Nervous/anxious/scared about the Autumn budget 2024

[Cartwrightandson]

I know that we don't know any details. We have read or heard bits that might be incorrect or just plain wrong. I also know we won't know anything until Wednesday when Rachel Reeves publishes/announces the contents of the budget...

But what we do know...it's the first labour budget for over 14 years, we've had a conservative government, austerity, brexit, covid and cost of living/interest rate increase meaning our economy is not in a good place.

Our services/infrastructure haven't had much needed investment for a long time.
Councils are practically bankrupt, some already are. Schools, housing, NHS, social care and economy are all struggling..to remedy this requires money and this will need to come from higher taxes.

There's a 19 billion pound black hole and Labour have already removed the winter fuel allowance, showing they are willing do things that are unpopular or possibly controversial..the Labour manifesto said it wouldn't increase taxes, but now they are saying they have to.

They've already allocated money for Ukraine, teachers, train drivers, junior doctors, NHS staff ect

Keir said people who don't 'work' for their income (shares/savings/landlord income) aren't classed as working people and will be taxed..

Basically this budget is going to need to raise taxes to pay for investment in services. That much we do know. But where the cuts and the tax increase will be is unknown. I don't think anyone will be 'better off'...

Possibilities.. (note these are not absolute, I could be very wrong)

Inheritance tax changes
Fuel duty increase
Income tax increase
Social housing rent increase
Benefit cuts
No free universal prescription for over 60s
Change to tax free allowance
Removal of help to buy, right to buy and alterations to stamp duty
Pension age to increase
State pension to decrease?
Tuition fees to increase
Tax free pension allowance to be reduced
Isa/bond/shares/investments taxed

Who really knows...but I think the labour comms are possibly leaking information so that we are being drip fed so when the budget does happen we already know and are braced/prepared for it.

Or what is being leaked about the budget is really bad but when the budget happens we are relieved it wasn't as bad the leaks hinted at. But it is still painful but we are more accepting because it's not as bad as it could have been...if that makes sense.

What is it you are scared of that the budget will do to you?

There will be a lot of tax changes that affect the rich, the super rich and pensioners that pay tax.
Eg cutting the amount you can take from a pension pot tax free from 25% to 20%, or taxing amounts over an amount eg 100K. (It's only fair, as these will mostly be people that paid tax at a higher rate and used the pension pot to reduce the tax they paid will be the argument, never mind that the plan was to draw this money out to pay off the mortgage/buy a new roof for the house or adapt the downstairs bathroom and add a bedroom so allowing you to live there for longer without impacting on social care.)

Free prescriptions will be discontinued for the over 60 but under retirement, and higher rate tax paying pensioners in England - that'll benefit the NHS.

Any pensioners without private pension will be fine as they can claim pension credit which opens the door to masses of over benefits, including winter fuel allowance: these will I'm sure be protected

And FWIW @GasPanic my eldest has a horse, pays for it all herself out of her (lowest tax bracket) income BUT the amount she spends is still less than one of her friends pays out on holidays abroad.

@dollopofsauce tax payments on dividends are now a 'thing' - back in the day it was considered fine if your company paid corporation tax thatdividends were considered tax paid. Now there's a threshold free - which has already been cut from £5k in 2016/2017 progressively down to £500 in this tax year, and then you're taxed according to your income tax band See https://www.gov.uk/tax-on-dividends

Oh right, ok keep blaming the tories as they did it at an election years ago

Labour has black hole as in the first six weeks they spent billions on pay rises we couldn’t afford. And now we all have to pay for it. It’s not the tories, we all know the economy was righting itself. Interest rates dropping, but they fucked it. We all watched, watched labour spend spend spend and cow tow to the unions again and now they are scrabbling about looking to tax everyone.

and it’s going to be a shit show for the next four years. If you think for one moment you’re going to see marked improvements for the money, you are sadly mistaken,

I reckon it's mostly going to be changes to rates of taxation on sources of income that aren't subject the standard income tax thresholds. The rationale being to bring them up to or above the normal income tax bands.
Also, employer NI contributions (so no one will see a change in their pay packet, though obviously some companies may slow/freeze recruitment and/or offer smaller pay rises/bonuses to fund it).
The freeze on petrol/diesel duty will end (painful, yes, but hard to still justify the freeze). Probably changes to CGT and IHT (see my first point) and the removal of various exemptions.

Pensions won't be cut (triple lock); income tax thresholds won't change; personal NI contributions won't change; state pension age won't rise.

I earn pretty well, I pay a lot of tax, I'll probably have to start paying more after the budget. But if doing so helps to improve and maintain services - especially the NHS - and make life just a tiny little bit easier for people who are really struggling then fine by me.

I don’t think that anything can be written off as disinformation until it actively hasn’t been implemented.

If people had said during the election that labour were planning to scrap the winter fuel allowance they would have been shouted down for publishing “disinformation” on the basis that Keir Starmer accused the tories of killing pensioners if they scrap the WFA, and yet that was one of the first things that labour did.

Of course not everything that is being bandied about is going to come to fruition, but until the budget is published, absolutely nothing can be ruled out.

This terrifies me, if he wins it will make the world even more dangerous and if he does not win he is going to cause profound problems by challenging the result and whipping up his cult followers. When I am feeling really depressed about it I can imagine civil war breaking out in the USA. Trump would love that. I try not to be dramatic but the events of January 6th leave no room for complacency

Labour has black hole as in the first six weeks they spent billions on pay rises we couldn’t afford

you don’t really believe this surely? Are you having us on?

The winter fuel allowance has been in the cross hairs for a while as it was widely accepted in policy circles for years to be a poorly targeted and poor value benefit. There are much better ways to help low income, fuel poor pensioners.

There is a lot of misinformation in this post. But I will pick this:

Any pensioners without private pension will be fine as they can claim pension credit which opens the door to masses of over benefits, including winter fuel allowance: these will I'm sure be protected

Is not true. The new flat rate State Pension is above the PC limit, as are a lot of State Pensions paid under the old system. Also many pensioners on SP only will have savings above the PC limit.

You have to be pretty poor to get PC, which is why it is wrong to have the WFA set at that level.

Agree. My in laws spend theirs on heating the pool in their Portuguese home.

the thing is in Order to support the government measures I need to know why we are in this situation first. And I don’t mean politically. So tired of hearing ‘14 years of Tory rule…’

what u mean is why economically are we in this situation? Is it an imbalance of the working population? Is it the NHS will never cope with the breath of conditions required? Is it that educating the entire populace to a highish level is too expensive? What is the level of police per capita compared to 100 years ago- is it too low and giving rise to resultant problems? Etc etc.

something isn’t working with society. and I feel that all these measures they are coming up with are just papering over the symptoms and hammering the easy pickings without actually getting to root causes of the economic problems which are not political but systemic.

Or you could wait a couple of days and stop all the fretful speculating.
Crazy, I know.

Edited to say I don’t mean to quote this quote- apologies.
The whole country is falling to pieces, do we want to repair it or just leave it to get worse?

Im an employer, if us paying a bit more NI so
my employees can get a GP appointment or that operation they’re waiting for, I’ll gladly do it!
The right wing media have basically whipped up so much hysteria around all of this, stop reading or listening to it. You’d think people would have learnt their lesson by now re media lies.

That's your in laws, there are 2.5m who will be in hardship due to the cut

Jeez! looking at the thread title and thinking First world problem. Personally I give very few shits about things I have zero control over

@AlbionLass

One of the least satisfactory aspects of all this is the way Rachel Reeves and her colleagues seem to be enjoying all this. They are gloating.

1 - Utter bollox.
2 - Liz Truss?!

Of course they did.

Labour were elected in July FFS.

She doesn't know, she just hates and fears them. Politics isn't always rational.

It’s not means tested at all, why in earth would this not be feasible?

And how long did the Tories spend blaming Labour? Fair few years iirc

Could be taxed progressively

Well that’ll be a first. Don’t worry though. If they do I’m sure the press and media will whinge and complain.

Does Starmer know? When he says 'pain' what does that mean? Not rainbows and unicorns I suspect

So they informed you that they were using their winter fuel allowance to heat their pool in Portugal?