Can’t just be me who is sick of the moaning about the private school VAT and winter fuel payments

[TruthorDie]

The moaning about them seems to be never ending. So tone death and indulgent on both counts. Not sure which is worse. A friends mum was ranting on social media earlier about winter fuel payments being stopped and how “worried about being cold” she was. Bad news is Lynn you haven’t needed to work since 1989, married to an oil exec and have had lots of the good life. I’m sure all of your Florida holidays keep you warm enough!

Bright children can get on anywhere, my siblings and l went to a comprehensive. We all have a couple of degrees, one of us has a PhD so it didn’t hold us back too much in life. Before anyone comes at it from the neurodiversity angle then l am and l wouldn’t be surprised if my younger sibling isn’t

I think you must be from a wealthier neighbourhood than me OP because a lot of the older people I know are worried about the winter fuel allowance going. People who are single and surviving on the state pension but don’t benefit from pension credits will really suffer because of this.

Sorry if you’re sick of hearing about it though, hope you’re feeling better soon.

I know several people in the same boat. It’s a disgusting way to treat pensioners.

Wait till Labour start raiding other benefits as inevitably they will, it won’t stop at pensioners and school fee paying parents.

I am kind of dreading the autumn budget. Already have lots of worried disability claimants calling up after the Tories announced the voucher idea,

The squeeze on the best state schools will make people start to care. I'm not engaging with the conversations because nobody ever listens to anyone else's point of view anyway. Time will be the deciding factor and by then it'll be too late anyway.

@TruthorDie - see, no one really cares about either issue VAT on PS fees and/or WFA - so you are quite right to alert us all to this fact.

My apols for turning your obvious, righteous point against your PP OP.

The best state schools are already oversubscribed and the undersubscribed schools will be glad of the extra funding per student.

Weirdly enough l have worked that out. Consequently l have being paying into a pension since l was 23. If there is a shortfall then l will downsize to free up money to pay for bills etc

Means tested yes, people that have a large income shouldn't get it but they have on purpose set it at an extemely low threshold so that the majority of people won't get it. Basically you would be better off if you hadn't paid your full NI and didn't get full state pension as pension credit plus the winter fuel allowance would give you more than the £11,500 full state pension 🤷‍♀️ I'm sure they could have saved money in a much kinder way, £11,500 is not a lot to live on if that's all you get!

@TruthorDie So then did people you know on UC have to pay for up to 50 years for OTHER peoples UC before they qualified for it - NO

OK not all pensioners paid in some would have credits but of course that is the same with UC you don't have to pay a penny to the state to qualify for that

Are the people you know on less than £400 a month on UC able to increase their income? because if they could not work they would be getting more than £400 a month not less due to LCWRA

If they did work is their UC added to their wages and taxed like the state pension is - again NO

Please do some research you do not get £221 PLUS pension credit unless you have a severe disability premium, the threshold for PC (income based) is £218.15 so people on the new state pension amount of £221.20 are £3.05 a week over that threshold, how can someone on just small amount be rich enough not to need the WFA

As a pensioner myself I lose mine which is OK I could do with it but at least I am not only £3.05 a week above the threshold like so many others.

What should have been done and could have been done if Reeves had thought about it is that the WFA could have been added to peoples state pensions that way pensioners who pay tax lose all or part of it through taxation - I would still have lost mine but others not as fortunate as me would have kept theirs

Every person I know who has kids in private school have kids with SEN. Dyslexia, dyscalculia, ASD/ADHD, dyspraxia, erlos-danos syndrome. That’s at least 10 kids I can think of, just off the top of my head. But it doesn’t suit the ‘everyone who has kids in private school is a privilege-purchasing elitist’ narrative to acknowledge the very high number of children in independent schools who are there because the state system couldn’t support them.

Acc to the independent Schools council:

103,000 pupils at our schools have special educational needs.
55,000 pupils are identified as having Specific Learning Difficulty (SpLD) and 7,000 pupils have an Education, Health and Care (EHC) Plans.

Out of 615, 000 children - that is 16.7%.

… but perhaps that number is inconsequential, as is the fact that 103000 families will have to go with out to find the VAT uplift, or withdraw their SEN children from schools that they are settled in and supported and hope the local LEA has a place at a school with SEN provision (none in my area, hence had to go private).

‘Cos VAT on fees will suddenly generate the money needed to invest in state schools and magic up 6000 new teaching staff and qualified SEN professionals by September.

It might get raided like the pensions of today’s pensioners did in 1997.
Labour took over £100bn in value from workers pension savings.

So wierdly enough, you might still end up in need of a benefit as a pensioner.

I will probably end up working well into my 70’s with the pension age constantly being increased so l will cross that bridge when l come to it 👍. I won’t have the luxury of retiring at 55 or 60 like lots of people before me have done. Bit depressing since l have had a job since l was 14 but hey ho

You moan a lot for someone who hasn’t got a clue what they are on about. People like you need to educate themselves outside of their bubble. Your older family is not the same as everyone.

In answer to your questions:

No
No (severe and enduring mental illness prevents work more. So far have been sectioned twice)
N/A were a high earner before mental illness so no benefits entitlement and a higher rate tax payer (so have paid in more than the average person to be fair)

I do have a clue. I admitted 1 point l was wrong on but l am right about the discrepancy between pensions and universal credit. Blanket benefits are rarely fair or right -look how child benefit was. It’s still a bit of a joke right now for many

All state schools have SEN provision. In the UK, every school (and maintained nursery) must have a SENCO and every SENCO must be a qualified teacher. Independent schools are not required to have SENCOs. How do you think parents of children with SEND who can’t afford to pay for private education manage?

Of course, I moan when a privilege is taken away from me. A lot of people are privileged in some way or the other and they would like to remain privileged. It is annoying when you don't share that particular privilege but I don't think it's so difficult to understand why people prefer to keep something that they believe is good for them.

It's a bit like getting lucky and finding a job with a good salary and then having that salary slashed by 20%. Yes you were lucky to have got a good salary but it still stinks when your salary drops by a significant amount.

Or imagine if suddenly your mortgage went up by 20%. Maybe just on properties above 200k to make it more comparable. Yes you were lucky to have been able to afford to buy a property in the first place but it still sucks.

I have a child in private school not because I think it's my God given right to get better education but because she was miserable in her old school and because we were lucky enough to be able to afford to send her to a private school. And even though in principle I don't agree with the concept of private schooling and I voted for Labour I still worry about the 20% increase in fees (on top of the 10% we already had this year). I wish we'd never gone private but now that she is happy in her school it's very difficult taking her out again. Yes, most kids are fine in state schools and maybe she would have been OK eventually but to change schools now is a big deal. There are actually lots of things I don't like about her school. It's not like it's perfect but I still think it will be too hard for her to change now. I almost wish that rather than charging vat they'd just banned private schools because then we would have had to take her out without feeling so guilty about it.

I don't expect anyone to feel sorry for us because obviously we are privileged in that we had the option to send her private and some people have much bigger problems than this but I reserve the right to worry about it. Except for this post I don't moan about it and certainly don't discuss it in real life with anyone but I don't think it's hard to see why the parents of private school kids aren't too thrilled about having to pay more now. No one likes paying more for stuff especially once they have committed to yhat stuff and can't really get out of it.

Erm it's 'tone deaf' love

Yeah well we'd also thought we had worked it out but we had budgeted for a 10% increase every year. Not 30%.

Yes, but it’s woefully inadequate - my kids state schools’ refused to even support an ed psych assessment for both my children, as was the case with every person I know. Our local school is at the top of the Times league tables, so it’s not because of being under funded either. We all had to borrow money from grandparents/family to pay for private assessments and those still in state schools after diagnosis and being given an IEP were offered a few hours a week extra support for their children, or a place in the one size fits all remedial classes that did not address their personal needs. Several families I know had to take the LEA to court to get adequate provision, costing them nearly £40k.

How do those who can’t find that money manage? By putting up with the woeful provision because they have little choice. The provision is possibly improved by the fact that some parents have removed their children, enabling those kids to get assessed sooner and have some of those hours that would be allocated to them. I can assure you, when these privately educated kids are forced to return to the state sector it will be those kids currently in the state system who will suffer. The few resources there are will be more thinly spread, those who can get/have already got private assessments will get their SEN provision sooner while those children whose parents cannot will slip further back in the queue.

None of the labour govt plans demonstrate how they are going to fund the increased demand for SEN provision or where they will suddenly find fully qualified SEN staff (which now requires a PGCE, 2 years teaching experience and a 2 year Masters) when they will already struggle to find 6000 teaching staff.

Neither issue impacts me.

However, I know people impacted by one or the other.

You say your PILs laughed about how they were goign to manage without the winter fuel payment. I’d suggest that they might be laughing on the other side of their face if one of them died and the other was left financially in the shit.

I have a friend who has one dc in the last year of private school. Because the VAT is goign to be an in year increase, she has literally no idea how to find the money for VAT in term 2 and 3. None whatsoever. Every pound was accounted for. What she’s probably going to do is to go into debt to pay the VAT and downsize her home when her dc goes to uni. By downsizing, she’ll be able to pay for uni and pay off the VAT debt.

If you are bored of the moaning, you should not expect anyone to listen to your moaning when a new government policy comes and hurts you.

The concept of something being tone deaf is nonsense. You can always find someone worse off than yourself. Should I say it's tone deaf that people complain they don't have the choice of sending their kids to private school when there are other parents who can't even afford to feed their kids?

There are a lot of things that are wrong with private schooling e.g. it perpetuates the inherent inequality in society and is therefore wrong especially in such an extremely class based society as the uk. Psrsonally i also think the academic hothousing isnt that great for the private school kids either. Neither of these have got anything to do with tone and taste. Or would private schools be fine as long as no one admitted to anyone less well off than them.that they send their kids to private school?

The fact that you think that tone rather than any real impact is important is a sign of how much deeper the problem is

You are the one moaning OP. Your moaning is boring,

Both policies have been implemented too hastily and with little regard to their impact.

I'm not against either policy but I believe the VAT issue could have been handled much better. Mid term is an awful time for any child to be changing schools. I think beginning of the next school year would have been better or even leaving existing pupils in their schools until there is a natural break. The more important issue than creating 6500 new teachers would be stop the alarming loss of excellent teachers due to their working conditions. I don't know enough about what's going on in schools but I guess academies haven't improved the sector.

The fuel allowance, very sneaky of the previous government to set the pension credit limit below the full pension. It seems a lot of so called experts haven't realised this. It would have been better to align it to council tax support, which would capture more pensioners that don't qualify for pension credit. Mind you that will probably depend where you livebas it differs from council to council now.

I am not affected by either policy but believe them both to be unfair in their current guise.