Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [391]
I was also appalled by the way in which men fathered a child and then absconded, leaving the single mother — and the taxpayer — to foot the bill for their irresponsibility and condemning the child to a lower standard of living. I thought it scandalous that only one in three children entitled to receive maintenance actually benefited from regular payments. So — against considerable opposition from Tony Newton, the Social Security Secretary, and from the Lord Chancellor’s department — I insisted that a new Child Support Agency be set up, and that maintenance be based not just on the cost of bringing up a child but on that child’s right to share in its parents’ rising living standards. This was the background to the Child Support Act, 1991.
As for divorce itself, I did not accept that we should follow the Law Commission’s recommendation in November 1990 that this should just become a ‘process’ in which ‘fault’ was not at issue. In some cases — for example where there is violence — I considered that divorce was not just permissible but unavoidable. Yet I also felt strongly that if all the remaining culpability was removed from marital desertion, divorce would be that much more common.
The question of how best — through the tax and social security system — to support families with children was a vexed one to which I and my advisers were giving much thought when I left office. There was great pressure, which I had to fight hard to resist, to provide tax reliefs or subsidies for child care. This would, of course, have swung the emphasis further towards discouraging mothers from staying at home. I believed that it was possible — as I had — to bring up a family while working, as long as one was willing to make a great effort to organize one’s time properly and with some extra help. But I did not believe that it was fair to those mothers who chose to stay at home and bring up their families on the one income to give tax reliefs to those who went out to work and had two incomes.* It always seemed odd to me that the feminists — so keenly sensitive to being patronized by men but without any such sensitivity to the patronage of the state — could not grasp that.
More generally, there was the question of how to treat children within the tax and benefit system. At one extreme were those ‘libertarians’ who believed that children no more merited recognition within the tax and benefit systems than a consumer durable. At the other were those who would have liked a fully fledged ‘natalist policy’ to increase the birth rate. I rejected both views. But I accepted the long-standing idea that the tax someone paid on his income should take into account his family responsibilities. This starting point was important in deciding what to do about child benefit. This sum was paid — tax free — to many families whose incomes were such that they did not really need it and was very expensive. But, as I reminded the Treasury on a number of occasions, it had been introduced partly as an equivalent of the (now abolished) child tax allowances, so there was an argument on grounds of fairness that its real value should be sustained. As a compromise we eventually decided in the autumn of 1990 that it should be uprated for the first child but not the others: but this did not settle the larger question of what the future of child support should be. I would have liked to return to a system including child tax allowances, which I believed would have been fairer, clearer and — incidentally — extremely popular. But the fiscal purists in the Treasury were still fighting a strong action against me on this at the time I left Downing Street.
All that family policy can do is to create a framework in which families are encouraged to stay together and provide properly for their children. The wider influences of the media, schools and above