Where is all the money going?

[LittleMissUnreasonable]

Excuse me for the naive question, England is not my country of origin so still trying to learn the system here .

I know this may seem very straightforward to a lot of people, but I wondered where is all this extra money we're putting in going? Council tax, petrol, bills, supermarket shopping and many other things have gone up in the last few years. Not even subtly but by huge amounts. Wages have either stayed stagnant or have gone up ever so slightly.

But yet despite all these hundreds of pounds we're putting in a month, public services seem to be the worse they've been in a while. Dirty streets, bad quality supermarket food, long NHS wait times etc. Where the hell is all this money going? Surely it can't all be on inflation and lining pockets of rich people. There must be enough left in the pot to change... something!?

To the Tories

From wiki.

I don't disagree with the pp but another answer might be:

• extra debt taken on during the pandemic, then followed swiftly by global inflation that raised the interest we have to pay on that debt, further compounded by evvents such as Truss shagging the pound, dropping our credit rating and further decreasing the favourable rates we get on new borrowing.
• This has meant interest rates have swung violently over recent years - reaching some very shocking highs. Look back at the relative stability on the early muillenium up until about 2010.

Thank you everyone so far for kind and intelligent responses. I do think maybe things are being done to improve things behind the scenes that maybe we're not seeing (such as clearing debt)

Health and benefits.

Our economy is horribly divided. Huge swathes of people aren't paid enough to live on and the state supports a surprisingly high proportion of people who are not in work.

Healthcare is expensive and made more so by costs of the obesity and mental health crisises.

Also healthcare is a bit of a vicious cycle.

Improving healthcare means people with severe disabilities, very frail elderly people, individuals with chronic severe health conditions, survive much longer than they ever did historically, but often at huge social cost in terms of care needs, medications, equipment, hospital stays, therapies etc.

With council tax, the money councils get from the government isn't enough to cover their outgoings, partly because of inflation (especially staff costs - minimum wage still goes up every year) and partly because more people are needing their services (more kids needing support in school, more elderly people needing care at home). There's no clever stuff going on behind the scenes, they are just trying to keep the basics going and the basics cost more money than they used to. The streets don't get cleaned as often because when you've got a choice between an extra street clean or making sure an elderly person gets their evening visit to remind them to take their medication, you've got to choose the latter every time.

The money is going to the rich. The rich have got a lot richer on the current governments watch, at the expense of the poor and middle income earners. Or even those who pay higher rate tax but aren’t rolling in it by any means.

I don't think people really understand the magnitude of the debt the country has the other side of covid. Like all debt it needs to be serviced or else the country's credit rating will go down.

Also - we are poorer, relatively, as a country, than we used to be. The pound is weaker. Anything we buy in from other countries (food, energy, fuel, services, materials, finished products) is more expensive.

The money goes into welfare and debt interest.

This country’s debt to GDP ration over 100% now. And we have over 5 million people on our of work benefits as well as an ageing population. On top of that we import nearly a million low skilled migrants who are not net contributors so we import people to pay for them to live. Because we have a low skilled, low wage economy. This leaves less than 50% of the population who are actual net contributors. They have been rinsed to death so are leaving the country in their thousands.

Successive corrupt and incompetent governments have imported low skilled migrants to massage economic growth figures while GDP per capita goes through the floor and people already here they poorer. At the same time they printed and borrowed trillion to pay their cronies during Covid and steal from us. And just to add insult to injury, a growing number of working age people have decided why work when you can live for free.

This country’s decline into a 3rd world backwater is almost complete. It is simply masquerading as a developed country.

the national debt is increasing, we are certainly not reducing it.

Yes, the pound is weaker. Thanks for that Brexiteers

my wife comes from a third wold country. Believe me we are a very long way from that lifestyle. People here have no idea how lucky they are.

And just to add insult to injury, a growing number of working age people have decided why work when you can live for free.

what utter bollocks. You have no idea what you’re talking about, clearly. You can’t claim out of work benefits without proof that you are applying for jobs, constantly. Unless you’re disabled.

I saw that an energy supplier had made huge profits after energy prices had shot up.
The government were, at the time, handing out subsidies to the public to pay their energy bills.
But there was no outcry from the government at the absurd profits being made.
Why not !!!
This happened in the UK and also in Ireland
Surely the government are there to govern the country and ensure fair play for its citizens.
Mind boggling.

I was listening to this week's episode of More Or Less, which covered the huge rise in taxation that is largely hidden.

One of the major reasons we're collecting more money but actually spending far less on infrastructure is that we have a massive debt, the interest rates for the debt rose sharply, the pound is extrememly weak, so we are chucking more and more money at servicing a debt without ever reducing it.

In addition, the war in Ukraine affects the cost of a number of global basics, with a knock-on effect around the world.

Add to that climate crisis related events that have meant extremely poor harvests (potatoes, wheat, barley, olives, grapes, oilseed rape, tomatoes etc etc) mean those commodities are much more expensive. And when things like grain go up in coast, animal feed goes up so meat goes up.

Basically, we're buggered.

And now we have an escalating war in the Middle East, which our Government seems quite happy with! There’s a potential for that to affect energy and other prices.

A very large amount will be pensions which of course gets worse the longer people live (which is a lot longer generally nowadays).

The rich are all in bed together, large tax avoidant companies make massive donations to the government, it’s the old boys’ club, government will never go after them as they profit from them, far easier to go after the vulnerable on benefits at the other end of the spectrum, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel

Here you go: https://ifs.org.uk/taxlab/taxlab-key-questions/what-does-government-spend-money

They’re working on that.

Some people's spend spend spend attitude and then be outraged at the payback in their purse for that spending is worrying. Government spending is no different to your own personal credit card.

Oh yes, God forbid that pensioners who've worked all their lives should be given a pension. What a cheek of them to live longer(!)

Honestly I can't believe the people who don't see the truth which is that there is always money to give tax breaks to the rich on this governments watch. Everyone else can go to hell...

The cost of providing state pensions and the NHS is far higher than it used to be, because people are living longer.

It's much more expensive to provide healthcare for an elderly person. More than 50% of the NHS budget is spent on people over 85 years old, even though they make up less than 3% of the population. When the NHS was first started this wasn't a big issue because it was very rare to live to 80 - now it's common.