Today we are witnessing a significant failure of the UK state. This morning, the personal finance campaigner Martin Lewis reported that around 30 per cent of families had not received their latest child benefit payment. HMRC, which administers the payments, said it was ‘working to resolve the issue’ and advising claimants to ‘continue to check your bank account throughout the day’. This evening, HMRC said that 500,000 claimants had been affected.
Child Benefit is worth £24 per week for the eldest child and £15.90 for every child thereafter. These sums will seem trivial to those with means but to poor and low-paid families they are a financial lifeline. The Daily Mirror has gathered social media posts from unpaid recipients saying HMRC’s error has left them unable to afford food or bus fares for their children. Families living in precarious financial circumstances are also more likely to rely on pay-as-you-go energy meters, mobile phones and broadband dongles. While a belated payment will rectify today’s error, some will be forced to take out payday loans until that payment comes, leaving them even more out of pocket.
Mistakes happen, systems glitch, and benefits are occasionally underpaid or paid late. Welfare recipients have experience of this. But a general election must be the worst time for a blunder of this size to take place, with the government of the day fearing political punishment from the millions affected.
But this won’t become a big election issue for three reasons. One: the state can fail the poor and low-paid without fear of the backlash that comes with failing the middle classes. Two: the families affected by this error are assumed to be Labour voters, if they vote at all, and the Tories never bother trying to win their votes anyway. Three: national journalists, and their producers and editors, don’t live from one benefit payment to the next, most never have or will, and will attach as much significance to this story as they might a mildly interesting campaign trail diary item.
That says a lot about the political and media classes and how estranged they are from how millions of lives are lived in this country. And that estrangement is why it’s possible to fail people as the state has done today and expect to face little in the way of consequences.
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