Downing Street Says » Tax Credits

Asked if the Prime Minister had full confidence in the tax credits system, the PMOS said that the Prime Minister recognised that the tax credit system had benefited 6 million families including 10 million children. The vast majority of which had not experienced problems claims or payments. They had had an unprecedented take up, with an estimated 80% eligible families claiming child tax credit. Some of the problems which had arisen, had come about as a result of technical problems and administrative errors and where that had been the case the claimants would not suffer. Other problems had arisen where claimant’s income had increased but they hadn’t notified the appropriate authorities accordingly. On 26th May the Paymaster General set out a series of 6 measures, which were in part designed to improve communication to claimants, to remind them that if their circumstances changed they did need to notify the authorities, so that their payments could be adjusted accordingly and the problem avoided. Also there would be greater liaison with the voluntary sector to help those who got into difficulty.

Asked if the Paymaster General had deceived parliament, the PMOS said no. She would address this issue directly herself in Parliament later today, and he did not want to pre-empt what she would say. However as she had said this morning she had given a specific answer to a specific question. The detail of that was something that she would set out in Parliament. Asked if the Prime Minister had full confidence the Paymaster General, the PMOS said yes. Asked of the Prime Minister had full confidence in EDS, the company who designed the system, the PMOS said it was for the Treasury to talk about its relations with EDS. That was another matter to be dealt with by the Paymaster General in her statement.

Asked about whether we would consider writing off some of the debts incurred, the PMOS said that we should recognise that where there had been faults in the system we had taken action to write off those amounts. On the other hand we also had to recognise that this was tax-payers’ money and therefore we had to manage it accordingly. The important thing was that we helped those who did get into difficulties, given that some of the people involved were from vulnerable groups. As he had said one of the 6 measures the Paymaster General announced in March dealt with this.

No Comments »

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Post a public comment

Name (required)
E-mail (required)
(You must give an email address, but it will not be displayed to the public.)
Website
(You may give your website, and it will be displayed to the public.)

Comments:

This is not a way of contacting the Prime Minister. If you would like to contact the Prime Minister, go to the 10 Downing Street official site.

Privacy note: Shortly after posting, your name and comment will be displayed on the site. This means that people searching for your name on the Internet will be able to find and read your comment.

Original PMOS briefings are © Crown Copyright. Crown Copyright material is reproduced with the permission of the Controller of HMSO and the Queen's Printer for Scotland. Click-use licence number C02W0004089. Material is reproduced from the original 10 Downing Street source, but may not be the most up-to-date version of the briefings, which might be revised at the original source. Users should check with the original source in case of revisions. Comments are © Copyright contributors. Everything else is © Copyright Downing Street Says.

» Wednesday, June 22, 2005

Tax Credits

No Comments »

Post a public comment

Search

Supported by

Recent Briefings

Archives

Links

Syndicate (RSS/XML)

Credits

Enquiries