YouGov Poll Shows 83% Support For Non-Universal Child Benefit Measure

A poll by YouGov for The Sun seems to have excited people over the headline figure of 83% backing the child benefit changes last night.  However, the actual story is more nuanced.

The principle of limiting Child Benefit so that people on higher incomes do not receive it is hugely popular.  83% of respondents supporting it, with 15% opposed.  The question though, was about the principle of the policy.

YouGov asked about the practicalities of the policy, and the way that a couple both earning £30,000 would keep child benefit, while a couple where only one worked and earned £44,000 would not.  41% of people agreed that this was a fair compromise given the cost of fully means testing child benefit, but 46% thought it was unfair and that the policy should be based on a proper means-test.  So the principle of the policy is extremely popular, but people are split over the implementation of it.

A lot of assumptions are being made in the media and elsewhere that the 15% who oppose this measure are the same 15% or so of people who will be directly affected.  This is a lazy assumption. An assumption that is almost certainly not true.

Obviously in most cases people who suffer from a policy are more likely to oppose it and people who benefit from it are more likely to support it, but it is rarely if ever so clear cut. There are no income cross breaks in the YouGov table, but looking at the other cross breaks, 21% of Labour supporters oppose the idea, compared to 9% of Conservative supporters. 18% of ABC1s oppose it, but so do 10% of C2DEs.

Chancellor Announces Bold Changes to Child Benefit

© The Conservative Party

The Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne MP, has unveiled a bold plan to get Britain's ballooning benefits bill back under control, while introducing fair play into the financing of the welfare state.
Today in his keynote speech at the Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham, the Chancellor announced that the Coalition Government will introduce a new £500 a week cap on welfare benefits, designed to ensure that workless households no longer receive thousands of pounds in benefits more than the average working family receives in pay.

At the same time, child benefit will be withdrawn from households paying tax at the higher rate, to ensure that people on low incomes are no longer taxed to provide child benefit for those with bigger salaries.

The changes mean that household benefit payments will be capped near the median earned income after tax and National Insurance for working families - around £500 per week by the time of implementation in 2013.

The cap will apply to combined income derived from benefits including Jobseekers Allowance, Income Support, Employment Support Allowance, housing and council tax benefits, Child Benefit, and Carers Allowance. Benefits like Social Fund loans and free school meals are not affected, and people with Disability Living Allowance and war widows will also be excluded.

The withdrawal of Child Benefit from higher rate taxpayers - saving an estimated £1 billion a year -will also apply from 2013, administered through the tax system. There are currently 1.2 million households where higher rate tax is applied which qualify for child benefit. The 6.6 million families with no higher rate taxpayers who receive the benefit will remain unaffected by the change. The Chancellor said:

"If the welfare state is going to gain the trust of the British people, it needs to reflect the British sense of fair play. So for the first time, we will introduce a limit on the total amounts of benefit any one family can receive; and the limit will be set according to this very simple principle: unless they have disabilities to cope with, no family should get more from living on benefits than the average family gets from going out to work."

As for child benefits, which cost taxpayers about £12 billion a year, the Chancellor declared:

"I understand that most higher rate taxpayers are not the super-rich. But a system that taxe working people at higher rates only to give it back in child benefit is very difficult to justify at a time like this.

"And it's very difficult to justify taxing people on low incomes to pay for the child benefit of those earning so much more than them.

"We have got to be tough but fair, and that's why we will withdraw child benefit from households with a higher rate taxpayer. When the debts left by Labour threaten our economy, when our welfare costs are out of control, this measure makes sense."