It has taken a “long time for the balloon to go up”, says John Rentoul in The Independent. The Budget was three months ago, yet it wasn’t until recently that the House of Lords “finally forced a retreat on tax credits”. It remains a mystery why George Osborne ever thought it was sensible to take large sums away from the working poor. As noted in the Financial Times, the cuts hit the very “strivers” the Tories promised to shield: for example, a bank clerk with two children stood to lose £2,262.
During a debate on the subject, “freed to express their doubts”, not one Tory backbencher supported the proposals in full, says Patrick Wintour in The Guardian. They instead warned that the £4.4bn cuts went too far and told Osborne that they should either not be imposed on current recipients or be delayed until the end of this parliament, when substantial changes to the national minimum wage will take effect. Yet the national living wage isn’t the answer either, says Kate Andrews in The Daily Telegraph.
The Office for Budget Responsibility reckons it will put 60,000 of the most needy out of work. A better solution that avoids job losses is tax reform that lets workers keep more of their earnings – removing the lowest paid from income tax and national insurance altogether.
Osborne didn’t knock £4.4bn off the working tax credit out of “foolishness or brute evil” – he simply “had nowhere else to go”, says Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian. He has promised to save billions of pounds, but is boxed in by “iron-clad promises” protecting everything from health care to pensioners. We will see more such episodes and they will hurt the Tories’ standing with voters.
Osborne’s real mistake was to treat tax credits as an accounting problem rather than a human one, says Rachel Sylvester in The Times. Putting numbers ahead of people is “an occupational hazard” for chancellors, but for Osborne it is also a “personal shortcoming”. He must not behave as if “ideology is more important to him that humanity… he must remember that politics is about people”.