Child benefit: would someone give IDS a brain scan and quickly?

by liamssoft | October 27, 2012 at 11:12 pm

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I would like to volunteer to be shrunk and placed inside Iain Duncan Smith's brain. I'm reluctant (who wouldn't be?), but after his declaration that poor unemployed people with more than two children should lose benefits, I feel I have no choice. I would require night vision goggles to see through the murk of his reasoning; also, a leaf blower to get rid of the dense cobwebs of what appears to be an entrenched 18th-century world view.

Stumbling around Duncan Smith's brain, I expect to come across a giant crumbling cuckoo clock, ticking monotonously but always showing the wrong time, with two tableaux alternating beneath. One: a decent-looking fellow (circa 1950s) doffing his cap to his "betters". Then another ghastly apparition: a couple slumped on a sofa, drinking, smoking, eating chicken from a bucket, cackling evilly as they fill out endless benefit forms for their many unkempt children....Read more

guardian.co.uk

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Should we legislate on family size?
We need an open discussion about what welfare is for

Times are changing: when Iain Duncan Smith suggested last week that state benefits should be capped at two children for the unemployed, he would once have been howled down as a roaring, authoritarian Scrooge. Today, it was a policy specifically tailored to be popular with Middle England. For the “squeezed middle”, whose financial resources – when married to their aspirations – can now often only stretch to one or two progeny, a large family has become a luxury item, like driving a gleaming Roller or flying club class...Read more

telegraph.co.uk

Dear Madam, we've axed your child benefit: The letter that could halt the Tories in their tracks

In the coming days, the Government will have to deal with anger generated by letters going out to 1.2 million households informing people earning more than £60,000 a year that their family is losing child benefit from January 7th 2013.

But Downing Street believes this will not halt its recent progress. They point out that the policy designed to save £2.5bn is popular: Tory research shows that even most of those affected by it support it.....Read more

dailymail.co.uk

A complicated system that is being implemented in a costly inefficient way.

Instead of the Government paying parents less, people will be required to return the child benefit money by filling out a self-assessment tax return.

This will mean an estimated 500,000 people will have to fill out the form for the first time.

Patricia Mock, a tax director in Deloitte's private client services division, told the Telegraph: "If you have a standard family with 2.4 children and two married parents all living together then the system is reasonably straightforward.

"But it can get really bizarre. Take that straightforward family. If the parents get divorced and the children live with the mother who has a new partner, and that partner is the higher earner, then he gets (to pay) the clawback even though they are not his children.

The same will happen where a father claims the benefit for children who live with their mother but has a new partner who earns above the threshold....Read more

sky.com

More than 40,000 children living abroad receive UK child benefit

Parents of more than 40,000 children living outside the UK are receiving child benefit, according to figures released by the Treasury just months before more than one million parents face having their benefits cut or axed.

The payments – worth up to £36m a year – have been revealed amid fears that changes to the UK's welfare system, due to come into force in January, are too complicated.....Read more

guardian.co.uk

High administration cost

John Whiting, tax policy director at the Chartered Institute of Taxation, said there would be an administrative burden on the Revenue at a time when it was facing deep cuts. He said the estimated £22m-£25m cost of extra administration was “a huge underestimate”.....Read more

ft.com