tiintax

I have very little knowledge of the tax credit system but, like many other people, I was disturbed by the suggestion that the government was taking money from the working poor and claiming it would be replaced by the increase in the national minimum wage.  For one thing, the NMW is only £6.70 an hour, applies at even lower rates to apprentices and under 20s, doesn’t apply at all to the self employed, and is poorly enforced and… creatively interpreted, shall I say? – by rapacious employers.

The rebranding of the NMW as a National Living Wage (from April next year) seems to see the age limit rise again to 25 and the amount rise to £7.20 an hour, with the promise it will reach £9 an hour by 2020.  But how can a pay rise in 2020 compensate for a tax credit cut in 2015?

#bbcqt Yes, but a “national living wage” in 2020 won’t help people getting tax credit cuts now. How are they to feed their kids today?

— Wendy Bradley (@wendybradley) October 8, 2015

However as the row about tax credits has been in the news I have been trying to clarify my own thinking about the subject.  Because I think that tax credits should – ultimately – wither on the vine, because I think that they can be a form of corporate welfare, allowing bad employers to pay poverty wages and let the taxpayer pick up the bill.  So I believe that increasing the minimum wage and decreasing tax credits is the right thing to do, and have said so before.

I was all set, in fact, to write a blog entry suggesting that grandfathering might be the “tweak” that politicians were looking for to get themselves out of the political row.  “Grandfathering” being the term used in tax and elsewhere for changing the law but allowing the old law to continue to apply in certain circumstances – for example, reducing the maximum amount you can put into a pension, but allowing people who have already put in more than that to “grandfather” the amount already there.

So – I thought, innocently – if you changed amount of tax credit but grandfathered those already in receipt of tax credits…

Say someone had 100 of wages and 50 of tax credits, you’d grandfather that total figure, so if tax credits went down to 25 you would pay a new claimant 25 but grandfather those already on 50.  But if their wages went up to 125 you would reduce the tax credits to 25, so they would still be on the grandfathered amount – they wouldn’t be a cash loser – but the state’s contribution to the amount would reduce.  And you would hope, of course, that by the end of the parliament they would be getting wages of 200+ and tax credits of zero so the benefits of the supposed economic improvements washed out the need for tax credits and people actually were better off.

Except…

Well, except when I started looking at what George Osborne had actually said in the Budget speech, I found he said this:

This approach means no family sees a cash loss.

Either he was being disingenuous in the Budget speech (it’s written in that dreadful, flat, verb-free politician-speak, so it’s entirely possible that the clear statement I picked out refers only to one, or some, or a few of the multiple changes he’s listing), or he’s changed his mind, or he’s lied to Parliament.

I’m sure there’s a simple explanation, but I’d like to hear someone ask him the question, please.