Andy Burnham should put the damn social care tax on landlords and big occupational pensions

The only thing I’m not sure about is how you would split it in marriages. My parents held everything jointly so I guess it would just hold over until my mum died? Or a value would be attributed when dad died and then a new value when mum died and then you add them up?

My parents paid privately for me to have my tonsils out in the 60s, because of the waiting list on the NHS, when I was off school two weeks out of three with constant tonsillitis and ear infections. It wasn’t that they could easily afford it either!

I think a 10% flat charge is an excellent idea. My parents have done a lot to ensure minimal IHT will be paid because they don’t want to see so much go in tax, when they think I will spend it better than the government (!) so basically because the tax is high, the govt will get either nothing or very little (because it’s all been handed over to me).
If the tax was 10% we wouldn’t have done anything to avoid paying it so the govt would have got around 200,000 from us instead.

Landlords already pay tax as do people with pension income over £12570

I’m not posting my tax return. You can believe (or not) what you like.
We’re selling up.

I wonder how much of that was for rent?

If there was more social housing, the amount of benefits paid to cover rent would be much lower. My MIL gets £125pw in housing benefit for the rent on her council house. Her NDN rents an identical house, bought under RTB but now owned by a private landlord, and pays £1,400 a month. She's carer for a severely disabled child, so can't work, and the state is effectively paying the landlord's BTL mortgage.

Another big part of the story is people of working age, not working. There was a thread the other day that was deleted about a couple, neither working, planning on having a child! Apparently they were both too sick to work. But not too sick to bring a child into this world! Eh?!

That’s certainly part of the story.

Yes, things were very different. And yes to other tax allowances too. Such as married "man's" allowance (could have been changed to a couple's allowance rather than scrapped), and also MIRAS tax relief on mortgage interest payments which was also scrapped.

It's what I mean about not only comparing "headline" rates of income tax between now and 40 years ago. There was SO MUCH that was different in other ways.

MIRAS tax relief was a huge benefit in it's day.

Top post, @Badbadbunny , especially this bit:

"Yes, income tax in isolation was higher 40/50 years ago, but public services worked and virtually everything was far cheaper in proportion to wages."

When I first knew what the basic rate of income tax was, 60 years ago, it was the equivalent of 42.5%. But the threshold at which you started paying was higher in real terms, and there were more allowances that could be offset against it. I can recall my father calculating whether a job offer was worth taking because he'd have to start paying tax and would have commuting costs because it was too far to cycle.

But public transport was cheap and efficient, my parents could choose the date that I had my tonsils out and it was less than a 6-week wait, ditto my mother's hysterectomy, we got a newly-built council flat at a very reasonable rent, a grant towards the cost of school uniform, grants to go to uni and no fees to pay. Vat wasn't even a thing and purchase tax was only on a range of non-essential stuff, not on non-food essentials like cleaning materials and toiletries.

No

Fair enough 😆

@PinkFruitbatisnt that largely to do with demographics and an ageing population?

We meaning the shrinking number of net economic contributors?

@LathkillDalewhen did your dc get braces?

I think I head that Kemi has said she was happy with cross party talks as long as the care problem was financed by public sector spending cuts rather than tax hikes. I know that's her opening bartering position, but let's hope that she manages at least some compromise that the costs of whatever new care system is put in place isn't financed wholly by tax rises. It has to be partly financed by cutting public spending spending/waste/inefficiency etc.

@Badbadbunny I agree; I wouldn’t have all these stupid indirect taxes to keep electoral promises not to increase rates of income tax - it’s much simpler just to increase income tax, and abolish the stupid separation of income tax and NI - they should just be amalgamated into one tax.

However, it’s not so simple as to say, everything has got more expensive - there have been improvements in some health treatments like cancer in children, and the NHS is expected to do far more than it did in the 60s, and for an aging population.

When we were at secondary school, we were ok at grammar schools, but 85% of the population got a second rate education in secondary moderns. Likewise, 5 - 10% of the population went to university, now it’s 50%. I needed my teeth straightened - my NHS dentist told me in the 70s, there was no orthodontic treatment for the bottom teeth. (All three DC had all their teeth straightened on the NHS). When I was growing up, the police weren’t interested in domestic abuse.

I started work in 1980, women had far fewer rights to equal pay, maternity leave, pension contributions, etc. Employment could ask at job interviews, if a woman was pregnant. If women employees got pregnant, they could be sacked. I got pregnant in 1987, and my employer expected me to be back at work, when the baby was 6 weeks old, because I had been there less than 2 years. There was no paternity leave for DH - he took annual leave for a week.

All the rights, women and children have now, cost money.

I’ve worked all my life. Been frugal. Pays into a pension. Made sacrifices. Worked all through having children.
why should i pay for people who don’t do the same? Don’t work, get everything paid for. Bloody scandal

now it’s likely I’ll be hit with higher tax while living, higher council tax as I live in the south ! tax on pensions that I’ve saved and already been taxed on, tax on investments to go up ( but people forget the risk taken) , higher inheritance tax

the way to fund this is to stop all foreign aid, stop funding illegals, cut public sector pensions, cut public sector waste / NOT through more bloody taxes

I agree with you about council-run care homes.

I'm old and remember how good they were, from visiting elderly relatives. Staff had decent pay and conditions, and as they weren't run for profit, they had better staffing levels.

The profits some of these homes make is absurd, and they mostly pay their staff NMW. A friend who is a former HCA and phlebotomist works in one and she gets paid more because of her training and experience: a whole 8p an hour more! (She only stays because it suits her; it's very close to where she lives and she stays on a ZHC because she likes to pick and choose what shifts she does.)

Another friend who is a MH nurse by training worked in care homes for a couple of years when he came back from travelling, then got a job in the hospital wing of a Cat B prison. He reckons the prison hospital is actually a much more caring environment than most of the care homes he worked in.

There's a care home a few miles from me that is really quite shabby and decrepit and, frankly, none too clean. The food is diabolical. The owner rocks up every few days in a chauffeur-driven limo, so she's obviously making a decent living from it!

You can't look at direct taxes in isolation. There's been a massive change from direct taxes to indirect taxes over the past few decades. We've taxes that didn't exist before, such as insurance, waste, air passenger, VAT on electric & gas, plus hefty above inflation rises on fuel duties, alcohol duties, tobacco duties, plus new higher rates of road tax on expensive cars, changes to benefit in kind taxation for workers who get benefits like cars, health insurance, gym membership, etc., plus "non tax" things like student loan repayments, compulsory workplace pensions even having to pay for green waste collections, expensive council car parks, expensive council sports centres etc. And that's not taking into account stupidly large increases in housing costs, rail fares, etc. And finally, the need for more and more people to pay for private health, whether directly or via insurance, for dentists, opticians, audiology, or going private to get treatment quicker when workers are losing their wages when unable to work due to a health condition that the NHS has 1 or 2 year waiting lists for!

Yes, income tax in isolation was higher 40/50 years ago, but public services worked and virtually everything was far cheaper in proportion to wages.

And you will be paying huge fees to cover theirs. Relatve was paying 1500 a week. The state was paying 500 for state funded residents. The self funders make up the shortfall. This is never mentioned publicly when discussing care home fees. This was over a decade ago and fees have gone up a lot.

No, when I started work in 1980, basic rate income tax was 30% (iirc having come down from 33% in 1979, top rate was 60% with an investment income surcharge of 15%, giving some people a top rate of 75%. Personal allowances were the equivalent today of £4,500, so much lower in real terms than today’s £12,500, at a historic high. The government in the 2010s made some big increases in the personal allowance in real terms, and the freezing of the current personal allowance is intended to bring them back to where they were, before those big increases in real terms.

NI’ees was a few percentage lower than today, but it’s not equal to the reduction in basic rate income tax by ten percent.

The population then had also recently been through the increase in VAT from 8% to 15%.

There has been a shift in who pays income tax - the top ten percent of earners are now paying 60% of the income tax intake; but it is unrealistic for the population to assume the top ten percent can be taxed enough to cure all society’s ills. (One of our friends, the senior partner in a firm of accountants, said that’s about 300,000 taxpayers)

So, no I don’t think modern young people are particularly hard done to; what affects them the most is housing costs; but that’s for different reasons, they need to take up with the government. I personally wouldn’t have sold council houses off cheap, under right to buy.

The problem is, this country is living beyond it’s means and the government has been selling off the family silver to maintain living standards; and cover up the massive transfer of wealth being funnelled upwards to the ultra rich, whose policy for the population through the media is “Divide and conquer!”

This thread is an example of the success of that policy.

I'm planning on taking myself out of the picture anyways if I end up needing care, but I'd be happy to pay more taxes or a 10% fee on my estate after death, if it meant universal social care for everybody, and not the current mess of a system where if you've got more than £40 in your bank and a house in your name and worked 50 years, you have to pay a kings ransom every week for care, while the person in the next room; an oxygen thieve who's never worked a day in their life and blown every dole payment they've ever received is getting the exact same care for free.

Maybe so, but my NHS pension has fallen way behind the figures for the State Pension

Of course areas differ, a friend inherited a house near Durham which sold for £40,000 and there were loads of properties under £70,000. Same as the south but I doubt there are many habitable houses under £300,000.

People really have no idea about house prices oop North. A standard 3 bedroom semi-detached in a decent area of Newcastle will be at least £500k.