Comment: I am a middle class benefits scrounger

For all the moaning about benefit scroungers that has accompanied the last decade of social reform there are many positive things the Labour government did to the benefits system.

Yet one aspect of its reforms was so clearly a fruit of the good times that it must now be cut; namely the decision to move the middle classes into the benefits system.

Middle class families are given a host of benefits they do not really need usually because of apparently ‘small ticket’ benefits introduced by Gordon Brown in his budget speeches to act as a distraction from the borrowing figures he was revealing.

For example our family which is by most people’s standards fairly well-off is still given over £130 a month in child benefit for our two children. It is a nice boost but in truth does not meet the need that child benefit was intended to meet. It was originally conceived as a benefit paid directly to lower paid mothers to ensure they had a direct source of income separate from their husband to fund the essentials of childcare. The implication was that too many dads were drinking their weekly wage before their wives could get hold of it.

We are by no means wealthy but this is simply not something that we would qualify for needing under any kind of means tested system.  Similarly, during both of my wife’s pregnancies we were given maternity grants of £190 to encourage healthy eating in pregnancy.

There is genuine food poverty in this country largely in the inner cities where people without cars are unable to access the cheaper produce available at out of town supermarkets. But in our household our lack of fruit and veg is entirely and exclusively our own fault. We are not so poor that we could not afford carrots for my wife in pregnancy.

In fact there may well be a case to work harder to subsidise the first six months of parenthood through the tax system particularly as companies are being asked to bear an ever higher burden for improved maternity and paternity cover, but that benefit is not it.

I have not yet made use of childcare vouchers although I could. Perhaps we can put tax-breaks that genuinely incentvise work like that into a different category than the rest but they are still middle class benefits fundamentally.

The think tank Reform has found that the UK’s spending on family benefits is the third highest in the OECD as a proportion of GDP below only France and Luxembourg.

More shockingly although we are spending a vast amount subsidising middle class families we are not achieving the reduction in child poverty which the Labour government had so hoped to achieve. Reform points out that although we spend on average £90,000 in benefits on a child up until the age of 18, £10,000 more than the OECD average we still have 1.4 million children in workless families below the poverty threshold.

In other words benefits for working families has done little to incentivise parents to work or remove children from poverty.

Reform says: ‘The reason that welfare spending has increased during times of growth is the expanding scale of welfare payments. In 2008, 60% of households were in receipt of at least one benefit; that figure rises to 93% for households with children. The safety net was designed as a ‘basic minimum’ and has become an expensive merry-go-round.’

The sad truth for the Daily Mail is that the middle classes have been guilty of just as much benefit scrounging as the poor over the past decade.