Where would you LIKE to see cuts made?

Moomaa, I think salizchap meant freezing pay for those earning over £30K, not cutting out all those jobs altogether.

Yes to tax on airline fuel and people on JSA doing social replayment.

You couldn't really have no one in the public sector on over £30k as most professionals are paid more than that so you'd have inexperienced or rubbish people that couldn't get a job in the private sector doing jobs like designing roads and bridges, overseeing build of schools, agreeing large developments of new homes, negotiating contracts for rubbish disposal, programming computers that hold the child protection register etc etc. Would you cut pay for firemen too? I think they get that much.

I'd cut trident, CTC and WTC for those earning over 40k, child Trust fund, raise retirement age NOW to 66, and add a yearly increase every 5 years till it's around the 72 mark.

I would freeze public sector pay for those earning more than 30k, cut quangos. Raise income tax by about 5% for all but the lowest earners. Get rid of EMA, but allow kids over 13 to work PT if they want (good experience).

Get rid of expensive managers in the NHS, get doctors and nurses to run the place, they know it best. Stop expensive and pointless new initiatives in schools, scrap the NC, let teachers teach! Like wise ofsed and league tables. All kids go to their nearest school, if it's a bad school, parents can help to improve it, and LISTEN TO THE TEACHERS/TAs instead of government who have NO experience of school environment except as a student.

Like the idea of paying full fees for over most higher ed, but totally free for courses in sectors where there is a shortage in the job market, they have something like that in France.

I also think it's a good idea to make people on JSA do some kind of social repayment, ie charity work, or work fair, unless they are studying/training, and there should be a limit on the studying, as I know of people who use study/training as an excuse for years on end. However, I suspect this would cost more.

The NHS needs a massive overhaul, possibly introducing charges for some services or some sort of compulsory insurance. There's so many of us living longer, often with complex medical conditions that the prinicples which applied in the 1940s can't possibly be maintained now.

We should also be looking at massive changes in the public sector. There are thousands of non-jobs (I know - I do one ) - partnership managers, vision managers, walking co-ordinators and loads of daft initiatives which should be cut immediately. This equally applies to government departments, quangos and committees.

We also need far fewer public sector organisations - get rid of county/districts and go unitary with far fewer councillors.

CTF
Trident
ID cards
NHS electronic patient record project
Stop paying bonuses to civil servants
Phase out final salary public sector pensions
Means test child benefit
Means test winter fuel allowance

I'll be back with more ....

No, that wasn't me saying that it was another poster. You are confusing me with someone who was a political troll.

what the hell is trident?

chil1234 they've been doing that for decades. Sadly they consider that London includes the South East (a huge area covering from Kent to Hampshire and up to Oxfordshire), so all of us poor sods living in the South of the country have seen our jobs move to the North. Great idea on paper- not so good when you are mucking about with people's lives.

We could easily start to plug the gap if everybody paid what they should. Starting at the bottom with the people working cash in hand, and the boot-fair and ebay traders who aren't declaring their income, right up to the very top.

There are just too many loop-holes and legal ways to avoid paying tax. There are directors who take dividends so they don't have to pay NI; companies "employing" their wife and paying her just under the tax threshold; the self employed writing things off to tax that aren't a legitimate expense, and making "losses" year after year.

I would like to see a tax-free personal allowance around the level of the minimum wage, and nothing else. Tax everybody on their turnover and don't let anybody claim for anything. It would be very easy to understand and cheap to administer, plus if everybody paid their fair share we wouldn't have to make cuts elsewhere.

BTW my own "gold plated" civil service pension is going to be about £4600 a year. So you can freeze them at £5k each and it won't make a blind bit of difference to me. DH has never been able to afford to take out a personal pension so that's what we'll be living on. Pension age is already going up to 66-68 and some of us have been working since we were 16, not 25.

swallowed why is it that when anyone disagrees with you you have to resort to insults? You called me a bigot on a thread a couple of days ago based on nothing but who I planned to vote for.

Anyway back to the point.

I am 100% for a fairer society, but the sort of tax thresholds you are talking about wouldn't be fair. We should be looking at moving towards a simpler tax system, a flat rate if possible, rather than adding more levels of complexity. People should be rewarded, financially, for working hard and climbing the career ladder, not penalised.

How much do we actually need to cut anyway?

According to this graph (page 5), a national deficit of 50% of GDP would be about what we had in this country since 1975; GDP in 2009 was £316,837 million; erm, exactly how many noughts are there on a billion?

I'd like to lose that new department set up to oversee MPs expenses. Employs far too many people and costs £80m.... I bet the average company with 650-ish employees doesn't pay anyone £80m to check expenses claims

Next, I'd move several large Whitehall departments lock-stock and barrel out into the regions, freeing up acres of massively valuable real-estate which could be sold off, reducing wage costs (no more London weighting etc.) and at the same time making the country less London-centric

In our area you can aply for government funding if you are on benefits for a free laptop worth £300 and also for your children to take part in outside school activities.

Just to cheer you all up, public sector retirement (at least in the NHS and I suspect elsewhere) is already 65 for new entrants.

I wonder how many people would actually be affected by limiting public sector pensions to 50k? I suspect you could limit them to 15k and still not touch 85% of the workforce.

wouldn't agree about the medical records computer system tbh, i think it's daft not to have computerised medical records, but NHS IT has suffered really badly from huge mission creep from the start.

alibaba TOTALLY agree about public sector organisations being able to build up reserves in some form.

I had forgotten about ID cards. Get rid of those, and the medical records computer system, and Choose and Book and all the other disastrous NHS IT schemes.

The airline fuel thing is a good idea as well. It should be taxed at the same rate as fuel for cars.
Yes people will be able to afford fewer holidays abroad, but it will be good for the environment, and good for the UK tourist industry.

swallowedafly - the problem is though that not all jobs are interesting and rewarding. There are some crap things that need doing and until we invent androids then someone has got to do them.
If you know that no matter how hard you work you aren't going to better your quality of life then that is pretty depressing. Essentially what you are talking about is Commuunism.

I would cut CB for over £100k. I would cut HIP, CTF, CTC for over £40k.

There needs to be a more realistic approach to annual budgets in NHS and local council. Rather than the current spend it or lose it situation which is what results in all the waste on re-decoration, pot plants, new carpets etc, there should be the option to roll money over from one financial year to another.

I'd like to see dramatic cuts in public sector pensions, and phasing upwards of the pension age for all.

I'd like the funding to be cut immediately for any non-evidence based treatments on the NHS, such as "alternative therapies".

I'd like there to be a per family maximum limit for amount of benefits that can be given (with a possible exception for disability benefits.)

I'd like jobs like my friends to be cut (and she agrees!) - going into state schools to teach relaxation techniques and yoga, paid for by the local council. (One of the schools is the same one where they claim no funding to diagnose my nephew's dyslexia.)

I'd like ID cards, and the medical records computer system, to be stopped.

I'd like a cash incentive for people to report benefit cheats.

Loads more, those are off the top of my head!

swallowedafly - I did include those who cannot work.

Those who choose not to work - yes, you are right of course, their children should not be penalised. Should have made that clearer.

I would get rid of:

• Health in Pregnancy Grant
• Child Trust Fund
• EMA (I hate things where children's parents are mean tested, there is no guarentee that the parents will support the child, I like the free buses 16-18 idea)
• Sure Start Centres in areas where there are already plenty of services for children under 5 (areas graded 3 by Sure Start).
• Any additional benefits where you get more for any children over the national average number of children. People in work don't get extra per child, they just have to make it go further.

I would abolish Council Tax Credit and put benefits up to cover this so people realise the real amount of money they are getting (will make working less of a shock).

I would abolish all the different benefits and just have one cost of living payment taking all circumstances into account by one agency, this would include child maintenance. There are always threads by people who don't know what they can get and when people list benefits there are always a string of acronyms.

I would make sure a working person was always better off than someone not working for any reason other than disability but not sure how (probably cutting benefits) and I would put disability carer and disability money up to minimum wage levels, after all if that's the minimum someone should have to live on then it's the minimum!

Would not reduce spending on NHS or education so would probably have to put income tax up.

Would re-evaluate all people in council houses every 5 years for financial circumstances and number of people in rooms. Move on those that don't need it any more.

Do something to incentivise 50+s rattlig round in big houses to downsize.