A way out of this Kafkaesque world

The regulator of premium-rate telephone services, ICSTIC, is investigating television companies which dangle prizes before viewers’ eyes and then make it extremely difficult to claim them. When it has finished with that, perhaps the watchdog might turn its attention to a similar scam: Gordon Brown’s tax credits. In last month’s Budget, the Chancellor held out the promise that 5.3 million people who will be left worse off by the abolition of the 10 pence starting rate for income tax will be able to offset some of their losses by claiming enhanced tax credits. What he didn’t say was that tax credits are so fiendishly complicated that millions fail to claim the money to which they are entitled. In the case of Child Tax Credits, for example, two million of the seven million who could claim failed to do so — a large number of them towards the bottom end of the income scale.