another point is, if you have kids born in the phils or UK, and you dont earn the £18.6k to bring your spouse here , common sense would tell you to get the kids to the UK and claim tax credits for them, maybe even the child care element of Tax creds and child benefit.
but if your spouse was here, you couldn't claim more of those benefits - so why not let her here ??? , but what is possible is that you wouldn't need to claim the childcare element (could be several £100's a month) as your spouse would be looking after the kids or even working and paying tax, and then if she was working you could be earning more than the tax credits cut off and not be able to claim tax creds saving the tax payer even more money
