Income criteria for child benefit will remain for families with three or more children, the government told parliament’s labour and social insurance committee on Tuesday, drawing criticism from the committee’s chairman, AKEL’s Giorgos Koukoumas. DIKO, which supports the government, welcomed the bill but said it did not go far enough.
DIKO parliament member Andreas Apostolou said the Deputy Ministry of Social Welfare had on Tuesday officially adopted his party’s position that Cypriot families returning to the island should be able to apply for child benefit from their first day back, and was preparing a plan. Asked whether the change could apply only to Cypriot citizens and not to other Europeans, he said it could, as the deputy ministry had found a way to do so.
AKEL criticism
Koukoumas said after the meeting that the government had made clear it would not listen to parliament, families with three or more children, single parents, trade unions or the Commissioner for Children’s Rights. It would not accept any of their main suggestions for improving its child benefit bill, he said, including an automatic mechanism to adjust the income scales each year in line with the cost of living.
Some improvements had been made, he said, but the bill remained “far from the needs of the modern family”. It raises the benefit for only two categories, he said: by 60 euros a year, or five euros a month per child, and, for the second scale, by 27 euros a year, less than 2.5 euros a month per child. The increases did not cover even half of the rise in the cost of basic goods and living over the past year, he added.
Koukoumas said the bill excluded single-parent families from any improvements, despite a pre-election pledge by President Nikos Christodoulides to improve benefits for single parents. Christodoulides’s pledges to scrap income and asset criteria for families with three or more children were also not being implemented, not even for dependent students, he said.
He compared Cyprus with other European countries. In Germany, child benefit is 255 euros a month per child with no income criteria, in Luxembourg it starts at 300 euros per child and in Poland it is 185 euros a month per child, he said, while in Cyprus the maximum is 49 euros, which would probably rise to 53 or 54 euros. Cyprus spends less than 1 per cent of its GDP on families and children, less than half the European average, and 277 euros per person on family benefits against an average of 830 euros, about a third, he said.
Budget surpluses should not be kept for tax breaks for big business or for Christodoulides to hand out before the election, Koukoumas said, but should be returned, at least in part, to a society under dramatic pressure.
DIKO calls for more support
Apostolou said child benefit was “the most targeted policy of the state to support families”, and that supporting families was a national duty.
He said that following initiatives by his party, the bill extended support to families and brought several thousand more into both child benefit and the nursery allowance. But it was not enough, he said, and DIKO was proposing a bigger budget to bring in more families, with income criteria rising further as family size increases.
For families with four or more children, Apostolou said, income criteria should be scrapped or raised to a much higher level, and students should be counted in the number of children for the benefit.
As a party supporting the government, DIKO had an increased responsibility to achieve more for Cypriot families and young couples, he said, and its proposals to the government on the 2027 budget included measures to extend the bill further.
