Although first mooted by the Treasury over two years ago, it is only this week that changes in child benefit will become fully apparent, as letters drop through the letterboxes of over a million households where one earner is bringing home at least £50,000 per annum.
Only last month at Conservative Party Conference, David Cameron made a powerful case for supporting the ‘strivers’ and the aspirational in our society. Yet it is precisely this group that stands to be most adversely affected by the child benefit changes.
Conservatives like me regard deficit reduction as a moral, as well as an economic, matter. Surely we owe it to our children and grandchildren alike not to pass on huge debts in the decades ahead for our consumption today.
As a result I shall always support measures by the coalition to reduce public spending. But on the implementation of these child benefit reforms let’s for once be wise before the event.
Tax collection should invariably be efficient and certain. Yet I fear that much of the £2.5bn per annum that these changes are expected to raise will either need to be written off as too difficult to claim or be swallowed up in huge administrative costs. This is my core concern.
All Conservatives rightly accept, to coin a phrase, that we are all in this together and must recognise the need to live within our collective means. However my fear is that this child benefit policy as currently constituted will bring a lot of pain for relatively little gain.
