High Income Child Benefit Charge

Douglas Chapman Excerpts

Thursday 2nd February 2023 Westminster Hall

[Douglas Chapman (Dunfermline and West Fife) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk (Martyn Day) for securing this debate, which is timely because many families are concerned about their finances and are struggling to make ends meet in the current financial crisis.

There are three key measures or themes have emerged in the debate. The first is that the changes introduced by George Osborne way back in 2013 are unfair and flawed. Secondly, Members from across the Chamber have said that they can help the Minister make the child benefit system fit for purpose. Thirdly, we are asking the Government to implement changes. Even a Conservative Government can introduce the concept of universality again and see whether that is a better solution than the one we have at the moment.

On the first point, like other hon. Members I cannot understand for the life of me why a family with two parents both earning £40,000 a year—a total of £80,000 between them—can claim child benefit unhindered by any other consideration, yet another family in which the main earner’s salary is £50,000 is penalised and the children get less benefit or no benefit at all. How is that fair? How is that equitable?

Claimants whose earnings rise above £50,000 have their benefit clawed back through the tax system, which means that they are exposed to the self-assessment system—in many cases, for the very first time—and incur additional costs in hiring an accountant or tax specialist. How is that fair? How is that equitable?

The £50,000 threshold has never been uprated since 2013 to reflect wage inflation during that period, so more and more families are being unwittingly sucked into the tax trap set by Mr Osborne all those years ago. To compound the situation, taxpayers have been charged penalties for failing to register their liability. It is like the WASPI scandal mark 2: people are not given sufficient information about the changes made by the Treasury, so parents get trapped in the tax liability net without even knowing it.

For many parents, it is simply not worth the hassle of having to navigate through our clunky system, so more than half a million people have elected not to receive child benefit. I thought that might be a win-win for the Government—they save on all those admin costs, get off scot-free by not having to pay child benefit at all and, of course, they do not have to worry about these pesky kids—but my hon. Friend the Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk has raised some questions that put those assumptions under some scrutiny. Again, I urge the Minister to reply to him so that we can get some clarity about that.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk pointed out, not claiming has some serious ramifications for both the parents and the child. As the hon. Member for Rutherglen and Hamilton West (Margaret Ferrier) alluded to in her intervention, for many parents—particularly women, or the lower earner—it means losing out on vital national insurance contributions, which could impact their state pension entitlement. As for the child, my hon. Friend has already highlighted the issue about national insurance cards for 16-year-olds.

The case is clear. The Government need to scale up the threshold from £50,000 to reflect pay inflation from 2013, but also to iron out some of these anomalies to ensure that child benefit is not only fair and equitable, but seen to be fair and equitable for all those families who are currently being penalised.

My second point is about the system being fit for purpose, which, from today, becomes a challenge for the Minister. I genuinely want to hear the solutions that are within her gift. Will she uprate the threshold beyond £50,000 in line with pay inflation from 2013, for example? If the clunky system has to remain, will she look carefully and sympathetically at the inequity of the families I have talked about, where family No. 1 is on £80,000 and has full child benefit, while family No. 2, on £50,000, is caught in the tax trap and offered limited or no benefit?

Will the Minister also consider devolving child benefit to the Scottish and Welsh Governments? Tackling child poverty is a national mission in Scotland. As part of our delivery plan, we already invest £8.5 billion to support families, a huge amount of which—£3.3 billion—is specifically targeted at supporting children. To help to mitigate the effects of the current cost of living crisis on households, our Government have also introduced the Scottish child payment, which they have uprated on one occasion. Better solutions can be found, and I hope the Minister is open to working with the Scottish Government and others to see where further devolution of budgets can take place. Will the Minister also solve the inequity of parents, especially women, who remove themselves from the child benefit tax trap but suffer other consequences, as other hon. Members have already highlighted?

I have left one issue until the end, which is universality. This policy is being driven by the needs of the Treasury, when it should be the needs of children and families. This is not just a challenge for the current Government, but, as the next election looms, a question for the Opposition, who aspire to be in Government. Is it therefore the policy of the Opposition to introduce universality to child benefit? It would be wonderful if that could be confirmed and a firm commitment given today in the summing up.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Victoria Atkins)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer. I congratulate the hon. Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk (Martyn Day)—I hope that I pronounced that correctly—on securing this important debate. I say from the very outset that I understand the experiences of his constituents that he described, and I hope that in previous correspondence we have acknowledged the tension—I suppose that is the word—of these points in the tax system, not just in the context of child benefit but across the tax system. There are points of tension where the next rating, if you like, of taxation falls, and those have repercussions. I promise him that I spend a great deal of my time considering that, not just in this context but, as he will appreciate, across many other forms of taxation.

Child benefit is an incredibly important form of state assistance. Historically, many decades ago, in previous generations when women did not tend to work or were not permitted to work in the way that, thankfully, we are nowadays, child benefit was often the way in which they could feed and clothe their children. Although our working economy has, thankfully, changed in so very many ways since then, we as a Government want to maintain that link between the state and helping families to raise children who need the help.

We genuinely understand that, for the lowest paid or the poorest of families, child benefit payments are vital to help families pay for clothing, food and other essentials. Some 7.7 million families are helped with the cost of raising their sons and daughters, and the Government are keen to continue that tradition. That is why, when we had to make difficult decisions in the autumn statement, we protected child benefit in real terms, which means that from April this year, subject to us approving it in due course in the Finance Bill, child benefit will rise in line with the consumer prices index, or 10.1%.

Of course, there are other ways in which the Government and local authorities offer support to parents with childcare responsibilities and costs, including for example early education through the Department for Education’s free hours entitlements and financial support for childcare through tax-free childcare and universal credit childcare offers. We all want to ensure the very best start in life for our beloved children.

The difficult challenges that we face in the wider economy, not just domestically but internationally, are having an impact on families up and down the country. Many of the worries circle around rising prices, or inflation. That is precisely why, in his new year speech, the Prime Minister pledged to halve inflation by the end of the year. We understand that if prices are rising, our money does not go as far. We want to ensure that we can halt the pace at which prices are rising, so that our hard-earned money goes further.

We have also taken decisive action to support households with those pressures over this year and the next, including by helping millions of the most vulnerable households through the additional cost of living payments over this year and next; the energy price guarantee, which will save households £900 this year and £500 next year; and the support for all UK households provided through the £400 energy bill support scheme. But we need to continue with our plan for stability and fiscal prudence and to be responsible with the nation’s finances. That is why we want to ensure that welfare spending remains sustainable and focused on those who most need the help. We continue to support the vast majority of families with child benefit payments, but the high income child benefit charge allows us to maintain that sustainability.

The charge affects a small proportion of child benefit claimants—namely, those who have relatively high incomes. The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) questioned the threshold. I hope that I can offer him some reassurance, on a national scale. In 2019-20—the last year for which I have been provided with figures—about 373,000 individuals in the UK declared a HICBC liability, HICBC being the acronym that the Treasury uses; I prefer what the hon. Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk said—“the charge”. However, the vast majority of those 373,000 individuals have incomes above the UK higher rate income tax threshold of £50,270. That is in the context, as I have said, of 7.7 million families being assisted with the cost of raising children.

Many of the individuals who earn above the £50,270 mark will earn between £50,000 and £60,000, so they will not be required to pay back the entire value of their child benefit, because it is tapered in that £10,000 spectrum. We have, I am told, never aligned the threshold for the charge with the UK higher rate threshold or, indeed, other thresholds for income tax. Of course, I note that in Scotland the Scottish Government have set the higher rate threshold for Scottish income tax at a lower rate of over £43,000. We are very concerned that raising the threshold above the £50,000 figure would come at a significant cost to the Government at a time when support is needed for vital public services.

[Douglas Chapman]

Will the Minister give way?

[Victoria Atkins]

I was just about to come to the hon. Gentleman’s question about universality, if that is the point on which he is seeking to intervene. He raised the issue of universality, and my response to that would be that he and others are rightly focusing on the challenge of people just over the £50,000 mark or, indeed, making comparisons with couples who individually earn under the £50,000 mark but together obviously earn nearly £100,000. I do not quite know how I would justify extending child benefit to couples who earn significantly in excess of £50,000 each. Perhaps a mile or two down the river, in the City, there may be couples in banking, the finance sector and so on who are earning not just hundreds of thousands of pounds but even more. I for one would much rather that the tax paid by our constituents —those of the hon. Member for Dunfermline and West Fife and mine—was focused on those constituents on whom we have rightly focused, namely the poorest paid, rather than those earning astronomical salaries.

[Douglas Chapman]

The point that I wanted to make was actually about whether we could get a view on the example that I gave of family 1 and family 2 and the inequity that there is for certain families. It may be that both parents or partners are under the limit but in total they earn a lot more than £60,000. I think that that is something that the Government could look at a bit more generously.

[Victoria Atkins]

I very much understand this point. I do not know whether the hon. Gentleman was involved at all in the scrutiny of the Bill that became the Domestic Abuse Act 2021, which I had the privilege of taking through the House a year or two ago. Interestingly, one of the challenges that his SNP colleagues put to me, in the context of universal credit, was that universal credit is paid per household. They made the point that, particularly for victims of domestic abuse, they would prefer it to be paid to the individual. The reason why I raise that is that we have a long-standing tradition—since, I am told, the 1990s—of individual taxation. I, as a feminist, am entirely comfortable with being—indeed, demand the right to be—taxed on my income, rather than that of my husband. The system of independent taxation being what it is, every individual, including each partner in a couple, is treated equally and independently within the income tax system. That means that the child benefit charge, sitting as it does within the income tax system, must adhere to those principles; that is the idea behind it. I acknowledge the tensions that the hon. Members for Dunfermline and West Fife and for Linlithgow and East Falkirk have raised regarding those families where people fall just below the threshold, but Governments of all colours must do that kind of balancing when setting thresholds and rates of taxation, and so on. That is why the charge is set as it is.