Do you think the government should raise the threshold for child benefit?

[nancydroo]

My understanding is if one person in the household earns £60k the household are not entitled to claim child benefit. If they earn £50k or more they get taxed on it but still get to claim it. However, if the combined household income is higher than this threshold but shared over a couple they can still claim child benefit. Do you think the government should raise this threshold? Are you nearing the threshold but going to miss the child benefit as income?

That's not true, my DH earns £50k and he does not pay 40% tax. The higher tax threshold is over £50,271.

I didn't say they were...

I was suggesting that if we stop handing out extra funding to households that earn 2.5 to 3 times the national average, that money could be redirected to support households earning significantly below the national average.

Absolutely. Considering how many single parents there are, why don’t any of the politicians try to appeal to us? Surely we’ve moved on from “back to basics”

I do think it should be raised. It' been 50k for many years and with inflation this should now be much higher.

I do agree that it would be fairer to use household income, however I beleive it was set up like this to be able to use the current tax and verification systems. If it was done using household incomes it would cost a lot more to set up new systems. It's set up in the most efficient way currently, which isn't always the fairest.

It's costly to implement a new system so they won't. I think it's harsh for single parent families. However, families with one earner over £60,000 who choose to have a SAHP have obviously decided they don't need any more income than that though. DH and I have a household income of £70,000 where we both earn similar amounts so we benefit from the system but wouldn't be able to live well off just one wage. Having a SAHP is not an option to us as it is to those with one higher earner.

One thing I do think could be an issue is if one parent is financially controlled by the other and has been coerced into being SAHP. In those circumstances the child benefit could be their only source of independent income. I think it was a way of protecting women in the past when it was more expected they would stay at home and the mother would usually be the recipient if the family allowance. It was a relatively more generous amount back then though.

DH is in that fuzzy mid range £50kish income where we claim cb but then he declares it on his tax returns so you sort have have to pay it back. I struggled with my problems and left my career but still work but get a very low wage that doesn't pay NI or tax but no other government assistance. We have manageable loans so our outgoings may be more than others with his income. We need the CB and would miss it if it went. I wish they would raise the threshold during this cost of living crisis as it feels it is hanging over us and will lose this benefit.

It's comforting that other people feel similarly about it being a household threshold rather than single salary.

I don’t understand- most benefits take account of partners income or lack thereof. What do you mean?

tbh it would be an easy fix to sort this for single parents- all that needs to be done is to change the rate at which the child benefits repayment charge applies. Seems that there is a lack of political motivation to fix this for single parents.

Probably. Universal benefits are very cheap to administer. I'd be happy just to go back to the old way.

It should be individual

The whole tax system needs reform. DH and I have a combined pre tax income of just over £90k. But the majority of that is earned by DH. I'm part time.

We're not entitled to child benefit. In addition we worked out that if we both earned around £45k each, because of how the tax system works, our take home pay would be a few hundred pounds more per month.

What's more, I currently work 18.5 hours. If I went full time, I would become eligible to pay tax, NI, student loan etc. For doubling my hours and therefore doubling our childcare costs, I would only bring home 50% more of my current take home pay, rather than doubling it.

The whole system needs a rethink.

Also two people working will potentially be paying more tax, it's an incentive to keep mothers in work.

So one family with 1 working parent on 60k pays 16k tax & no CB.

Two parents on 50k each getting CB & paying 12k tax each.

It's costly to implement a new system so they won't
But this is a new system. It used to be calculated on total household income.

No it didn’t.

It used to be paid to all families with children, with no upper threshold. If you had a child, you were eligible.

revenuebenefits.org.uk/child-benefit/policy/where_it_all_started/

Yes it’s grossly unfair always has been and it’s a divide and conquer thing because anyone who pointed it out s grossly unfair was told that they were lucky to have a partner earning over 60K. Sometimes being a SAHP is not a lifestyle choice rather that it makes no sense to pay more than one parents salary in childcare costs.

Most working parents I know have family for childcare.

I think the one that needs sorting first though is Child Support, make absent fathers pay for their children.

if you are just over pay some additional pension contribution and will keep you under limit

Was never calculated on household income since it was introduced. Only benefits like universal credit are calculated on household income not universal benefits. Easiest way to fix would be to scrap child benefit and build it into the universal credit system by upping limits. When Ds was born back in 2010 we got the tail end of the old tax credits system and on that people got small amounts of tax credits on fairly high incomes. The issue with that was that people were ending uk with large overpayments due to changes in income from one year to next. With rti and universal credit info should be more reliable

If you don’t work being in receipt of child benefit maintains your NI contributions for a state pension. So women who are sahm whose DH earn above the limit are being discriminated against in terms of state pension when older.

I get why you feel like that but I think it should be individual and paid to the lowest earner out of the two of the parents if there are two. Not everyone has access to a shared account and it could be their only source of income.

Its the single parents at or just over threshold who are most adversely affected by this. They get 0 help with anything.

Totally agree whatever the threshold is, it should be on the household income.

I think you can still claim the NI contributions but not the cash up to a certain level anyway

Its the single parents at or just over threshold who are most adversely affected by this

The majority of single parents / lone parents, so then likely women are affected more.

Should be household income. We didn't get it because he earned £62k, I earned £9k due to dd with Sen

I actually didn't know this. My DH wage has went above 50k this year and I thought my child benefit would be stopped. I only earn 10k so I am happy it won't be!

It's very unfair to widows

There used to be a widowed parents allowance which they go until youngest was 18 that should never have been scraped.

But actually the whole tax and benefits need revamped and made simpler. And some way of ensuring that people who work more than 16 hours aren't worse off than people who do.

You can make a claim for the child benefit but opt not to receive the actual payment so no higher income child benefit charge to repay. This preserves your NI credits. Not that this makes the system any more fair but thought I'd mention in case it helps anyone.

I also think the threshold should be raised as more and more people are presumably brought into the tax as wages rise over time.