Dr. Tom McDonnell:

I will start on child benefit, although the two issues are linked. It is a broader point that the goal of the report was to design a system that would, in theory at least, eliminate deprivation. The focus of the report was adequacy. With respect to child benefit, we came to the view that child poverty was far beyond an acceptable level - it affects close to one in five children - and we felt one of the areas in which significant reform was needed was the redesign of the tax and welfare system to attempt to eliminate deprivation rates for children. The first decision was that child benefit should not be taxed, nor should it be reduced from its current level. It falls into the category of the type of payment for people of working age, children and pensioners that should be benchmarked and ultimately indexed. On top of that there should be an income-related, tapered, additional support. That additional support should be paid for every child in a household and alongside that there would be a tapered working-age support, which would be an amalgamation of the working family payment and jobseekers allowance, which, again, would be benchmarked and indexed and would taper down as a recipient's income increases. This would be an enhanced benefit. One of the criticisms of the commission was that it only focused on increasing taxes and so forth. Root-and-branch reform of the welfare system did not get as much attention.