A Belated Blog on Child Benefit

I have only myself to blame for not being up to speed and offering the blogosphere my thoughts on the child benefit fiasco that was unveiled by the Tories last week in Birmingham. Unfortunately holidays and yet another bug passed to me by my ever generous 15 month-old son left me unable to get to a computer.

As an aside, what a fantastic advert for Birmingham the whole thing was. I tuned in one evening to the sight Quentin Letts of the Daily Mail being interviewed by the BBC alongside a Venetian-looking canal, bathed in autumn sunshine, with a jazz band clearly audible in the background!

Anyway, onto more mundane matters, namely child benefit. The Government has been accused of being unfair, which is probably true, but it is interesting to try and work out how it got itself into this mess.

The problem with making cuts to child benefit is that the easiest method to do it is via the PAYE system, but the fairest method is to means-test.

The problem with means-testing is that it involves calculating a combined husband and wife ‘household’ income which cannot be processed through the current PAYE system, which only takes into account individual income. To properly means-test the Inland Revenue would have to send us all a form, which we would then send back and a calculation would be made upon which our child benefit would be paid.

However, as we have found with tax credits, circumstances change in that individuals get pay rises or lose their jobs, babies are born, people fall ill or are injured at work and on and on. This means that on top of the workload to calculate millions of child benefit tax codes, there would also need to be a constant revision of the codes which takes manpower, usually in the form of civil servants and large call centres.

My gut feeling is that Dave and his cronies sat around and came up with this plan but then had to work out how to make it work. At some point somebody will have pointed out that to means-test would mean hiring thousands of public sector workers which would leave all but a small percentage of the actual saving intact.

It won’t be the last time the Government comes up against this sort of obstacle. Cameron has already talked about the possibility of thousands of public sector jobs being lost as we try and rebalance the deficit. However, those salaries will not flow straight down to the Treasury’s bottom line. As Sir John Gieve, former deputy governor of the Bank of England, pointed out before the General Election, job losses have to be paid for by unemployment benefit, retraining, increases in other benefits, not to mention beefing up Job Centre Plus.

The Autumn Spending Review may be brutal, we can only hope that the Government has identified real savings not paper ones and it won’t have to come back for a second bite when it finds a few months down the line that it hasn’t saved enough first time around.

Pee Off Gail

How to win friends and influence people by Gail Adams, Director of Immigration and Border control FOR THE MIDLANDS who told delegates at a Home Office conference last week, that Birmingham smells of urine.

Firstly, it doesn’t. And secondly, even if it did – why would anyone announce such an opinion at a conference in the very city about which they were talking?

More worryingly, Gail's line of defence is that she lives in Birmingham, is a former Birmingham City Council Executive- and the conference was held in the city purely at her insistence.

Well thanks Gail. Hard to know who came off worse – Birmingham or you? Fair to say you offended your fellow guests, your neighbours and indeed, an entire city.

Hardly great PR for Birmingham either. At a time when the city is battling the affects of the economic downturn – we hardly need you on your soap box, trying to clean up Birmingham. That operation happened a good while back and gave us Bullring, Brindley Place, The Mail Box, Fort Dunlop, The Custard Factory, Hotel du Vin, Millennium Point – not to mention regeneration schemes in Digbeth, The Jewellery Quarter and Eastside and much, much more.

In my humble opinion, every resident of Birmingham should start to do a bit of PR for place, starting at the top (civil servants like Gail - for example). So, I shall set a precedent. I live and work in Birmingham because I like it. I like the where it is, in the middle of the country, minutes from the motorway network and close enough to other major UK cities (and a good many international ones too).

I like the surrounding countryside and I like the shops, theatres, restaurants and museums. My son likes the Sea Life centre and I shouldn’t admit it, but I like “doing the weather” at the BBC’s Midlands HQ in the Mailbox.

Most of all, I like the people. I work in PR in Birmingham but never come across any media luvvies – just down to earth, honest, hard working folk, like the rest of the city’s inhabitants. Makes you wonder why Gail lives here really. And that brings me right back to how this article began, with a headline that pretty much sums up what I am feeling right now.