When it can't find stories to print from the Courts concerning claimants being prosecuted for benefit fraud, our local paper likes to ensure its letters page seethes with vitriol towards the Undeserving Poor. There's a classic in today from a gentleman who seems to think it's time to means-test Child Benefit for all families, though how this is supposed to address his perceived list of social ills has passed me by in his rant, as follows.
"If we can finally, at long last, take state handouts away from the richest families who don't need it, let's also take child benefit away from fit and healthy layabouts who don't do themselves and their children any justice by treating the public purse like a socialist bottomless pit. Where's the harm in making them support their children by doing a decent day's hard graft? Funding the fallout of their latest act of promiscuity should rest on their shoulders. Maybe then, they'd learn the real definition of responsibility. Maybe then the surplus cash could support children who are forced by successive governments to care for sick and disabled relatives. Maybe then, children in genuine poverty won't have to rely on food banks to survive. It's time for a proper national means-test. Even now, child benefit is paying for overweight scroungers to up-size their social housing, smoke 20 cigarettes a day and binge-drink."
Where do we start? Perhaps with a brief history lesson:
Child Benefit – originally ‘Family Allowance’ - was introduced thanks to the campaigning philanthropist Eleanor Rathbone, who noted that even the children of working families often went hungry because their mothers lacked an adequate, reliable income, sometimes because neither parent had regular employment, sometimes because their wages were too low, and sometimes because the father failed to pass on enough of his wages to support the family. Over eighty years later, it would be nice to think these problems no longer exist, but they are actually as prevalent as ever and by no means restricted to the poorly-paid or unemployed.
By making Child Benefit non-means-tested, it gave the same support to all families with children and gave them all an equal stake in the Welfare State. I am sure that the move to introduce means-testing, and in the clumsy and unfair manner in which it has been done, is actually about divorcing the middle classes completely from the Social Security system, so that as further cuts are made, it no longer matters to them.
You could equally make a case - and perhaps the Condems will do just this as soon as they dare - that non-means-tested disability benefits aren't needed by the 'better-off'. After all, the removal of Free Bus Passes and Winter Fuel Allowance from 'better off' pensioners is up for discussion already. But as anyone who has ever done benefit take-up work will tell you, the very fact that a benefit isn't means-tested is often the key to getting the poor-but-proud person to make that claim. Years ago, I often got elderly clients of the Home Improvement Agency I worked for to claim Attendance Allowance on the basis that "the Queen Mother could put in for this if she was as poorly as you!"
There has long been a sound argument that Child Benefit should be raised to better reflect the real cost of raising a child, but count as taxable income. If this happened, there would be no need for means-tested Child Tax Credit and the biggest winners would be those on low to middle earned incomes - the very people Mr Angry thinks he's on the same side as.
The ridiculous suggestion that benefits cause the 'feckless' to breed is something I'll tackle in more detail in another blog, but I notice it's often the very people most keen to ensure their own children get a good education and nice white-collar jobs who seem most appalled at that prospect. Which makes you wonder who they think will be collecting their rubbish, clearing their drains and providing their care when they're elderly, if these jobs are beneath their own offspring?
