Angela Rayner wants to cut child benefit payments for middle-class parents who earn over £50,000 – according to a leaked government memo.
That might be fine if you stroll around west London with a Bugaboo pram while your husband has a high-flying job, but for the rest of us – including single mums like me – it could be hard-hitting.
In a move that will send shockwaves through Mumsnet, the deputy prime minister tried to convince chancellor Rachel Reeves to “claw back” money from families in which one adult earns more than £50,000 a year, under a “contentious” cost-cutting proposal.
Parents can currently claim £26.05 a week for a first child and £17.25 for any additional child – for me, with two young children, that is £2,252 per year.
While I know the type of middle-class mum Rayner is targeting, it is not the whole picture. Some of my mum friends don’t even remember they receive child benefit in the first place, because the amount that drops into their current account each month is so paltry. One of them wants to get her child benefit backdated to fund her matcha latte habit.
Any cuts for them will be more about “Damn, I have to cancel my daily yoga at 1Rebel” or “Must stop the aerial pilates at Repose” than anything drastic, or even related to childcare costs. Another who doesn’t need to work told me cost-cutting in her household meant cutting three exotic holidays down to two a year to afford the added VAT on private school fees.
These measures, though, could remove child benefit support from nearly half a million families – some of whom genuinely need it. Alarmingly, these proposals blatantly ignore single parents like me – and many other striving middle-class families struggling with childcare costs.
The government might want to close a black hole in Britain’s finances, but at what cost to the wellbeing of middle-class mums like me?
I do not have the luxury of a two-parent family – my partner died while we were in the middle of IVF and I went on to have his two children using his banked sperm. I am not playing the victim card, but it is tough to survive.
How many more Mini Rodini leggings, Peppa Pig cruise ships and old baby cots can I sell on eBay to help fund childcare costs with the onslaught of soaring household bills? Birth rates are plummeting because Gen Z can’t afford kids – how is this going to help us?
Rayner’s demands would reverse the policy of extending access to child benefit implemented by Conservative chancellor Jeremy Hunt in his March 2024 Budget – which saved families an average of £1,300 a year.
It meant families with a top earner of up to £80,000 could keep some or all of their child benefit. Under the old rules, the full benefit was stopped at £60,000.
Hunt has condemned Labour’s plans to reverse the policy. He said: “Abandoning them would finally confirm that, far from being a New Labour government, this is a traditional anti-aspiration old Labour government.”
The problem is that many middle-class mums like me who are on Rayner’s hit list might have middle-class backgrounds, but we can no longer match them economically.
Call me privileged – and I am, in many respects. I was sent to a private school in Kensington where we played lacrosse, and I never wanted for anything when growing up. School trips were ski trips – not an afternoon in the Science Museum, as they are now for my two children, Lola, eight, and Liberty, six, who attend a state primary in the same west London borough.
There is little infrastructure in place to help with astronomical childcare costs of £18 to £25 per hour. A full-time nanny in London is between £50,000 and £80,000 per year. That’s exactly what I need – but it’s currently just a dream.
What Rayner’s crackdown on child benefit will really mean for middle-class mums like me is less time with my kids. It will be about sticking them in wraparound clubs after school five days a week – and being stretched to such a degree that it’s impossible to be present for important things.
The thought of helping them with a Tutankhamun school project, as happened to me yesterday, will feel like too much pressure in the juggle. I could become more intolerant and stressed than I already am. It’s time mums like me who need help were supported – and not thrown to the wolves. We need child benefit – and that is that.
