200 families claiming housing benefit have 10 or more children!

NEARLY 200 households with ten or more children are costing the state £2million a year in housing benefit. An estimated 380,000 households with more than two children rely on the handouts to pay their rent.

Some 42,000 of these have more than five children, receiving on average £7,500 for their housing costs. And 190 families have ten or more children, receiving on average £10,526 in housing benefit.

Families with three or more children cost taxpayers some £2.3billion in housing benefits. The government has vowed to cut this back by imposing a cap on the maximum amount that can be claimed in welfare to £26,000 a year.

Cabinet ministers have also triggered controversy by urging welfare recipients to consider whether they can afford to have more children.

Official figures show that families with nine children receive more than £11,000 a year in housing benefit, or £925 a month.

The average family spends £606 a month on rent or mortgage payments, a third less than is being paid out in housing ben-

Have to make choices

efit to these large families. Separate figures released this week showed that 40,000 households with five or more children where at least one parent is on welfare cost taxpayers a massive £150million in child benefit alone.

The overall burden on the state of supersize families where one parent is on a jobless or sickness benefit is at least £350million – not counting housing benefit.

Some 180 families on jobless benefits have ten or more children, and ten families have an astonishing 13 or more.

The figures were released by the Department for Work and Pensions under a Freedom of Information request from the Sun newspaper.

They cover families where at least one person is claiming jobseeker’s allowance, incapacity benefit, severe disablement allowance, income support, employment and support allowance or pension credit.

George Osborne has ordered that the welfare bill be cut by a further £10billion, on top of the £18billion reductions already under way. The Chancellor warned that parents claiming unemployment benefit could lose child benefit, income support or tax credits if they had another child.

The move triggered controversy but Mr Osborne insisted that working families had to make choices, so the same should apply to those on out-of-work welfare.

Those with incomes of less than £16,000 a year can claim housing benefit as long as they do not have savings of a similar amount.

Working families can also claim it, although just 18 per cent of recipients have jobs.

Those earning more than £16,000 can qualify depending on the size of their family and any disabilities.

More and more have been doing so because private rents have risen by 37 per cent over three years.