DAVID CAMERON and George Osborne have been accused of "leading a charge" against the traditional family in an attack by the leader of the UK Independence Party (Ukip).

Nigel Farage claimed the Government viewed households where one parent stayed at home to look after children as an "economic enemy".

The comments came after the Chancellor said stay-at-home parents had made a "lifestyle choice" as he explained why they would not qualify for a new scheme which will help two-earner households with an income of up to £300,000 meet childcare costs.

The childcare vouchers, available to parents earning up to £150,000 each, will offer support from 2015 to families where both parents work as part of a £1 billion-a-year package of Government help with nursery bills. But writing on a newspaper website, Mr Farage said: "Recent nonsensical Government policy suggests the real economic enemy to the coalition isn't the failure to empower small and medium-sized businesses, but seems to be the concept of the traditional family, where one parent goes out to work while the other brings up the children.

"To have a Conservative Government leading a charge against marriage and the family and using taxes to act as their vanguard in this work seems to me to be betraying the very foundations of our society.

"It will be expensive, destructive and at best a fiscal sop to the clamour from the modernist ideologues that infest Westminster."

Mr Osborme has indicated measures to recognise marriage through the tax system can be expected in his Autumn Statement later this year.