A better start
From Gordon Brown’s pre-budget report speech yesterday:
I have received powerful representations that in the last months of pregnancy when nutrition is most important and in the first weeks after birth, the extra costs borne by parents could be better recognised if we did more to help through our universal benefit, child benefit paid to all.
Maternity grants are available to low income mothers from the 29th week of pregnancy.
Help should be available to all mothers expecting a child. So child benefit will be paid on that basis for every mother - additional child benefit that recognises the important role at this critical moment that child benefit can play.
About time too. In 2004, the sadly now-defunct Maternity Alliance published a paper looking at how much money pregnant young women got a week, and how much it cost to eat a healthy diet. (sadly no longer online) They found that you needed to spend £20.25 a week to eat a healthy diet, but the vast majority of young pregnant teenagers living away from home couldn’t afford that. The project had young women living in a hostel keeping food diaries for a week; it was shocking to read these young women were surviving on tea, chips, biscuits and toast for the most part. Hopefully this scheme will make a real difference to pregnant women and the health and lifechances of their children.
Tea and bread ain’t bad for you. Preferably wholemeal.
Also, the milk tokens scheme has been thrown out and there is a scheme called Healthy Start instead, where the vouchers are exchangable not just for milk but also fresh fruit and vegetables, and you can also get free vitamins. For each child under five you get a £2.80 voucher. For each child under one you get two vouchers. I use mine for my milk from the milkman, because my son is only fifteen months so drinks about a pint a day of the stuff!
We don’t often agree on policy details, Antonia, but on this one, we do. Paying child benefit to pregnant mothers is cheap, easy and doesn’t suffer from the micro-managing hoop-jumping that features in so many of Mr. Brown’s proposals.
Personally, I would start the payments much earlier in the pregnancy, but that’s not a reason to oppose this proposal.
“Personally, I would start the payments much earlier in the pregnancy”.
I think I agree with this, though certainly the proposal as it stands is a good start.
Can you guess the enlightened perspective and rationale of the speaker who argued against this proposal at a child poverty meeting I went to, addressed by Polly Toynbee and David Miliband?
I think we’ve had this discussion, jdc. I imagine it was someone worried that paying a benefits premium to pregnant women might undermine abortion rights.
Indeed. That was very annoying. “You can’t pay child benefit, it’s not a child”. There’s a bigger picture here than semantics, I think? Or do you think that’s a good point - I just don’t see it myself.
Mind you, if we start paying it at the start of pregnancy, is it like tax credits, do they have to pay it back if they decide to terminate it (evidently this is fairly simple, if it’s unwanted they hopefully just wouldn’t claim to start with - but let’s say they hadn’t intended to but it turns out to be disabled)