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AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

Original poster

To think 'in your face Osborne?'

493 replies

Littlefluffyclouds81 · 26/10/2015 20:50

I'm not. I know I'm not. I'm personally going to have a glass of wine and celebrate there being a significant amount of egg on the Tories' faces.

OP posts:
HelenaDove · 26/10/2015 23:22

Does anyone remember a poster called Huntycat from a few years ago She correctly predicted all this and UC etc and she was right.

She used to post a lot when i first joined 4 years ago.

ssd · 26/10/2015 23:25

I dont remember her, but there is one poster called isitmebut who constantly toes the tory party line, I can imagine they are all in a rage tonight and gearing up their answers for mumsnet tomorrow.

HelenaDove · 26/10/2015 23:26

Huntycat was lovely. She got a lot of crap from some of the right wingers on here at the time.

Bookeatingboy · 26/10/2015 23:29

I'm not against helping the MOST vulnerable. But Tax Credits don't do that, they help millions of people, many of whom have made lifestyle choices

Where is your evidence to support that statement?

Are you actually suggesting that by not working full time due to having a severely disabled child is a lifestyle choice I've made... really!

HelenaDove · 26/10/2015 23:29

She got it right about the bedroom tax too in the very early days. She was right when she said it would affect the disabled. I knew she had got it right at the time We were on many of the same threads. I had a diff user name then.

Darvany · 26/10/2015 23:32

Hunty voted Tory in 2010 despite being a disabled lone parent of four with disabled DC because she felt that Labour had not done enough to help and believed Camerons's "will take care of the disabled" lies.

Her subsequent posts and advice were spot on. I have a massive amount of respect for her.

Paddletonio · 26/10/2015 23:32

I don't think people earning £35,000 need to be receiving tax credits.

ottothedog · 26/10/2015 23:34

Why not?

HelenaDove · 26/10/2015 23:35

Oh i didnt realise she voted Tory.

HelenaDove · 26/10/2015 23:36

Hunty is a decade younger than me if i remember rightly.

ottothedog · 26/10/2015 23:37

It isnt 'people earning 35k' its 'people with 3 kids and a household income of 35k' who get it.

Darvany · 26/10/2015 23:38

Yes Helena, but as she said on here, she had an awfully disadvantaged childhood and was too young to remember the Thatcher years. She really believed them and was absolutely gutted.

TalkinPease · 26/10/2015 23:41

Median household income is £26,000 a year
Median individual income is £18,000 a year
ie half the population get less than those numbers

Tax credits have been used to subsidise bad employment practices by corporates
That must end
but it MUST be done to make the corporates change their ways without crippling millions of families.

TalkinPease · 26/10/2015 23:42

NB
Cameron and Osborne are annoyed that the Lords have overturned a Statutory Instrument : a short piece of secondary legislation

If they had done their job and brought in a properly scrutinised bill, this would not have happened.

HelenaDove · 26/10/2015 23:44

YY Darvany I realised that was the case I remember her posts well.

And she really researched stuff well too which helped a lot of posters.

ottothedog · 26/10/2015 23:44

Now that i do agree with, TalkingPease

Darvany · 26/10/2015 23:45

UC calculations and all sorts. I do miss her.

StormyLlewelyn · 26/10/2015 23:47

I don't think people earning £35,000 need to be receiving tax credits.

And what would they pay their childcare fees with? Fairy dust?

Someone on £35k isn't getting pots of money but they get enough to help make it worthwhile to go to work otherwise they'd be crippled by the childcare costs and wouldn't be able to work. Take home on £35k would be £27400 (give or take), £2283 a month, and say they have two children.

Rent/mortgage - say roughly £700.
Council tax - £150?
Food - £400 including nappies for the youngest
Gas and electricity - £100
Water - £40
Phone - £50
Public transport - £160 a month for bus passes (based on ours which are £80 a month each).
Childcare - around £700 to £900 a month depending on exact hours, school holidays, local rates, etc.

Even with childcare at the cheapest rate of £700 a month, that's £2300 a month being paid out on essential bills. That's before clothing, home/buildings/life insurance, prescriptions, dentists, opticians, birthdays, unexpected bills, or the hundred and one other little things that might crop up.

I can quite easily see how people on £35k with childcare costs to pay need at least some support from TCs.

ElizabethG81 · 26/10/2015 23:57

OK, for those who can't see how someone earning £35k might need tax credits, here's a little example.

Single parent of 2 pre-school children, works full time, earns £35k. After tax, NI and student loan deductions, she brings home c.£2,100pm. Lovely.

BUT, what is she to do with those pesky pre-school children while she goes to work? Tie them to a tree outside her office? Leave them at home alone? I imagine both options would be frowned upon by social services. So, she has to pay for childcare. Where I live, in a relatively affordable area of the country, a full time nursery place would cost £170 per week, per child.

So, our woman taking home the lovely £2,100pm now has to pay just under £1500pm of that to the nursery. Leaving £600 to pay for everything else. And she doesn't need tax credits?

Under the current system, she's get approx £150pm in child benefit and £800pm in tax credits, leaving her with a total of £1550pm as her actual income after childcare.

Yes, it costs the tax payer a lot of money for those years when her children need childcare. But she also pays quite a bit of tax and national insurance, and will hopefully continue to do so once the children have grown up.

MillionToOneChances · 27/10/2015 00:14

they will push this though in spite of the Lords and our democratically elected government can get back to delivering the programme they were elected to.

Except they weren't elected to deliver this program, were they? They were elected on lies that they wouldn't cut benefits for working families and have them gone one worse and used a Statutory Instrument to push their amendments through with minimal debate - a committee of maybe 15 MPs debating for maybe 45 minutes before rubber stamping, rather than the whole House of Commins getting to debate a Bill. The government acted in a way that was unconstitutional and the House of Lords has pulled them up on it, as far as I can tell from googling. This idea of pulling the rug out before the Living Wage has even ramped up was pure evil, anyway. It's not like families could plug the gap, as if they earn more their benefits would reduce further.

MillionToOneChances · 27/10/2015 00:14

House of Commons

longtimelurker101 · 27/10/2015 00:19

" the programme they were elected to"

They weren't elected to do this, which is why they've had to shoe horn it in through a statutory instrument rather than as a bill, a bill would have had to be in their manifesto.

Paddletonio · 27/10/2015 00:59

I don't deny that childcare is expensive. I think there needs to be a big shake up of childcare actually. But to me it does seem perverse that someone on 35k is getting nearly a grands worth of credit (as stated in someone's example up thread) bringing their net income to about £3,300 per month! I earn nearly £50k and take home £2,600 per month and get no help (fwiw nor do I think the government should be giving me any!)

How does that make sense? If I'm expected to survive without handouts, why are people on salaries that are not that far removed from mine when you look at the net monthly figures deemed to need such large amounts of state help that bring their incomes significantly over mine... You would say someone on £50,000 is well off and not in need of help so why do we need to give credit to people so they end up actually having much more income than that?!

Forgive me for not having sympathy for those cuts. I do have sympathy for the cuts to the very lowest paid.

Tax credits should be a help to those earning well below the average. It is utterly ridiculous for them to be paid out to hordes of middle class families who are earning well. Surely that was not the idea.

I think all these credits increase reliance on the state and let businesses off the hook by subsidising wages.

Good If these proposals are going to be looked at again and tweaked to minimise the short sharp shock to the poor, but those who earn well above average and receiving such high amounts do need to be cut, surely.

Pretty sure most people do also see it this way. Tax credits have got out of hand.

Tootsiepops · 27/10/2015 02:28

Tax credits are out of hand but it's because a) the cost of childcare is fecking outrageous and b) wages are shite.

Why the fuck are taxpayers having to subsidise the likes of Sainsbury's (for example) because they're not paying their workers enough to live on? Angry

Tax credits do need to be reformed, but the Tories have gone about this arse over elbow.

They're also now hinting that there will be 'repercussions' for HoL for this evening's defiance.