Gender pay gap and child benefit

Tim W has ripped into another article on the gender pay gap and reminds us that the real gap is between working mothers (tend to work shorter hours and miss a few years etc) and everybody else.

This is easily fixed. Take all Child Benefit, Child Trust Fund and Child Tax Credits and roll it into an flat-rate, non-means tested, non-taxable Child Benefit of £35-ish per week (or whatever is roughly fiscally neutral), payable directly to the mother (unless she's not looking after them, of course). As a further tweak, we could limit this to (say) the first three children in each family.

An average working Mum with two kids would thus get an extra £3,500 tax-free per year, which is equivalent to an extra gross salary of £5,000, which in turn would make her net income much the same as everybody else's.

As things stand, the savagely means-tested Child Tax Credits system discourages mothers from working and/or cohabiting, which is another reason for doing this.