To be irritated by this £100k a year whiner

[Viviennemary]

On Question Time tonight they were talking about subsidised childcare and the new benefits for younger children. Then a woman came on with a boo hoo sad face and said she wouldn't be getting it. So I think Fiona Bruce said because your income is £100k a year plus Then she said that it wasnt fair as there was only one wage. And their household only had one earner.

Well tough. Folk on just over £12k a year are paying tax and this cheeky woman thinks her child care should be subsidised. It made me mad.

And I agree it’s not a race to the bottom.

just sometimes a little acknowledgement that you aren’t at the bottom is nice.

I havent missed the point, I earn £11.45 an hour, I'm not sure where my incentive is either😂😂😂I had to stop at one point because I couldn't afford it until my child was 3

Let’s do a household of £100k income with one on £60k and one on £40k - no child benefit.

They take home £5,471 a month.

They have two children, aged 1 and 3.

The eldest gets tax free childcare and 30
free hours, making their nursery bill £1,200pcm

The youngest get tax free childcare. Their nursery bill is £1,800 a month.

They have a mortgage of £300k over 30 years at 4%. This is £1,400 a month.

This leaves the family with £1,071 a month to pay for their commuting, council tax, energy, bills, clothes, running a car maybe etc etc.

Is it so hard to see why things might be tight for them?

If she's a single parent then fair enough. It is unfair. But if she has a partner who is earning the £100k and she's not working then why she she be entitled to free childcare?

This.

You want to be paid for by the hard work of others, basically. While slagging them off.

Exactly.

People respond to incentives and disincentives. This is the same whether the disincentive is losing access to full free hours or free school meals. Someone else's take on whether the person needs the money or the provision doesn't factor into it, because why on earth would it? Vanishingly few of us have opinions that are taken any notice of beyond our family and friends, if that.

So the question is simply whether people are egotistical enough to think their political stance on the undeserving rich/undeserving poor should outweigh the need for policy that doesn't discourage working.

I don’t earn anywhere near 100k but can see that the system we have is strangling progress. Universal free childcare, child benefit for all and the protection of the personal allowance would encourage young families to earn more because they feel the benefit of every extra pound they earn. Every time a high earner comes on here complaining about the tax hit they have, they are advised to pay more into their pensions or refuse a bonus to ensure they are not worse off, this is insane!

See above, I earn £11.45 an hour. A smaller mortgage perhaps? I don't know. Everyone has to make sacrifices to support their children. I could definitely, very easily, live on £100 flipping k a year

Not everyone on low wages gets everything handed to them for free. We have an income of 30k a year. We get child benefit for one child. That is it. We don't get any other top ups as we own our own home. We don't use free childcare as we work opposing hours. I'm working 10 hours tomorrow away from my family for £104.01.

Sometimes I think those that are topped up via UC, receive CoL payments/benefits, free prescriptions, free nursery hours, cheaper days out, have their rent paid and all the rest of it, are royally out of touch with how much these things actually cost an average or higher earner because they never have to pay them themselves. If they saw the figures, they’d get a shock. Easier to bleat on about ‘the wealthy’ and how they should be giving them more though I suppose.

London generates something like 30% of UK taxes and has a disproportionately high portion of jobs that are this high paying. If everybody chose to live in a cheap part of the country, chances are they wouldn’t be earning as much and less taxes would be raised.

I agree with this completely. No one says that higher earners should have to pay for a reception place or to take their children to the GP. Why is early years education different?

My OH earns over the threshold (I’m nowhere near) and so we don’t get Tax Free Childcare or funded hours. It feels very unfair not to be able to benefit from a tax system which you are contributing more to. We would be better off if he could go part time as we’d save on nursery costs (two pre schoolers) and become eligible again. That’s an insane policy position from the government - people paying less tax and contributing less to society and yet could still be better off.

Ultimately @Viviennemary, the country needs higher earners in order to support the needs of those on £12k per year. Why is it fair that they are economically penalised for doing so?

I agree. I’ve never lived in London, or the South East, but have no time for this selective misunderstanding about why the city operates on a different financial level to the rest of us (and why it benefits the rest of the country).

A full time nursery place here, Home Counties but not london is £2307.50 with no funding. This is 7:30-6. They also do an extended day 7-7 which is £3185 per month.

We joined the same nursery 2.5 years ago and the day rate has increased by 77% for the long day and 32% for the shorter day. Waiting lists are long so it's difficult to easily change nurseries, but they have all increased their prices.

Missing your point I’m afraid. Most £99K jobs carry at least three times salary death in service benefit which is of course more than enough to pay a few years of childcare at nursery. And of course you can always buy your own.

Why is it assumed that childcare fees are paid solely by mothers? Surely they are split equally between both parents? Unless, of course a parent has sadly died.

We need to stop making childcare only a women’s problem. It is the responsibility of both parents/ the family income to pay for childcare!

Families on incomes of £50k get at least £700 pm per child in free childcare and child benefit. That family would need to earn at least £10k gross per child to cover those expenses that they get for free.

So those on £50k actually benefit by the tune of £10k per child, whilst still paying about £6k in tax.

The £100k family pay over £30k in tax plus their own childcare/no child benefit.

Doesn't take a lot of brains to work out a 50k household between 2 incomes with 2 kids in childcare is better off than a £100k one income family with 2 kids.

The resentment towards the very people who are funding this support and not benefitting is ridiculous.

Critical thinking is a desirable skill for top paid positions. Might be worth a couple of the bitter people on this post considering.

I was only pointing out that the example given was a bit misleading as it didn't accurately reflect reality for much of the country.

I agree and none of that contradicts my point. I was not making a judgement about anything - I was pointing out that whilst there are many valid and varied reasons for people earning £12k they all depending on the person earning more so they can enjoy the standard of living they have. It is just a fact not a judgement.

There are structural causes for people earning £12k that are outside of their control (or certainly a lot harder to resolve than for other people) - such as lack of societal investment in their education or access to land and capital due to the way our society lets the means of production aggregate down family generations (largely due to the way we so aggressively tax earned income rather than unearned income). Whilst I don't believe it is deliberately done, I think it is a happy consequence to the wealthy (and by that I mean wealth in terms of land and capital ownership and not those with high incomes) that public sector tax and spending policy makes those with low incomes resent those on high incomes and vice versa rather than all looking at the few with the actual wealth and how their wealth could be better deployed for the good of us all.

We should be looking deeper into the provision of childcare and why it's so expensive.

The Government has known for some time that funding is inadequate and childcare is prohibitively expensive. Their response is attempt to bribe the electorate via the so-called "free" childcare scheme.

Childcare has become big business for some with shareholders and investors.
The expansion of the 30 hour "free" childcare scheme benefits these shareholders, many of them foreign, allowing them to claim money from the Government.
Smaller, independent settings do not have investors to tide them over, so they're going out of business. Ofsted is contributing to this situation by suspending settings at a moment's notice, sometimes for months.
That's why parents are having such difficulty finding childcare places, let alone affordable ones.

Childcare workers have been warning for years that this situation would arise. The Government did nothing.
Presumably the current situation is precisely what the Government wanted. We already know that Rishi Sunak's wife was at one time a shareholder in a childcare business. I wonder how many others benefit.

They are making sacrifices to support they children.

It is you that is criticising them, for saying they are struggling to make ends meet, given the very high cost of living when paying for childcare.

How do you pay for two sets of childcare fees on £11.45 an hour? Given it's easy for you to afford day-to-day life, it would be great to hear your advice on how others can achieve the same.

Somebody has to do the 12k jobs and it's not just a matter of working hard at school or making the effort to better yourself. Clearly someone on12k can't afford to pay tax. Full-time work, whatever it is, should be paying enough to live on. A lot of people on high salaries are doing jobs which have little value to society and think it's okay to pay low wages to others, then complain that the low earners aren't contributing.

As mentioned upthread, full time minimum wage is around 24k. You’d also get child benefit, subsidised childcare and you’d probably be eligible for shared ownership housing.

Your overall tax might be higher though. I don't know the figures but if your tax free allowance reduced or disappeared and the tax rate up to £100k increased it is possible that your tax bill would increase.