"Huge families on benefits are no myth... oh, hang on..."

From The Daily Mail

CLAIM: Only a tiny number of jobless families have large numbers of children reliant on the State for support.

REALITY: There are 160 families on out-of-work benefits with ten or more children. This figure was cited by the Left during the debate over the case of Mick Philpott from Derby, who killed six of his 17 children in a house fire and whose lifestyle was subsidised by taxpayers.

However, closer scrutiny of official figures shows that there are huge numbers of large workless households reliant on welfare.

There are 194,000 homes with three children; 76,310 with four; 25,980 with five; 8,760 with six; 3,200 with seven; 1,080 with eight; and 360 with nine.

Some 419,370 workless families have two children — which is the average number of offspring for all homes in the UK.

Yes, this is all very naughty of them, and if it were up to me I'd roll Child Tax Credits (awful, awful, awful) into a more generous Child Benefit (non-means tested, non-conditional, non-taxable) but pay that only for the first three children which a woman has (but not pay any for fourth and subsequent children) as a quick and simple way of eliminating the "mothers-versus-everybody else pay gap".

But let's look at the bigger picture:

In April to June 2012 there were 3.7 million UK households with at least one member aged 16 to 64 where no-one was currently working. This represented 17.9 per cent of households and was a fall of 0.8 percentage points, or 153,000 households, on a year earlier, the second consecutive fall. In all, 1.8 million children lived in these households, as did 5.0 million people aged 16-64.

So on average, there are 0.36 children for each workless adult.

How does this compare to the population as a whole?

In England & Wales there are 10.5 million children aged 0 to 15 and 36 million people aged 16 to 64. Add on 11% for whole of UK and knock off the ones from workless households and we end up with 35 million 'working' adults and 9.9 million children, which means 0.3 children per 'working' adult.

So yes, it would appear that workless adults do have slightly more children than their working counterparts. If they had children at the same rate, they would have 1.5 million children instead of 1.8 million. Only half of those are "extra" children (fourth and subsequent children), or put it this way, out of those 3.7 million workless households, only 116,000 have more than three children.

Let's assume that they receive about £60 a week for each child (CTC and CB) that means the total amount redistributed from working adults to non-working adults to pay for these extra children is a shade under £1 billion, i.e. 0.5% of the total welfare budget, and if you capped CTC and CB at three children, the "saving" would only be half that.

Big deal, is all I can say. By all means "do something" about this out of principle (there are social costs to take into account as well, but those are difficult to quantify), but don't pretend it's a cost-saving measure.