To ask if you were Prime Minister for a year, how would you combat the cost of living?

Income tax personal allowance set an national minimum wage.
Income tax thresholds to increase with inflation
End the erosion of personal allowance at £100,000
End green levies
North Sea Oil
Frack
Reduce tax on fuel
Sort out business rates on hospitality
Cut VAT
Paid for by welfare cuts and taxing profits in the country they are made (I'm looking at you Amazon)

I would increase the tax allowance threshold for a start and I would let people have tax free overtime and bonuses once you hit a threshold of 35 to 40 hours a week. So if you have to work more or have 2 jobs you keep it yourself. If people on benefits get free money the workers get the same. Fuck this shit where there worse off than us also as a pensioner paying into the system for 30 years or more they would get a lot more state benefits tax free not talking universal credit people just people who choose not to contribute when they can. I wouldn’t give people with anxiety or depression more than 2 years of benefits without them helping themselves. Cannot sustain this shit forever.

1.Rejoin the EU, and join the Eurozone.

2.Dismantle the NHS and rebuild more efficiently for the modern world. Focus more on prevention and emergencies. Make citizen mental health a priority.

3.Raise the PAYE tax starting point and introduce a decent rate flat tax with no loopholes.

4.Remove means tested benefits (they cost a fortune to administer) and introduce UBI, a smaller amount for children akin to child benefit, larger for adults.

5.Compulsory solar and underground rainwater tanks plumbed to toilets for all suitable new builds.

6.More emphasis on retrofitting insulation, solar, and rainwater tanks to all properties.

7.A high tax on new, plastic based clothing.

8.A high tax on UPFs, and their ingredients, such as cheap fats and emulsifiers.

9.A high tax on all single use plastics.

10. Increase taxes on petrol and diesel cars.

11. Investment into expansion of railways to increase capacity for both passengers and freight.

12. Investment into expansion of cycling and walking infrastructure, with an increase in safe places to park bikes.

13. Introduce higher taxes for shorthaul, domestic flights.

14. Introduce a wealth tax for assets, and remove the loophole where the very wealthy can place their money and assets in trusts to avoid inheritance tax.

15. Move parliament to a new, modern location and remove the adverserial nature of the debating chamber. Open the old buildings to the public, host citizen debates, etc.

16. Introduce elections for the higher house, open to UK citizens over 45, with elections every 10 years. Remove bishops.

17. Make solar compulsory on all suitable infrastructure, both in existance and new. Ban solar farms in open countryside.

18. Invest in tidal power.

19. Move to the most efficient and successful form of PR for all elections.

20. Change the house purchase system in England and Wales to one which ties everyone in much earlier.

That'll be enough for my first 12 months! 😆😆😆

I find it quite odd that people are suggesting things that are already policy, do they not actually know how their own country works?

Well it wouldn’t take a year, twenty would be a little more realistic. A big change thats needed is attitude change, at the moment the most common want seems to be paying £0 but receiving gold and not giving a shit about other people, you can’t have success with that. The British attitude to education also needs to change, being a bit thick and putting in no effort is the norm and celebrated, the whole “oh I can’t do maths” is really damaging.

Obviously being in the EU would help, but the UK rightfully wouldn’t have the same package as before.

Food prices don’t need to fall, food is already extremely cheap in the UK, further falls would either mean increased tax funded subsidies, or more farms going out of business, both of these things would be a negative on the economy.

Some services could be brought back into state control, however that requires people to vote in a party who can do that in a way to benefit everyone, rather than just voting for themselves rather than society as a whole. Imagine if we had nationalised water during Johnsons term for example, it would have led to an even worse outcome to whats currently going on with water companies.

Scrap all the political non-jobs that cost the country billions in wages and budgets for vanity projects: all mayors, almost all of the Welsh assembly and Scottish parliaments, most councillors and most MPs.

Some areas have literally 5 or 6 politicians 'representing' them, each given a budget. The locals have no idea who they're meant to complain to re the potholes but there's no money to spend on the potholes because it's all gone to ..

All these ridiculous politicians

Kick everyone who is under-occupied, or has the means to house themselves, straight out of their social housing. Ensure that people who actually need the housing, get the housing. We don't need to build more, we need to distribute better.
Ban owning a second home. Even for MPs. There's better ways to house MPs
If people are housed according to their needs, with rent they can afford, this will free up more money for bills and food.
That's where I'd start. But I'd struggle to get voted in with that policy 🤣

@SJone0101really? I’m 52 and have lived in the UK since I was 2 years old.
I've worked and paid tax for over 30 years but you think I shouldn’t access the NHS for free?
What utter nonsense.

How much tax did you pay to your home nation, before returning?

Reduce accessibility to benefits. Got anxiety or acne.. then you can still get a job.

Create a formula by which companies have to raise salaries for their employees in proportion to their profits thus capping the proportion of profits that can be paid to share holders or to executives as share packages. The biggest problem in our economy is wage stagnation. This has been exacerbated by UC and the old working tax credits whereby the tax payer has been subsidising multi billion companies by effectively allowing them to pay their workers below market salaries.

Migrants not in work would be sent back from whence they came. 👋

Sending money abroad is a necessity in order to keep unstable countries in check and to keep problems there from escalating further (think huge amount of displaced people because of famine or war for example...). . It sounds like an easy fix but there are no easy fixes really. It would have been done already otherwise?and I'm not talking about Trump...)

I agree but the government needs to seize empty properties which are unclaimed /unoccupied for over 5 years and bring them back into housing stock.

A few European countries already do this & then you won't need to build as much. The problem with building more houses is that they tend to be ££ executive homes that first time buyers can't afford. So you still have a housing crisis and foreign buyers snapping up ££ homes for investment.

There are ordinary homes which lie empty for years (10 in my area) where the owner has died/disappeared. After 5 years of being unclaimed, the council/housing associations should be able to refurbish and let out. The council housing list in my area is out of control and this would be a way of dealing with it.

Child maintenance - we should adopt the American system and penalise for non payment & take it directly out of wages. Men who father children shouldn't be allowed to get away with it because that's why our welfare bills are high. Lots of single parent families are reliant on UC & a significant number of those have absent fathers who don't pay maintenance. Don't cut welfare support but make the men pay so welfare support isn't needed as much.

Mr Speaker, I propose to :

1, Cut taxes for low & middle income earners by restoring the personal tax allowances in real terms to where they were before they were frozen in 2021. This would increase the basic allowance to £16k & the higher band to £63k.

2, Keep the 2 child benefit cap & cut benefits overall by the amount required to pay for the above tax cuts.

3, Drill, baby drill. Make the U.K. self sufficient in energy again by allowing fracking, exploiting North Sea oil & gas to the max, more onshore wind, building new nuclear power stations etc etc. Remove all taxes, levies etc from energy bills for domestic & industrial users.

4, Introduce a mansion tax of 2% per year on the value of all residential properties worth >£2m & 5% on all properties worth >£5m.

5, Increase the minimum wage by 10% this year & again next year.

6, Build, baby build. Introduce a massive house building programme, made possible by planning reform, abolition of green belts & uncapped volume based tax incentives for house builders.

Together, these measures would cut the cost of living significantly, put money in the pockets of ordinary working people, increase the supply of & cut the cost of housing and massively increase incentives to work instead of choosing to live on benefits. I commend this statement to the house.

I love the community solar idea, that would make a lot of sense.

Compulsory purchase all empty housing stock - no more homes as investments while people are homeless. Make the housing stock half protected social housing with HB rent rates with no right to buy, and the other half put on the market.

Use AI for good by automating enough that humans can work reduced hours on same pay. Those new free hours can be instead of paid for child care reducing costs for working parents.

Identify the sectors where AI cannot perform, encourage humans to train in those areas. Ensure human jobs are supplemented with a wage increase on a percentage basis in relation to the automation savings gained by a company i.e. if a company saves £500,000 through automation, at least £250,000 goes to boosting their human employees wages.

Community solar panel loans or grants, so that a street of housing can apply for solar panels and battery placed in the sunniest site, and can share the benefits and costs, rather than access to solar being per individual household and unaffordable cost. The right for that street to sell back any unused energy to the grid to either pay back loan quicker, and later to build a savings pot for maintenance of the equipment so that it is self-resourcing.

Renationalise the energy, public transport, and water sectors.
Change the law so that newspapers and other media can only be owned by people who are ordinarily resident in the UK for tax purposes. Install solar panels on every new building and subsidise fitting them to older buildings.
Scrap the nuclear deterrent and spend the money saved on building proper conventional defence forces.
Remove businesses like Crapita, PWC, and Palantir from public contracts.
Cut the Royal Family down to the same size as other European countries and it has to fund itself.
All politicians have to wear shirts like Formula One drivers showing the names and company logos of anyone who donates to them.
Disentangle from America as much as possible.
Change how foreign aid is spent. Aid is for people in war zones or who need food not for buying their governments new tanks.

I disagree. We need to rely on renewable energy and dare I say it nuclear power to offset all the reliance on the Middle East/ Russia and US. It’s only going to get worse as we go on. The renewable sector will have a bunch of jobs.

i would also look very seriously at AI and the impact to current and future employment. I would close the loop holes that make it possible for people like Richard Tice to avoid paying over £600’000 in corporation tax and others like Caffè Nero who pay no corporation tax in the U.K.

I would make it easier for small businesses to set up and even have pop up stores in the failing local high street to test their business model and have reduced business rates.

Labour are already investing in the NHS. But I would like to offer a lifestyle sector in the NHS for those willing to pay. There are other companies out there that offer for payment more detailed lifestyle blood tests, DEXA scans etc which the NHS could offer for payment.

That’s essentially the U.K. benefit system you’re describing, paid for by a minority of hard working net tax payers . They get the ‘supermarket sweep’ every day.

Give everyone an annual "supermarket sweep". To be paid for by the Royal Family, Nigel Farage and the estate of Margaret Thatcher.

Good question, I think perhaps, or maybe for certain courses? Depending on societal needs? It obviously used to be, though unfortunately not for my generation.

I'd forgive all student loans, I think this would actually end up giving the economy a boost as there would be more money to spend.

@BewareoftheLambs would you also stop all future student loans so universities are free?

Oh and, tiny thing, but to show willing I would scrap MP expenses except for basic travel and staying in simple hotels. No second home or energy bill paying or free dinners.

I would make it impossible for parents (mainly dads) not to pay a sensible level of maintenance towards their children, if they choose to have more etc this will not be taken into account as that's their choice. If they think things will be tight for them, tough luck. No fiddling woth self employed status etc either, all would have to pay a minimum regardless of income.

I would also work on making sure people working are the ones who get most support, unless properly temporarily between jobs. I would make sure benefits are only usable for certain things- food, energy bills, some for toys. Not sure how but definitely not for drugs, cigarettes, Sky or anything not essential. Unfortunately, we don't have the money to give out for those things now.

I would invest in renewable energy as it will be cost efficient in the long run.

I don't care about legal immigrants getting the same as everyone else if they work, it seems to me that they often contribute more to society than many of the 'Reform' voters types.

Id finally scrap HS2, or sell it or something, the money wasted on that project is ridiculous and continuing to be.

I'd forgive all student loans, I think this would actually end up giving the economy a boost as there would be more money to spend.

I would tighten the regulations on places like Temu and Shein.

Id sort out the stupid mess of tax at around 100k to 125k which makes peoole earn less.

Id lower inheritance tax to a smaller percentage that waa applicable to more estates and was less avoidable.

I would seperate the pension into two. A universal element as thats what people signed up for and peeled they are owed and then a means tested element that tapered very carefully so noone was penalised for saving small amounts.