Working Tax Credits cuts this April will cost 450 Reading families £4000 a year

READING & DISTRICT LABOUR PARTY MEDIA RELEASE

14 February 2012


Rachael Chrisp: Working Tax Credits cuts this April will cost 450 Reading families £4000 a year

Labour Women’s Officer, and Park candidate, Rachael Chrisp says that 450 families with children in part-time work in the two Reading constituencies are set to lose around £4,000 a year from April 2012.
They are among more than 212,000 families nationally, earning less than £17,700 a year, who will lose all of their Working Tax Credits unless they can increase their working hours from a minimum of 16 hours a week to 24 hours a week. Between them those families have almost half-a-million children.
Rachael Chrisp says: “The Tory-led Government has been raising taxes and cutting spending too far and too fast. Unemployment is rising and the economy is going into reverse: nineteen out of every twenty employers are cutting people’s hours, not increasing them. And from April, 450 Reading households, with 900 children, will be losing almost £4,000 a year, or £75 a week.
“It tells you everything you need to know about David Cameron and George Osborne that, while the banks are getting a tax cut this year, and the bankers are getting bonuses, their Government is making life harder for parents in the squeezed middle who are working and trying to do the right thing. As we’ve been saying, this financial crisis was created by the bankers, and is being paid for by women and children.”
//ENDS
Note for Editors Figures showing the number of couples with children benefitting from Working Tax Credit and working between 16 and 24 hours as of December 2011, and who will be affected by these changes, can be found in this parliamentary answer to Cathy Jamieson MP with a constituency breakdown: http://www.parliament.uk/deposits/depositedpapers/2012/DEP2012-0031.doc#