Hoo-bloody-ray! Child benefit cuts to be 'looked at for fairness'

[NoWayNoHow]

Basic logic and maths prevails at last!

Fingers crossed they actually find a fairer way to implement - I remember the uproar when it was first announced, simply because it was so ridiculously prejudiced against single salary families.

pamplemousse, carers whose partners earn 43k+ will lose their child benefit as well though and I don't think that's fair either

I think you make some very relevant points niceguy and Mrs Heffley. this government needs people to be out spending money as isn't most the economy built on this. If we are all permanently tightening our belts then it isn't that good.

Agincourt I do take your point as well and it must be very hard.

So are you saying that its ok for the state to top up your salary to virtually that of a Hrt payer if you want a low paid job and can't be bothered with a career. And that its fine for you to work your socks off in a maangement role doing 60 hour weeks and take home the same a person doing a 9-5 admin role. Pamplemouse. Interesting logic.

Pample great you don't need it-we do.

I don't expect it forever or irrespective of what we earn.If dp earned 80K they could have it with my blessing,he doesn't so I'm bloody angry at the unfairness and couldn't give a stuff attitude towards hard working families.

Agincourt I totally see how that would seem unfair to you. But really, I think that you should be getting MUCH more for the work you do with your child, such that the CB loss would seem a tiny amount in comparison.
Newcastle yes. Because there should only be five years/ child max where the second partner can't go out and bring in a second salary. And this really is a small amount in the grand scheme of things. At which point you would reap your rewards. European directives mean that noone should be doing a sixty hour week ;)

The problem with these figures (helpfully posted by Betsy) is they make an assumption that the lower earner is renting their housing and receiving HB/CTB. I work and earn around £15K. I pay a mortgage of almost £600/month. Let me assure you, I have NO HELP whatsoever towards my housing costs - neither HB or CTB. These kind of examples do tend to rely on assumptions like this, but seldom reflect reality. FWIW I know people earning in excess of £60K living in subsidised (council) housing, whose housing costs are minimal as a percentage of their salary.

1. One parent on £44k, other parent not working ATM - 3 children - ChB no longer payable due to HRT payer

salary 44k less tax/NI £12k give net/month = £2667

1. One parent works FT on £15k pa, other not working ATM, 3 kids

salary £15k less tax/NI = £12435pa = £1036/mth + ChB for 3 Children (£204/month) = £1240 + tax credits £726/month (according to entitled to) = 1966 + HB/CTB of £488 (according to entitled to)= £2454 net/mth

I do think higher rate taxpayers should have CB reduced or removed, but I'm not sure the threshold is fair and I definitely don't believe that the £80K joint earners keeping it/£43K single earners lose it is fair. I also think the government needs to put something in place to ensure SAHMs in families which will lose CB should have their NI contributions covered so they don't lose pension entitlement.

And I think Gideon and Cameron are utter idiots - the iniquity of their proposal didn't cross their minds earlier? Well... duh...

Well I can tell you for a fact that when you factor in travelling my dh does this and more at certain times. It's not righ. I don't like it but it's life. If he didn't his work wouldn't get done and than where would he be.
FWIW with 3 children if I went out to work and earned 15k I doubt we would be any better off. Even when dc are at school I would be paying about £35 a day for breakfast and afterschool clubs where we are. Factor in the £60 to £70 per day in school holidays I wolud probably be worse off.

Exactly alemci when DD was little DH earned a little less than £15,000, he worked hard during work hours but could come home at half five and switch off until 8.30 the next morning.
Now we have three soon to be four DC, he earns just enough to pay HR tax but is out the house by half six, often doesn't return until half seven or and even then spends at least an hour working on his laptop, his job is way more stressful, he rarely gets chance to switch off.
Big difference for not a great deal difference financially.

pamplem0usse my complaint is not that we are skint on DH's wage, although I would obviously rather have CB if I had the choice, lets face it who wouldn't really. I fully appreciate we no longer rely on it to live.
It is that a couple could earn almost double our income, and if we are comfortable then they are surely very very comfortable and still be able to get it.
That and the fact it is removing an incentive for some people to better themselves.

I also think that due to the way the economy has changed so rapidly over the past few years people on £43,000 a year could easily go from being very comfortable to just breaking even. You can't unhave the children you had when you were more able to afford them.

when mine were little, the CB paid for playgroup. My DH could not have afforded to pay these costs. I was very appreciative of the CB and it meant I had some control over some of the money.

I had no other income so I sympathise with the SAHM's whose DH don't give them any money. My DH is quite generous and would have given me some if he could.

I'm so stressed about this got young family and only thing we claim is cb. Dh just over threshold and his job reflects the long hours and oversea travel making me working very hard. Hence sahm. Had new addition (12 weeks tomoz). I've not claimed MA or anything like that as been sahm. We aren't wealthy but do own our own home with large mortgage. We have not bought anything we haven't had money for so apart from mortgage debt free. My car is 12 years old and I walk when I can rather than drive to save money and keep healthy. We don't go on holidays usually as can't afford it. Our mortgage is large and salary gets eaten up on mortgage, bills, food, petrol, car maintenance, insurances and dh pension. We don't have sky, i can't afford to replace laptop, I don't go to hairdressers, my clothes arent new. Guess what I'm saying is, we manage and we keep out of debt and are feckless. But the child benefit is a big help. I use it for their savings, clothes, shoes, school trips. Without my kids will lose out. I'm really about this

Rightly or wrongly the middle classes see CB as just about the only 'benefit' they get from all the taxes they pay.

Otherwise all you get is slammed from every direction. The squeezed middle is the perfect analogy. You are deemed 'rich' enough to pay higher rate tax and not be entitled to free school dinners, dental, eye tests etc. Yet you are nowhere near rich enough to be able to afford a couple of accountants to shuffle your money off to better climates.

For me this isn't about whether or not a family earning £40k 'needs' CB or not. We all live to our means. Life will go on without it. Harder of course but it will continue.

My primary objection is the sheer stupidity of the way it's being implemented. Not only do families earning up to 2x another continue to get CB. If you are £1 over the HRT limit, you can lose £200 a month (assuming 3 kids). That's like a govt enforced paycut and I can only imagine a lot of parents who earn around that limit will be desperately trying to get their income a tiny bit lower than the cap.

Is that what we want to encourage? Our workers to spend their time trying to find ways to earn LESS???

Agree nice guy. Dh actually was looking at whether he can increase pension contributions to bring down taxable salary or wether he can take a pay cut but employ me as PA.

pamplemousse, thank you. I am feeling a bit hard done by but the local authority cuts appear to have been implemented with us in mind first as well, maybe because we are seen as too expensive. I had my 8 hour care package - which under the circumstances was already small- cut to zero. I live hundreds of miles from our families and my daughter is so severely and complexly disabled that friends cannot help out but my social worker saw fit to reduce it to nothing. Then after a fight panel decided 6 hours a month would be plenty oh and a 4 hour carers break in which i am not allowed to leave the house because the agency care team deem it too much a risk for me to leave her alone with them and she too much of risk to take out, yet I am expected to do it, alone, with her siblings in tow. Some carers break that is for me let me tell you. Anyway I have gone off subject somewhat but yes I feel hard done to and I am not the only carer this has happened to

I don't like discussing figures either but my husband earns just over the threshold and neither of us are middle class, we are both working class. Always have been, always will be.

My primary objection is the sheer stupidity - oh, mine too.

Listen, Frothers have suffered froth exhaustion and we really need more people fothing and tweeting.

Blog here: toomanycuts.blogspot.com

Tweet with #frothers hashtag, preferably giving a link to the blog.

Email MPs and Lords here: writetothem.com or from the sidebar in the blog.

Oh and another thing I just thought of.

Most people do not suddenly become higher rate tax payers. It took me a long time and a lot of hard work to gradually work my way up. And gradual is the keyword there.

So imagine I've been steadily working my way up in my career and I'm nearing the threshold. I'm working my nuts off to provide the best I can for my family and pay my share of taxes to the govt.

My boss now comes along and says "Well done mate. Top piece of work this year. We'd like to give you a 10% payrise." Now usually you'd expect the person (eg. me) to say "Thank you very much." Company's happy, i'm happy, taxman's happy....everyone's happy.

Not so now. That 10% now knocks me over the limit. Instead of getting say £50 more a month (for example), I'm now going to actually be losing CB so I'm getting a pay cut! So logically I've three choices:

1. Tell my boss "No thanks, please don't give me anymore money" (!?!?!?!)
2. Tell my boss "No thanks. I need at least a 20% payrise to make it worth my while" (Good luck with that!)
3. Tell my boss "Thank you very much. But can I now work less hours please?"

The govt have in effect created a situation where there's a glass ceiling that people will be desperate to avoid smashing into.

I suppose all this discussion is illustrating is that people's lives are complicated - no one person's circumstances are the same as another's. An example:

DH and I are 'comfortable' because we budget that way. We are not extravagant, but we enjoy some luxuries providing we save/ budget and we make sacrifices and priorities. We both work FT and have a 14 mo DS who goes to a CM 5 days a week. For that reason holidays, weekends and getting away from it all with our DS are extremely important to us. We both fall under the HRT bracket, but are by no means skint. We car share to work, but petrol still costs us £350 a month. My DH has two daughters who he pays £300 per month in maintenance for. We share the bills and are equal partners. Some months are a struggle, some months aren't. For us, child benefit is extremely useful because of our childcare bill.

My sister is a SAHM. Her DD goes to nursery twice a week. Her husband earns £100k at a bank in London and keeps money off shore to circumnavigate tax. Radley handbags and Tiffany jewellery are commonplace items in their house. Child benefit probably goes into their DD's piggy bank. I love her dearly but we are worlds apart.

Whatever Osborne and co decide will piss off someone. I don't want my CB to go - whilst i don't 'rely' on it in its truest sense, i do make good use of it. But if i lose it i'll deal with it and be relatively 'happy' providing the government drop this farce that could really badly affect families with a single HRT payer. It's completely illogical. I want money to go to people who really, really need it and genuinely rely on it. Only rigorous means testing (inlcuding all the variants of expenditure that exist) will ensure that happens. Sadly, i fear that nobody will really win in this situation.

This will most probably make me unpopular but

"Her husband earns £100k at a bank in London and keeps money off shore to circumnavigate tax"

these are the kind of people they should be trying to extort money off. It's disgraceful that people are allowed to do this.

agree with you niceguy and part of the difficulty is that the NI/tax labyrinth is so so complicated. DH did a ton of overtime last month and we are worse off

I don't understand how this will be implemented. The CB is in my name and taxation is individual.

Niceguy, an alternative on breaking the glass ceiling (i.e. becoming less well off by earning more, just crossing into the 40% bracket and losing CB) is to pay more into your or your OHs pension. The govt have yet to clarify what effect this would have for removing CB, but it could re-classify you back into the 20% rate threshold due to rules about tax and pension contributions. So you could get to keep the CB while putting aside more for your pension pot. The family budget each month wouldn't increase, but you would gain, albeit in the long term.

Another thing that annoys me is why aren't rich pensioners loosing their WFA?My parents use there WFA as pin money for one of their 4 holidays a year.

How can you justify getting rid of one universal tax and not the other?

I'll tell you why because the majority of WFA recipients are Tory voters.Tories look after there own,always have,always will.

Because wealthy older people vote, and lots of them vote tory

Look at the reduction on council tax for 2nd homes

I think one reason for the backtracking is to do with the "real time information" system they were hoping to be in place simply won't be. The whole removal of CB for HR taxpayers is going to rely on people letting HMRC know that they are HR taxpayers, because the government's systems aren't clever enough to do that yet. The idea is that they will be, soon, but who knows?

As for how much is "enough" money - it all depends, doesn't it? Great if you managed to buy before the house price rises and so you have a nice small mortgage. We didn't. We have a 3 bed semi and a mortgage of nearly £1400 a month. Ok, we didn't have to buy. But I don't see some of the posters acknowledging on here that one reason they don't have to work is because they were lucky enough to buy a house early enough.

And there is a big advantage to a universal credit scheme, ie low admin costs. What's the point in bringing in a means tested system that costs as much to run as the savings it generates?

Like I said, I can't see how they are going to do this until real time info properly works, and they know how much a " household" earn.

Final point - if this does come in, and you / your DP is only just over the threshold, the solution is to increase pension conts to get you just under the limit. The government have said pension conts will not be included in gross pay amounts.

Badger but not telling us what is going on means you can't do this. We'd have to start doing that now.I don't want to be cutting our income now if it ends up that we won't loose it. Considering seeing if dp can get a pay cut so we only loose half.

council tax is 90% for a second home in most counties