Social failure is costing taxpayers more than £100bn a year, a fifth of all Government spending, it was claimed this week. At the heart of a 671-page report on ‘breakdown’ Britain, by Iain Duncan Smith’s Social Justice Commission, lies the belief in a “direct causal link between the number of children brought up by unmarried couples and problems of instability, crime, educational underperformance and drug dependency”, said Will Woodward in The Guardian.
Recommendations include a new tax on alcohol and doubling the Carers’ Allowance, but the report’s most “eye-catching suggestions” involved “tearing up the tax and benefit system to swing the support of the state firmly behind couples”, said Benedict Brogan in the Daily Mail. It calls for an end to the “couple penalty”, which gives a single parent the same benefits as couples, by topping up the cash offered to couples in the Working Families Tax Credit to about £2,000. It also proposes allowing non-working spouses to transfer their personal allowance of £5,025 a year to their working partner, worth £20 a week. The combined cost of the proposals is put at £6.2bn.
Cameron’s “marriage bonus” makes no sense, said Polly Toynbee in The Guardian. If the incentive is big enough to persuade couples to marry, children of single parents will “fall even further behind”. The real problem is that our tax system is based on individuals, but benefits are based on households, said The Independent. But surely this could be fixed without a marriage premium, which “smacks of old-fashioned and unproductive moralising”.
No it doesn’t, said The Daily Telegraph. Duncan-Smith and Cameron are just stating the facts and offering a solution. There’s lots of evidence that children raised by two parents living together do better and couples are more likely to stay together if they are married. Besides, Cameron is not proposing that single parents get less help, but that married couples should get more. Nor is he claiming marriage is “some sort of social panacea”, but that it must be “central to a wide programme of initiatives to deal with addiction, debt and welfare dependence”.