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Budget will test Mr Osborne’s ‘fairness’

By Daily Mail Comment
Updated: 18:26 EDT, 5 March 2012 Shaky finances: The Mail reluctantly accepted the Government's case that higher-earning families should give up their child benefit

With the nation’s finances in such a parlous state, the Mail reluctantly accepted the Government’s case that higher-earning families should give up their child benefit.

But, as we argued at the time, it was a grotesquely unfair anomaly to say that, from next year, a family with one person earning £43,000 should lose the payment, while a couple who both work, earning £85,000 between them, should keep theirs.

In particular, it appeared to constitute yet another attack on the traditional family in which the mother wishes to stay at home to raise children.

Now, belatedly, ministers accept that they have created what Nick Clegg yesterday called ‘unfairness’.

But, worryingly, the Coalition appears to have no idea how to fix this mess.

If ministers simply raise the threshold at which child benefit is removed, say to £50,000, the same anomaly – the penalty for couples in which only one person works – will remain.

Meanwhile, any more complex adjustment, such as basing decisions on household income, rather than whether one person pays the higher rate of tax, risks creating a means-testing bureaucracy which will swallow billions of pounds. Expectation: Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne will deliver the budget on 21st March

If this were not enough of a headache, it emerges the Treasury is seriously considering the long-discredited Liberal Democrat idea of a ‘mansion tax’ on more expensive properties.

This is despite the fact it would be impossible to introduce the levy without punishing pensioners who live in larger homes, but have only a modest income.

With only 15 days until the Budget, George Osborne has a lot of work to do.

But he should be looking to make further reductions in public spending to fund the tax cuts needed to promote growth. New taxes are not the way to create national wealth.

More from Daily Mail Comment...

Wrongs and rights

Yesterday, the Mail revealed the terrifying news that police have ‘lost’ contact with 850 registered sex offenders – with officers having no idea if they are now preying on new victims.

The Home Office’s response is to close loopholes in the current system, which, incredibly, allow a homeless sex offender to give their address as a park bench.

Yet, with depressing predictability, officials are being undermined by human rights judges who have ruled that no one can be kept on the register for life, without the right of appeal. Thus, every year 1,200 dangerous individuals will be invited to go to court to demand their ‘human right’ to walk Britain’s streets unchecked.

And the right of the public to be kept safe? Forget it.

Botched delivery

The Coalition came to power with a determination to subject the Health Service to much-needed reform. Ministers recognised that, with the population ageing and health care becoming ever more expensive, there’s an urgent need to change the NHS’s antediluvian working practices to get true value for the £110billion it spends annually.

They also saw merit in allowing GPs – rather than remote, money-devouring bureaucracies – to decide which treatment is best for their patients. Objective: When the Coalition came to power, they were determined to spearhead reforms in the National Health Service

Yet medical professionals oppose these ideas – and worried patients struggle to understand what they mean.

Today, on pages 36 and 37, we analyse how the Government hopes to introduce these changes, in a Health and Social Care Bill which is of vital importance.

What a pity that ministers have themselves failed so abysmally to articulate the case for the biggest NHS shake-up in 60 years. Truly, their handling of NHS reform could not have been more inept.


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