Tax Credits are EVIL
Just more-or-less sorted my 'Tax Credits - Annual Review' for the last tax year and I am very, very angry. Partly on my own behalf, but mostly on behalf of people I care about (viz., people who are skinter than me).
I entirely blame the Labour Party generally, and the Rt Hon (Dr) Gordon Brown MP specifically.
I've ranted before about how complex and confusing tax credits are. It only gets worse. There's a crazy, arbitrary mix of allowances and addings-in and takings-off. It's taken me half a day to get ours sorted - and our affairs are moderately straightforward as people-with-very-small-children go. And the information/advice line won't accept calls: "we're very busy at the moment". Well, duh, all the claims are due now, and the procedure on the form for notifying any changes in circumstances is "phone us to notify us then tick this box". No non-phone method allowed.
As well as the intractable trade-off between tax credits and salary sacrifice for childcare costs, we have the prospect, as **FIXME approaches three years old, of the added complexity of "free early years education of 12.5 hours per week", which sounds simple (it's free, and you as the carer don't have to fill in many forms) ... but isn't. Luckily the nursery he's at is registered for this scheme, so in my dreams we'd just get 12.5 hours of the time he's there for free. Ha ha. Apparently it's not actually 12.5 hours, it's up to 5 sessions of up to 2.5 hours (he's there for more than 12.5 hours a week, but only for 4 sessions), and only up to an hourly rate considerably less than what they actually charge, and only 38 weeks of the year (term time? but whose? the nursery doesn't have terms and is on the border between two local authorities). That should be a nice juicy saving, but precisely how much? Beats me. But I must tell HM Revenue and Customs within a month.
Our personal complexity will take another jump when **TODO starts nursery ... argh. It'd be nice to be able to, you know, budget and work out how much more it'll cost us to put the kids in the expensive nursery versus cheap pre-school scheme and/or childminder ... but frankly, it's way beyond what I can actually work out. And I have a PhD in a highly-numerate area and use numbers a lot in daily life.
It's so unfair and unnecessary to make this sort of calculation so hard. And to make the consequences so grave for the very people that most need the help. It's not so bad for me - I'm not scared of forms, highly numerate, highly literate, good at managing money, have savings to fall back on (and family if push came to shove) to smooth out income fluctuations. And my income is reasonably good. If those things don't apply to you, you could really do with the help ... but you are so stuffed. And don't get me started on the entirely wasted money spent on the administration of all these schemes, every last penny of which is unnecessary. (The child benefit scheme runs anyway, and it'd cost no more in admin terms to channel all the money that way.)
Curse you, Gordon Brown!
I entirely blame the Labour Party generally, and the Rt Hon (Dr) Gordon Brown MP specifically.
I've ranted before about how complex and confusing tax credits are. It only gets worse. There's a crazy, arbitrary mix of allowances and addings-in and takings-off. It's taken me half a day to get ours sorted - and our affairs are moderately straightforward as people-with-very-small-children go. And the information/advice line won't accept calls: "we're very busy at the moment". Well, duh, all the claims are due now, and the procedure on the form for notifying any changes in circumstances is "phone us to notify us then tick this box". No non-phone method allowed.
As well as the intractable trade-off between tax credits and salary sacrifice for childcare costs, we have the prospect, as **FIXME approaches three years old, of the added complexity of "free early years education of 12.5 hours per week", which sounds simple (it's free, and you as the carer don't have to fill in many forms) ... but isn't. Luckily the nursery he's at is registered for this scheme, so in my dreams we'd just get 12.5 hours of the time he's there for free. Ha ha. Apparently it's not actually 12.5 hours, it's up to 5 sessions of up to 2.5 hours (he's there for more than 12.5 hours a week, but only for 4 sessions), and only up to an hourly rate considerably less than what they actually charge, and only 38 weeks of the year (term time? but whose? the nursery doesn't have terms and is on the border between two local authorities). That should be a nice juicy saving, but precisely how much? Beats me. But I must tell HM Revenue and Customs within a month.
Our personal complexity will take another jump when **TODO starts nursery ... argh. It'd be nice to be able to, you know, budget and work out how much more it'll cost us to put the kids in the expensive nursery versus cheap pre-school scheme and/or childminder ... but frankly, it's way beyond what I can actually work out. And I have a PhD in a highly-numerate area and use numbers a lot in daily life.
It's so unfair and unnecessary to make this sort of calculation so hard. And to make the consequences so grave for the very people that most need the help. It's not so bad for me - I'm not scared of forms, highly numerate, highly literate, good at managing money, have savings to fall back on (and family if push came to shove) to smooth out income fluctuations. And my income is reasonably good. If those things don't apply to you, you could really do with the help ... but you are so stuffed. And don't get me started on the entirely wasted money spent on the administration of all these schemes, every last penny of which is unnecessary. (The child benefit scheme runs anyway, and it'd cost no more in admin terms to channel all the money that way.)
Curse you, Gordon Brown!