From the BBC:
The Conservatives are considering limiting child benefit to three children, BBC Newsnight has learned… It would save an estimated £300m a year - but Tory MP Dominic Raab said it was not purely about cost but could "send a message about personal responsibility"…
Child benefit can be claimed by anyone responsible for a child under 16, or under 20 if the young person is in education or training - though since 2013 there have been restrictions for families where one parent earns more than £50,000 a year. It currently pays £20.50 a week for a first or only child, then £13.55 for other children.
Deliberately ignoring the elephant in the room as per usual.
Child Benefit is (or was) a splendid benefit, it was small amounts of money (nowhere near the average cost of bringing up a child) but everybody gets it (until recently when it was withdrawn for higher earners). The total nominal payout is about £10 billion a year and fraud, error and admin costs are so small as to be barely measurable.
The biggie is Child Tax Credits, up to £53 a week per child plus bits and pieces, which is a total payout of about £25 billion a year, the bulk of which goes to a very small number of relatively large families with low or no (declared) income. So for second and subsequent children, the extra cash you get from having another child is £66, which is probably more than the marginal cost of bringing up a second or subsequent child (the biggest cost is the mother's fall in earnings, if she's not in paid employment, that's a sunk cost).
Fraud, error and overpayments are endemic; admin costs are enormous and they put a sadistic amount of effort into clawing back overpayments from randomly selected people. And it is savagely means-tested, of course.
Now, if you chuck Child Benefit and Child Tax Credits in the pot and divide it by the number of eligible children, it comes out to about £55 per child per week (see pages 8 and 9 of the Citizen's Income Trust booklet), without the need for means testing and so on, which seems fair enough to me.
If you want to cap this at three or four children per family/mother to "send a message about personal responsibility" then that also seems fair enough; any 'savings' from doing so are minimal in the grander scheme of things (£1 billion a year, perhaps?) but possibly worth having.
Debate Magazine
