How will George Osbornes budget affect families?
“It’s class war, isn’t it?” This was the view of a woman asked by the BBC what she thought of George Osborne’s emergency budget, the day after it was announced. Eleanor Donne and Vicky Perin In his emergency budget speech George Osborne described the cuts he was delivering as “ensuring everyone, across the income scale makes a contribution to helping our country reduce its debts”. It would seem that the Royal Family is not exempt from ‘sharing the pain’. Taxpayers’ funding of the queen will be frozen at just 39.9 million for this financial year. Let’s hope she and her children don’t suffer too much as a result. Meanwhile, back in the real world, Britain’s poorest families face freezes with quite different implications. Child benefit, a vital component of low income and unemployed families’ subsistence budgets, has been frozen for three years. This means it has effectively been cut in relation to inflation, VAT rises and the soaring cost of living. It will therefore hit, as with the ent
In his emergency budget speech George Osborne described the cuts he was delivering as “ensuring everyone, across the income scale makes a contribution to helping our country reduce its debts”. It would seem that the Royal Family is not exempt from ‘sharing the pain’. Taxpayers’ funding of the queen will be frozen at just 39.9 million for this financial year. Let’s hope she and her children don’t suffer too much as a result. Meanwhile, back in the real world, Britain’s poorest families face freezes with quite different implications. Child benefit, a vital component of low income and unemployed families’ subsistence budgets, has been frozen for three years. This means it has effectively been cut in relation to inflation, VAT rises and the soaring cost of living. It will therefore hit, as with the entire austerity package, the poorest hardest. Pre-election talk of ending this universal benefit and making it means-tested, leading to complex application forms and income assessment processes
