Dr Dan Boucher: Under this Government, we're one of the most unfriendly countries to single earner couples in Europe

Dr Dan Boucher is Director of Parliamentary Affairs for the charity CARE

After this year’s budget there was a bit of a backlash from stay at home mums (and dads) because of the lack of support afforded one-earner families. The proposal for child care tax breaks for all families apart from one-earners did not go down so well with stay at home parents.  However, George Osborne has since promised that an announcement on the long-awaited transferable allowance policy will be forthcoming in this year’s Autumn Statement, ahead of the 2014 Finance Bill.  This policy will directly benefit one-earner married families and cannot come too soon. Here are just some of the reasons why:

Is it right that two, two-parent families, each with two children and on identical household incomes should be taxed radically differently because of the choices the parents make about how that income is raised?

CARE’s research shows that a one-earner family on mean average wage (as defined by the OECD, 2011), £34,286, will pay £8,159 in tax. A comparable two-earner couple, by contrast, will not pay nearly as much. For example, if one member of the couple is on £20,572 (£395 per week) and the other is on £13,714 (£263 per week), then together they will pay £5,544.87 in tax. The simple truth is that one household with the same number of adults and children as the other will pay £2,1614.13 more in tax just because one parent stays at home to look after the children! Is that right?

Moving to one-earner families on £60k, the income level where child benefit is lost, the difficulties become even starker. A one-earner couple with two children on an income of £60,000 will pay £13,950 in tax. A comparable two child, two-earner couple family, each earning £30,000, meanwhile, will pay £8,768. After the Higher Income Child Benefit Charge is added, the one-earner couple's tax bill rises to £15,667. This is £6,899 more than that of the two-earner couple. Put another way, a one-earner family with two children and on an income of £60,000 already pays 59% more tax than a comparable two-earner couple, each earning £30,000. With the introduction of the HICBC, the one-earner couple will pay 79 per cent more tax.

Dan Boucher: A lesson from Wales. Labour has Co-op candidates. We should have Mutual ones.

Dan Boucher was the Welsh Conservative Candidate in Swansea East in 2011, moving the Party forward from fourth to second place. His book out this week "The Big Society in a Small Country: Wales, social capital, mutualism and self-help". The foreword is written by Brian Griffiths, Lord Griffths of Fforestfach, the Head of Mrs Thatcher’s Policy Unit from 1985 till 1990.

In 2011 I stood as the Welsh Conservative candidate in Swansea East and I was very proud of our manifesto commitment to encourage "everyone who wishes to leave their community a better place than when they found it, by sponsoring volunteering and a Welsh Big Society".

Although some have suggested that the Big Society is a quintessentially English, Tory idea, with nothing to offer Wales, The Big Society in a Small Country advances a very different thesis. The last eighty years may have been defined by Labour’s ascendency, with its commitment to the Big State, but we must not fall into the trap of settling for a very narrow view of history.

If we really want to understand Wales we must take a must longer view, and when we do so we are confronted with the characterisation of Wales as a ‘community of communities’ - a nation that is encountered primarily from the bottom-up rather than from the top down, and which actually places far more emphasis on itself as a nation than on the state, which is very much of secondary importance.

Given this ‘community of communities’ tradition, why is it that Wales is now portrayed as a nation in love with Big State Labour and Nye Bevan? To answer this question we have to go back to the inter-war period depression. Historians of the period make it plain that the level of suffering in Wales at this time was unparalleled in the UK. People became malnourished, with all its attendant problems, and a staggering 430,000 people left Wales. In this context the old decentralised solutions seemed too modest. This extraordinary problems seemed to call for an extraordinary solution and the Labour Party, which had not initially been a disciple of the Big State, became a convert and so too did many of the people of Wales.

The sad implications of that decision are still very evident today. The public sector in Wales is far bigger than the public sector in England. According to some estimates it is deemed to be as much as 70% of GDP. There is a very considerable shortfall between tax receipts and public expenditure. In this context, even the Labour Party has come out and said Wales badly needs a bigger private sector.