Jobless couple on £95,000-a-year benefits

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Jobless couple on £95,000-a-year benefits
By Claire Ellicott
6 September 2010, 12:18pm
Reader comments (3)

A jobless couple rake in £95,000 in state benefits a year - and even have breakfast delivered to the door each morning, courtesy of the taxpayer.


The money - five times the starting salary of a teacher - goes to unemployed Pete and Sam Smith and their ten children, who live in a rentfree four-bedroom house.

Last night critics said it was disgraceful that the family pocketed huge amounts of taxpayers' money and called for urgent reform to the benefits system.

The Smiths were moved last month by the local authority from a house in Bath, which the landlord accused them of wrecking, to the large house in the Bristol suburb of Kingswood.

But Mrs Smith, 36, complained that the house was too small, the breakfast portions too stingy and said she could afford to buy her brood only one Nintendo Wii games console between them. She claims she is also forced to pay £100 a week to keep her five cats in a cattery.

'It's very cramped here,' she told the News of the World. 'We've been told we might not be given a new house for another nine months, which is ridiculous.

'The breakfast supplied by the council isn't like proper hot food. It's usually eggs, beans, tinned tomatoes and cereal, which isn't really enough for us all and we have to heat it up ourselves.'

The couple have not worked since Mr Smith, 40, resigned from the Army in 2001 to care for his wife, who has curvature of the spine, and their children. At that time they had three.

Mrs Smith receives up to £140-a-week child benefits for her children aged from four months to 14 years.

The family also get disability living allowance, carer's allowance, tax credits and income support. The total with child benefits is £44,954.

They then receive a £950-a-week bed-and-breakfast deal where the council pays for breakfasts delivered to their home, which comes to £49,400 - a total of £94,354 a year.

Emma Boon of the TaxPayers' Alliance said it was 'disgraceful' that the family received state money after wrecking their last home.

'It cannot be right that there are so many cases where couples are getting a lot more than the average working family,' she said.

A spokesman for Bath and North East Somerset Council said it had a legal duty to rehouse the homeless children and that the breakfast delivery deal was a 'temporary' arrangement.

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