The Government has announced on national radio that it intends to tax some of the poorest children in the UK and with the notable exception of Gingerbread, there do not appear to have been any objections raised. This is from a Government led by a Prime Minister and various Cabinet Ministers who claim that this is a Christian Country, that their Government does do God, and that there is such a thing as the Big Society. The attempt to justify this policy on Radio 4’s Today programme was handed to the quietly spoken Steve Webb who is a member of the Lib Dem Christian Forum. The Bible I read seems to make it clear that parents and society at large are responsible for ensuring that all children are cared for, for the good of the society, so either this policy signals that all previous promises of a caring society are off, or else this is a ridiculous idea that should never have seen the light of day.

The clue for the Ministers is in the name, it is called Child Maintenance. Whatever the case in some households, this is not a mechanism for penalising one parent for earning more than the other parent thinks is appropriate, nor is it a way of one parent being forced to subsidise the leisurely lifestyle of the other. It is for ensuring that the parent caring for the children and therefore less available to work and raise an income, has the resources needed to look after their children. The proposal is that if the parents cannot agree who is responsible for feeding and clothing their children, that the caring parent must use £20 of their family budget, money which in some households may be more than they have to spend on food for the week to ask the state to intervene in the dispute. To compound this travesty, assuming that the state decides that the children need more funds than are currently being provided and the carer wants the state to channel these payments from the other parent rather than trust them to pay directly, that Mr Webb and his colleagues plan to tax the parent making the payment by 20% and tax the children by a further 4%. This in a nation where Pop stars and Comedians feted by Prime Ministers, and Companies paying minimum wages are able to avoid Millions of pounds of tax, because the Government claim it has not yet found ways of stopping them. Perhaps they are simply too busy thinking of ways of making the poorest pay more!

According to this news report into this topic, one of the background pieces of information is that the current CSA computer system is costing all of us £74M a year to run. That is a lot of child maintenance. However I understand that the Government has recently paid Microsoft £5M to continue to support an out of date version of Windows, simply because it is cheaper than replacing 1000’s of Computers. We are not taxing Civil Servants for using out of date computers, so why are we about to tax children for the help we are providing to ensure that they are well fed and have money to pay for clothes?