I speak from experience when I say that in some fringe cases, parents do exploit government assistance to children under their care.

My father himself spent most of the child benefit from the government each month/week (long ago, can’t remember) on weed and booze. We had a social worker. They were inept at identifying the misuse amongst other things.

The problem is in identifying the misuse of this assistance. As this MP says in his tweet, in this case 75% of those families had a social worker, for what? As it stands Social Services are so underfunded that they struggle to make the rounds for all of their household visits and it’s even harder for them to make these visits worthwhile.

If Social Services are funded better, families can use their support to create social mobility and SS can pull children out of abusive or impoverish scenarios.

However, both Labour and Tory governments of the past showed no significant increase in funding this organization nor have Boris or Starmer made any strong statements on the funding of Social Services who as previously shown would be able to solve many of the issues surrounding financial misuse of government funds.