This morn­ing, the Prime Min­is­ter used his BBC inter­view to let us know why, exactly, his pro­posed changes to the Child Ben­e­fit sys­tem take into account the income of a sin­gle fam­ily mem­ber rather than the house­hold overall.

As loudly bemoaned in the media over the past few days, the Con­ser­v­a­tives plan to scrap Child Ben­e­fit for higher rate tax pay­ers, those earn­ing over £44,000 a year. Because this is tied in to the tax sit­u­a­tion for a sin­gle indi­vid­ual, it leads to wild incon­sis­ten­cies in the fam­ily incomes that are affected. Under the scheme, a two-parent house­hold where one par­ent earns £44,000 and the other does not work would lose their Child Ben­e­fit. How­ever if both par­ents were to work and earn £43,000 each, for a total of £86,000, they would still receive the payments.

As some­one who earns far less than £44,000 and who could still get by with­out Child Ben­e­fit if nec­es­sary, I have no prob­lems with scrap­ping or reduc­ing Child Ben­e­fit for those sub­stan­tially more wealthy than myself. But couldn’t we at least make it fair?

David Cameron’s excuse for this unfair­ness is that to base it on house­hold income rather than indi­vid­ual income would involve a whole new means-testing process, with all the added bureau­cracy and money-wasting that involves.

Has Mr Cameron for­got­ten about Labour’s Child Tax Credit scheme, a bizarrely par­al­lel yet unre­lated pro­gramme under which work­ing par­ents can claim more money. Child Tax Cred­its are means-tested based on house­hold income in just the same way that the Prime Min­is­ter is claim­ing to be too much work. Would it not in fact reduce bureau­cracy and wasted effort if both were to be com­bined into a sin­gle Child Ben­e­fit sys­tem that was means-tested on house­hold income?

But no, appar­ently the deci­sion is set in stone.

How do the Con­ser­v­a­tives plan on try­ing to fix this unfair­ness? Appar­ently, it emerged this after­noon, with a mar­ried cou­ples’ tax break. How­ever, as the rumour heard by the BBC has it, this would only affect cou­ples earn­ing less than the £44,000 thresh­old — the house­hold with one par­ent earn­ing over £44,000 and one stay-at-home par­ent would not stand to ben­e­fit. It’s also reported as being intro­duced “before the 2015 elec­tion”, poten­tially leav­ing a four-year gap between then and now in which the unfair­ness of the Child Ben­e­fit change is not being adressed.

Fur­ther­more, while the pro­posed mar­ried cou­ples’ tax break thank­fully includes civil part­ner­ships, it pre­sum­ably does not include long-term part­ners who choose not to marry. I imag­ine that encour­ag­ing tra­di­tional val­ues such as mar­riage is a vote-winner amongst cer­tain groups of Tory vot­ers, but should the gov­ern­ment not stay well clear of these very pri­vate deci­sions? Should a poor cou­ple who do not want to marry be pres­sured into it, how­ever gen­tly, by their finan­cial situation?