After Ed Balls announced earlier this week that Labour would remove the winter fuel allowance from the wealthiest 5 per cent of pensioners, I wrote that it was a sign that the party would not seek to reverse the coalition’s cuts to child benefit. Having made the argument against universalism in the case of winter fuel payments, it becomes harder to make it in the case of child benefit.
This morning, the BBC has confirmed my suspicions, reporting that “a future Labour government would not reverse cuts to child benefit made by the coalition”. This is partly for the obvious reason that it would be very expensive to do so. Given that public spending, as Balls indicated in his speech, will continue to fall under a Labour government, it will be hard to justify spending £2.3bn on restoring the benefit to individuals earning over £50,000 a year, who rank among the top 8 per cent of earners in the country.
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