Below I outline the ways I believe this budget will help our families with childcare, housing and taxes.
The Budget helps families by reducing their childcare costs, and giving extra help to people looking to buy a house or move house through the extension of the help to buy scheme. It also makes the married couples tax allowance more generous, and it also helps families by cutting their income tax bills.
I know that the cost of childcare is a big part of family expenditure and I think to have more tax relief on people’s spending on childcare is a really important step. So you’d have £2000 per child that you can claim off of your tax bill, which then goes towards your childcare costs. You administer the scheme, you decide where the money is spent. I think it’s a really important step in the right direction towards helping families. For most families, where both parents are working, childcare is an unavoidable fixed cost. So that’s a really important measure that’s come out of this budget.
One of the big bills that all families have, like all other householders, is council tax. And we’ve managed to freeze council tax in Shepway for the last 4 years, which again is a fantastic achievement and it means what is often one of the big household bills that comes every year is now a lot smaller than it was.
I feel very passionately about helping more people to buy their home. It gives them security, it gives them something to invest in, I know it’s what people want and there’s a big demand for housing, particularly here in Shepway. And the Government’s Help to Buy scheme is helping people get the money together to find the deposit they need to buy a house. Often, when people are looking at buying a house, they can afford the mortgage but it takes too long to raise the deposit, because the deposits have become so big.
To be able to get an investment from the Government that basically covers the large part of the deposit for you (there’s also some local investment that Shepway District Council can provide as well, which may provide the other component) is a great way to help get more people onto the housing ladder. Tens of thousands of people have already benefitted from the Help to Buy scheme, and the Chancellor said that he’s going to continue to scheme through this decade; that’s going to be a very helpful measure to get more people into the housing market. It is geared towards new build homes, but that’s good because one of the problems we’ve faced in the last few years is not enough houses are being built. The reason those houses haven’t been built is that the house builders are not convinced there are the people there to buy them. So what Help to Buy does is it says to the building community, we’ve got a lot of people here that we’re going to help buy a brand new house if you build it. So they’ll build it knowing the buyers are there.
These are the key measures that I think affect families in this year’s Budget. But I want to know what you think and you can have your say by visiting the Have Your Say section of my website, which can be found at damiancollins.com.