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A worryingly large number of families in Birkenhead have sought my help in recent years having had their budgets wrecked by a sudden problem with their tax credit or Child Benefit claim.

Those families have often had to rely on food banks as a direct result of the time taken to transfer from one type of tax credit claim to another, as well as the loss of birth certificates when new Child Benefit claims are being processed.

I have therefore been campaigning for HMRC to put right those parts of the system that bring such misery into play.

The department responded brilliantly to my campaign last week.

A new telephone service will soon be introduced by which tax credit claimants are able to convert single claims into joint claims.

This will remove the need for them to request a new claim pack and wait for it to be processed, thereby cutting waiting times from eight weeks to two.

In addition, an iForm will be introduced for families applying for Child Benefit, thus removing the need for families to post HMRC their children’s birth certificates and other original documents which too often get lost and delay the claims by several months.

Both services will be introduced as pilots by the end of December, with full rollout to follow in early 2017.

By initiating these major improvements, HMRC will cut several weeks, if not months, off the length of time many thousands of families need to wait for their money to arrive.

This will immediately restrict two of the main supply routes to the country’s food banks.

There is no surgery this Friday, but there will be one the following Friday, November 4 and the one after that November 11.