Criticism
The Working Tax Credit scheme has been subject to much criticism, particularly in the wake of the difficulties surrounding its implementation. Criticism has focused on the way that credits are calculated on an annual basis, leading to overpayment, followed by large demands for repayment, which those on low income may find difficult to meet. David Harker, chief executive of Citizens Advice commented "This is an untenable system. An annualised system doesn't provide the stability of income required by low income families". In addition, the scheme has been accused of being over complicated and difficult for claimants to understand, and of underestimating the extent to which the incomes of low-earners can fluctuate over a year, especially a problem for self-employed people whose income may fall below the minimum wage (at which point Working Tax Credit is disallowed).
The Labour Party claim that the tax credit system has proven to effectively tackle child-poverty, with, by their previous government's definitions, 2 million children lifted out of absolute poverty and almost 1 million out of relative poverty by 2007. However, the current Coalition government is seeking to redefine poverty so as to highlight "children living in workless households or those with drug-dependent parents", despite their tax credit incomes, remaining in poverty. Even with the previous definition, this government cites that the existing tax credits system failed to "meet its statutory target to halve the problem by 2010 - despite the huge amount of taxpayers’ money spent on tackling it."
Read more about this topic: Working Tax Credit
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)