HMRC review of High Income Child Benefit charge

Pennywise

calcotti wrote: »

As to how unfair it is - welcome to the Cameron/Osborne project.

It was a lib-dem policy!

calcotti

Pennywise wrote: »

It was a lib-dem policy!

At the risk of going way off topic for the benefit forum, it appears that the policy was first announced by George Osborne at the 2010 Tory party conference. See https://researchbriefings.parliament.uk/ResearchBriefing/Summary/SN06299 and https://researchbriefings.parliament.uk/ResearchBriefing/Summary/SN05732.
I am not in a position to say whether or not the idea was given to him by the Lib Dems - but I can't immediately find any evidence that it was.

zagfles

calcotti wrote: »

At the risk of going way off topic for the benefit forum, it appears that the policy was first announced by George Osborne at the 2010 Tory party conference. See https://researchbriefings.parliament.uk/ResearchBriefing/Summary/SN06299 and https://researchbriefings.parliament.uk/ResearchBriefing/Summary/SN05732.
I am not in a position to say whether or not the idea was given to him by the Lib Dems - but I can't immediately find any evidence that it was.

The Tories will want credit for it. It was all part of the "we're all in it together" agenda. They wanted to counter the usual left wing propaganda that the Tories "look after their rich mates" and the cuts targeted "the sick, disabled and vunerable" etc.

The point of the child benefit cut was to show the "rich"* are being targetted as well. Together the pension allowance changes, they did actually make the IFS graphs look far better when showing the distributional impact of "austerity". That's quite hard to do when you're making big benefit cuts.

* "rich" in the eyes of the typical Sun/Mirror reader most of whom can only dream of earning £50k and who assume anyone who earns that sort of amount is filthy rich even if they support a family of 6. That's also why the unfairness of the implementation was politically astute, it kept it in the headlines as people whinged about it, and all the typical Sun/Mirror reader will hear is the "rich" moaning about benefit cuts, they won't be interested in the details. It just pressed home the point that benefit cuts affected the "rich" too.