Taxman

A moth I unearthed

I have had the dubious honour of being preached at by Gordon Brown. This was some years ago now in a church in Brighton and time has mellowed the memory. I have no idea what he spoke about. I can't even remember if he was Prime Minister or only Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time. My only vivid memory is of him leaving with his cortege immediately after he spoke, well before the end of the service, which struck me as a little rude as he hadn't mentioned that he would disappear early. But I suppose when you are Very Important you get to do things like that. He probably had some financial crisis to sort out I suppose.

The sweetcorn are hitting the roof

One of the things he did whilst in power was to introduce Working Tax Credits which are somehow still in place today, just about. They are like a benefit for low-income working people, but administered by the tax office not by Social Security. I bet HMRC loved that: “You mean we have to give them money, not take it away?!”

Anyway, when I plunged from my higher-tax-bracket income in London to earning a pittance as a market gardener in Wales, I became eligible. And so I've been claiming it since 2014, except when over-wintering at Pilsdon (because volunteers do not count as working people, apparently.) It gave me an extra £50-ish a week which has been very helpful. However this spring they did not start paying it again, instead making me provide them a full audit of my financial and business affairs to assess whether I was in fact eligible. And, they decided, I am not.

On what basis? On me earning too little.

I would not like to meet this slug on a dark night

Strange as it may seem, if you don't earn enough you don't get the extra help. Equally of course, if I earned a lot I would also not be eligible. What the earning threshold is that I am stubbornly below, they don't say. I suspect it's a clever ruse of George Osborne, our current Chancellor of the Exchequer, to stop paying it altogether to anyone.

So I asked them to reconsider, and they came to the same decision. My self-employment is not “commercial” apparently. They don't care that I have reduced my living costs to remain within the little I do earn (not counting the tax credits). Now I've appealed to an independent tribunal on the grounds that market gardens do not create much profit and take a lot of hard work, and this should be taken into account. We'll see what they decide.

Harvesting the lettuce for my salad bag deliveries