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Working Tax Credits

March 10, 2012 by · Comments Off on Working Tax Credits 

Working Tax Credits, A Labour MP has seized on a Parliamentary debate to mark International Women’s Day (IWD) to attack the Government’s policies relating to women and families.

Opening the debate in the House of Commons, Fiona Mactaggart, MP for Slough, criticised the coalition’s plans on tax credits and child benefit.

She said: “Welfare reform trumpeted as a plan to make work pay is hitting the poorest working families with children, many of whom will lose their tax credits, worth £3,800 because they are unable to find extra working hours.”

She noted this year’s IWD theme was “empower rural women, end hunger and poverty”, but added: “The great thing about child benefit, it says that all of us are responsible for children and it ought to be universal, it is in effect a tax allowance for children and it is quite wrong to suggest that it is the kind of benefit that somehow richer people should be exempted from.”

Mr Osborne announced at the 2010 Conservative Party conference that from January 2013 couples with at least one parent earning more than £42,745 a year – the 40% tax rate threshold – would lose their payments, saving the Treasury around £1 billion.

Conservative Harriett Baldwin, MP for West Worcestershire, said she was “disappointed” the debate was becoming a “bit of a political rant when we have so much to celebrate in terms of women in this country”.

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