To want a budget which puts young people and families first

No sweetheart, if is not ridiculous at all. A healthy society should place the well-being of children at its heart, as they are our future. That includes easing access to property to their parents to ensure they have a stable upbringing.

Sorry about your condition, but your claim about young couples with children having it easier than childless singletons defies the most basic arithmetic calculations. More often than not, one of the wages will be dedicated entirely to pay for the nursery, and you still have to feed and dress the little one/s.

If by 'They', you mean people paying tax in Scotland, then yes. We pay a higher rate of tax. The process of administering/assessing free prescriptions costs quite a lot (I can't remember how much), it's almost more cost effective to have our prescriptions for free. My friend was involved in the evaluation of the policy, and the cost saving/spend was a fairly small margin.

I do think, overall, we should be looking at how we can make life a little easier for young people (and what do we class as 'young' - given more older students, etc.), but it's not fair to think that everyone over 50 is doing it for their kids. I couldn't have kids, and like a PP, paid a LOT in fertility/IVF treatments. That's fine, I am not complaining, as needed to know that we'd tried.

However, I am far from wealthy. I earn a reasonable salary, but it has a maximum of around £55k, in a University. So, I don't get bonuses, big pay rises, etc. I am now on my own, and won't get my employment pension until I'm 68. I will have my mortgage paid off by then, but on a modest 2 bed apartment. I KNOW I am much better off than many people, but thinking we're all well off, and 'doing it for the kids' really isn't accurate.

I presume the op has a young family which is why they are suggesting a budget that suits them but it needs to be fair for everyone

I think raising the tax free threshold for everyone would be a good idea that would reduce the need for top up benefits. I don't think it's the same with UC but I knew people on tax credits who would only work 16 hours a week as they would lose their benefit so would be no better off working more hours

Either free prescriptions for everyone or a lower flat rate for everyone if on multiple prescriptions you can get a prepayment that makes it cheaper

In an ideal world means testing on things like wfp but I think it's to expensive to implement

I don't know much about it as it's not likely to affect me as i don't have a second home /share to sell but changes to capital gains tax

Saying it’s harder now for young people doesn’t mean it was easy, it’s just harder now.

Well if this site is anything to go by, statistically speaking, a majority.

Are there many youngsters using this site?
Why on earth would you extrapolate MNs to real life, people don’t open doors after 6pm here!

Don’t They pay more tax though?

personally I agree with the free prescription one. I don’t get why they are free after 60 when the retirement age is 66 currently. If you are on sickness related benefits then fair enough but why is someone earning £50k a year getting free prescriptions?

I'm not sure many of us would disagree that young people have been shafted. I can certainly see that my children and their partners are having a tough time, and have little choice about mums working etc.

But I'm thoroughly sick of the assumption that we had it easy. We did not. We just had a different set of problems.

We DID work hard. We DID struggle. We just had a whole load of other shit to deal with.

Well if this site is anything to go by, statistically speaking, a majority.

Yep I agree. Young people have been absolutely shafted. I'm so fucking bored of hearing older people saying it was harder in their day. And actually I'm 48 years old myself.
Time to redress the balance.

How many young people are doing 5 long shifts a week, plus an overtime shift at the weekend, with the other adult working unsociable hours around their DH because there's no childcare available... free or otherwise.

Just to pay the mortgage and utilities.

Because that's what we did in the 80s and 90s.

I am probably quite a lot closer to 50 than the op and I absolutely agree with the basic principle. Pandering to largely older Brexity, Tory-types ( and that is a demographic fact) has led this country to the brink. It’s time to prioritise other demographics - that doesn’t mean shafting older people but it does making them less front and centre in policy making - so re-designing triple lock, removing the no NI exemption for pensioners etc.
By older people I mean c67 plus - not people of working age.

Err that was a joke…

I was a teen during the early nineties recession. People went into negative equality with their houses. There was mass redundancies - three million unemployed. Graduate and sSchool leaver jobs disappeared overnight. It was a scary time and times were tough.

Life hasn’t always been easy.

Yes of course those things benefit the children but it would be very naive to think that no-one ever wastes their benefits on things which do not benefit their children.

I’ll answer that for you

“Real wages grew by an average of 33% each decade from 1970 to 2007; but they are now back at the level they were at in 2005, according to data from the Office for National Statistics, ONS (Times, 2023).
Indeed, the Resolution Foundation calculates that after 15 years of stagnation, average earnings are £230 below the trend before the global financial crisis of 2007-09 (BBC, 2023).”

Salaries are higher than the past.

Why wouldn’t they be? Have they kept up with inflation though?

Plus house prices vs salary ratio is also higher. 5% of a big mortgage is not that different to 15% of a smaller amount.

Salaries are higher than the past.

No but if some of the mostly younger people who couldn't be arsed to vote got off their backsides and did so, then we could have had a different outcome

@daliesque why do you think most didn’t vote & the outcome would have been different?

The fact is younger generations today are more pampered, have more luxury and more opportunities than any generation before them.

What opportunities? To get on the housing ladder? To build equity if one is on the housing ladder? To have access to a great pension scheme? Salaries that grow in line with inflation or at least don’t stagnant? Or do you mean opportunities like watching lots of different TV streaming services?

The same as every single generation before them has had to deal with choices previous generations made?! I’m so sick of this victim narrative. Yes, some things are harder for young people than previous generations, and some things are a hell of a lot easier. The fact is younger generations today are more pampered, have more luxury and more opportunities than any generation before them.

Scarily, I think you are right @taxguru .
I'm so glad I'm old.

Build the infrastructure, train the tradesmen. Britain built millions of houses in the past it can do so again.

It will take a while, but it took decades to get into this mess. You wouldn't expect to be able to fix it with one budget.

You'd think so, but they seem incapable of even realising that there's a problem, let alone finding a solution. They're too busy congratulating themselves for getting 10% of list price of, say, the stationery catalogue, when everyone else gets 50% off!

We can't "build millions of homes". There isn't the infrastructure, there aren't the tradesmen. It's too simplistic.

Far better would be to bring existing homes back into residential use by targeting empty properties, attacking second home, holiday home and holiday let owners, attacking foreign investors who have homes that have been empty since the day they were built, incentivising conversion of derelict retail and industrial properties, do something about all the empty floors above High Street shops, etc etc. Existing properties already have the infrastructure so it should be a quick and easy process to bring them back into use - just needs the political will.