Where are those people's families and where is my tax going?

[AmusedTaupePlayer]

Nearly 50% of my income vanishes in tax and NI, and I’m seriously wondering what I’m getting in return. The streets are filthy, the Tube’s a mess of delays and breakdowns, and my child’s school can’t even fix leaking ceilings.
GP appointments? Impossible. Police follow-ups? Hit and miss.
I asked my councillor, and he said most of the money’s going to social care — mainly for elderly people and kids in care. Fine, but it makes me ask: where are their families? Why is the state carrying so much, and why does it feel like we're footing the bill for a system that’s barely working?
I’m not trying to be cruel — just frustrated. Is anyone else getting the same response from their council? Or any better answers?

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• Free cash flow: £1.75 bn (–15%)
• Net debt: £9.45 bn (–2.4%)
• Adjusted diluted EPS: 27.38 p (+17%)
• Statutory net income: £1.63 bn (+36.7%)
• Dividend: Final 9.45 p, total 13.70 p (+13%)

hope that helps @strawberrybubblegum

My DH's mum told him that the only reason why she had him and his 3 siblings was to prevent herself from committing suicide aka she didn't really want children.

2 out of her 4 children have left the country, the last child is very much similar to her and would probably never leave home (and doesn't have the capacity to be a carer). DH is in trauma therapy due to years of abuse (his father used to hit him and the mum egged him on).

This is why some families will be dysfunctional and they will be reliant on the care system in their old age. MIL has a London home but if it's sold to pay for care what happens to the daughter. It's just delaying the problem by a generation

Thanks @swirlythingy2025 !

Well, exactly! When someone on MN complains that social services doesn’t want to put their elderly parents in a care home everybody jumps to advise: ‘they have to!’, ‘make a complaint’, ‘don’t accept your parent back home from the hospital’. Why is nobody asking ‘can you or your parents afford to pay for a carer’?
To what extent should I pay for someone else’s elderly parents? When my turn comes I am certain nobody will pay for me as there will be no money left with the way this country is going. I have no children (and no parents), so I will have nobody to bring me a glass of water when I’m old. I want to save my money so I can afford my care when I’m old, not pay it to look after other people

They’re not necessarily abusive parents. I used to work with a couple who had mental health issues. The issues were quite severe so they weren’t able to look after their children. They had several children. Every time they had a child this would be taken away from them. Most of their children had also inherited their mental health issues.
When I met them they had one child they had been allowed to keep . Social services were closely involved to help them raise the child. Can you Imagine the cost and the resources that had been spent on looking after this couple’s children, whether în care or not…

I still remember the poor boy who was allowed to live with them. He had come from school (I think he was around 5) and his mother gave him a bowl of cereal to eat. The boy sat on a little chair and was eating his cereals, his coat and backpack still on. It was freezing cold outside, the window was open and the heating was off. The dog approached and started to eat the boy’s cereals while the boy was also attempting to finish his cereals. And the parents were obviously to it all, to the cold, the little boy who still had his backpack on, the dog eating his food. It makes me cry every time I remember that little boy.

I guess some people should not be allowed to procreate, and I guess I’m about to be attacked for saying this.

The Nordic countries have historically had a very strong sense of personal responsibility in terms of working and doing things for themselves, and not taking advantage.

They also have a lot of social pressure around conforming to these things.

If that culture is undermined substantially, they would see the same kinds of problems we see elsewhere.

The thing is, we don't seem to have the stomach to enforce that kind of personal responsibility.

I'm not sure we ever had the culture of civic responsibility that the Nordic countries have. But we seem to have almost deliberately destroyed any sense of personal responsibility too.

I feel pretty pessimistic about the UK Welfare state. It certainly can't continue the current direction of travel - it will implode, and not that far in the future. But no one will accept any meaningful change either.

Can only speak for Sweden but personal responsibility is not enforced, its an un written contract.
You get ill/unemployed/etc the states supports you..... in return, you work, pay taxes, look after your children even after divorce.

We don't have that in the UK, unemployment benefit in the UK is around £100 per week, regardless of your previous earnings, in Sweden its 80% of previous earnings.....

So generally speaking, people accept higher taxes.

However, as Sweden has voted for more right wing parties recently, they have seen a drop in public services.

UK? high taxes and get little back.

I can agree with much of this post. the so called safety net welfare state is not even there anymore.
SSP, Unemployment benefits all a pittance, meanwhile, have children, rent, unemployed and your income from the state will be far above the NMW, CSA isn'tt even counted, which seems bonkers....

Yet the welfare bill and numbers claiming disability benefits is the highest in Europe.

On responsibility, i'm 62, when i left school, being unemployed was seen as an embarrassment, queuing on a thursday morning to sign on - a badge of shame.

Work, any work, was better than nothing... now, it seems that being on UC is a right, a meaningful way to live.

How did this happen?

Why are some people opposed to this idea? Obviously some people should not have kids

Because where do you stop? Everyone has their own ideas about acceptable parenting - from feeding to weaning to school attendance to what children eat, wear, their hygiene etc etc. We do have a threshold whereby children are removed but removing someone’s right to family life is no small thing and needs strong evidence.

Yes this is the issue and I don’t think you can trust the government and their agencies to always make a fair decision . And I’m saying that as someone who worked for social services and despair at some of the people bringing kids into the world .

However look at periods in history where children have been removed from homes for utterly wrong reasons on a large scale. It may not happen to the same extent now but it does happen. And biases around race and class and culture also come into play where certain demographics are given less grace than others.

All this would apply if these same decision makers were charged with deciding who has children or not.

well firstly anyone with a long and varied criminal record because chances are they would then teach their offspring the criminal ways

I’m in Ireland and we pay similar if not more tax, we have to pay privately for doctors and dentists, and prescriptions, we don’t have an NHS, we don’t even have a tube 😂

I have no idea where our tax is going either!!!

Well she's not doing pretty well though is she? Because half of it is taken off her!

But surely given our taxation system it’s impossible to have 50% of all earnings taxed at 50%?

I think the OP is exaggerating.

You understand that the majority of households with children on UC are in work, right?

@Gabitule strange that they themselves didn't feel the cold

I also know of some children who have parents long gone into multiple different partners and each one a child with. Moving to further away from the ones they leave behind

@cloudyblueglass there are some real perversities for higher earners on PAYE. Marginal tax rates for the slice of your salary between 100k and 125k is actually 62% because of the gradual loss of any personal allowance.

If we’re talking flat-rate, then tax and NI at 100k is about 32% of your total gross salary, but it goes up pretty steeply after that (c. 36% at 125k etc).

DH earns 180k and his overall tax rate is 41% (ie he gets to keep 107k). Yes, we’re on decent salaries, but it took years of graft and training, we need to fund paid help to keep things ticking over at home, and despite paying well over £100k in tax every year, we can’t get a GP appointment either like everyone else, so it feels like a pretty shit deal. Oh and everyone seems to think we should pay even more…

And the majority of UC households may be in work, but they may not be maximising their hours which is another perversity of the system. The availability of in-work benefits alongside low salaries seems to be a chicken-and-egg situation, but I’m pretty sure Gordon Brown’s idiotic tax credit bonanza didn’t help matters.

I worked in child protection years ago. There have always been thick/abusive/inadequate parents. 🤷‍♀️

There have always been inadequate parents, but at the very least we need to try and do something about this. Sure Start did just that and was beginning to show results when it was scrapped by the Tories. Policies that address this problem are long term and slow burn - the electorate like to see instant results for their votes, and so the problem goes on and on.

We need a government with courage and vision to even chip a tiny scrap from this problem.

I’ve no argument with about the state of yhd NHS - except to say at least you could afford private health insurance/pay privately. I work full time for a local authority and currently cannot work as I languish on an NHS waiting list for a 1st appointment ehich I know will result in abdominal surgery. Eight weeks so far - I go down to zero pay in four weeks time. I’d give anything to have been able to afford to have insurance so I could have jumped the queue and not had my finances utterly destroyed. I would also qualify for universal credit if I were single - even though I work full time and not at the bottom of the LA pay scale. And I work hard. Oh, also have two children with disabilities - had no idea yhd first was disabled until after the second was born - who has the same disability.

Im not sure why you think those working full time in much lower paid jobs have more time and energy to keep everything ticking over at home, either. We just have to muster it up from somewhere or let our standards drop - no affording ‘help’.

Really tired of the ‘UC claimants are scroungers’ narrative.

I’d happily go private @cloudyblueglass but there is no private option whatsoever for pediatrics. (Well, there might be in London, but we’re pretty rural). I have already spent well over £30k of net income on things like the SALT, OT, Ed psych and equipment DS needs because of tactical prevarication by the NHS/LA while they argue at a snail’s pace about budgets.

Absolutely not suggesting that those in lower paid jobs don’t work hard, but higher paid jobs in my field typically come with cross-border management requirements (ie working in other time zones), loads of foreign travel, networking and off-sites for days on end. My typical working week is “only” about 55 hours if I’m in the UK, but DH racks up about 70 including a full weekend clinic. So we absolutely need extra household/childcare help and those needs cannot be met with an ad-hoc babysitter and a cleaner for a couple of hours a week.

Meanwhile, DH is whimsically looking at an equivalent job in Bermuda for over 3 times his salary…