Sandra Dunham, 32, is reluctantly returning to work in January after taking maternity leave to have baby Alfie, aged 6 months.

She is grateful for a slight increase in child benefit, which will give her and her husband Kevin, 33, an extra £62 a year. With cuts in the basic tax allowance, she will also receive £239 more a year but says it is not enough to allow her to be a stay-at-home mother.

Her job as an asbestos surveyor pays £28,000 and her husband is a carpenter earning £25,000. As well as a mortgage of £250,000 on their family home, the couple have thousands of pounds of debt and Sandra has reduced her pension payments in order to afford day-to-day expenses.

“I am grateful that Alistair Darling is acknowledging the need to help out families, but with the cost of childcare, credit card debts from work we’ve done on the house, even the price of a big supermarket shop, I won’t feel much better off. There will be a lot of young families who are going to struggle, particularly if the country is borrowing a huge amount of money. How are we going to pay it back?”

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