Legal Property and Financial Relations in the Functioning Family

Abstract

There still remain some areas of financial or property relationship in which not only husband and wife but minor children also are regarded as a unit, headed as a matter of law by the husband and father. The principal areas are:

• (i) Maintenance. The husband’s common law duty to maintain his wife and minor children, which survived the introduction in 1870 of a partial system of separate property between husband and wife, and the more thoroughgoing separation introduced in 1882 which is still operative.¹

• (ii) Taxation. For purposes of income tax, capital gains tax, capital transfer tax, and the proposed wealth tax husband and wife are treated as one and the legislation spells out that the husband is that one.² The incorporation of the income and property of minor children into the unit for tax purposes is less complete, and has varied in recent years on political grounds.

• (iii) Social security and welfare: including National Health Insurance, retirement benefit and unemployment insurance; supplementary benefit and family income supplement. Exceptionally, under the Family Allowances Act 1965 and the Child Benefit Act 1975³ family allowances⁴ and child benefit which will replace them, are normally sent by post to the mother, reaching her on Tuesday. When Government proposals for a tax credit system were published in 1972,⁵ the representations made about the importance of a woman with young children receiving at least such minimum amounts direct and in the middle of the week resulted in a government assurance early in 1973 that family allowances would not be absorbed into the combined tax and social security scheme, but would continue to be paid direct to the mother without deduction.⁶