@Arkady - my understanding is that the £26k limit is for a household rather than per person.

The Evening Standard says there will be a cap of £250 a week for a two-bedroom property, £400 for a four-bed home. Rightmove brings up 1 4-bed and 3 2-beds that would qualify.

@lisbet - I agree. The only way I have been able to afford even a one bedroom flat in Stroud Green (ish) is to buy a derelict one, complete with smashed windows, and do it up from scratch myself. And I have been working full time for 10 years without any gaps.

Surely the point of benefits is to make sure people are safe, secure, healthy and warm until they are more able to support themselves - ie. not having a veto over which postcode you live in - but if someone's been employed all their life and then becomes genuinely unable to work long term it seems a bit harsh to turf them out of the area!

I like the sound of the system in Germany (?) where (this may be an oversimplification) the more you work, the more credits you rack up so if something bad happens you'll be better supported by the state - this seems a clever way of making it worth people's while to get a job without removing the welfare state altogether.

And spare me the people who are complaining because one partner earns more than £48k so they've lost their child benefit - I don't pay tax so that they can afford two holidays a year.

Very interesting inversion of normal party political standpoints at the moment...

Yes, that is shocking and lunatic. I had hoped that this time round they would be able to accept that it was no longer the 1950s - alas not.

Andy, the FT Westminster blog had a pretty well-informed comment, which I have taken the liberty of pasting below. The cap will affect a surprisingly high number of households. The key is to combine three or more children with reasonably high housing benefit. The previous government made eliminating child poverty a huge focus over more than a decade. But they used a static rather than a dynamic model for this. In practice this meant that workless families with several children needed a very large and ever-increasing amount of money flung at them via benefits in order to ensure the children were not "poor" (on an equivalised basis and using the threshold of 60% of median incomes after housing costs, which is very much a moving target). Far less thought was given to the second-order question of how incentives are changed for various people down the line when making choices about work, family size etc.

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[http://blogs.ft.com/westminster/2010/10/live-george-osborne-at-the-tory-conference/#more-62241](From FT blogs:)

AB 12.37 Just spoke to Ian Mulheirn of the Social Market Foundation, a former Treasury official who is one of the top experts on all these welfare changes.

It sounds like the cap on benefits will be around £500 per week, which amounts to £26,000 a year for the household.

This basically means it targets families with three or more children who are claiming a relatively high level of housing benefit (i.e. they are living in a home in outer London). Ian has worked out that the housing benefit claim needs to be around £220 per week, given the other benefits that are available for children and those out of work.

This basically means that the cap on benefits is another assault on housing benefit, which took a big hit in the emergency budget. The number of people affected adds up to around 200,000, according to Ian. It seems like this will raise significantly less than £1bn, so it is as much about the symbolism as the savings.

I agree with ADGS on that limited point.

Capping at 26k sounds like a fair argument, problem in practive will be that for those families looking for work they will by definiton get moved away from the more proposerous parts of the country and end up in areas with other claimants - reducing the chances of them finding work - assuming they are actually looking.

I am interested by the idea that we can discuss this without being 'party political' since the cuts are so obviously ideological. Child benefit is the only universal benefit,which means it is the only one that is widely taken up (generally, more benefit is lost in not being claimed than is lost through fraud or error). also everyone forgets that it is a benefit for whoever cares for the children, usually women. Even wealthy households do not necessarily share income fairly ... Before this cut was announced, 70-75% of the burden of these cuts was felt by women. As for housing benefit, the major reason it is so expensive to the Treasury is the runaway house-price (and therefore rent) inflation provoked by the sale of council houses and relaxation of mortgage restrictions in the 1980s. It will hit working households as well as the unemployed and those with disabilities and will make it much harder for people toget back into work if they cannot live in areas that have good public transport or are near their existing networks of friends and relatives. Given that these attacks on the welfare state are being rushed through with so little thought that the government hasn't worked out an accurate way of assessing who to attack (ie child benefit anomalies), it does not look as if the move is an economic one. What is more, it is pandering to the more selfish views of society, quite successfully to judge from some of the comments here. Remember, the children of today will pay your pension tomorrow and will create the world in which you live as an older person.

Amanda, I don't think this is as ideological as you suggest, indeed I'm concerned that it’s easy to fall back on routine lines of thought on this issue. For the record I’m not a Tory, and I’m to the left of both Labour and the Lib Dems on many issues. But I don’t have a problem with ceasing to reward people who choose to have lots of children, or ceasing to pay benefits to people who receive more than the average income. I’m a little twitchy about the £44 grand cut-off being for an individual rather than a household, but I’ve seen enough condemnatory studies on the efficiency of means-testing to accept that it would be difficulty to implement it differently. I’m afraid that I can’t accept that it is fair to pay wealthy families child benefit on the off chance that family income might not be shared equally! I rather doubt there are many well-off parents leaving their partner and children to starve.

I do agree that we need to rethink our attitude to housing though. Ceasing to act as though we can indefinitely grow the population of the country would be a good start. Maybe ‘Cameronomics’ has considered that trying to lower birth-rates through lowering child benefit will positively impact housing costs in the long term!

Twinspark, you have a tendency to conflate ‘poltics’ and ‘party politics’.

@ali - there aren't enough children of tomorrow to pay for your pension. The dependency ratio won't allow it. So you have three choices: 1. mass immigration to create a young enough labour force to support all the retirees or 2. radical scaling back of pension provision to make pensions smaller, more restricted and available later in life. 3 compulsory savings for pensions.

The reality will be a mix of 1, 2 and 3. The only pension provision you can count on is that which you have saved for yourself, and even then I wouldn't bet on the rules changing about getting your hands on it.

This isn't party political in any way. It's just raw numbers. There aren't enough people, high enough investment returns, or enough people saving.

Sorry! Ali - I meant Amanda!

Has anyone considered that I might be worst off? I have no kids - no benefit. If I plan to, I'm over the threshold anyway - no benefit. I'm not married either - no future benefit. I've been paying income tax for 20 years and never drawn any benefit. I've been paying into a private pension for 10 years, but by the time I'm due to retire, I'll probably be dead, having worked my ass off for 50 years trying to keep the welfare state afloat.

BTW, I've said it before, but Bob Crow is a dick. He'll do his best to bring the country to its knees just to get on telly. If he thinks he can elicit the same kind of support for a general strike that they do on the continent, he's a bigger idiot than he looks. He'll try and do it off the back of the pensions deficit and probably again call for "civil disobedience'. To suggest that his members are the ones responsible for keeping the country running is an insult to the private sector. In fact, I wondered whether Bob Crow himself could be picketed. Surely you just need to lock arms around him every time a camera crew goes near him.

@Amanda, taking into account that means testing is very difficult to do successfully without introducing all kinds of perverse outcomes, I actually think the child benefit cap is quite a progressive measure. Essentially it should redistribute cash from wealthier members of society to poorer people and I can't see anything wrong with that.

Sure, it's a blunt approach, but benefits are supposed to be there to help the poorest, rather than to provide the middle classes with a bit of extra pocket money.

I agree that it's unfortunate that this budget cut will disproportionately affect women (I'm female) but on balance I think it's most important that less well-off people of both sexes will still receive the benefit (after all it's supposed to be for their kids). I'd be very uncomfortable indeed if wealthier women were getting it at the expense of poorer men.

And I'm not making a party political point - in fact I'm the quintessential floating voter.

Anyway, that's my twopenneth for the evening.

I think Ed Miliband showed himself up on Sunday Politics Show saying Millionaires should get child benefit. Following my earlier 'woh is me' post, I found his comment about child tax credit being a 'universal benefit' rather insulting if not naive. I have no kids so its NOT universal. It raises an interesting point about people who never have kids or even people who CANNOT have kids, which surely makes his comments discriminatory. Why should childless adults subsidize everyone else? or is that a stupid way of looking at things?

@Ali hear bloody hear! I am genuinely scared about what is happening. It is increasingly feeling like a return to the early 80s but at least then they were upfront about it.

@Arkady. At no point did I say I agree with universal benefits. I don't. However the way the cuts are being implemented is both unfair and will cause unnecessary suffering for large numbers of people who in no way contributed to the problem in the first place. (incapacity benefit claimants being only a few) Anyone who works in education, and particularly in pastoral care is already beginning to see the results of increased poverty levels. The notion that those in real need are being protected is laughable. Meanwhile bankers' bonuses went up 10% in the last year. I would be equally pissed off if it was Labour.

I don't think Alistair D would have come across as "gloating". You just need to see the Cabinet Secretary in action - he is loving it !

I'm beginning to think that the headlines on friday 21st (after the 20th announcement) will be "big cuts, but a lot slower than expected"

All I can say with regards to benefits is that for the first time last year after a degree and earning a decent wage all my 16yrs of working fulltime I couldn't afford to live after the recession hitting the industry I work in and being on the dole for longer than a month.

I turned to housing benefits after 6months when my redundancy pay had run out... Now that I'm back working as much as I can freelance I can't actually afford the place that housing benefits were paying the full whack for!!

So I can SO UNDERSTAND why people scrounge off benefits and can't be bothered to get 'proper' jobs. It has opened my eyes to the whole way it operates and it doesn't help people to get motivated to fulltime employment at all.

Don't get me wrong though I would much rather work than watch paint dry at home all day - but it was a real revelation and made me realise how easily it can become a 'way of life'.

The reality is the cuts are likely to force a lot of women out of work, regardless of what they say about making work pay. The only reason I was able to go back to work after my daughter was born was because Labour had introduced child tax credits and that paid part of the child care. Under the old system I simply couldn't have done it and I wasn't on a very low wage. This is because the cost of childcare is astronomical in London: 8 years ago I was paying £150 per week to a child minder (couldn't afford the £220 a week the local private nursery cost) and I was a single income household. I would imagine the costs are higher now. With rent and bills on top my wages just didn't cover it. It was the only reason I wasn't on benefits. Obviously it was my choice to have my child but by working at least I was paying back into the pot, and because I was able to keep working I have progressed in my job and continue to pay in increasing amounts of tax. None of which would have happened if that benefit had not been available.

The 'effects' are described in copious commentary from the media and in the house.

• but the commentary is commentary, not fact. Fact, for me, is someone saying "because of changes x and y, I'm going to do z". Are people really going to move out of London? Or will private rents come down? Or what? People can respond in a number of ways to these changes.

I understand the appeal of 'impact and facts' but not even the architechts of these grand plans have real detail on that.

• I agree, but I think that's the point. It seems that many of the consequences of these changes are unknown. So whilst "this is all terrible" is a perfectly reasonable response, I'm more interested in people's practical response. For me, someone saying "As a result of this change, I'm going to do this" is what's missing from the argument.

One of the best things I saw on the recession was on a football forum, where people were reporting what was happening in their company, their family or to their job. It was so much more illuminating than a media narrative about 'cuts' in the abstract.

Had to laugh a bit at a government document which has been leaked from number 10.

Apparently the Government is a bit concerned that it is not being viewed as to quote “the most family-friendly government ever".

During the last election the Tories had the concept a creature they dubbed the "Holby City woman" – middle-aged women doing clinical or clerical jobs, who they apparently sucessfully targetted in the demise of GB but feel they are now loosing. ( I wonder why?)

There is more about the leak here

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/sep/13/government-plan-win-back-women

If you want to read the actual restricted doc it is here

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/interactive/2011/sep/13/leaked-memo-women-coalition-government

Maybe DC should refrain from the sexist remarks he seems to have habit of using in the House.

Some of the stuff in there is quite interesting although it would be interesting to see how shortening school hols or introducing personal budgets for maternity services to allow women to shop around for services will go down with folks.

Getting quotes to have your baby whatever next !

I also see from other sources that the Universal Credits bill which IDS is pushing through has a move from bi weekly benefit payments to monthly.

Apparently this prepares people for work !

I suspect that might come if the Euro colapses !

Oh, also, it's rarely as simple as "just move somewhere cheaper!" because, well, moving costs money, particularly if you have an entire family's worth of stuff to move with you. I have friends who are a single income household - no kids - and when he lost his (well-paid enough to rent a house in a small town, not enough to save much) job everyone said "oh, why not move into a smaller house? You'll save loads!" Except that with the cost of moving, plus the fact that they probably wouldn't find anywhere very quickly, and the fact that they had a fixed contract on their current house, and they'd either have to get rid of a lot of their stuff or put it into storage, it would not have actually saved any money over the first year or so, if at all.