"The only money available to teens at the moment is the EMA and this only applies to those post 16 and in education. If this petition is passed then each child once turned 13 shall recieve £10 a week which will be collected at the post office so there is no need for a bank account.At the moment there is no personal source of income for a child if they do not work or are not 16 or over and in education. This money will stop parents beeing bugged for money."
I can't decide what order to take the possible objections to this in ...
Since I've decided on my arbitrary use of ONS statistics which show that from 1991 until 2000 at least there were a reasonably consistent approximately 12,000,000 children between 0 and 15. Ergo there are roughly 750,000 young people per age - so about 4.5 million kids between 13 and 18 (inclusive). At a cost of £520 per year per kid, that's about £2.34 billion. Now, according to the Department of Health the NHS's running costs for the financial year 2003-2004 are something like £61 billion. So not counting the administrative costs for this project (which I'd guess would be substantial), it would cost about the same per year as the NHS costs for a fortnight - which sounds like, well, lots.
Other objections can be expected to include a profound resentment of encouraging children to depend on government handouts, and complaints about a reduction of parental control (money can be both carrot and stick in childcare; this would reduce that for parents).
Then there's the most important question: why? "To stop parents being bugged for money"? This really doesn't sound like a good reason to me ... and the sort of kids who'll bug their parents with any persistence will probably continue to do so. What's a tenner?
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