Mothers at Home Matter

This letter was sent by committee member Anne Fennell, to her local MP, also concerning the fact that Child Benefit cuts will be highly difficult to implement and very complicated.

"Dear David,

You are probably aware of this document already as it is in the news but it is a good analysis of the Child Benefit problems by the Institute of Chartered Accountants for England and Wales (ICAEW). It documents not only how the bill is unfair in principle: household income is not taken into account; number of dependents are not accounted for; families in similar financial situations could be treated quite differently; it uses the tax system to claw back from one individual a benefit paid to another, but it also shows how it is seriously flawed in practice.

When the proposal was announced the justification for allowing one household where a single earner was in a higher tax threshold to lose their child benefit while a household where two earners...

This week The Times reported on ideas being explored by the Treasury to help parents with childcare costs, to include £10,000 loans and deregulation of the childcare market.   Our Chair, Anna Lines, wrote this letter below, and although it was unpublished, we felt it might inspire others to write in response to other half-baked government plans.

Nothing illustrates more clearly that the slogan "high quality affordable childcare" is a contradiction in terms than the Social Market Foundation's proposal to set up a childcare loan scheme. Third party care is clearly not affordable unless heavily funded by the taxpayer and it cannot be of high quality if no. 10's policy team is looking at relaxing the staff ratio in nurseries.

The mothers "lost" to the economy are their children's and society's gain, their now invisible work too can be argued to add to the country's GDP and, given high unemployment figures, vacancies are soon filled.

Some...