At the start of the week and the new month, I got up at 6.00am after a reasonably early night’s sleep and contemplated some of the jobs for this morning. I suspect that of the weather is not too cold, the car could do with a wash and I need to make a visit to a household store to replace a broken shower head in our guest bathroom. The political news this morning is dominated by the Rachel Reeves Budget aftermath and whether she has lied to Parliament and to the country. I think that a consensus view is that whatever verbal gymnastics are deployed it looks as though Reeves put the unity of the Labour Party ahead of the wider interests of the country, as Trevor Philips has wondered. The one policy that seems to have been universally popular in the Labour Party of not the country is to reverse the child benefit cap. The ‘child benefit cap’ refers to the two-child limit for Universal Credit and Tax Credits, which means families can only receive the child element of these benefits for their first two children. This policy, introduced in 2017, is set to be scrapped in the UK from April 2026, so families will be able to claim for all children, regardless of family size. However, a little historical corrective may need to be applied at this point. The child benefit was introduced to replace the system of support for children known as ‘Family Allowances’ which pertained right throughout the 1950’s. ‘Family allowances’ were a government-funded benefit paid to families for each child after the first, intended to help with the cost of raising children. Introduced in the UK by the Family Allowances Act 1945, they were a universal, non-means-tested payment made directly to the mother. The scheme was eventually replaced by child benefit between 1977 and 1979. So the present cap on child benefits, limiting payment to the first two children, is actually restoring the situation which pertained for over thirty years. Polls from July and November 2025 indicated that between 59% and 61% of the public supported keeping the policy of the child benefit cap, while about 26-28% wanted it abolished. However, polls also show that support is lower among certain groups, such as Labour voters and younger people. The argument in social policy circles about this is that couples raising a family ought to be aware of the costs involved and should be prepared to fund their ‘first’ child whilst the state steps to alleviate the child poverty which might be triggered by the birth of a second and subsequent child. So under the Family Allowance system, a family with three children would receive the family allowance for the two younger children which is, in effect, what happens now with the cap on child benefit after the first two. So the more recent policy would really start to bite after a fourth child was born to the family and for us to wonder in these days of public concern about the consumption of the world’s resources whether the modern state should be subsidising the raising of fourth and subsequent children- after all, contraception is reliable and readily available which it certainly was not in the 1950’s and early 1960’s. Perhaps this is a case where, as a nation, we have become habituated to the distribution of benefits and the issue needs to be rethought. My own view is the child benefit cap should be retained but with a delay built in of about five years which could then, as with other taxation matters, allow people a certain amount of time to plan for the future. But of course the Labour party is much exercised, as it should be, about family poverty but whether the possession of children is a prime cause of poverty is a debated issue. Children do not cause poverty; rather, having children increases family costs and can make existing poverty worse. The primary causes of poverty are complex and include factors like unemployment, low wages, economic inequality, and lack of access to education and healthcare. Having children in a family already struggling with poverty often exacerbates financial strain due to increased expenses for food, bills, and other essentials, especially in countries with limits on financial assistance for larger families, like the UK.
It has been an interesting day today. My Droitwich friend dropped in to see me after her yoga class and whilst she worked on her laptop I made a cheese-enhanced scrambled egg breakfast for us both. Then she made for home and as I was drying the dishes, I realised with some dismay that she had left her mobile phone charging up in the kitchen. We both had to think how to rectify this situation and fortunately made the correct decision – I emailed my friend and she, in turn, realised that she needed to read her email in case I should use this only means to getting in contact. So our emails were both written and then read in short order and so I popped over to Droitwich to hand over the phone and we jointly relieved that we had resolved the situation quickly. I returned home and had a small fish-on-bread type lunch before venturing out to fill the car with much needed petrol. I also visited the nearby household supplies store in order to purchase a new shower head but they had none in stock. So I made for our local plumbing supplies store and bought a new five position shower head which seemed to fit well enough and has restored the shower to its full functionality. What remains of this dull and rainy afternoon will be devoted to gutting our pile of newspapers for articles that I wish to retain. I have already made a start on this task and discovered several really interesting articles the content of which will, no doubt, be reflected in some future blogs. The Panorama programme on a Monday evening is generally quite interesting, so I ensure that I am in bed warmed up well by the electric blanket before the programme starts transmission at 9.00pm although there is a clash of good programmes competing with each other for the 9.00pm slot which used, in byegone days to be the watershed when all good middle class children were in bed and their parents settled down for some serious television.