The taxman is blind to marriage – help us open his eyes!
Last week the Government called in the competition watchdog over its own childcare, asking the Competition and Markets Authority to investigate the hidden fees families are charged on top of their ‘free’ hours. You do not summon the regulator to a system that is working. However, there are more fundamental questions here about the approach to childcare itself.
The scale of funding is extraordinary: a record £9.5 billion this year, which – in the Government’s own words – is there to “boost growth by supporting parents back into work”. The funded thirty hours now begin at nine months old. For each of these children, the taxpayer hands providers almost £14,000 a year – £12.04 an hour, across the 1,140 hours it funds. That £14,000 is spent not to raise a child, but to return its mother to work. It is aimed at GDP growth, not at the family that raises its own. Marriage, the lifelong union of one man and one woman, is the most stable home a child can have, but the taxman will not see it.
Yet the country leans on the very families it overlooks. Every state pension and every NHS hospital depends on a working generation – one that parents bear and raise at their own cost, for everyone else’s gain. George Beglan recently called this a “hidden free-rider problem”: the parent “bears the full expense”, he writes, while the return “accrues to society at large”. It is the logic of a state that sees a child first as a future taxpayer, and only second as a child. But children are not an economic input to be farmed for future tax; they are persons, loved for their own sake.
And the tax does the same work as the subsidy. To the system it makes no difference that you are married, or that one of you stays home to bring up your children: it is marriage-blind, taxing husband and wife one-by-one, as though each lived alone. A family loses some of its Child Benefit once a single earner passes £60,000, and all of it by £80,000 – while a couple earning £50,000 each, £100,000 between them and just as likely to be married, keep every penny, because only one income is ever counted, never the two together. In 2023, a couple with two children and £60,000 between them pay over £7,000 more as a single earner than if both earned half. The one nod to marriage left in the income tax system, the Marriage Allowance, is worth up to £252 a year. The same purse, as we have shown, offers a parting couple double what it offers one that stays together.
It all points one way: the state will pay to take a family apart, and tax it for staying together. So this week, please write to your MP with one plain request: that a married couple be counted as the single family unit they are – free to, for example, share their personal allowances in full, not a grudging tenth – so that a family raising its own children on one income is no longer punished by the tax system. It takes two minutes at https://www.writetothem.com.
Marriage is not a private arrangement for the state to take for granted. It is the foundation of family life and the safest place for a child to grow up. It is time tax law saw it for what it is – the best start a child can have.