What goes around comes around ...

Suggestion #6 of my Bow Group Report of July 2006 was to increase Child Benefit for under-5's to £36 per week.

The first key proposal in Iain Duncan Smith MP's policy group's report of October 2007 was to increase Child Benefit for under-3's to £56 per week.

Frank Field MP has now gone even further and suggests in today's Telegraph that as a starter for five (scroll about halfway down), parents be paid a quarter of a child's overall Child Benefit and Child Tax Credit in the first two years of the child's life, (claiming less later on) to enable Mum to stay at home while the child is very young.

He appears to have put his foot in it here: he reckons that the total Child Benefit plus Child Tax Credit for each child is £100,000.

Actually it's less than a third of that: total Child Benefit £10 bn, total Child & Working Tax Credits £13.5 bn in 2006-07 per HMRC Annual Report (in my 'stat's and stuff' section), divided by 13 million children aged 0 - 17 (from 'population pyramid') = £1,800 per child per annum x 17 years = £31,000 per child overall.