school lunch the questions which should be raised are, what are they doing with their £21.80 a week Child benefit and why are they not seeking some proper employment which will make them a little less impoverished? It isn’t really good enough to publish articles, expecting people to swallow everything at face value without asking pertinent questions. But, of course, it would possibly not suit the BBC’s narrative to do otherwise.
Answers to a question like this will be, by their nature, judgemental. It would be equally judgemental to say “The poor things, they’ve done everything they can and prioritised their spending as well as can be expected, but they’re still skint.”
In the short term the parents need to consider their priorities. Whatever their circumstances, they receive £21.80 per week in Child Benefit to assist with their child’s upbringing.
“Each meal at her school, Dixons Marchbank Primary, costs £2.10.”
So she can have a meal every day and they would still have £11.30 left over from their CB.
In the longer term (i.e. next week) the father needs to look for some employment that will pay more money than he is earning buying and selling.
//Yes, the father could change jobs...but are there any in deprived areas?//
There seems to be plenty of unskilled jobs in the Bradford area:
https:/
//do we know whether or not shutting down his business would be financially better than taking a minimum wage or zero-hours job?//
Most of them pay £10-ish an hour (there’s no necessity for it to be a zero-hours contract) so £350 for a 35 hour week. Since they currently cannot afford £2.10 a day to feed their daughter I would say £350 a week must be an improvement on selling karzhi rolls for 20p profit.
If the mother doesn’t work (which seems likely due to their impecunious circumstances) she should consider getting a job which will fit in with school time or perhaps a WFH job – the first one on this list, for example:
https:/
These are just examples I found without really trying.
//have you travelled by public transport . the cost of this has risen above all sense,//
A First West Yorkshire single ticket from Bradford to Leeds costs £2. So £4 a day (less than half an hour’s pay). No doubt season tickets will be cheaper and the number and variety of jobs in Leeds will be far greater.
There are a few other aspects to this which make interesting reading:
//…while the cost of the family's weekly grocery shop has almost doubled.//
Why has it? Nobody else’s has. The items showing the biggest increases are milk, butter, margarine, flour and olive oil (all by around 30%). So even if you lived solely on those, your grocery bill would not have almost doubled.
//…although looking at it again it's tagged as "young reporter"//
It was written by Branwen Jeffreys, the BBC’s education editor.
If there is truth in this article and they really cannot afford £2.10 a day for school lunch the questions which should be raised are, what are they doing with their £21.80 a week Child benefit and why are they not seeking some proper employment which will make them a little less impoverished? It isn’t really good enough to publish articles, expecting people to swallow everything at face value without asking pertinent questions. But, of course, it would possibly not suit the BBC’s narrative to do otherwise.
//Tory: "Let them eat cake"//
Any comments on the points I have raised? Or is it just the usual "but you don't know all their circumstances." Very true, I don't. But I know they should be getting twenty quid a week Child Benefit and the father is not unable to work as he's flogging fruit and veg and karzhi rolls. Something else which has occurred to me:
//...from which [the karzhi rolls} he expects to make only 20p each - even less after petrol costs//
So he runs a vehicle? Presumably to enable him to sell vegetables and toilet rolls. There is something seriously wrong with his business model if he can afford to run a vehicle (petrol £1-60-ish a litre plus tax and insurance) but cannot afford to pay for his daughter's school meals (£2.10 a day). He should have ditched the buying and selling as soon as it ceased to make a profit (if it ever did). As I said - priorities.
Any comments on the points I have raised? Or is it just the usual "but you don't know all their circumstances." Very true, I don't. But I know they should be getting twenty quid a week Child Benefit and the father is not unable to work as he's flogging fruit and veg and karzhi rolls. Something else which has occurred to me:
//...from which [the karzhi rolls} he expects to make only 20p each - even less after petrol costs//
So he runs a vehicle? Presumably to enable him to sell vegetables and toilet rolls. There is something seriously wrong with his business model if he can afford to run a vehicle (petrol £1-60-ish a litre plus tax and insurance) but cannot afford to pay for his daughter's school meals (£2.10 a day). He should have ditched the buying and selling as soon as it ceased to make a profit (if it ever did). As I said - priorities.
He will be able to access Universal Credit even if self-employed. Perhaps, like many, he has worked out he's better off self-assessing at a low profit and receiving the top ups UC provide. The cost of the school dinners seems very fair, and I too wonder why the child allowance is not being used to feed the child.
Why not go back to the meat and two veg. plus a pudding ? We used to thrive on those foods in the 50s/60s. We were always ready for dinner time and I don't remember vast quantities of left overs. If you didn't like what was on your plate there was always another pupil to 'sneak' it to when the dinner lady wasn't looking.
They try too hard these days and give them too much choice.
I agree that the child allowance money should be paying for school dinners but surely not £2.10p for a piece of pizza and a few chips with ice cream for afters .
They try too hard these days and give them too much choice.
I agree that the child allowance money should be paying for school dinners but surely not £2.10p for a piece of pizza and a few chips with ice cream for afters .
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