Plan B Forum

For her the benefits system is ‘a joke’ – yet others might not find Kathy Black’s situation a laughing matter.

The unemployed mother – said to be pregnant with her 17th child by a sixth father – lives rent-free in a council house worth £135,000. In total, she receives more than £600 every week in benefits, equivalent to the take-home pay of a worker earning £42,000 a year.

And the 45-year-old, whose oldest child is 28 and youngest is one, also banks thousands of pounds in maintenance each year from one of her ex-partners without it affecting her state income.
Yesterday, unrepentant about her lifestyle, she boasted that the benefits system showered her with ‘too much’ money. ‘If my ex earns £3,000 a month and I get £1,000 in maintenance the authorities don’t take any of that money into account and I still get my child benefit, so in a way they pay me too much,’ she admitted.

Mrs Black also receives thousands of pounds in maintenance each year from one of her ex-partners, Tony Blackburn - without any penalty against her state income ‘The benefits system is just wrong. It’s a joke. I will go to work when my children are old enough but at the moment it will cost the state more to put them in childcare while I go to work.’ But Mrs Black – who had her first baby at 17 – has been criticised by two of her children, saying they rarely saw any of the benefit money and were often left to fend for themselves.

Family members, who claim she is pregnant again, also said the mother receives £100-a-week in child benefit, with the rest of her money from a variety of handouts including either income support or child tax credits and housing benefit. Her son, Orry, 17, said: ‘When I was there, there were ten of us in the house. Once, she did the weekly shop and just came back with five crates of beer.
‘Most of the time she would just buy huge bags of pasta and some sauce and we’d live on that.’ Daughter Teresa, 22, said: ‘I don’t know what she spent the money on because all our clothes were hand- me-downs. ‘In Year Seven, I was out of school for 72 days babysitting my brothers and sisters. We were left to do everything ourselves.’

Mrs Black, who lives with her seven youngest offspring in East Hanningfield, near Chelmsford, Essex, refused the opportunity to deny their claims yesterday.


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Her son, Orry, 17, said: ‘When I was there, there were ten of us in the house. Once, she did the weekly shop and just came back with five crates of beer.
‘Most of the time she would just buy huge bags of pasta and some sauce and we’d live on that.’ Daughter Teresa, 22, said: ‘I don’t know what she spent the money on because all our clothes were hand- me-downs. ‘In Year Seven, I was out of school for 72 days babysitting my brothers and sisters. We were left to do everything ourselves.’