Are we heading into a major recession?

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Things are already tough in my industry - I’m a contractor and this past year is my worst in over two decades - but should I be expecting things to get worse not better?

and I sound stupid, but what are the main economic indicators?

The pp is correct. You might not notice as I take it you are a Labour voter

Try reading?

We do. They just don’t want to work.

im recruiting for a full time manual labour job. Not glamorous but above minimum wage and has opportunity for good career progression. If you work hard by 25 you can be on 30k plus a house and bills paid.

Tried so many avenues to get local young people. Job centre send them. They don’t turn up. I’m sure they tell the job centre we’ve rejected them. Offer them a job and they can’t get out of bed for 9am and don’t turn up. Again, I’m sure they tell the job centre a different story.

We fill the vacancies with immigrants with the right to work and semi retired post 55 women caught out by government pension.

I think we’re heading for a recession. Businesses haven’t yet felt the impact of the April taxes. I produce an item many of you will buy on a weekly basis. Our contract is set up with the supermarkets that they know all our input costs. Which are based on minimum wage by the way for every single worker. When they go up the price we get paid goes up. Works in the other direction too. I can’t see how food isn’t going to go up substantially in April. This is not an unusual situation.

We all complain that we thin everyone should be paid an amazing wage. But that’s not reflected in our shopping habits. We buy cheap tat from SHEIN and the like or imported Dutch pork. Not the British stuff that pays its workers well and looks after the environment (not perfectly yet I know but a flip site better than some countries we import from.)

The charity I work for is expecting an increase of £450000 due to the NI contributions increase. that is not sustainable and there are likely to be mass redundancies.

Yes but they are taxing the wrong people. Over 50s are hoarding all the wealth while young workers can't even afford a home. Older people need to start paying more tax to cover their own care.

At @MidnightMeltdown I agree they need to target wealth but look at the outrage with means testing WF. The care may end up getting funded by default though. I said on a recent thread that the IHT threshold should be lower. People want the NHS, free social care but they want low tax. You can't have it all.

We do. They just don’t want to work.

We don't. There are more over 65s than under 15s. In the 60s we had 5 workers to 1 pensioner, it's now 3:1 and 2:1 is on the horizon. Feel free to find different figures though @WhitegreeNcandle?

Try reading?

I need something of note to read but good luck with Reform.

Poor wage growth partly started with freedom of movement.
A warehouse worker on £10 an hour suddenly found themselves competing with EU workers who would willingly work for less.
I don’t have any issues with EU workers as they are a fab bunch but it did impact British citizens.

I saw something different in 2008. I work in construction and because of Labour shortages, the prices charged by contractors were eye watering. A sparkie's mate, the guy who essentially holds the ladder, was being charged out at 30 quid an hour. One quote I got was 300 quid a day for a guy to water the grass. And that was 15 years ago. Eastern European labour meant the rates had returned to what they should be. Not minimum wage, but an appropriate rate for the job.

Wage stagnation happened because of the banking crisis, not the Easter European labour.

@wipeywipe fair point. I don’t have the figures. What I do have is anecdotal experience of is lots of young men and women not working in our local area.

The pp is correct. You might not notice as I take it you are a Labour voter

I've voted for all 3 parties over the years. I won't be voting Reform though.

@WhitegreeNcandle I'm sure there are and I agree with the point re wanting uber cheap goods. Statistically we don't have enough young people though.

Brexit-Brexit--Brexit(to blame)

Mistake of the century.

@wipeywipe do you want age-related tax bands? If I need care in my dotage, I expect to self-fund via the sale of the marital home. If I live a long time in care, there won't be much left over for HMRC to take in IHT. But if I spend the savings I have worked to accumulate on frivolity then the tax payer will have to fund my care.

This!

This thread is a great example of why we are partly in this mess.

People just don't want to acknowledge the fallout from 08, that Tory austerity didn't work, that we have an ageing population. Everything is simply the fault of immigrants.

Because as you point out we have an aging population and immigrants on the whole tend to be young.

We don't have enough young people to pay the pensions of the old. One thing to do is raise the retirement age, which will work to an extent, but you'll end up with more older people unable to work through ill health and claiming disability benefits instead of their pension, or just generally considered unemployable and unable to get a job due to ageism so on benefits for that.

The Tories did a lot of posturing on immigration but had no real intent to do anything about it because of the above.

I thought the same for posters glossing over impact of the budget

As shown in CBI figures

@Papyrophile Not sure. I know Portugal are looking at very low or no income tax for under 30s. Much of the West has the same demographic issues so will be trying to attract young people. We are already losing skilled young people which exacerbates the issue.

Care in the home which is far more common needs to be funded too though & housing is excluded from that.

But if I spend the savings I have worked to accumulate on frivolity then the tax payer will have to fund my care.

A lot of the problem is this isn't it? "why should they get more then me" etc. Who knows if the landscape will be different in the future, the assisted dying bill will be passed imo.

@DaphneduM You need to understand where Labour got votes from. Brexit voting areas. Enough of these voters don’t understand economics or what they have done. Labour needs to keep them on side and therefore doesn’t do what it should regarding EU trade. We are an unbelievably stupid nation. It will be Farage next.

We will be on the cusp of a recession. We are just in the positive on productivity but few businesses feel bouyant. The government does back business. It backs unions and the state. We have no headroom due to borrowing costs so the state will now have to reduce spending. Far too many people are not working or producing anything. Those that are are pushed to pay too much tax.

We don't have enough young people to pay the pensions of the old. One thing to do is raise the retirement age, which will work to an extent, but you'll end up with more older people unable to work through ill health and claiming disability benefits instead of their pension, or just generally considered unemployable and unable to get a job due to ageism so on benefits for that.

That's the conundrum. Healthy life expectancy hasn't increased. And younger generations don't have the same levels of home ownership so that bill will increase. It's why I think we are fucked!

The Tories did a lot of posturing on immigration but had no real intent to do anything about it because of the above.

Absolutely.

Certainly no wonder why Farage needed to repackage his party. If it had been a success I dare say he would have held on to the name.

Quantitative easing from 2008 until very recently has been catastrophic. We may be about to see the first significant benefit of Brexit when Brussels begins to thrash out the next seven year budget plans and starts to pay down the COVID support. The UK is no longer the second largest crontributor to EU funds so Germany and France will have to find huge sums to fill the gap.

There was a link from politico added earlier today on this or another thread.

They can't get enough British citizens to work since that ended, which is why they burn huge amounts of perfectly good crops because they don't have the workers to harvest them. Now they try to entice people from abroad with higher wages than they were paying EU workers originally and can't even make it happen then because of too much red tape.

You could ban all immigrants from working in the UK, you wouldn't have British people filling the jobs. You'd have British people at home still claiming benefits.

And in terms of balance I am that way myself. I had a 50 year old lodger from abroad who got up at 4am every day to walk to a local warehouse for a well-known British high street retailer to see if they had any work for her that day (zero hours contract with work allocated on a day-by-day basis). No way in hell would most people do that.

You'd have British people at home still claiming benefits.

Are you excluding state pension & pension credit from that?

It looks like it. I really hoped Labour would do better but they’re hopeless in every way. 🙄🙄🙄🙄