To want the Government to do more about the Cost of Living crisis?

Obviously the means-testing of state pension has to come alongside mandatory saving by employers and employees (and a similar mandatory scheme for the self-employed unless they can prove sufficient assets to provide for themselves in old age) with no opt out. There should be no option to choose not to save.

Other countries have made such reforms to make their pensions systems sustainable and capable of coping with demographic change. We need to do the same.

Then effectively pension credit and state pensions can be merged as a means tested benefit for those who cannot possibly provide for themselves.

The middle classes have been getting too big for their boots by bettering themselves financially in recent decades so now those in charge have to make things go back to normal with a larger distinction between those that need to keep all the assets and us lesser plebs.

You can be sure that actual millionaires aren’t sweating about energy bills, the price of food or losing BTL investment tax breaks.

The government will only do what the people at the actual top tell them to do. I remember Prince Philip giving the government a telling off after 2008 - that was quite telling.

Some “pay up”. But per my post what they are required to pay is also vastly insufficient to cover their liability for 50% of the cost of providing for the child in terms of housing, childcare and everything else they need. It is calculated as a percentage of the non-resident/ absent parent’s income (and reduced if they decide the have further children or move in with someone with existing children of their own!). That is nonsensical: the cost of raising the child remains the same. They created the child so should pay 50% of the cost. The resident parent doesn’t get to decide not to pay for the child’s clothes or house or food or childcare because they had a drop in income etc. so in effect they have to not only do most of the parenting and all of the career damage that entails but also subsidise the non-resident parent’s 50% of the costs.

The amounts that are required to be paid need to be far higher and based on evidenced cost, not salary. Like all other parents non-resident parents will just have to be poorer themselves and pay for the child’s needs first. Liability for non-payment needs to be made criminal, not civil. The money should be paid to the resident parent by HMRC and recouped from the non-resident parent with the same vigour as non-payment of tax with criminal charges, removal of any entitlement to state benefits at all for perpetrators until they clear the debt in full, and like other countries confiscate their passports and driving licences and register CCJs against their name etc for non-payment: a functional system with enforcement like in most developed countries.

Until such enforcement takes place there is absolutely no argument whatsoever to suggest including money that may/ may not be received (and the CMS often “write off” without the permission of the person it is owed to and receipt of which could cease at any point) in any calculation of income for tax or benefit purposes. Note also that any child maintenance that is received was already taxed before the non-resident parent paid it so trying to include this in taxable income for the other parent who administers it towards the child’s costs which they pay as the resident parent (it isn’t for them, but the children) would mean double taxation.

Your comments and those of @BigAnneseem to be an attempt to demonise single parents who are doing the work of two people already and are the responsible parent who has remained and actually fulfilling their responsibilities. It is quite disgusting to be attacking them, of all people.

As an economist I can tell you with no doubt at all that the problems with the UK economy are absolutely nothing to do with single parents. This is just nasty, spiteful rhetoric with no basis in reality, I’m afraid.

In short, you are barking up the wrong tree and this has pretty much zero impact on the issues with the UK economy, although the utter failure to provide robust enforcement does of course impact single parent families very negatively, who are already penalised significantly by the UK tax system, compounding existing disadvantage.

I suggest you find a new hobby horse.

You’re absolutely right. But all that will happen is the responsible among us will be making provision for ourselves early on, so the state pension can be taken from us and given to somebody who didn’t bother.

I’m in my mid 30s and have many friends who have no private pension and very patchy NI records. I don’t think it’s even occurred to them we are 15 years into working life now and they should really be thinking about these things.

This is what happens when you create a culture of endless safety nets.

Lowest pension in Europe I think

Economists have been pointing out the sheer impossibility of these systems being funded as they stand for over 30 years (despite the half-hearted reforms to public sector pensions in the meantime which are nowhere near sufficient). It’s a mathematical fact that the promises made at present cannot be paid, so they won’t be. It would be far better to be upfront with people about this now so they have time to plan, but of course our politicians don’t want to address unpopular truths so they deflect and try to find scapegoats or focus on irrelevancies in comparison like single mothers caring for children or disabled people or immigrants or whatever to deflect attention from this huge, grey, big earred animal sitting there in the corner.

Until the structure and funding models for healthcare and pensions in the UK are addressed (by far the two largest and most wasteful items of expenditure) and our tax system is reformed to remove the well-evidenced perverse incentives stifling any prospect of growth living standards will continue to decline because there will not be sufficient money to fund the productive investment in areas of the economy that will actually improve productivity and raise living standards: education, infrastructure, energy security etc.

These are basic economic realities but the electorate do not wish to hear it so keep voting for people who are pursuing policies which will accelerate the decline.

Tell me about it. For 16 years and 2 kids my ex paid the grand sum of £28

In the end the csa scrapped the claim when youngest DD was 21

The NRP should be forced to contribute a set minimum regardless of their own declared means. Far too many sit unemployed or work for cash in order to shirk their responsibilities to the children they had a part in creating.

And yes, this should go via HMRC with real sanctions for non-compliance.

Maybe they should get the NRP to pay directly to the state then to ensure what I said doesn't happen. Else you are plunging over a third of people into below the law poverty

My DH used to work for Ofwat and led a team that got that subsidy for South West. He has retired now but was livid when he saw it was now being scrapped.

Sorry this DOES need reform.
It looks like about 37% of parents do not pay up, which is awful, but it does mean that 63% DO pay up, so we have an extremely generous safety net in place for something that is more likely not to happen than to happen.
Posters on MN are always very eager to cull pensions and benefits to pensioners but are strangely reluctant to engage with anything that affects their age group.
The current system permits someone to claim full benefits for being a single parent then potentially a generous maintenance payment on top, untaxed.
Pensioners quite rightly pay tax on anything they get above the basic allowance amount - why can't everyone?
Completely agree about the public sector pensions though. That and the ability to retire a whole decade earlier than SP age.How they have managed to convince the country that their jobs are uniquely stressful and their pay is massively lower than private sector I will never know.

Ah because blokes can be bloody u reliable at paying it. So if they didn't cough up it would leave the parent with care below the amount needed to live on by law id they decided not to cough up

It used to be the case parent with the child could keep the first £15 but the rest was taken off any benefits

@Eridian - agree, the public sector and state pension funding situation is frightening.
https://www.if.org.uk/research-posts/can-the-uk-afford-to-pay-pensions/

I wish you were in charge to implement these!

It’s not puzzling at all.

In most countries absent/ non-resident parents are forced to pay 50% of the cost of housing and raising their child including childcare and if they do not there are severe penalties, similar to how HMRC treats tax evasion in the UK (as a criminal matter). All welfare benefits will be withdrawn for unpaid childcare support, it will be recorded as an unpaid debt with the equivalent of a CCJ and mean your credit rating is wrecked and you cannot rent a property or get a mortgage or loan or credit card, penalties include removing driving licences and passports and even prison sentences.

In the UK there is no enforcement like this so many people simply do not pay and, even if they do, it is nothing close to the 50% of the costs of raising a child for which they should be liable.

Therefore, it is clearly not possible to count unenforceable and often unreliable child maintenance as part of income when making monthly income calculations for the purposes of benefits as there is an extremely high prevalence pf these not being received consistently or at all.

Once a functional system with the above penalties and requiring absent parents/ non-resident parents to pay their true share of 50% of their children’s living costs is put in place perhaps it could be revisited, but not until such a system was in place.

Exactly why I said we should emulate the Australian state pension system. They used to have a system similar to ours but changed it decades ago due to exactly the same foreseeable and entirely foreseen demographic time bomb, rather than burying their heads in the sand about the known fact that a system like ours is not affordable with an ageing population. It’s basic mathematics.

Nothing will improve in the UK until many people accept the reality that they are not entitled to the largesse which they’ve come to expect and that it literally cannot be funded. See also public sector pension liabilities: if either public sector pensions or state pensions continue without signifiant reforms then it is not an exaggeration to say they will bankrupt the country.

There’s also a very good reason other countries aren’t copying the NHS model. We need to adopt a system similar to France or Germany which pound for pound have far superior outcomes.

And low and middle earners in the UK need to accept that of they want European levels of state services they are going to have to start paying significantly more tax. Our tax system has some of the very highest rates in the world, starting at relatively low levels of income comparatively, for our “higher earners” and while low and middle earners pay far, far less than those in comparator countries. The cliff edges need removing (e.g. scrap the removal of the personal allowance (that one is causing SO much damage to growth and tax revenue)/ childcare funding/ child benefit to make them all universal again (evidence shows this would more than pay for itself in a very short time) and lower the universal credit taper rate to incentivise work) and the unstable tax base needs redistributing to make it more stable, restore the social contract to maintain buy-in for public service funding, and restore the incentives for work and higher productivity. We need to remove anomalies in the taxation system that distort the economy and disincentivise work e.g. we should levy tax on a household unit basis like pretty much every other developed country. We urgently need to reform business rates.

We need to redistribute a significant amount of public spending from the old to the young and invest twice as much on education and also fund energy infrastructure, food and water security better. Growth is being strangled by our high energy costs. We need to have a proper industrial strategy investing in technology and key UK high productivity sectors to restore growth and ensure there are worthwhile career paths and restore our balance of payments and investment. All of this is blatantly obvious to anybody who wants rising living standards and growth because it is essential for rising productivity which is the only way to achieve that. Redistribution of an ever shrinking cake with no effort whatsoever to address why it is shrinking will simply accelerate the decline.

This is all very basic economics. The question is why our Governments refuse to do any of it and why they electorate moan constantly rather than demanding that their politicians do the above.

Cycle paths are really useful for cost of living though as cycling is a very cheap form of travel. The biggest blocker to its uptake is a lack of safe routes. The Active Travel share of the roads budget really is tiny.

If you really want to save money from the roads budget it would be much more effective to stop building new roads as they don’t ease congestion (redeploying National Highways to fill potholes might well be popular); ban pavement parking (as it cracks paving stones which need to be replaced) so that the London rules apply to the whole country or even tax the very heaviest SUVs as they cause greater wear and tear on the roads (as Sadiq Khah is considering in London). Or you could consider issuing more tickets from speed cameras so that all offences get a ticket.

Play parks (at least where I live) also get very little funding & rely on crowdfunders, but again they are really useful re cost of living as they are free. They are also essential for children living in older inner city areas or flats where there is very little space for outdoor play. Cutting essential services for children (eg Sure Start or Youth Clubs at the beginning of Austerity) has been tried before & proved to be a false economy.

What puzzles me is the fact that child maintenance payments are disregarded when claiming UC.

I live in a mix of social housing and real wealth. Either way, “luxury” treats like nails, hair and coffees/takeaways/bars/restaurants are always rammed.

Not many signs of a COL crisis here. 🤷‍♀️

If any previous government had half a brain then either:
A proportion of NI contributions could have been ring fenced and invested solely for state pensions.
Or:
The revenue from North Sea Oil could have been invested by the government in pensions funding. As Norway did. Instead it went into the general fund.

The country can’t afford to keep bailing people out. It’s that simple. Ideally, they would lower tax, so that workers etc kept more of their own income, but they keep borrowing to increase benefits. Makes no sense.

I'm not sure how old you are but when you retire there will be even more retired people as people live longer and longer. I suppose the only answer is for either the state pension to be means tested or there won't be a state pension and people will have to pay into a private pension and rely on that. Extending retirement age won't help as that will put pressure on the job market.

Difficult times ahead I think.

Indeed. And rent/ mortgage which the vast majority of pensioners do not (either their rent is subsidised or their mortgages paid off) and childcare, and commuting, and all of the other costs involving children, as well as more tax.

The bottom line is on average the current cohort of retirees are costing the state over £200k more in real terms per head (primarily in healthcare, social care and state pension welfare) than they paid in taxes over their lifetime. Young people are having to pick up the tab for this entitlement and those of working age now are forecast to pay £300k more in real-terms lifetime tax than they receive in state services and benefits, which is one of the primary reasons that living standards are dropping like a stone and all other services are collapsing.

15% of the population (the over 65s) are consuming almost 50% of public spending. This is not sustainable and they’ve paid nowhere near enough to fund their demands. If they care at all about this country having a prosperous future then they’d stop deflecting blame and claiming young people are “lazy” (welfare benefits to those of working age have been relatively constant as a percentage of GDP over the last 50 years) and the very large numbers of them who are well off would scale down their unnecessary demands on the state.

Unfortunately, there seems to be little prospect of this happening due to the supremely entitled attitude of the proportion of that cohort who behave like this who think it’s outrageous to suggest they shouldn’t receive huge welfare payments that they do not require. The way many of them contort themselves grasping for a way to try to justify it and their self-righteous indignation at any suggestion they should make any sacrifice at all would be extremely amusing if it wasn’t one of the main contributors to the UK’s rapid decline.

The UK emulating Australia’s pensions system, with far higher and mandatory (not opt out) contributions to personal pensions and means-testing the state pension would be a good start!

Don’t be silly. Other than debt, most of their funding comes from government grants. Did you really not know this or are you being disingenuous? In effect it is just another outsourced/ semi-privatised service with all of the negative effects remaining on the taxpayer and now some private debt holders also making a profit.