Gemma and Chesney Winter-Brown in Coronation Street should be enjoying life as newly weds but instead they’re struggling. Paul – Gemma’s brother – has been diagnosed with motor neurone disease, Gemma’s depression has reared its head again, and now her ad-hoc childminding business has been rumbled.
And then, of course, there’s money. Poor Ches and Gemma are on their uppers, scraping together their pennies to feed their five kids – Joseph and the quads. Gemma’s even got in contact with her ex Henry Newton to see if he can get her work in one of his pubs.
Things are bleak.
But we couldn’t help wondering if there was any help out there for a couple who work as hard as Gemma and Ches do.
So we got in touch with debt specialists Creditfix and asked them what benefits and other help the Winter-Browns could claim.
And the results were jaw dropping!
Here’s what we discovered.
Chesney and Gemma’s income
Our experts at Creditfix started off by working out how much money the family would have coming in from their jobs. Ches is the manager at Prima Donner, and Gemma works at the Rovers. Plus there’s Bernie – Gemma’s mum – who also works at the kebab shop, and in Roy’s Rolls – but to make things easier we’re going to concentrate on Ches and Gemma for now.
The lovely people at Creditfix told us the average wage of a general manager at a uk kebab shop is around £26,000 a year. That works out as roughly £1800 a month.
Gemma’s full-time wage would be around £20,000.
She only works part-time though, so could bring home about £800 a month.
Cost of living!
The Winter-Browns have a LOT of expenses. Our experts told us the average monthly rent for their house is £1,542, while full-time childcare could be as much as a whopping £234 every week for each child. That’s almost £1000 a week or £4000 a month. OUCH. Though the twins don’t go to nursery every day, so that keeps the costs down a bit.
Council tax in Weatherfield would be about £140 a month, while their utility bills would be about £200 a month.
And that’s before you start thinking about how much it would cost to keep the family fed, along with clothes for the quads and Joseph.
It looks impossible. But luckily there is help out there! Because the family are eligible for all sorts of benefits.
Extra cash!
Little Aled is deaf, so he could be eligible for Disability Living Allowance, if the family can prove he needs more looking after than a child his age without a disability. The DLA rate is between £26.90 and £172.50 a week depending on the level of help he needs, so we reckon the lower end would be about right – bringing in roughly an extra £100 a month.
That childcare bill may be eye-watering but the Winter-Brown household qualify for tax-free childcare. That means they can get up to £500 every 3 months (up to £2,000 a year) for each of the quads to help with the costs of childcare. This goes up to £1,000 every 3 months if a child is disabled (up to £4,000 a year). Aled would be eligible for this if he received Disability Living Allowance. That’s an extra £333 a month for Aled and £500 a month for the other quads.
And the little ones are also entitled to 30 hours of free childcare each a week as long as their parents work.
Suddenly that childcare bill seems a lot more manageable!
More money!
Then there’s child benefit. The Winter-Brown family are not affected by the two child limit on child benefit as they have quads. So our expert reckons they are entitled to a total of £87.60 weekly child benefit for all five kids. That’s roughly an extra £350 a month.
Because the family are working they’d be eligible for Universal Credit which could bring in as much as an extra £2000 a month. You can see a breakdown of this universal credit payment here. Though – and this is where it gets a bit tricky – they wouldn’t get this payment if they got the tax-free childcare payment (still with us?). It’s either/or – not both.
And as a low-income family they would be eligible to get help with prescriptions, dental care, and other health costs. They can also get additional help with health costs if they claim universal credit.
Bye bye Bernie?
If Gemma kicked her mum out (no, we don’t want that to happen either!), they’d also become eligible for a council tax reduction!
Using Creditfix’s cost of being a parent calculator, our experts have worked out that, based on two parents both working, the Winter-Brown family could actually have up to £2,000 left after childcare and rent payments every month.
Now that’s definitely enough for a packet of Freshco fishfingers (or two!).
Read more: Complete Coronation Street cast list 2023 – meet them all here!
Coronation Street usually airs on Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 8pm on ITV.
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