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hi..my 2 girls aged 9/10 were put into my care on 4/4/11 by social services because of an incident at their mothers house ....its over a month now and im still waiting for a reply off family tax credits .we have been living sorry no surviving on my benifit since 4/4/11 of £60 per week ...nobody seems to care about this is there anyone who can give me some advice please
Hi jimmyc43
I am sorry to hear that you have been left in such a mess. I would have thought that they would automatically help you. Have you got a Family Support Worker in place? The "passport" to getting the financial help with the children is Child benefit, in other words the person who gets the child benefit is the one entitled to the other things.
I am going to contact our specialist 1-2-1 Money Advice Service and ask them to leave you a reply here on this thread. In the meantime it is possible to apply for a Crisis Loan, phone 0800 032 7952
You can also contact The Salvation Army (click the blue link the put yout postcode in the "Find a Centre" bit on the top left hand side) for a food parcel to keep you going
Hope this helps for now
thank you for the reply and i contacted crisis loan and they have given me enough money to last us 5 days after that im back to square one ....its just a case of nobody seems to care or wants to listen ......if i didnt have a heart i could take the children down to social services and let them put them into foster at a cost of £350 per child per week then maybe someone would open their eyes and listen to the problems us single dads have ....thank you
Well it could happen to any single parent really, man or woman. Glad you have a few days help at least. Do try the Salvation Army as well, they help a lot of people. I did contact your Money service and asked them for their input, so watch this space for the next bit of information!
Hi Jimmy
The social worker who is active on your childrens case should be able to draw down money from the Social Services available funds whilst you are waiting for the tax credit office to pull their finger out;
I would advise that you get an appointment at a local advice service re the ongoing tax credit claim; you can make a complaint re the amount of time it is taking for them to sort out your payments; you can do this with the support of an advice worker and it may help if you do have that support to get the claim sorted out quicker, it also takes out some of the stress for you if someone else is doing the representation.
I would advise that you recontact the social worker involved and stress how much financial hardship you and your children are experiencing and that it is causing much distress and concern for you and your girls; an advice worker can also support you to do this.
You can as suggested in the previous comment apply for a Crisis Loan but of course these loans do have to repaid and that seems a little unjust in your circumstances but it is an available option.
You should also check at your local tax credit office if you are eligible for an emergency payment from tax credit office HMRC; these are available to people who are waiting for their claim to be sorted, who are experiencing financial hardship and to prevent people incurring further hardship by taking a repayable crisis loan.
I do hope this is helpful and I hope your difficulties are reolved quickly
Regards
Debbie
Thanks for that, Debbie 
Jimmyc, you can click here for your local Citizen's Advice Bureau details.
I don't know if it's still the same but six years ago it took a while for anything to get sorted for me as the child benefit book was in my wife's name, I was named on the book and could cash it but my wife was the main named person. Because of this I could not get income support because they would only give it if the child benefit was in my name, and because of that I could not get child tax credit.
As I remember it... Child tax credit only if you have children and you only have children if the child benefit book (claim) is in your name, at least that's how their system thinks.
Maybe it's changed since then, but it took me a couple of months... prolonged by my wife's lack of cooperation.
Also, once it was signed over to me my wife still got a further, two or four weeks of payment before it was given to me.
Child benefit is automatically put in the mothers name, or it used to be anyway.
The DWP and Tax office are not used to dealing with the whole situation in reverse. They messed up my case and I missed out on a few weeks or a month or so of payments when they finally did sort it out. Also they were sceptical at first, despite me arriving every time with my five month old daughter and two year old son in tow. I had to give them contact details for the family protection police officer that had dealt with me and the social services people before they would believe me.
Good luck : )
can anyone tell me were i can get help to keep my 2 girls ? they were put into my care over 5 weeks ago now and family tax credits say that they havnt recieved my claim form ....its realy hard the 3 of us living on 60 pounds a week nobody seems to care about this not even social services who took the girls off the mother and put them in my care ...is there anywer i can get funding from ?