“I have breast cancer, relied on my child benefit to pay for after school childcare while I go to my pre-op assessment, which I now can’t attend so I have to delay,” she wrote. “If the delay means I require a mastectomy because of YOUR mess up, who is liable?”
With child benefits, parents can claim £25.60 per week for one child and £16.95 for each additional child.
The two-child benefit cap, introduced in 2017, means that child tax credit and universal credit is restricted to the first two children in most households. It means that families claiming benefits who have a third or subsequent child after April 2017 are denied more than £3,000 a year per extra child compared with families whose kids were born sooner.
Around 1.5 million children live in families whose benefits are reduced by the two-child limit, which has widely been called to be scrapped.
HMRC said it was “sorry” for the delay to payments, and that it understood “the concern and difficulty this may have caused”.
A HMRC spokesman added in a statement: “We have now fixed the problem and are putting measures in place to prevent this from happening again.
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“Affected customers will now receive their payments on Wednesday morning. Anyone who has incurred a direct financial loss because of the delayed payment can apply for redress by completing our online complaints form.”
It added that payments scheduled for Tuesday (4 June) would be made on time.
Journalist Kevin Maguire explained that while the glitch at HMRC should be criticised, the “bigger picture” is how difficult the cost of living crisis has made life for families.
“The screw-up is unacceptable and that incompetence and ineptitude is hugely damaging, but the bigger picture is the number of people who live [hand] to mouth, paycheque to paycheque, payment to payment, in the world’s sixth biggest economy,” he said on Good Morning Britain.
“They’re [families] in incredible hardship, and the blight that has on their lives and the lives of their children, that’s what it highlights.”
The Children’s Prosperity Plan charity added: “The recent failure in HMRC’s system that delayed child benefit payments for nearly half a million families is a stark indication that our current welfare infrastructure is not up to the task.
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“This disruption not only caused immediate financial hardship but also exposed the vulnerabilities in our support systems.
“It’s essential that we develop a more reliable and responsive welfare system to ensure that no family has to face unnecessary delays in receiving the support they crucially depend on. We cannot allow technical failures to compromise the wellbeing of our children and families.”
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