To ask if you have an idea you believe would significantly improve life in the UK?

[ConfusedmumUC]

I’ll go first.

I can’t help but think making someone’s rent payments eligible to prove you can pay a mortgage would go a long way to housing security for so many people. And limiting the amount of properties owned by one landlord / amount a landlord can charge in rent, would also go a long way. I can’t help but think profiteering massively off of a basic need and right such as housing is really not ok.

Im sure there’s a reason why my idea wouldn’t work, feel free to put me right 😂

What’s your idea?

To qualify for a new passport everyone has to pick crops in the fields for a fortnight. Not convinced by the ethics and air miles of flying in exploited workers from Indonesia and south America

Here in UK we have BTL LLs as a form of investment as state pension is so poor, MPs vote down min standards & we have children even dying in damp and mouldy houses.

More than a few MPs are landlords, yet these same MPs are allowed to vote against raising standards. The system is corrupt.

GreenTeaPingPong · Yesterday 19:07
Set up excellent and widely available gold-standard treatment for addictions, including the trauma underlying them.

This would decrease the sum of human misery, as well as massively reduce crime and homelessness.

Good point. I’d add in to focus services on early years to reduced ACEs and developmental trauma in the first place.

Fund it through properly taxing the wealthy. I mean taxes on assets and wealth rather than just income. The unequal distribution of wealth is obscene in the UK at the moment. That inequality leads to higher crime and poorer mental health (for the haves and have nots).

@Vimto1

I fully agree that we need more effective taxation of wealth, unearned income, and gains. Right now a multimillionaire living on capital gains, dividends and interest will normally pay a much lower overall tax rate on their annual gains&income, compared to the overall tax rate paid by a midlevel professional working full time. That just makes no sense.

On the other hand, inheritance tax can and will be avoided in various ways if it is set at an extreme rate, plus it arbitrarily penalises children who are unlucky by having their parents die when they are young. One reason why some people choose to work hard at providing goods and services for others, is to give their children opportunities they may not have had themselves. Unless we want to prohibit all inequality, introduce full communism, and use force and coercion to get people to work, it’s important for people to have choices around how much of their life energy they devote to earning money, and how they use the money, and that must include helping their own children and other relatives. In parallel, in order to increase fairness and have a functioning society, we need to tax people progressively.

However, a 100pct inheritance tax is not taxation but rather confiscation, and the fact of being arbitrarily timed to the often unpredictable moment of one’s own death would drastically reduce the motivation to work and to save. It would penalise primarily those who are unlucky enough to die unexpectedly when they are between middle aged snd approaching retirement age but not yet retired (=typically the age range when personal wealth peaks).

A modest annual wealth tax, on the other hand, could be designed to tax people in proportion to their current ability to pay, and it would put a brake on the ability of the most wealthy to keep growing that wealth gap, without disproportionately penalising the family members of people who die unexpectedly. It would probably also raise more than an inheritance tax from the wealthy elderly, who currently can give much of their wealth to their children and avoid any wealth or inheritance tax if they then survive for another 7 years.

@YankeeDad yep, a tax on wealth rather than income and at a higher rate for high value individuals was my first suggestion.

The point around achieving equality is really key. The inter-generational transfer of wealth is only entrenching the class system and leading to further inequality. One way to tackle this would be to look at inheritance rules.

hear hear

Completely agree. It was interesting to watch Undercover Boss and see just how many CEOs struggled to do an entry-level job at their own company. Many would have been sacked on capability grounds. Minimum wage jobs might not require specialist qualifications, but that doesn’t mean they are easy.

Include commuting time in contracted working hours.

Better funded social care. Return of convalescent facilities, as a halfway house.
Cut down middle management in the NHS and have more staff on the floor.
Scrap HS2. No one wants it.
Cheaper childcare get people into work.

Realistically, how much do you think people care about anyone else's children? The actions of the majority clearly demonstrate the answer is very little.

Better funded social care. Return of convalescent facilities, as a halfway house

No staff, its a MW job and seen as such, no one aspires to go into care, change that, open up EU workers to come here again.

Cut down middle management in the NHS and have more staff on the floor

NHS needs more and better management, where do medical staff come from?

Scrap HS2. No one wants it

No, change it to a normal line, UK doesn't need Hi speed but it does need capacity.

Cheaper childcare get people into work

Bells on! UK has most CC in Europe, why?

I borrowed this from the book "How to do welfare" by Chris Worth (available on Amazon) where he suggests a UBI of £12,500 per adult per year. He gets the net cost down to 58 Billion. It makes for an interesting read.
www.amazon.co.uk/How-do-Welfare-Chris-Worth/dp/1912795299/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3CO56NDKO5JJ9&keywords=how+to+do+welfare&qid=1671368741&sprefix=how+to+do+welfare%2Caps%2C143&sr=8-1

There are 46.4m British citizens over 18 in the UK. Around 3.7m overseas; call it 50m. So the total bill is £625bn. More than double the current welfare bill of
£265bn. And total tax receipts were only £690bn. At first glance, this throws UBI under a train. But remember: UBI is an income, not welfare. And income
has economic benefits beyond government assistance. So let’s work out what it really costs, using the UK as an example. The answer is surprising.

1. Replacing other welfare Easy targets first. UBI replaces all other welfare.

Housing benefit, Working Tax Credits, the State pension, unemployment benefits, Universal Credit, Statutory Sick Pay, Maternity Allowance, marriage allowances, everything. Because even among families receiving more than one of these, few rack up anything like the benefits cap of £26,000. And UBI adds up to £25,000 for a two-adult household. This takes £265bn off our £625bn figure straightaway. We’ve already improved our cost calculation by nearly half, to £360bn. And we’ve barely started.

1. Replacing tax allowances

Next, recall that UBI replaces the taxable allowance: the first part of everyone’s income before tax kicks in. With no tax allowance, the actual tax take from people’s earnings goes up. There are 30m earners in the UK. Even accounting for income tax alone, that’s another sixty billion to pay for UBI, reducing its net cost to £300bn. But UK tax includes other taxes: National Insurance, payable by both employees (the part you see on your payslip) and employers (the part you don’t, because it’s added to your gross income by your employer first.)

This swings in another bucketload of cash: about £1,500 in employee NI on the first £12,500 of your salary, and another £1,725 by your employer. (Yes, NI
is huge.) Another £96bn in the pot, without any changes to the existing tax system. There are further benefits up the earnings scale, since higher tax rates
effectively kick in earlier: another £7bn or so. The net cost of UBI is down further, to £197bn. Less than the UK government has committed to various foreign wars, bank bailouts, or viral pandemics in a single year. And we’ve still got plenty of headroom.

I think the breakdown of family units with strong morals and work ethic , love and support has a lot to do with things.

And maybe thats the really issue we need to fix

Why do you want them to wait until you're dead to benefit? IHT is a tax on hoarding, spend/give away your money earlier and you won't pay any or much less.

100% is extreme but I'd like to see lower thresholds and fewer loopholes for the elderly. There obviously needs to be provision made for people who die younger and leave dependant children.

I definitely think that childcare for the first child should be tax-deductible.

There's a debate to be had about second and subsequent children because we have to consider if increasing the population at a time of climate crisis is a good thing.

Absolutely

@ConfusedmumUC I've been saying this for years .. you should be able to get a 100% mortgage for less than your rent payments if you can prove you haven't defaulted for a set amount of years!

It would solve all housing problems !

Seems easy to me , no doubt someone else will tell me why it won't work but my very large 4 bed house is cheaper than the rent on a flat we rent out which is bonkers ( obviously I know why etc but it's still madness )

Exactly. I work hard to provide for MY family, not some family who may have no intention of ever working. Why should other people reap the benefits of my hard work.

To force feckless fathers to pay child maintenance and support their children.

I would make it a stigma like drink driving and remove driving licences, passports etc.. I would make it a reasonable amount, not the pittance it is for most atm. I would also give powers to include all the self employed, unearned income, property etc... and both parents should be equally responsible for childcare.

Wow, the only reason you're able to 'work hard' is down to luck. Maybe if we all actually recognised that every child deserves a good start we'd start tackling inequality.

Crime, simple as, unequal societies have a lot of crime.

The poor will take your wealth from you and it you continue down the road of ever greater punishments i.e death penalty, as a pp wants, all that will happen is they will kill you to get what you have.

Look at the USA or South Africa.

And stealing from those who have worked hard to give to those who don't have will just encourage those who are lazy to remain so

@funtycucker

Yes it's natural to want to help your family

Litter picking shouldn't be seen as a punishment, it should be taught as a basic respect for your environment that everyone does.