Jeremy Hunt’s Budget shows why mothers like me feel abandoned by the Tories

In his last Budget before a general election, Hunt made an aggressive play for the votes of lower and middle income families. And as a working mother of two feeling the pinch – with rising housing costs, high childcare fees and inflation-busting food and energy prices – he certainly got me listening, writes Hannah Fearn – but it’s not enough

The chancellor announced a rise in the threshold for repayment of child benefit from £50,000 to £60,000 a year (Getty Images)

No wonder Labour is silent on policy right now. The longer Keir Starmer keeps quiet on his forthcoming manifesto promises, the more the Conservatives creep into their territory and start bringing their ideas into policy. In his last Budget before a general election, Jeremy Hunt was making an aggressive play for the votes of lower and middle-income families. And as a working mother of two feeling the pinch – with rising housing costs, high childcare fees and inflation-busting food and energy prices – he certainly got me listening.

Many of the pledges the chancellor made, including a 2 per cent cut in National Insurance, had been so widely trailed that nobody was expecting a rabbit-out-of-the-hat moment. But the closest we got was on one very important measure: a rise in the threshold for repayment of child benefit from £50,000 to £60,000 a year.

From April, this means that families will be able to claim some form of child benefit until one parent’s salary hits £80,000. As a result more than 500,000 families with young children – including mine – will retain more than £1,300 a year. That makes a huge difference to disposable income at a time of rapid inflation.

I’ve always believed, and still do, that child benefit should be universal – a payment attached to the child, not to the circumstances of the parent – but the time to have that debate is at the arrival of a new government. For now, this will have to do, and it’s very welcome.

Hunt has also promised to remove the unfair advantage that allows a family on two smaller salaries to retain more of their child benefit than a single-income household on a higher one from 2026. That’s one promise that is so complex to administer it has been shunted down onto the “after the election” pile. In other words, it won’t happen at all.

Combined with the cut to national insurance, these measures should leave families in the mid-life juggle feeling better off. The problem for Hunt, and for his party as we head to the polls later this year, is that it won’t touch the surface of how abandoned by the government parents feel.

The national insurance cut is paid for by further cuts to public sector spending. Where those could come from is anyone’s guess. There is no meat, fat or sinew left on the bone – and voters have noticed. Polls consistently show that, even despite the cost of living crisis, more are worried about the quality of public services than they are about small tax savings.

For families with children, the balance is tipped even further in favour of spending on services. The years spent caring for infants and children put you in much closer and more frequent contact with the public sector, whether that’s making doctor’s appointments for vaccinations or trips to A&E for childhood maladies that escalate, making use of local libraries and toddler groups or the daily school run and chat with your child’s class teacher. It’s not just the bins going unemptied that you notice: the disintegration of the public sector, the lack of support for every family from the structure of the state, is impossible to ignore. It cannot go on.

Meanwhile, the party’s pledges on childcare, which stole Labour’s thunder exactly a year ago at the 2023 spring Budget, have proved hollow. Today, Hunt promised a two-year indexing mechanism to ensure funding rates for nursery providers keep pace with inflation and wage growth. That’s much needed but in itself won’t solve the childcare crisis, which is a much larger problem. If the funding doesn’t match the upfront cost of delivering subsidised hours for providers in many areas of the country – as is currently the case – many will continue to opt out of the scheme providing supported hours for children over the age of nine months.

There is also a huge staff shortage that cannot be filled. Many nurseries have waiting lists twice as large as their intake, and even more are closing their doors because they can’t make the sums add up. Demand far outstrips supply, and with the government’s offer that demand is only rising. Worse, because nurseries in wealthy areas are propping up subsidised hours by charging more to parents taking up full-time hours, it’s the nurseries in the poorest towns and cities that are more likely to close. For many families this supposed childcare handout has changed very little for parents of young children, some of whom are now getting into consumer debt just to be able to stay in work.

My youngest daughter recently turned three. She attends nursery three days a week, that’s 30 government-funded hours. But her place still costs us more than £350 a month due to the rise in associated costs, such as food and school holiday care. It’s less than it used to be, yes, but it certainly isn’t “free”.

So will this Budget convince me that the Conservatives now have the best interests of struggling, juggling families at the heart of their policy-making? The chancellor tried his best, but sorry, that’s a no.