If you’ve ever had to claim a benefit of any kind, you may have found yourself wondering rather patronisingly how those who ‘really need it’ can ever make sense of the forms and the system and whether it’s actually worth bothering. Many couples, with a non-working (usually) Mum and 40% taxpaying (usually) Dad thought just that when the means-testing of Child Benefit was controversially introduced.
Unless you’d read the small print, you wouldn’t have known that, for the stay-at-home to keep their National Insurance track record, they’d need to go through the palaver of registering for then not taking benefit. And for those that hadn’t realised, our the government’s saying ‘tough’. Caring and sharing.
