On the Child Benefit issue described, I’m afraid I don’t know enough about that particular area to have a considered view.

On another note, I was pleased to hear Stephen Timms raising a lot of these issues in the debate yesterday.

As you say, the issue you’re describing – the split of income – is relatively easy to fix (assuming both partners have a bank account, which is a slightly separate issue, but let’s ignore that for now).

The things I’m worried about are not. (Especially what amounts to yanking housing benefit into central government control, priming it for major rate reductions and tying receiving it to job-seeking – pernicious when people can only work part-time for disability or care reasons, or simply have a low-hour reasonably high-rate job)

At the moment inequality exists when, even if there is equal care ie the child spends half their time with each parent, the main carer , usually the mother as you say, receives all the money with not even an implied responsibility to help the other parent.

I think it’s particularly important to draw attention to the issue I describe, though, in part because it can seem minor. It’s one of those small changes that risks slipping through unnoticed, but payment of child tax credits to the main carer was a hard-won victory. And it’s a relatively small fault in Universal Credit that wouldn’t be enormously expensive to correct. But as (I hope) you can see above, it has the potential to be a pretty significant issue for many people, especially for some of the most vulnerable women in the country.