Tax breaks for married couples.
Tory proposals regarding tax breaks for married couples with children hold a narrow and short-sighted focus not just in their alienating the roles, successes and problems experienced by an increasingly diverse number of family types, but also their ignorance toward the origins of troubles families might experience in supporting their children: the availability and cost of child care services being just one.
The policies endorsed within a report by Iain Duncan Smith call for tax breaks for married people, the discouragement of cohabiting couples, and tougher conditions on benefits for lone parents. This hailing of family breakdown as the main cause of the nation’s social ills has thankfully already been denounced by a number of ministers and anti-poverty campaigners.
The plans place an emphasis on the nuclear family being a stable structure in which to raise young children, an issue that has been statistically substantiated as fact by various reports over the past few years. Oddly, however, the Tories place additional significance on marriage as being a requisite for this family structure. In so doing they not only exclude the obvious demographics of same sex couples and lone parent families, but also those families that are centred around the very same nuclear unit the Conservatives encourage, yet are co-habiting.
Under these proposals, married couples would benefit from a £20 a week tax allowance, costing an estimated £3.2bn a year, as well as an idea for frontloading allowances so parents receive more in the first three years of a child’s life. These two main schemes have been structured around the requirement that one of the couple did not go out to work. The underlying premise being toward enabling greater numbers of mothers to stay at home – another Dickensian principle.
I certainly do not criticise financial support for parents, as it would be foolish not to acknowledge poverty’s vast and negative impact on their ability to support children. However, I am critical of Conservative proposals to link financial concessions to marital status. If anything, lone parents are generally in greater need of support, financial or otherwise, than a married couple whose ability to care for their children is restricted by a need to work.
The report is quite incongruous and contradictory, stating on one hand that it wishes not to “promote marriage at the expense of single parents”, yet at the same time argues for restrictions on benefits for such lone parents. Surely any policy framework centred on families should be written to ensure that parents of all circumstances and backgrounds have equal and ample support available with which to ensure the safe and effective nurturing and education of children.
As I stated at the very beginning, I feel that policy is wrong to focus solely on marriage as a source of ameliorating social ills. As Kate Green, chief executive of the Child Poverty Action Group, has rightly said: “The factors behind marital breakdown can be present in a person’s life even before their relationship has started. A marriage certificate does not end addiction, it does not cure a mental health condition, it does not cancel debt, it does not increase skills and qualifications and it does not provide employment.” Take the idea of frontloading: would an alcoholic or drug addicted parent be less inclined to continue with their habit with an allowance from the government of £2,800?
All of this and we’ve not even considered how the Conservative Party plan to fund these extra financial concessions. For a party that has openly disapproved Labour’s record of throwing money blindly at problems, such as the NHS, these current proposals lack any semblance of good judgement.
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3 Responses to “Tax breaks for married couples.”
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I am a little lost with this one.
Surely the underlying premise - that nuclear families are the best device for raising children - is a fact that simply cannot be argued with. Two parents means twice the guidance and twice the income. both of which will surely greatly lessen ‘problem children’ and make for a happir society in the long run. Any money spent via the tax system to promote nuclear families will surely pay itself back ten fold after just one generation as less children ‘go off the rails’ and put pressure on our welfare system.
However. Tory proposals linking the ‘nuclear family’ to marriage is, as you point out, almost criminal. Co-habiting couples and civil partnership couples deserve the tax breaks just like anyone else.
Also you mention that the proposals seek a reduction in support for single parent families. This is news to me - but it is also entirely criminal.
So the proposals could do with a little rewriting - but surely the underlying principle is spot on, no?
p.s. and if your looking to raise a little cash to pay for these tax breaks - I know a certain agricultural subsidies scheme that could do with a little less money…
couple of things…
first i think if Tories wanted to help families that would create better access to the housing market for first time buyers. i’m sure that would help more than ₤20/week.
second, i love your design. where do you find such cool photos, like the one at the top of this post?
I’d happily swap the design for yours. As for the photos sxc.hu and flickr users share tonnes of images using the various non-commercial Creative Commons licences. It’s those mixed in with a few of my own.
As for the housing market, it’s a very complex and heated issue whereby almost any action is going to have negative reactions somewhere else. In my non-professional opinion I see prices falling naturally within 18 months as upset and worry surrounds people’s rampant borrowing habits and thus destabilises the market - similar to what we are witnessing across in the USA.