In search of Middle England
Middle England, we are told, will suffer as a result of the changes announced to child benefit. But where is Middle England?
The phrase conjures up nostalgic images of 1950s Britain: Miss Marple keeping a close eye on the neighbours as she prunes her damson; John Major's picture of "the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and - as George Orwell said - old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist."
(It was a rather selective quotation from Orwell who also referred to the "clatter of clogs in the Lancashire mill towns, the to-and-fro of the lorries on the Great North Road, the queues outside the Labour Exchanges", but no matter.)
Middle England, one supposes, is a comfortable place, neither rich nor poor. Conservative. Law-abiding. Decent. It is in the middle.
For the purposes of this UK blog I am going to assume that Middle England really means Middle Britain and I suppose what we are talking about is a place where people live on middle incomes.
In the spirit of Miss Marple, I have been searching for clues to its location so I can try to divine how, statistically, residents of Middle England will be affected by withdrawing child benefit to households which include someone earning more than £43,875.
David Cameron said this week: "I'm not saying that people on £43,000 are rich - they're not" but it was clear he regarded them as "better-off" and, as such, wealthier than middle earners.
Most people have no idea what the median (middle) income for adults in the UK is. That's because, for reasons I don't quite understand, none of the thousands of official statisticians paid to keep an eye on the nation's wealth are asked to calculate it.
My search for an answer started at the Office for National Statistics and ended at the Treasury via the Department of Work and Pensions. No-one so far has been able to provide me with a number. We use the phrase all the time but it is not a recognised as an important bit of data.
I can tell you what the net (after tax) middle income is per week. Have a guess? Don't peek. How much do you think? The answer is...
Yes, line up all the weekly net incomes of all the adults in the UK and the number in the middle is £223. But there are methodological questions about this number.
The calculation includes people who are out of work and pensioners. It also includes all those adults who rely on someone else's income. Millions of parents who look after children full or part time while their partner goes out to work count as having a low income. Lady Leisure, wife of the billionaire pork-belly magnate, might also appear to have an income close to zero.
So official number crunchers [1.20MB PDF] have come up with a way of taking account of the "household" effect. The measure is called "equivalised household income". This formula pushes up the mid-point on the line to £407 per week.
This graph illustrates the income profile for Britain before housing costs but after tax. It shows that the vast bulk of people have a net income of between £200 and £450 a week. No £10 band outside this range includes more than a million adults.
If one were to look at earnings - we only count those people in work - a Middle England resident [203.79KB PDF] would have a gross salary of £25,800 which comes to about £380 a week after tax. To put it another way, it would require a 70% pay rise for a 'middle earner' to get them to the point where their household might lose child benefit.
Finding Middle England, though, is complicated by the fact that local rents and house prices vary widely across the country and obviously have a big effect on a household's disposable income. One could argue that Middle Britain is the place with middling spending power.
Gross Disposable Household Income (GDHI) is an official calculation of what a household has to spend after tax and housing costs [1.77KB PDF]. The most recent figures show the average GDHI per head across the UK is £14,872.
So where in Britain would one typically find households with that level of disposable income? It is certainly not inner London where, despite some of the most deprived neighbourhoods in the country, average GDHI is £22,135. It is not the stockbroker belt where it is between £17-18,000.
The regions closest to the average are the West Country and East Anglia. Middle England is not Great Missenden. It is Great Yarmouth. It is not St Albans. But it just might be St Mary Mead in Devon. Home, of course, to one Jane Marple.
~RS~q~RS~~RS~z~RS~33~RS~)
I'm 
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This is a very interesting piece that deserves wider attention, particularly from the rabble rousing anti-tory tabloid media. The fact is, only a very small proportion of the UK will feel the effect of the child benefit changes but it will save the country a huge amount of money. While it is not an ideal plan in terms of how it being implemented (potential loop-holes etc) it is absolutely right. Nobody earning enough to be classed as a higher rate tax payer should be getting a penny in state handouts - they are not 'needy' and they are not the most vulnerable in society (who benefits are meant to be for). Hopefully in time, the government will work out an efficient and cheap way of amanding this to be based on total household income. In the meantime though this is as fair as it can be under the circumstances. Don't you find it strange though that Labour have been a bit quiet on this proposal since it was announced? Who would have thought?
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I agree that this is very informative and welcome.
However, both the politicians and the media appear to be obsessed with income and do not consider overall wealth. Who is 'wealthier' someone earning £16,000 but with a £250k house, no mortgage and a £500k investment portfolio? or someone earning £50k with a £250k house, a £250k mortgage (due to the recent downturn) and no investments, pensions or savings?
Who should receive child benefit?
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I think this was a very well thought and interesting article. My belief is that the middle classes are vanishing. I am a stay at home mum with 3 children and made that choice because I wanted to do this and due to the fact that my husband was posted whilst I was pregnant. We dropped my teaching salary and live off my husbands RAF Officer pay. We missed the housing boat and therefore rent. We do not lead a lavish lifestyle and have one 5 day UK family holiday per year. Once upon a time we may have been considered middle class but now I would classify myself as working class with middle class aspirations. Someone who is middle class can normally afford to own a family home which we cannot do. I am not complaining but that's how it is.
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You are right in questionning where 'middle-England' exists. It invokes ideas of the 'home-counties'; of the W.I.; cricket on the village green; and nicely preserved lawns where tea is served in the afternoon.
It is a concept that exists only in the writings of Agatha Cristie, D.H.Lawrence and the moguls in Hollywood who like to think that the English live in mansions surrounded by acres of beautiful countryside.
The old-style Conservatives still believe in this, but this is a tendancy to be the older generation who have the time to attend party conferences.
Modern conservative know the harsh realities of life, and the economic situation.
Where is middle England?
Desperately trying to keep their jobs; desperately trying to keep their companies from bankruptcy; trying to earn a living for their families; wondering why they work all the hours to pay taxes; and wondering why a Labour government got us all into this mess.
Look for middle England amongst the over-worked, anxious workers who haven't had a holiday for years!
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an excellent, sane piece from you once again, Mark
But there is a point I've been getting at - I had roughly guessed a typical wage was 25k (cheers for official figures), therefore a dual income (or typical middle household) is just over 50k - makes a sole income household on 45k look rather hard done by on this issue
However, I would also point out that sole income households have the luxury of choice - they can sacrifice one salary to live off a regular household income that one person is earning, the rest of us simply cannot do that in the first place
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"Nobody earning enough to be classed as a higher rate tax payer should be getting a penny in state handouts"
£44K doesn't go that far in London/SE England for a mortgage laden taxpayer with a non-working partner looking after baby and other young children.
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Interesting stuff, especially the GDHI part. I'm the sole-earner in our household, and we will be losing our child-benefit. However, our GDHI (per person - there are 2 of us) is LOWER than the figures for any region in which we live (England, South East, Outer London, & Surrey. And we live in a modest 2 bed house, which is actually too small for us.
I think it's fair to say, my main gripe is not losing the child-benefit, but the inequality between single-income and double-income families. But I'm used to it - as a family our income is already subject to 40% tax on a salary that is less than many families with 2 lower-rate tax payers.
The fair way to fix this has nothing to do with where the child-benefit is cut, and nothing to do with Transferable allowances; The fair, and only correct way, is to base the tax rates on the total Household income, so that all families are taxed alike..
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A very interesting analysis that shows that the higher rate taxpayer is on 70% more than the median, for the whole country. A higher rate taxpayer in the south-east (where house prices and other costs are much higher) is therefore not exactly stinking rich.
Yet many people are pillorying the higher rate taxpayer as somehow a perfect target for targeted tax increases and benefit cuts, and the Tories think this is right.
Who would have thought the Tories would be the party that was coming up with schemes to even out wealth, so we all end up on the same income, irrespective of how hard we work (or even if we don't work). What happened to the idea that the country is best served by people who work hard, settle down and have a family?
Meanwhile Labour has spent the past 15 years doing everything it can to make the rich richer!
The world is standing on its head, and we in Middle England are the target of the Tories. As a higher rate taxpayer in the South East I actually don't mind paying my share towards the budget crisis, but I resent the idea that my money should be taken to keep the non-working poor in beer, fags and cannabis.
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"Nobody earning enough to be classed as a higher rate tax payer should be getting a penny in state handouts"
I dont disagree in principal, I am a higher rate tax payer (just!) and my wife doesnt work to bring up the kids. I think that peoples issues are that a couple earning £40k p.a. each have almost double our income and will get child benefit whereas we wont, which goes against the fairness principal.
Also the reason wages are what they are in my area is because a 3 bed semi costs in excess of £200k.
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4. Eurosider
Bang on - I agree with you on this.
Middle England has to be applauded. It's rolling it's sleeves up and is getting on with it, same stoical values, half glass full attitude, which this country needs more of.
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I still object to the unfair nature of Osborne's proposals to use the presence of a single higher-rate taxpayer in a family as the cut-off. We already have tax credits managing to account for two incomes, so why can't this be extended to child benefit. Even better, morph the Child Tax Credit and the Child Benefit into a single benefit and save one set of bureaucrats.
And don't forget the NI credits that can be claimed by the non-working spouse, which amounts to a double-whammy on the single-earner family.
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In response to Alex (1st post) - I've never heard such nonsense in all my life.
"the anti-Tory Tablod media"... so by that you mean The Daily Mirror because that is the ONLY newspaper - tabloid or broadsheet that supports the Labour Party.
In fact to make it clear let me list all the Tory supporting newspapers. The Sun, The Daily Mail, The Daily Express, The Daily Star, The Times, The Telegraph, The Financial Times. Even The Guardian supported the Liberal Democrats at the last election.
Perhaps if you read the only Labour supporting newspaper then you might have heard the cries of outrage from the Labour party.
By the way, great article Mark.
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Reading what Alex said about 'only a very small proportion of the UK will feel the effect of the child benefit changes', illustrates how statistics can be read in ways to support opposing arguments.
If I lived on my own, I would be in band 8 of figure 2.1 well up in the table of earners. Fact is I have a wife and 2 children and I'm in band 4, a fair chunk below the median income. I will be losing £1750 child benefit and £540 family tax credit. This represents 7% of our total household income after tax and 11% of our GDHI.
If I am in a small proportion of the country affected, then that just seems even more unfair.
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I have two jobs and still struggle to pay rent - but I try not to have a knee-jerk reaction to this. If the top tax earners have access to benefits, they're more likely to support the welfare system.
If we take away child benefit from the rich today, what's to stop them from losing access to, say, the NHS in future? That would be incredibly harmful to the whole welfare system and open the way for multi-tiered benefits, some for the poor and some for the rich. Let's not move onto that slippery slope.
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"Nobody earning enough to be classed as a higher rate tax payer should be getting a penny in state handouts"
Agreed in principle. The problem is people earning this sort of money have been over-taxed to pay for the over-blown welfare state. The issue is not earnings but taxation. Labour had followed a policy of taxing people and giving them their own money back (a) to create the myth they were state-dependent and might therefore be the more inclined to vote Labour and (b) to create non-jobs for the public sector moving money to and fro (who would also vote Labour). Nice work if you can get it. After years of over-spending we now have a double whammy where people earning £44k or shouldn't need state assistance but should also be paying far less tax. At the moment you can't have both - Catch 22.
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Middle England, in Daily Mail Speak is earning over £40K. The top 10% of earners, therefore, which happens to include a lot of newspaper owners, Satellite TV owners, Journalists, Company Directors, MP's...
When something is said to hit middle england it doesn't mean the vast majority of us, as you would think, but the well off people.
There may be the odd person with a big house and low income, but generally big income = big house, and low income = low house or no house.
Of course the most intelligent thing the tories could have done was raise income tax, difficult to avoid, but there's some macho point in not changing the current rates for some reason.
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I don't think it is fair that a married couple can earn 87k before child benefit is cust whereas a single earner gets capped at 45k. This needs to be addressed before this benefit cut comes into place. But did you hear these people who earn 45k complain when housing benefit was cut? Did they shout loudly? Was there extensive news reports about that? No. It didn't affect the people who make teir voices heard. I am a single mum earning 21k (before tax) and live in London. I am not entitled to Housing Benefit anymore. Thankfully the £20/week child benefit will stay, not that it pays for much in London. If people who earn 45k cannot manage on their wages, they have more serious problems then the loss of £20/week.
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In the last part of your excellent article it is not as clear as it might be as to what is disposable income per household and disposable income per head. In a houshold of two adults the dsposable income would be more than £29k on average judging by the pdf you refer to. But somebody living alone would on average have Gross disposable income of 14k. Is this right? It seems reasonable.
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I don't have much connection with terms like 'middle england' or 'british' (lower case with intent) - they have little or no meaning in a situation where it is every man for him self.
However, cameron claims to be fighting waste and has even adopted a laughable mantra that he is all about being 'fair'
Stopping benefits to a family on £45K whilst continuing to fork out my money to famiies on £80K - how is this ending waste or fair?
I can only think a Sir Humphrey somewhere in the treasury is having a good chortle over his port and plotting what is the next ludicrous policy he will quietly support without pointing out all the flaws.
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"This is a very interesting piece that deserves wider attention, particularly from the rabble rousing anti-tory tabloid media."
I think we must be living on different planets. The newspapers on mine are with maybe one or two exceptions universally pro-tory.
Anyway, you don't need to raise much of a rabble to make a bunch on not to bright public school boys look bad. They do it all by themselves.
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I agree with the first poster - it is conceptually wrong for a higher rate taxpayer to be getting any form of welfare benefits. The follow on from this, however, is that what is consistently ignored is that the higher rate band starts far too low!
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The country needs money and the way to get it is through tax. Very simple statement but the difficult bit is implementing it fairly.
There is a reason Why the threshold is £44k. It affects a minority of individuals. Less public outcry.
But it will affect some households badly. I am a stay at home mum with 5 kids. Husband works and now we will lose these benefits at the stroke of a pen. And it will not necessarily have the desired effect.
Already he is considering working less hours to maintain the benefits and be at home more. There are positives in this but the biggest negative is the financial strain a reduced income with the same mortgage and other outgoings it will bring.
Child benefit should not be touched. There are other ways to tax people. The police do it every day in their new role as tax collectors for people who speed a few miles per hour over the perscribed limit.
Increase the fines is one solution for this criminal hardcore. By the way , I do not condon speeding nor reckless driving etc as many families suffer from the consequences of this call it what it is.Speed and get hit in the wallet. The message will sink in. Police & govt be honest about what you are doing.
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Does poster Michellegrand (#16) truly advocate HIGHER tax rates? As we already have a 50% band, raising a penny more would mean that (in relation to earnings over the threshold)the government would get more from one going to work than one would oneself. I am sure the past was great fun, but that is one aspect of history I would not care to see repeated.
The Conservatives are right to evaluate on what our (for it is ours) money is being spent. Dr Fox might like to recall that, whilst defence of the realm is a primary duty of any government, it was to fund the Napoleonic wars that William Pitt instituted Income Tax in 1798. Though at least the top rate was 2 shillings in the pound (10% in new money).
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It's a cut of 1 billion.
To put that in context, the failure of those nice traditional banks, Northern Rock, Bradford and Bingley, ... has cost us 22 billion.
Blame the bankers?
Well, when you consider that the real government debt figure is 5,000 billion when you include all the off balance sheet fiddles to hide the real scale of the problem, its a pittance.
The problem is the cuts that are needed to meet these debt problems are unachievable. That means default on these liabilities. That is going to be reneging on pension promises.
Civil servants are owed 1,200 billion.
Accrued State pensions are 1,600 billion.
State pensions are promises, civil servant pensions are contracts. That means the public is going to lose again, and the fat cats in the public sector will win.
Now I guess that some civil servant will tell us they have paid for their pension. Perhaps we should give them their contributions back with 5% interest. It will save hundreds of billions of pounds. In reality they haven't paid the full price. They have had the higher salaries and the huge pensions with early retirement
Nick
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Everyone has a choice, regardless of income, of whether to have children or not and, how many. All these moaners, should take responsibility for the amount of kids they chose to have and stop moaning that the state owes them something. I think child benefit should be abolished for everyone - and yes I have children.
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Very interesting article - Though having served my time in the ship yards I hardly think of myself as your archetypal 'Middle class - Middle England' type.
But yes I am a higher rate tax payer (earning over £43,500 K) - and I don't think I deserve handouts - I can't agree more and I'm happy for them to cease.
I'm also happy for my wife to stay at home as a housewife with NIL benefits, to ensure my kids are raised to the best possible standard.
It's our choice for my wife to stay at home - but she's not living off the state and thus not competing for a job with those who can't find work. We're simply able to get by on one 'good' wage.
But what I can't stomach is the fact that a couple earning a combined wage of up to around £87,000 a year will still get paid the benefit in full.
In two years time both my kids will be in full time schooling and my wife will have returned to her circa £15-20K job – so we’ll manage. But these higher earning couples will still be able to claim this benefit.
I'm happy to hold my hands up - so should they! There are people out there that need the money more than I do, and certainly more than they do.
Mr Cameron, All I ask for is some sort of parity - not for me - but for those that need the help.
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#5: it may not be a luxury if your other half earns less than or equal to the cost of child care.
#19: it's not fair. But is it fairer than continuing to pay a universal benefit to everyone, regardless of their income?
Under the Tories' proposed system, some people on high(er) incomes will stop receiving a benefit paid for by all taxpayers, including low earners. Surely this is fairer than the current situation, where theoretically millionaires are eligible to receive money from the Treasury? I think the Tories' great failure on this one is not successfully making the point that means-testing costs (lots of) money and that, in these cash-strapped times, it's probably better to increase the fairness for a large saving than to maximise the fairness for a small saving.
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It HAS to be absolute rubbish, that or about 1% of the population owns 99% of the housing!
25k salary => borrowing of 75k, certainly no more than 100k. Average house prices - even after the drop are well over 60k more than that.
Someone somewhere has got there sums entirely wrong.
And its NOT all people whose parents remortgage in order to stick huge deposits down... this doesn't happen on the industrial scale suggested by the numbers... after all, if it did people would never manage to retire.
No, somewhere you have your numbers wrong in an attempt to make us all feel better about the fact we work 60 hours a week in order to see most of that taken up in bank fees, supermarket profits, excessive taxation and MP's expenses.
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There are about £30m taxpayers in the UK and about 4.6m company directors - many of whom will skew these figures. Their official income could be the salary they pay themselves (which could be deliberately made very low to avoid NI, 50%, 40% and even 20% income tax rates). Directors' share dividends are tax-free up to c.£40K. Tax-free, justifiable(!) personal expenses can easily amount to tens of thousands a year. Companies can buy goods and services tax-free for directors (e.g. travel, phone, internet, accommodation, meals, computer equipment, "use of home", in fact, anything that can be deemed to be of use to the business) that ordinary employees often have to pay out of their post-tax earnings. Many of these things can be of personal benefit to directors (though not in the benefit-in-kind taxable sense).
Dividends and any remaining profit in the company will be taxed at 21% corporation tax for companies earning under £300K/yr and, when the company is shut down, dispersal of company assets to the director(s) will be taxed at a further 10%. VAT charged on goods and services is also of benefit to companies' incomes as they get to keep a significant proportion.
I would suggest the UK could easily have over a million additional £100K+ earners who pay relatively little tax but don't appear as such in any official figures.
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Perhaps I'm missing the point, but all this whining about the perceived unfairness of a household with one earner on £45k losing benefit, whilst one with two earners on £43k each would not, seems to miss the point. The Household with two taxpayers in that situation will be paying over £25k p.a. in tax and NI each year; twice what the single taxpayer would pay. The latter contributes less to the coffers so gets less back. Isn't that fair?
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Re Sam's point of abolishing it for everyone. I actually would be more in favour of this approach rather than discriminating against a minority. I think an overhaul of the entire welfare system, taxation and public sector is long overdue.
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Dom: But I'm used to it - as a family our income is already subject to 40% tax on a salary that is less than many families with 2 lower-rate tax payers.
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Because you choose to not have one adult work!
Why should we pay for your lifestyle choice which is unaffordable for us?
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It's perhaps worth emphasising that the GDHI per head figures are the mean GDHI, and not the median (middle) GDHI.
GDHI also has a skewed distribution, so the mean is much higher than the median because of a small number of people with exceptionally high incomes. I suspect the chances of obtaining regional estimates for median GDHI are slim at best, though!
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27. Q-balls wrote:
#5: it may not be a luxury if your other half earns less than or equal to the cost of child care.
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Granted but how much is childcare exactly? Minimum wage full time is about 12k, or 10k minus tax - surely that would cover it?
We're in the realms of extremes now - talking about thousands in childcare...this a one thousand pound benefit cut, those extra pennies on NI from Brown hit us all for thousands
with childcare vouchers (which are not being scrapped if you get in btw) you can save thousands
And again, the typical working couple can't even try - they have to work, and pay for childcare
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Post #2 A1M (presumably a.k.a. Vince Cable) wrote:-
"However, both the politicians and the media appear to be obsessed with income and do not consider overall wealth. Who is 'wealthier' someone earning £16,000 but with a £250k house, no mortgage and a £500k investment portfolio or someone earning £50k with a £250k house, a £250k mortgage (due to the recent downturn) and no investments, pensions or savings?"
Could it be that most politicians and the media actually understand that 'wealth' is, normally, merely the accumulation/saving of income that has already been taxed? It doesn't matter whether the present holder or his parents/grandparents et al saved the money; other than, if it was inherited, it was almost certainly subjected to further tax before it was handed down.
The fact that the '£500K investment portfolio' was probably worth £700K five years ago (investments as well as house prices can decline) and is now probably producing only £5K a year (after costs but before tax) doesn't seem to deter those who feel that money saved and managed by others should be shared out amongst all those who didn't or couldn't save.
Mark's article was excellent reporting - high on fact, low on opinion. The child benefit argument has two years to be sorted out and hopefully the coalition, who proclaimed 'fairness' in every sentence of their joint/rejigged 'manifesto', MUST find a way to overcome the blatant unfairness of removing benefits from a £45K single income household but not from a double income £80K household. I would certainly suggest they cease their pathetic attempts to justify it - it's just an administration problem, SORT IT.
I'm 75 and have no personal interest in child benefit other than a lifetime abhorrence of all forms of injustice - the current proposal is one of the worst examples for many a year. I've just spent over a decade listening to the lies of the Blair/Brown era - I hope this isn't the start of another period of broken promises and false statements (lies).
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Well the removal of this benefit is equivalent to a salary cut of 3000 to 5000 a year to those most affected to you cant expect people to welcome it with open arms.
However what I suspect is the real cause of the anger is the politician's continual emphasis on "fair" (or sometimes "tough but fair"), sometimes in direct response to the one- vs two-earners question, when it is blatantly not "fair". All they had to do was to say that such anomalies were regrettable and sadly other similar cases would no doubt surface for other groups when other changes were made, but no, they had to stay "on message" with the f-word. You could almost believe they were getting their advice from the same places as the last lot.
Oh, and come up with a better excuse than "its too difficult to deal with households" when the old tax credit system has done this for years - again, if what they mean is "the private sector charge us an arm and a leg for every change we make to the tax system, so we have to keep them as simple as possible" then say so.
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Well the removal of this benefit is equivalent to a salary cut of 3000 to 5000 a year to those most affected
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those most affected being those with the most kids - namely, at least five...
average number of kids is less than two - the equivalent loss in a pre-tax salary is about 2 grand
3 kids wouldn't even be 3000
of course the more kids you have the more it will cost - and also the more bizarre it will be that you're reliant on 13 quid a week to pop out a ridiculous number of dependants
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#30 - Nigel
It may be the case that a couple earning £87k between them is paying more tax than the single earner on £44k. However, it is also true that a couple earning £22k each will be paying less tax (because there are two personal allowances in there) and get to keep the benefit as well. If they can manage to do tax credits on both partners, why not child benefit too? I think if they fixed this one issue then a lot of the complaining would go away and they wouldn't need to mess around with a marriage tax allowance.
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Surely the solution is to abolish child benefit and put all the money into Child Tax Credits. That way the benefit would be means tested (as it is now) and would only go to those that "need" it.
Either was my wife will still lose her child benefit, but she will be able to save it by cutting back on other areas, like her hair. And my daughter will just have to have fewer beauty products.
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#34 tarquin: In my area, average day nursery fees are in the region of £60 per day or approx. £13,500 per child per annum (assuming the children don't attend when the parents are on holiday). So that's about £27,000 per annum for a family with two young children.
Child benefit for this family is worth £1,752.40 per annum. Each working parent can pay up to £243 per month out of their gross salary via childcare vouchers; thus something like £120 per month saving for a higher rate taxpayer (inc. NI) and about half that for a basic rate taxpayer. For argument's sake, let's say both working parents are basic rate taxpayers and therefore the vouchers are worth around £1,200 per annum to the family.
(I haven't mentioned child tax credits because it looks too hard to work out where the salary sweet spot is but I don't think it's material. I have also ignored the fact that once those children are 3 they get free hours of childcare and of course once they go to school the costs come down again.)
So you're right to say that the benefits aren't dramatic in terms of the saving to an average family but (I think) not right to say that a minimum wage earner can earn enough to send both their children to day nursery. Please feel free to challenge my calculations though!
Responding to various other posts regarding the fairness of the cut: the child tax credit is, I think, means-tested. As per my earlier post, means-testing costs money and I think extending this to the child benefit calculation would be costly. We need maximum bang for buck. In my view the Tories should stop claiming the cut is fair and instead say it's fairer than it was (which I think is true). Once we have the money we should invest in an HMRC system which recognises relationships between people and so can automatically work out household income. At that point we can truly make child benefit fair.
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Q-Balls:
Point taken that in some cases it will make economic sense to sacrifice one salary
That's extortionate, makes me glad I have a family network
But that said, (and this is more a general point on the whole issue) we are further and further limiting the scope of this problem - those who have to give up work, those right on the tax threshold, those who can't rely on family, those who live in higher priced areas - whatever benefit you cut, someone will hurt, it's all relative and as I've said since day one, if these people never had their 1 or 2k extra, they wouldn't be missing it - I think it's taking a lots of balls(/stupidity) to address this rather emotive issue, even if they did muck up the implementation quite a bit
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