So child benefit to go for higher rate taxpayers

[foxinsocks]

So says George osbourne on breakfast telly. Missed the details but sounds like it comes in from 2013!

That's shit riven.

I think you are right though it CB and CTC will be scrapped altogether a few years after under the "Universal Credit" scheme the Tories are proposing.

They want to get more people out to work, where exactly?

Well its pretty clear to me that between us all on this thread we have already figured out why this CB announcement is a badly thought through policy.

One wonders why an army of Trasury civil servants couldn't do that or did the ministers ignore them I wonder?

'BB/scaryteacher - I object to the lack of independence about it. If they want to link DH and I completely in terms of tax and let me transfer my personal allowance to him while I'm not working then that is a different matter - but a half and half is unacceptable'

Exactly. I had said this earlier as well.

"I really do not feel well off and am in tears at the thought of losing this money."

I'm really sorry that you're upset, but you ahve said that you put half of this money into savings every month for your children. You don't need that half, or you would be using it. You have the money to extend your house.

Why should the state support your kids saving accounts? Why should low rate tax payers also support you having two cars, an extension and a small holiday when they can't afford food?

scaryteacher - yes I agree with that too. Indeed allowing a transfer of personal allowances would have been a perhaps a good way or at least a less bad way of replacing CB.

I know that only 10% of the population earn over the 40% limit, but probably a large proportion of these people live in the south east of England around London where housing costs and commuting costs are so much higher than the rest of the country. So many of these earners will have less disposable income than people earning the same amount in other parts of GB. The majority of those earning over the 40% threshold are not earning over £100,000 but are earning £40,000-£50,000. Cameron and Clegg are not in the real world if they think that people on a household income of this amount, living in the south east, are wealthy enough to not miss this amount of money. It equates to a huge drop in salary or a huge rise in tax.

I am quite surprised by this announcement. Either the books are far, far worse than we have been told and therefore necessitate such a cut, or the Government has made a monumentally stupid decision.

All the parents I know will be affected by this cut. None of us are wealthy. If this cut will really affect just 15% of the population then there must be a further 85% who are really, really badly off...

The pressure to find ways to earn more and more money just to afford a reasonable standard of living is getting too much in this country. And once again those at the very top of the pile and those nearer the bottom (but some with a more comfortable standard of living than with 2 parents working, big mortgage and childcare) remain unaffected.

BB- Is this one of the things IDS and GO were arguing over?

Also, is there not some equality infringement if employees are required to declare to their employers how many children they have?

None of their business, surely.

'Why should low rate tax payers also support you having two cars, an extension and a small holiday when they can't afford food?'

Mmmm, specious a bit. The higher rate taxpayers are paying for the CB as well. It's my dh's salary that pays for the cars, the mrtgage etc, not lower rate taxpayers.

So if the biological parent of the children is absent and their income is HRT then do they loose the child benefit in taxation and the resident household still keep it?

We pay over £40k in tax a year, and will consequently lose our child benefit despite my husband's income being our only source of income to support our three children - so what exactly will we get for our taxes going forward?

No married persons allowance to 'encourage family life', no nursery vouchers from 2011 onwards, no child benefit. Our local school is average, the local hospital seems to spend most of its time being sued for malpractice, and our village barely has a street light to fund.

We try to live healthy lives, which hopefully means we won't burden the NHS, we don't commit crime, ask for housing benefit etc. Our son will need private coaching to bring his English and maths up to standard.

The middle classes aren't a bank for the poor, or conversely the city. When will we see the benefits of our hard work?

lucky - yes you do have a point but the chances are my DC won't be able to go to university if I don't save for them now.

DP and I are both from low income families and have hefty student loans and scrapped and struggled to get good jobs. DP pays his fair share in tax as it is. We only have money to extend our house as my MIL died and left it to us. Yes if we were truly hard up we would need it for food.

I am not saying we shouldn't have our CB reduced but to scrap it altogether in the manner they have proposed is unfair.

@ Edmonds5... if you pay £40k tax then your take-home is significant. Anyone who thinks they are paying in tax for what they can get back is always going to be disappointed

STOP THE PRESS "Cameron and Clegg are not in the real world"

Who'd have thought it? Gideon George Osbourne is another one who is on a different planet to the vast majority in this country. You knew all this before the election.

A few weeks ago the outcry was that the burden of the cuts would fall more heavily on the poor than the rich and this was seen as a bad thing. Now we have a measure which definitely affects the poor less than the rich and we're not happy with that either.

@sweetkitty, you have 2 years before these changes take effect and you have 'good jobs' by your own admission. Count your blessings.

One of the awful outcomes of this is going to be absolute irrational dislike between social classes. Resentment towards those they perceive as freeloading/ to those couples earning the same as the single earner households and getting Child Benefit/ etc etc.

I've been expecting it to be cut for ages - it only being cut for higher rate taxpayers is actually better news than I expected from the weekend's news. Though I expect they'll come back for more. We have a household income of just over £50K but it's divided 55-45 between us, I earn slightly more, and we're both basic rate tax payers.

Although our household income sounds good, childcare costs at the moment means CB makes a real difference, along with a small amount of tax credit and childcare vouchers, to making work pay. Those 3 things at the moment add up to nearly as much as the difference between take home pay and childcare plus fares to work of more than £1,000.

I think that we're better off than some households with one higher rate payer.

There is also the issue of taking money away from some women that they have control over, if their husbands or partners are well paid but keep/spend their wages (a problem that CB was introduced to address thoughmore for working class families).

The money that is going to be saved from 1.2million fmailies not getting child benifit, is going to be used to pay for the new universal credit - the goveremnt need to save this money to pay for the universal credit to be brought in - where we will have a sytem of benifits to people working to make it better of working than not - just like tax credits.....

nymphadora - I suspect this may well have been one of the things GO and IDS were arguing over. The criteria set by Treasury was these Universal Benefit changes had to pay for themselves.

This proposal to cut CB certainly has the look of a blunt instrument compromise.

Just been on the phone to DW who is hospital recovering from a op but even throuh the haze of painkillers her reaction to this when I told her was - that is mad!

She also quickly worked out we would still get CB for the 2 DSs even though I know for a fact I am far far better off than someone with a family struggling to make ends meet with one earner on £50k in the South East.

That does not make me feel good.

grumpy pants - that suits the government well

Am sitting here PG with DC2 now wondering how on earth we are going to afford to live...

• no childcare vouchers from next year
• no child benefit for DD or additional benefit for DC2
• no maternity pay for me (I run my own business)
• DH earning less now than he was three years ago (works in corporate sales, commissions have shrunk)
• energy bills rising every year
• mortgage still massive...

We may have to sell up and go to Australia or something. Maybe the Government would prefer it if all the intelligent, young, professional families in the UK who pay the bills and claim very little back from the state upped and left? Because ultimately that's what we're heading towards. A repeat of the 1970s.