New UC rules to force both partners to work ??

[Citrusmuffin]

I can’t find anything online about this but have heard it’s being changed as previously there had to be a certain number of hours worked but this could be by just one partner but now it’s being changed to make both work even though the total household hours don’t change??

This seems very unfair and taking away choice for some families in difficult circumstances. I just can’t find the official guidance is anyone able to link to it ? Thanks

If people go to work they use childcare ( earnings less than 100k get 30 hours ). That place means work for childcare providers. Childcare providers as a business pay tax and the carers get a wage to keep their families and pay tax. The mother/ fathers working pay tax.
Everyone pays into a pension to look after them when they need it in the future and they all pay NI for other services.
Those with health issues, the disabled, pensioners and those unable to work get support from these taxes so they can live.

And the world goes round.
Everyone is contributing.

Did you notice. I explained this without using rude or sarcastic remarks.

I think some people are missing the point here and get very defensive presumably because of their own personal situation.

At the end of the day people who can easily work and choose not to- especially at the point they can get some cheaper childcare to do so and don't have very specific health reasons not to- I don't give a shit if you do absolutely sweet FA for years provided you have your own resources or partners income to do so- it's not ok to let other peoples tax pick up your tab -

Disabled people and chronic health conditions and those with children with severe disabilities - this is a totally different thing altogether and the reason we need to get those who can but won't work looked at is so those who genuinely can't work can actually get better support. At the moment not enough people are net contributors - it's a fact.

The gvt have enabled this situation by a chronic lack of affordable housing and rules that don't always make it that you are much better off at work- particularly those who rent, are lowish earners and have a fair few children.

The op stated she can't work because of disabilities. That's why the conversation has changed. Posters didn't understand why the op didn't want to work but from what she has posted she can't work even if she wanted to.

Loved Sayeeda Warsi on Stephs Packed Lunch earlier. They were talking about benefits and she pointed out that furlough was also a payment from the state.

Is that news to people?!

That's one of the reasons inflation os so high now and living standards plummeting, because we effectively putting half of the country on benefits for months on end.

That proves the point really: if fewer people contribute to the economy and more people take out than pay in, it results in everyone getting poorer and real-terms salaries falling...

Hence we need everyone that can work, to work, and not 16 hours per week out of 168. People who claim benefits when they could work more are actively making the whole of society gradually poorer, and then moan about low salaries when they are directly contributing to the UK's extremely low level of productivity that causes low salaries and means public services can't be funded properly. 🤦🏻‍♀️

Yes. This.

@AlienEgg it was the low paid who delivered the middle class banana bread bakers all their shit during the lockdowns While those middle classes sat on furlough.

@JenniferBooth I don't think that's quite the whole story- plenty of lower paid people were on furlough too- including most retail , apart from supermarkets- and I know plenty of banana bread bakers still working at that time-we were. It's a very mixed bag of who wasn't working.

This is why i never swallowed the "all in this together" shit punted out to us during the lockdowns I remember having a conversation with DH in April 2020 where we were saying poorer people will be made to pay for it all.

@JenniferBooth well I was furloughed without choice - threatened with redundancy if I didn’t take it. I’ve paid £30K tax and NI in the last year alone so I’m confident that I’ve more than covered my share.

@JenniferBooth well the cost of it all certainly doesn't seem to have been passed to the much higher earners! (Never is)
Post Brexit they can still hide their zillions offshore.

What about the 30 hours of free childcare that everyone, including people on 100K plus salaries are entitled to?

That's not correct.

However, it should be. Childcare funding, education, healthcare etc are universal goods and should be available to all. Restricting the access of those who pay for them (for themselves and everyone else as well) to these things means they will be gradually means-tested with ever lower thresholds until hardly anybody gets them at all. It also reduces "buy in" from the very people that we need to pay for them, so that everyone can access them.

Evidence from abroad shows large buy in from all earnings levels to good state services when they are universally available. I.e. high earners don't resent paying way more than it would cost them to personally access such services (just for their family) in taxes AS LONG AS they also get access to the services and the quality is good. So they will continue to fund it for those who can't, if it is good quality and they get it too. They have paid for it, after all, for themselves and others.

If you go down this bitter route instead and expect these people (who mostly are not rich or wealthy, just earn more than average but also usually have higher expenses too in order to do so because they live in expenses places in order to do so, and who work long hours and make huge sacrifices of time with their own families in order to do so) to pay for what you want, but tell them they should pay for it for you but not be able to use the service they are funding themselves, then you lose that buy-in to the welfare state and, indeed, to the very idea of society.

The result is that means tests are put in place, like with child benefit as an example, because many people considered £50k a good salary, not understanding that this doesn't go far at all in many areas. So now these people are funding this, yet don't get it themselves. Then with fiscal drag, you end up with more and more people not eligible.

To be cynical, if I was trying to design a way to remove any support for the welfare state, introducing means testing is the obvious way to go about it. Then you gradually lower the thresholds (through fiscal drag this won't take too long because of compounding, even in lower inflationary times) and before long you end up with one group of people funding things for another group of people and getting nothing back. Then you have a very easy way to convince them to scrap it entirely, because why should they?

If you want a welfare state that is sustainable, people who can contribute need to have the decency and respect for everyone else to do so. But you also do not want means testing for basic things like childcare funding. Because by doing so you will undermine the public support for it and ultimately bring about it being cancelled altogether.

This is why any attempt to means-test the state pension will be the death knell of the whole thing. People simply won't be prepared to be the ones who pay most in their lives and get nothing back at all. For now, higher earners pay far more than they get back, but will accept this. If a Government then says they'll get nothing, what will happen? Whatever threshold that people think is "fair" at the time will gradually lower through fiscal drag or other measures and eventually nobody (or very few) will get anything at all. Pressure to keep the amount up with inflation will vanish, in fact the opposite will be the case.

This is the stuff people don't think about. Blinded by bitterness or jealousy, they do not grasp the long-term impacts of these decisions and that ultimately raging against people who pay for the services for everyone accessing those same services themselves might seem like a nice idea now but, much like with the Brexit insanity, it seems people with such mentalities do not have the foresight or wider thinking to grasp the big picture and how this will impact them as well in the long-term. It is such an easy way to get people to vote for their own demise, by manipulating them into bitterness against others who they perceive to have more than them, even when these are the people providing for them!

If you want to carry on this way then fine, but it won't end well. The types of countries people here SAY they want to emulate involve universal services for everyone, and also middle and lower earners paying FAR more tax than they do. Not expecting everything to be paid by other people. You will never create a proper society that way.

Really?

Highest tax burden in 75 years now I believe? People earning £60k can be paying 85% effective tax rates if they have children. Over 100% tax if they earn £100k. People will not work more to be poorer.

"Higher" earners on PAYE have been holding everyone else up and funding the country for well over a decade now. You can't tax any more out of them.

So many people seem to confuse those earning £50k-150k with "the wealthy". This group pay much higher tax rates than anybody else. The wealthy pay much lower ones. They need to be taxed a much higher percentage but it's harder to do so politicians don't do it, just milk those on PAYE in the middle. But the reality is there aren't enough of either of those groups to fix this. We have extremely low tax rates in the UK for lower and middle earners, much, much lower than in comparable countries or the ones we want to be comparable to. This attitude needs to change entirely, if you want society to be different, public services to be funded well and society to function better. Because there are so many more if those people, a small group of people cannot possibly fund them all, it's not mathematically possible.

So when people say "I'd happily pay more tax" they need to mean it: that they personally would, not expect someone else to do it. And by more, it means much more if they want to be like Denmark or Germany etc. And actually work full time unless they are physically incapable of doing so, contribute properly not just claim money because "it's easier". And that they should receive most of what they do earn tax free, with no comprehension that for the people paying for all of this half or more of every additional amount earned is taken at source as tax to fund this for them.

The more people who decide to work part time and "claim top ups" because they feel they are "entitled to" do so when they don't actually need to - they could work more but don't want to - the poorer we will all be. And the shitter education, healthcare, etc will become. It is all basic maths in the end.

How? Only 20% of the people in the UK are actually paying more tax than they take out. I don't see how poor people could possibly be the ones paying for it all, given they receive far more from the system than they pay in. It is a very small proportion of people who are paying to everyone else.

How do you know they were on furlough? They may well have been working from home and worked throughout lockdowns?

The trouble with being given extra hours is those hours are often INTERMITTENT and INCONSISTENT. they are not guaranteed and in work benefits can be stopped and not restarted for weeks while they adjust it. Jobs often ask people to KEEP THEMSELVES AVAILABLE just in case some extra hours MIGHT crop up We need you to keep yourselves available just in case. So the worker then takes the risk of being dismissed if they take another job to wrap around it and first employer phones them and moans when they arent available These employers are asking their employees to be ON CALL without paying them to be.

Our striking doctors are paid for being on call.

Aside from any arguments, this discussion has been better than any government think tank. Very interesting discussion.

@AlienEgg I don't disagree- maybe I should have actually clarified- I meant super wealthy!! I think middle earners and lower level high earners bear the brunt to a riduculous level

"the second has contributed to the wage stagnation that we’ve had over the past twenty years."

How so?

Surely increasing the supply of low cost labour (because that's what women whose families are claiming UC generally are) will put a downward pressure on wages?

Also this:

"Looking after very young children is a contribution to society."

"My children were nurtured by us despite going to nursery"

Of course - but that's maybe because it was right for your child and your family. It might not be manageable for everyone - depends on the child, the childcare setting, the health and wellbeing of the parents, the type of work the parent does.

"The trouble with being given extra hours is those hours are often INTERMITTENT and INCONSISTENT. they are not guaranteed and in work benefits can be stopped and not restarted for weeks while they adjust it. Jobs often ask people to KEEP THEMSELVES AVAILABLE just in case some extra hours MIGHT crop up"

This - so much this.

We've gone through an employment revolution over the past few decades. Very few unskilled/low wage jobs now offer any security or predictability in terms of hours worked, and the benefits system has been redesigned to be punitive and difficult to negotiate. I think a lot of people who post on these threads have no idea how very much on a knife edge so many family's finances are, where a couple of weeks of not getting the shifts you need, a glitch with your UC claim, can leave you at risk of homelessness or being absolutely penniless. I understand why families don't want to live like that.

Yep, people respond to incentives. With low paid, variable hour work, of fucking course that'll look like not taking the risk of doing more.

"We have extremely low tax rates in the UK for lower and middle earners, much, much lower than in comparable countries or the ones we want to be comparable to.

Hard to make meaningful comparisons without also taking into account the value of benefits and public services.

The point is that the reason they can fund better public services etc is because they have a broad tax base where even lower earners pay a lot more tax. It cannot be done otherwise.

You can tax higher earning PAYE employees to oblivion as we do already and because there are not enough of them it will never raise enough. You could (and should) take the genuinely wealthy far more by raising capital gains tax to income tax levels. But again, it will not be enough to fund the public services people want because there aren't enough of them, even though each one individually pays a lot.

We have a much narrower tax base than the countries whose public services, social housing and pensions people desire, because many pay no income tax at all here due to our very high tax free allowance, and even those who do pay very low rates until they become higher earners. The only way to raise sufficient revenue to pay for the type of services people want is to either significantly raise VAT, the basic rate of income tax or NI. And maybe half the tax free allowance.

The problem is that when people say they'd happily pay more tax they are generally people who pay little anyway, a few hundred pounds per month. What they need to understand is that it is those taxpayers whose tax bills would need to go up by 50%-100% to fund what they say they want. And many of those who currently pay nothing paying a few hundred pounds. Sadly what people usually mean is they'd happily pay another £50 per month or something, or that someone else should pay it.

Plenty of studies showing our narrow tax base and that it's not possible to fund it like that. Employees on higher salaries have carried the rest of the country for years and are already paying more tax than in many countries with better services. With student loan 9% repayments added on, and means testing of childcare funding etc that don't exist in those other countries, our tax rates on £50k-£150k salaries are the highest in Europe - real effective tax rates of 85% up to over 100% if you have children!

So those people cannot now possibly pay more. Yes, get the wealthy to pay more but that won't fix it. So the question becomes will the low/ middle earners pay up too, as they do in the countries with good services? That's the only way. If they won't, it won't happen.

"And actually work full time unless they are physically incapable of doing so, contribute properly not just claim money because "it's easier".

I think you'll find all the countries where you have high levels of full time working among women with small children all have childcare provision which is
much, much more affordable than the UK.

As a proportion of average earnings we have some of the highest childcare and housing costs in the world. And surprise! comparatively lower numbers of working mothers....

Yep. And much better equality etc as well. But you can only fund good quality universal childcare provision like that if everybody works instead of claiming money and expecting other people to pay, and you increase tax rates so you can pay for it and everybody contributes to it. So if that's what people want they need to work, then it will be affordable for the UK. If they won't work and expect other people to fund their living costs and, if they do work, pay little or no tax, them obviously there won't be services like that. It's basic maths.