For example, the US version of the working families tax credit has turned out to be riddled with fraudulent claims. About 110 per cent of the families thought to be eligible actually claim the EITC. If so, he ought to make it his business to find out.The outcry about his pre-election notion of cutting child benefit for the over-16s should have warned him, though. It is certainly true that middle-class families gain unduly from child benefit because it is not means tested, but for the women who receive it, it is often the only money of their own they have. As the IFS showed in its analysis for The Independent yesterday, the proposed working families tax credit could be a straight transfer of money from women to men.Perhaps Mr Brown is simply unaware how much this matters in households, especially when money is tight, and how much difference it can make it can make to the welfare of children.

Even though women are the main earners in about two fifths of low-income households, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the tax credit will go to men in the other three-fifths. This information is currently held separately, by the Benefits Agency, and is not shared. There are clearly civil liberties worries about concentrating all this personal information in one department – and its information technology supplier, the American-owned corporation EDS.A tax credit based on household income would also require a return to joint taxation. The Chancellor has been known to dismiss this as an objection made only by middle-class women, but he will find that even if that is true, abandoning individual taxation for the sake of a tax credit for low earners would prove extremely unpopular with a key political constituency.

This is one of the perils of having an all-male team drawing up welfare- reform proposals. Besides, joint taxation certainly reduces the incentive for the second person in each household (usually the woman) to work by taxing their first pound of income, and would end up reducing labour supply.Another gender-related objection is that Family Credit is paid almost entirely to women. The Chancellor wants to get away from the notion of handouts. Just as important, Family Credit shows up as social security expenditure, and his own spending limits will not allow any expansion of the scheme.One catch is that tax is administered by employers, not the Benefits Agency. A family-based tax rebate will require employers to collect a lot of detail on the financial position of other members of the household, not just the person who works for them.