Hunt out of touch?

[BluebellsBluebell]

£100k is 'not a huge salary'. Fair comment. Yanbu

Does this show Hunt and the tories are out of touch. Yabu

Everyone is moving away from the Tories. Thank goodness. I do think we need universal benefits with increases in all tax bands across the board to pay for it. We need to celebrate the fact that we have high earners in this country, paying large taxes to the benefit of society.

There was a reason why new Labour were ‘intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich - as long as they paid their taxes’. The reason was that these people funded public services.

Because the Conservative Party exists to protect the interests of the wealthy, and is funded by the wealthy.

The Conservatives are also extremely good at convincing people that issues that affect the wealthy are everyone's issues. 95% of the population earns nowhere near £100k a year.

Likewise, 95% of the Estates of people who die pay no Inheritance Tax, but reading the Daily Mail, Telegraph or Express you'd think that the government (and particularly a Labour government) is about to kick everyone's dependents out of house and home and steal their grandchildrens' inheritence. As usual, Hunt features in this nonsense, having previously mooted raising the threshold to £1m - i.e. almost three-times the current threshold. It must be the very rich company he keeps that keep giving him these ideas.

It many surprise you to know that those working in investment banks and retail banks all pay taxes on their - sometimes quite substantial - income. The financial service industry pays a huge amount of this nations taxes. ALL workers are essential.

@Skippythebutterfly thanks so much for being so patronising- there was me thinking only poor people paid tax. Silly me

That's what redistribution looks like though. More help for the people at the bottom who actually need it.

The people at the bottom don’t seem to understand that this is how it works though, and automatically think those on £100k must be totally loaded. When the simple fact is if they have 2 kids in nursery they truly aren’t.

He is very out of touch. He was crap in health , no idea.
Average is £35 k so yes £100k is huge.

My point is that someone on £100k isn't earning 3x the average wage, its more like 1.5x the average wage for a parent with two small children - as the previous poster was claiming.

Two nursery places in the South East can easily be £4,000 a month, 80% of a £100k salary, and yet those people are being excluded from tax-free childcare and free hours.

That is the critical context here.

Redistribution... specifically penalising high-earning working parents of under-5s? Seems an oddly specific group to target so severely.

This is a cliff-edge which incentivises the highest tax payers to work less. It's irrational.

If their raison d'etre is to look after people earning over £100k, they have a funny way of showing it!

1. Childcare £100k cliff edge.
2. >£100K effective 60% income tax rate with erosion of personal allowance
3. Until recently, pension annual allowance at £40,000 with tapered annual allowance - only to stop doctors reducing workload or retiring.
4. Pension lifetime allowance £1 million until recently abolished - only to stop doctors retiring
5. Higher rate tax thresholds frozen
6. Capital Gains Tax annual exemption reduced from £12,300 to £3,000 for 2024/25.

Maybe there are arguments about Conservatives looking after the wealthy, but if they are, it certainly isn't people earning between £50k and £250k as they are been royally shafted in the lifetime of this parliament.

Oh, and no changes to IHT threshold, despite being at £325,000 since 2009, residence nil rate band accepted.

It's a weird one isn't it.

No longer the 'party of the rich', they are now just the party of the old it seems.

Thing is - you can promote any policy for pensioners regardless of their wealth/income and no one really challenges it, but suggest increasing the thresholds for childcare support and it's 'giving money to the rich'.

Which is... odd...

Like I say, I think the cliff edges are ridiculous, as is the built in disadvantage for single parents who don't receive any maintenance from their child's other parent. So I agree that the system needs reform so that it's fairer for everyone and so that it doesn't actively disincentivise people from working full time. However, I do agree with the basic principle of redistributing wealth from those who have more to those who need more.

I disagree that £100k can be viewed as anything other than a high income, while acknowledging that disposable income will obviously beAnd I don't buy into the notion that high earners necessarily work harder than anyone else.

Two nursery places in the South East can easily be £4,000 a month, 80% of a £100k salary, and yet those people are being excluded from tax-free childcare and free hours.

So the problem is the cost of childcare, not the salary?

Why is childcare £4,000 a month in the South East? Why is there not government-funded pre-school provision? Because the Conservative government believes in low taxes and the Free Market, and this is the rate that the market will bear (despite locking out millions of families).

More civilised countries, where average earnings are higher than in the UK, have camparatively inexpensive childcare. Typical childcare costs in Germany are between €15-€400 a month for state daycare, averaging at around €169 per month. Childcare in Denmark costs around £450 a month for 0-3 year olds.

@MidnightPatrol I just see lazy old anti-tory lines dragged out time and time again on threads like this, without any hesitation to actually explain how they are the party of the high earner. Jeremy Hunt acknowledging that £100k hardly makes you the Wolf of Wall Street these days, in a 1-2-1 conversation who is affected by the £100k cliff edge, seems to offend people.

Fuck me 30% of people who’ve responded think his statement was fair enough. I am lucky enough to earn that much and if I ever forget how privileged I am (yes I live in the South East, yes I have an enormous mortgage, yes childcare costs/uni is expensive) then I hope I lose it all and have to claim UC, I’ll deserve the karmic payback. There is NOTHING acceptable about Hunt’s glibness.

Yes, the issue Hunt is referring to (which was poorly phrased) is the issue of loss of childcare subsidies impacting higher earners.

I agree that universal state-backed childcare should be provided, as elsewhere in Europe.

There is government-funded preschool provision, and the value of that provision is increasing (additional 15 and 30 free hours). But on £100k you don't get that - hence the conversation.

I haven't said £100k isn't a high income, nor have I said they work harder than anyone else. Nor do I disagree with the basic principles of a redistributive tax system.

But it is an absurdity to have cliff-edges in the tax system which are so extreme.

If any other group was spending 80% of their income on childcare it would be worth of attention (as we have seen from efforts to counter that), so why suddenly not at this threshold?

Why are we so desperate to particularly penalise higher-earning parents of toddlers? It makes no sense at all.

See the various threads of people cutting down their hours or stuffing money into their pensions - this is reducing tax take for the government, hardly a good policy if you'e looking to redistribute money.

"Maybe there are arguments about Conservatives looking after the wealthy, but if they are, it certainly isn't people earning between £50k and £250k as they are been royally shafted in the lifetime of this parliament."

Those being royally shafted are the millions who have seen the vital services on which they rely - universal healthcare, public transport, utilities, education etc. - either chronically underfunded or monetarised, with the profits going to investors rather than back to the users in the form of investment, lower bills and fares or service improvements. The present government has spent 14 years dismantling the social contract that has been refined in the century from the end of WW1 to the detriment of millions of people in the UK.

If the 4% of the population earning £100k or more think they're being shafted, they can try living in a shitty HMO and working for a year on a zero-hour contract for £11.44 an hour, and hope to goodness that they don't get ill.

Why should they try living like that? They've grafted, studied, worked for free for years to get to that point. They deserve what they get, and given their contribution to the country's coffers, I think they deserve their voice to be heard.

But. Taxing higher earners til the pips squeak is a reality that doesn't change the situation on the ground for those that need those vital services. Like I said earlier, its possible to hold two thoughts in your head at once.

The thing is - it is ridiculous. It is £100k and need childcare support? On the surface that sounds mad. I would have thought the same.

Firstly people forget about the impact of tax thresholds - as I outline above a parent on £100k might have 1.5x the take home pay of a parent on £35k. No one would assume that without doing some maths - it's surprising.

And then I think people have their head in the sand about the cost of childcare. The cost has risen above inflation every year for 15 years or something - mine has increased by 20% since I signed up two years ago. No doubt it will go up again this year. £4,000 a month for two is normal here.

I still can't quite wrap my head around it myself tbh.

IMO the Tories have backed themselves into a corner with freezing these thresholds, and now cannot increase them without bad press. So they don't. God know what it will look like in 5 years time, when even more people are caught.

Most people earning these salaries will have spent time living in a shitty HMO and working for low wages. I spent about ten years living in one (as do most in London).

It's not a competition about helping one group vs another - we can care about improving housing for those on minimum wage while also agreeing it's not right to remove childcare support from higher earning working families.

"Why should they try living like that? They've grafted, studied, worked for free for years to get to that point. They deserve what they get, and given their contribution to the country's coffers, I think they deserve their voice to be heard."

Really? The wealthiest people in the country have "grafted, studied, worked for free for years to get to that point" have they? Is the implication that those who are not as wealthy have not "grafted, studied, worked for free for years to get to that point" - in which case you should go talk to some nurses, teachers, engineers, chefs, skilled tradespersons and others who would love to earn even half of £100k a year.

Why 4% of earners deserve to have their voices heard any more than the millions of people whose jobs have disappeared, whose educational opportunities have been diminished, who can barely afford to eat or heat, who are living in slum housing and whose prospects and ambitions have been dashed by the idiotic policies and incompetence of Cameron, May, Hunt, Truss and Johnson? The government is supposed to work in the best interests of all of the population, not just the 4% who have the Conservatives ear and who can send a helicopter to summons the PM whenever they want to tell him something.

It’s not even 4% of earners. It’s a sub section of that 4% who have children under school age. I saw somewhere it’s about 300,000 people - about the same number as WASPI women who the government ignored for years. And the same applies in that their situation is temporary and as soon as it comes to an end they stop caring.

Well no, sorry if this hurts, but those on minimum wage have not studied, grafted and worked for free for years. Unless they are directing their energies extremely badly.

And the people on 100k are nowhere near the wealthiest in the country. Your ire needs to be directed and the ultra-wealthy, generational wealth, Lord Sainsbury types. Not the person who works hard for their family as a doctor or a solicitor, a bank manager or architect. In all of those jobs you've mentioned, there are routes to £100k. Not easily, granted. But there are. Plenty of skilled tradespeople take out loans secured on their home, set up a business as bring in in excess of £100k following years of sacrifice and personal risk. Teachers can go on to be heads of large schools, or go into upper echelons of the educational system. Chefs would earn a shed load if they reached the top of their profession.

They won't do it by just rocking up day after day, doing their jobs, taking no risk and expecting it to fall in their laps. Those on £100k haven't.

I bet people agree that people on 100k should be allowed to send thier child to a state school and not pay for it.

I dont understand why having universal free childcare hours is considered a step too far.