People like me shouldn’t receive child benefit

We are broke. Come Budget day next Tuesday, George Osborne will be wielding a long and very sharp knife. And one of his targets will probably be that middle-class handout, child benefit.

When we had our eldest 10 years ago, I couldn't quite believe that for the first time in my taxpaying life, the Government was giving me (and every parent of a child under 19) free money. It was our choice to have children and none of my childless taxpaying friends were getting any similar benefits.

Brought in by the Labour government in 1977, it came to £15 a week for our firstborn and just about covered the cost of his nappies. Not a fortune, but still gratefully received and it popped into the ether of our joint bank account.

Every few years they would write and say "have another 45p" . The payments now stand at £20.30 for the first child and £13.40 for each subsequent one, which in our case makes it worth £47.10 a week or £2,449.20 a year. Or close to £50,000, should the government keep paying until they are all 19.

But that is not going to happen now. And really, nor should it. Last week Frank Field, the Government's new poverty adviser, prepared us all for having this benefit taxed or cut.

It will be hugely unpopular with the protectors of Middle England but they are in no position to protest. Though some people still don't seem to get it, the days of favours and free money belong to that bygone world of £1,645 duck houses and 110 per cent mortgages.

This is a benefit that from the start should have been means-tested and gone only to those parents who really needed it. Now the Government simply cannot afford to hand out £50 a week to people like me, who have benefited from both the housing market and the longest economic boom in modern history. For anyone over 40, even our higher education came free.

I am surrounded at work by clever, motivated graduates who are still paying off their student loans and who, short of marrying into money or getting a large inheritance, don't have a hope of owning a family house in London within the next 15 years, if ever. And they are the lucky ones with jobs.

The legacy we have left them, and our own children, is debt. That means £70 billion a year in interest payments alone if action is not taken, according to David Cameron.

Of course no one wants to give up £2,500 a year, not when your husband is freelance and the children are already at a state school, like me. But for those who fall into the 40 per cent tax bracket, though easily done in London, isn't it morally unjustifiable to keep on taking what is essentially a welfare handout in this age of austerity? It's blinkered, unseemly — like those Labour ministers who are refusing to give up their chauffeur-driven cars.

Besides, when George plunges the knife in on Tuesday, we should save our squeals for something other than the loss of our child benefit. It will, after all, save the Government only £7 billion a year even if they get rid of it for every middle-class family. Cuts to services, a rise in VAT and massive job losses — those will elicit the really pained howls.