Kids are lonely and unhappy, fat and bullied. Half don’t eat breakfast, a third of under-16s regularly drink, nearly four in ten 15-year-olds have had sex. About 4,000 or 8,500 children (depending on which spokesman you were listening to) were admitted to hospital with alcohol-related illness, some 630,000 prescriptions for antidepressants are handed out to children annually and 11.2 per cent of girls self-harm. http://http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/alice_miles/article2577790.ece

The Conservatives' less than sanguine view of childhood! Even David the optimist Cameron would be hard pressed to see much positive amongst this salvo of failings. The Conservative solution to this crisis of childhood-more outside play. As Alice Miles in The Times puts it The Conservatives’ childhood agenda has shrunk from revolution to roundabouts. Well almost, there is another Conservative response, which is to reward couples with children with extra tax credits. As Alice Miles argues Cameron’s conservatives have marshalled this proposal towards a caricatured problem of the government’s policy. As with most caricatures the version is less than entirely accurate.

It is not the case that couples who stay together are penalised and paid less in working tax credits than lone parents, an error parroted by people who are too well paid to know. Both families get the same. The Tories have been using a grossly misleading comparison, first cited by the Labour MP Frank Field, to back up their case. Mr Field has said that a single mother working 16 hours a week, after tax credits, gains a total income of £487 a week, but a two-parent family earning the minimum wage has to work 116 hours to gain the same income.

Unsurprisingly the Conservative’s inaccurate diagnosis of the policy has blunted the effectiveness of their remedy.

The only problem addressed by Mr Cameron’s policy is this: if you are a couple with children living together, but you lie about the fact, then you are up to £1,700 a year better off from the working tax credit, as one of you can claim a lone parent top-up. This encourages people to lie about their living arrangements when they claim the tax credit. So Mr Cameron wants to offer the extra £1,700 to couples with children who admit to living together. That’s it. At most it will stop some low-earning couples who live together but lie about it from lying about it in future.

See? It doesn’t make any sense as a “boost for marriage”. You don’t have to get married to be eligible. And if you are already married, well, you don’t need the encouragement then, do you? You’re just being given an extra £30 a week. Nice, but why? If you want to raise children out of poverty, as the Tories claim, then putting extra money into working tax credit for couples is about a third as effective as putting it into more child tax credit for all children, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

So why when there are more effective policy tools have the conservatives stuck to the guns-in a word symbolism. As Miles recognises the policy signifies that Tories believe in two-parent families. In short it might not be the most efficacious policy, but it does chime with the Tory faithful.