A VERY BRITISH BENEFITS CUT By Giles Turnbull [Standfirst] George Osborne's plan to cut child benefit for high rate taxpayers has got the middle classes up in arms. Giles Turnbull offers a middle-class dad's perspective on it all. You might want to grab a calculator first. Right, pay attention. This is going to involve a bit of maths. Last week, the chancellor George Osborne announced plans to cut child benefit payments for high rate taxpayers, with the aim of saving £1bn per year (out of a total £12bn child benefit budget). What seems odd to some is the way the axe is falling. It's not based on total household income, but on how much each breadwinner earns. If either parent's earnings tip them into the higher 40% tax bracket, the family will no longer qualify for child benefit. Right now, that higher bracket starts at £43,875, but by the time these changes come into effect in 2013, it will have dropped to £42,225 (or even lower, but let's assume it stays there for now). Write that number down, because that's the magic one. That's the number you're not going to want to see on your payslips if you want to keep claiming child benefit. Now here's the weird bit. Let's take the Typical family - Mr and Mrs Typical, and their two kids, Average and Ordinary. If either mum or dad earns more than the magic number, zap! They're no longer entitled to child benefit. But if both of them earn fractionally less than the magic number - let's say they're both on £42,000, making a total household income of £84,000 - they are still entitled. Bonkers? Yes, a little. Mr Osborne says it has to be done this way, because the cost of doing all the admin to add up and check every claiming family's total household income would have wiped out the billion pounds he was trying to save in the first place. A billion quid? That's the kind of money that eight-year-olds talk about. "I get a pound pocket money." "Yeah? Well I get a billion pounds every week, as long as I tidy my room." "Yeah? Well my dad's an alien." "So? My dad's got an iPhone." And so on. A billion pounds sounds like an enormous amount of money, but here's the really upsetting bit: for governments, it's tiny. It's a minuscule pinprick in the national finances, a gnat biting the elephant's bum of debt that the country now owes. It's one tiny contribution to the whole, and each family has to make its own tiny contribution too. The amount of child benefit paid out is the same for everyone, no matter how much you earn and no matter how much your kids lie to their friends about the pocket money you give them. Roughly speaking, it's 20 quid a week for the first child, and 13 quid each for additional children. For a lot of families, that money really does make a difference. And it's those families that child benefit was invented for. It was introduced 60 years to help families with children get by after the war. Times have changed, families have changed. If you're earning the kind of money that puts you into that higher tax bracket, £20 a week isn't going to make a lot of difference to you. My boy's eight. He loves Lego, Doctor Who (the Eleventh Doctor is better than the Tenth, in his opinion), football and Asterix books. We've been very lucky to get child benefit of £20 or so a week for the last eight years. I don't want to say no to what seems like free money, but if I'm truly honest I have to admit: we can manage without that. Most middle-class families earning the kind of money that Mr Osborne's talking about can manage without it. After all, it's not like £20 goes very far these days. It might just about get a round of drinks at the pub (as long as there's not too many of us). It will fill barely a third of the petrol tank in my clapped-out old Skoda. It will disappear in an instant if I take the boy and one of his mates out for a day trip. Our family isn't wealthy but we're doing OK. Losing £20 a week isn't nice, but neither is it the end of the world. We can manage. Most people in our situation can manage. Having another child means qualifying families will get that additional £13 per week, but as prices keep going up and benefits stay put, that ends up being worth less and less. For some families it might work out better for both parents to work. Two jobs earning less than the tax threshold means a higher total income. But that also means both parents out all day, more income tax paid, and out of school hours childcare to pay for. For most, it just means making cutbacks. Maybe dad can't have his subscription TV, or that flashy new phone he had his eye on. But that's the whole point. Those are middle-class luxuries that the middle classes like to buy because they can afford to. That's not what child benefit was created for. Some parents - especially dads - might feel under pressure to earn more. The problem is that earn just a small amount above the threshold and the extra income will be wiped out by lost benefits. You'd have to earn significantly more to make it worthwhile. So bizarrely, there might be pressure to earn less. Some people might prefer to take a few extra days of annual leave, rather then get pushed into a higher tax bracket. The benefit rules apply to everyone, male or female. So both dads and mums everywhere are going to be cutting back on what's not essential. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. After all, plenty of people in previous generations managed on a lot less than we do now.