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!

Thedollshouse - Lol, lol.
Xenia must be at the Tory party conference...

Just noticed that the first person giving opinion on BBC news website is retired and in favour of cutting CB but says

"I don't think they should cut the winter fuel allowance though. Why? Because we have paid penal tax rates on our income for years and years and he has got to be conscious of the promise that "we will look after you when you are old". Bus passes should be kept too."

He obv has missed out that they also made promises about CB...

4 yorkshiremenish, but I'm nothing like Xenia. I'm a single mum and had to work full time when my baby was 3 months old. Got no help whatsoever apart from CB. Things improved when labour got in, help was there. Work still but earn less than half of £44K so just coming at this from a prosepective of the lower paid.

Erm, maybe my partner is working evenings and weekends already (he is actually) and I am needed for appts and just to sleep from caring all night in the day? Just a thought.....

Mined I am trying to find a job to fit around it, just no luck so far.

Getorf we must ahve a different definition of chav. For me it's an offense term about people with no life aims and a certain subculture. you on the other hand are just average and nice. And I am very WC and not a chav.

Capitalism needs children to be born from all classes and to fill all levels of jobs. In fact it needs a surplus of workers to function so it has a power over workers.

""If it is to go, then universal benefits for pensioners (other than the basic pension) should also be means-tested.""

I doubt it - the proportion of pensioners that this would affect (hence the number of votes they would lose) would be higher. Therefore, this is a higher risk strategy.

As usual this seems completely unfair. A single parent, working full time on 40k, having to pay a mortgage (perhaps in the south-east) for full-time childcare gets no tax credits or child benefit what so ever.

It does not even reflect family income - I am a basic rate taxpayer with a good but pt job. DH has his own company and therefore can choose to pay himself exactly up to the 40% barrier (which he does already). We have an income of around 70k, not in the southeast and would still qualify. . FWIW I would rather the money I get went to getting a family out of the poverty trap but all this 40k and you're rich crap really gets up my nose. They also seem to miss that you can have a pretty low income and still be wealthy, for example if you have large amounts of inherited wealth, for example.

The problem is that people listen to the TV and think that 40K is a lot but how rich you are depends on your outgoings. I'd like to see Osborne and his family live in London on that.

cuts have to be made somewhere to start to reduce our debt or the country will never get out of this "era of austerity".
i think HRT payers are a good place to start. i will lose my child benefit but am happy to and would rather i lose all than see a situation where everyone loses some.
whichever way the threshold was worked out would create winners and losers. they have tried to organise it in a way that makes it cost efficient to manage.

To everyone who voted Tory - well done - NOT! . Poor old Barbara Castle must be turning in her grave today.

damn.

will be interesting to see whether the grey vote is sufficiently powerful to prevent reductions in winter fuel etc. Why not take that away from higher tax payers at the very least?

They can't get rid of winterfuel - Nick Robinson reckons they have to keep that because 'Call-Me-Dave' himself said they would. Osborne and Clegg said they would keep child benefit, but they don't care about not letting them take the flak.

"I cannot understand why women living off their partners income therefore not working can be up in arms about it. If it makes you short and you really need the money go out and earn it."

Many women would love to go out and earn money if:

1. The costs of childcare weren't more than they could earn
2. If good quality childcare were available that would fit around the hours their job demands
3. If there were somebody available to care for their disabled child
4. If it were possible for them to find a job that fits in with demands of school.

As I am sure you know, sometimes because you have children, sometimes, for some people it is that little bit more difficult to go out and get a job, and if a person can get a job, their household costs are more because they have to pay for childcare (which as we know, for most people, is paid out of taxed income).

That is why child benefit is quite a cool benefit really. You can tax people according to income, but ensure that at times in their life when they need a little bit more support you can help them out.

In the meantime as GO says, if people living outside the south east are finding it so fabulously easy to live on less than £30K, they can always donate their child benefit to the government.

they have got to start means testing pensioners. actually the word makes me laugh. 60 year olds, fit as fiddles, living it up on mortgage free houses going on mega holidays "we worked all our lives for this"... now sitting on mega equity in their houses

having enjoyed:
with your mortgage interest tax relief
free education including university for your children
low childcare costs as wives could afford to stay at home

wtf!?

I half agree Rokers

Indeed I remeber thinking this myself but there has to be a midway.

Why should a family with two earning just below cut off get it when someone with a partner earning £1 over and no earning partner have it cut?

That's what befuddles me.

I get that tehya re trying to prtotect the less well off but this si clumsy.

carers has gone same way- used to be available to all meeting a set of criteria, under universal credit i'll still get it as low income but middle class people (or just anyone with an earningpartner) won't any more.

Personalkly, i;d ahve kept tax credits, chucked an extra X per child onto that and then it could trickle off as TCs do and tkae into account factors such as family size etc. I might even start the trickle at 5 in fact to reflect earning barriers before school age.

So we are told that we must tackle the benefit dependency culture in our society, who are they talking about middle & high earners?
How on earth do these new measures they are bringing in tackle the very root of benefit dependency culture in the UK?
They may save a few million pounds by targeting the working man/woman earning over a certain wage but I can't see that this measure to stop child benefit to working people will have any affect on the benefit dependable people they are talking about in the first place in our society.

Home Responsibilities Protection and it's replacement .....

so, how will the proposed changes to CB affect this.....think others have questioned it, but equally many may have overlooked that loss of CB could have a knock on effect to this too.

Youknow abouteve, there's this idea that not working is a luxury.

Actually it isn;t, always.

It can be very boring and isolating being at home when it's not chosen. Certainly it is slowly destroying my mental health, if I didn;t have study (independent, can;t even make a 7pm class now!) I'd be really quite ill I think.

What theis government needs to focus on is who ahs a choice and who doesn't, and whether they can help to get them a choice. Becuase most people do want to contribute financially, certainly once the kids are in school.

Home Responsibilities Protection and it's replacement .....

so, how will the proposed changes to CB affect this.....think others have questioned it, but equally many may have overlooked that loss of CB could have a knock on effect to this too.

"they have got to start means testing pensioners. actually the word makes me laugh. 60 year olds, fit as fiddles, living it up on mortgage free houses going on mega holidays "we worked all our lives for this"... now sitting on mega equity in their houses"

I couldn't agree more.

"It's not difficult to earn £40 a week doing a night job"

Might be more difficult to find somebody to look after your children who will charge you less than £40 a week for their labour.

Are childcare vouchers going too?

The way they are going about this is not fair, I've written to my MP (can't think of anything else useful I can do).

DH is only just into the higher tax bracket, the only silver lining for us is that when the time comes he will ask for a couple of hours off a week, why should he go to work for nothing? (we will have 3 DC). That's not really the whole point of these proposals though is it?

My parents are in their early 60s and my father still works and pays tax at the higher rate (though they still have amortgage). They find it silly that all over 60s are offered a winter fuel allowance when they have several luxury holidays a year.

I'm sure if there had never been child benefit and it was suddenly introduced as a universal benefit, there would be many of us a little bewildered as to why the government were giving us this money when we have got by without it. I thought the small amount of tax credits we once qualified for would have been better off going into a big pot and subsidising childcare.

But, many families are used to having child benefit and always expected it to be there, regardless of whether one of them has worked their way up in their job to qualify for paying higher tax. People have based decisions on knowing that child benefit was part of their net income. It does matter to lose 5%.

My Dh has only been in that tax bracket for only 2 years. We moved our family across the country for him to get a better job. We incurred extra costs for doing so, have had a load of stress in the meantime and we're still waiting for life to get better. It seems like the cost of living rose just at the time his income did and we're yet to see any difference in the money we have left over at the end of the month.

aha, LeninGrad......so that means you get the CB in one hand....then partner has it removed from other hand........but person getting it then doesn't lose home responsibilites (or it's new replacement) credits? Suppose that is something.....not much...but something......but oh dear, oh dear.....will make tax affairs even more bureaucratic .....just what every tax payer needs, not.

But is the person who looses the tax the biological father(not supporting walked away sort) or the husband of the mother (who has already welcomed children into home and supporting them)?

It seams again unfair that absentee parents are not only getting away with not really contributing but also not loosing out when they should have a legal responsibility.