rising food, fuel, housing, gas and electric prices, are they sustainable, what will happen

[superv1xen]

if they keep spiralling upwards like they are doing?

wages are not rising in line with the cost of living, in some cases they are not just being frozen but being cut, extra financial help such as tax credits are being cut, everything costs a fortune so everyone on a low to moderate income is being squeezed to within an inch of our lives (stating the obvious here i know)

but my question is what is going to happen? is it going to get to a stage where people literally can't afford food or to run a car or afford to get to work or put their heating on in winter? it probably already is like that for people even less fortunate than us.

or will the prices of everything eventually stabilise and/or go down and/or will wages etc pick up as the economy recovers (if it ever does). or will vast profit making companies be forced to lower their prices (can't see that happening) ....sorry if i sound thick but i just don't understand how things work, all i know is every month things seem to get tighter and tighter for us as i am sure it does for many other families.

i'm finding myself dreaming about a lottery win a whole lot more than i ever did 5 years ago....

fargate - yes, it's astonishing. What sort of ridiculous society do we have where two fat cats grab all that cream and leave everyone else paying through the nose for what's left?

Create, it's very nice for you that you haven't noticed the decline in living standards, but most people have. And many people are really suffering. It's not big or clever to try to say 'I don't know what you are moaning about'.

we have the most expensive railways in Europe and the government has just smugly decided to put fares up by between 8 and 13 per cent telling us 'passengers have to bear more of the cost'. WHY?

The government subsidy on rail fares is being reduced so that the passenger pays more and the public purse less; I don't think there's anything smug about that.

Cuts are having to be made everywhere. People will never agree on what should/shouldn't be cut.

Shelly, so answer my point about why spending on railways is defined as subsidy while spending on roads is defined as investment?

Passengers in the UK already bear a disproportionate share of the costs compared with every bloody other European country. Pushing up rail fares will price people out of jobs and, for those who can afford it, onto the roads, leading to more congestion and more accidents. Decent, affordable public transport is a social good which has all kinds of economic and social benefits. The experiment has been done, in South Yorkshire during the 1980s, and in-depth research comparing S Yorks with demographically and geographically identical West Yorkshire showed unambiguously that investment in public transport is cheaper overall and saves lives through getting people off the road, reducing traffic accidents. Saves police time, too.

edam - That's not what I was saying at all. I leave my job on Friday due to redundancy, so I have very much been affected. But, there still seems to be an awful lot of money about and (IMO) wasteful spending going on

edam, I happen to live in Yorkshire. I don't think that it's a good region to use in your point.

The whole public transport system here is terrible - well, maybe in the cities it's ok, but in general Yorskhire is rural and there's little in the way of PT but for a sparse bus service.

A lot of people here resent the subsidy on PT because it's of absolutely no use to us (our villages) and we have no choice but to run our own vehicles.

Our particular area was noted last year in a national survey as having the worst road surfaces in the entire country. Any spending on these roads would definitely be an investment.

i live in an area of the uk that is minimum 30 miles to the nearest train station and the bus services have just been cut because of the local government spending cuts.

Quite simply, you have to drive. I've seen my weekly petrol bill go from £25 per week to £60 and I have no other alternatives. That doesn't include parking, which is £8 per day, or anything towards wear and tear on the vehicle.

The rural economy in the UK is terrible. The gap between rich and poor couldn't be more evident than at the moment, where all the rich second home owners are holidaying here, whilst the locals are staying at home and counting pennies.

As Edam said, if you read her post, South Yorkshire - massive connurbanation Sheffield-Rotherham-Barnsley of 600,000 pop. ??

fargate - Yes, I did read edam's post.

There's a lot more to South Yorks than Sheffield, Rotherham and Barnsley. I can tell you for a fact that Barnsley's PT provision is utterly crap outside the town itself.

I'm really scared about the cost of living, particularly with winter suddenly not seeming so far away. I had planned to put an extra £10 a week on my gas meter but I just have not been able to do it.

The last couple of years it has been a desperate struggle to heat the house. We're in a rural area, where it tends to be colder. What we wear always reflects the season; you will not find us wearing short sleeves in the house in autumn winter or spring.

I can't ditch the car (which would save me lots of money) because public transport is so poor where we live, and because I am an essential car user 20 miles away from home.

What are those things you can have on radiators so you can adjust the heat setting? I need to beg the council for these.

I'm also considering finding out about opneing up the fireplace that the council bricked up before I moved in. Does anyone know much about doing that?

maristella The valves are called TRVs - thermostatic radiator valves.

I don't know much about fireplaces, but what I would say is that unless you will definitely use it (constantly in the winter), it might be better not to have it open. A lot of heat can escape up the chimney.

The fact you're on a pre-pay meter doesn't help as you're no doubt very aware, I'm sure. I don't know what the solution is but when people are struggling what they really don't need is to be paying more for their energy.

Shelly, haven't had a chance to catch up on the whole thread, but while Barnsley's public transport may well be crap now, my point is that during the 80s the then S Yorks Passenger Transport Executive and MBC proved that making public transport extraordinarily cheap and plentiful is a win, win, win - massively reduced costs for the public purse and businesses, massively reduced congestion, massively reduced traffic accidents with all the consequent costs (and heart-break), massively increased ability for social inclusion. Investment in decent public transport pays enormous dividends, even for those who don't use it.

(Sadly Maggie abolished all the metropolitan borough councils because she was pissed off with Ken Livingstone in London and took 'em all out when she got rid of Greater London Council. So now traffic and public transport in S Yorkshire is as shit as everywhere else. Life would be cheaper and more pleasant all round if anyone involved in transport remembered what South Yorkshire achieved but no-one seems to.)

And (sorry for going on) my original post did say this was back in the 1980s, I don't know why you are countering it by going on about what public transport is like now.

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edam - Thanks. Your info is very interesting, I wasn't aware of much of what was tried with PT in the 80s.

The reason I was 'going on about' what PT is like now, though, is because I thought we were discussing the current situation: subsidy decrease and subsequent fare increases.

fargate re stagecoach, that is disgusting

superv1xen it is disgusting, isn't it. Tho' sadly not entirely surprising any more. I don't know if I didn't notice these sort of announcements before or if they weren't given such prominence in the press.

I realise that some of the Stagecoach shareholders will be pension funds, local authorities etc rather than individuals, however what I don't understand is what will happen to the share dividends in future when fewer and fewer people can afford to use their trains and the company has decreasing revenue. It seems to me to be like slaying the goose that lays the golden egg.

Or is this another Southern Cross Nursing Homes-type fiasco in the making ie the owners withdrawing as much capital as possible whilst they can and then letting the company fold ??

Very good point fargate!