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AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

To ask if you were Prime Minister for a year, how would you combat the cost of living?

230 replies

MzGG · 27/11/2025 21:53

To ask if you were Chancellor of the Exchequer, how would you combat the cost of living?

OP posts:
Genevieva · 28/11/2025 09:51

LizzieW1969 · 28/11/2025 09:40

What about my DB? He’s lived in this country almost all his life, but because our parents happened to be working in Africa at the time, he was born there. So because of this he shouldn’t be entitled to benefits (he’s very disabled and unable to work) but my DSis and I would be because we happen to have been born in this country. (For context, our DM is fully British whereas our F was Czech.)

Rather arbitrary, don’t you think? Or would you say that my DB is fine to claim benefits because he happens to be white? You wouldn’t have a clue about him after all unless he told you his life story.

Edited

Your brother is British by descent not naturalisation, so was British from birth. The suggestion was very loose. More a general principle of if adults move to a country they shouldn’t expect that country to support them. If they can’t support themselves they should go home.

surreygirly · 28/11/2025 09:57

HeddaGarbled · 27/11/2025 22:22

Pray that Trump will stop being a dick, that Putin will pull out of Ukraine and that there won’t be any other wars, climate events or foreign actions that impact the global economy negatively. Otherwise, piddle about pretending anything I do makes more than a tiny bit of difference (Liz Truss excepted, of course).

Maybe stop fuelling price increases and unemployment with taxes

SerendipityJane · 28/11/2025 09:59

MzGG · 27/11/2025 21:53

To ask if you were Chancellor of the Exchequer, how would you combat the cost of living?

Rejoin the EU.

Next ?

BrightSpark10 · 28/11/2025 10:00

Cut taxes for workers, not handouts for everyone-
Put more money back in the pockets of people who go out and graft. Raise the personal allowance and simplify the mess of income tax + NI so work genuinely pays more.

Push people into work, not long-term dependence-
Increase job-seeking requirements, speed up sanctions for those refusing reasonable work, and boost training for people who actually want to get back into employment.

Lower taxes by cutting the waste first-
Shrink unnecessary admin, scrap failing programs, and stop throwing money at schemes that don’t work. Every pound saved goes into lower taxes and better frontline services.

Support that builds people up-
More training, more upskilling, more help getting into better-paid work not just payments that keep people stuck in the same situation.

A simple principle: Work hard, get ahead-
The system should push opportunity, not dependency.
Reward contribution, not avoidance.

surreygirly · 28/11/2025 10:01

Genevieva · 28/11/2025 09:51

Your brother is British by descent not naturalisation, so was British from birth. The suggestion was very loose. More a general principle of if adults move to a country they shouldn’t expect that country to support them. If they can’t support themselves they should go home.

No one said that
Do you think its if fine that people turn up here illegally and are given somewhere to live and benefits
use of schools roads doctors they have not contributed to

surreygirly · 28/11/2025 10:02

SerendipityJane · 28/11/2025 09:59

Rejoin the EU.

Next ?

Yeah that is working really well for the basket cases that are France and Germany
LOL

Thatsalineallright · 28/11/2025 10:05

peoplegetreadyforthetrain · 27/11/2025 22:25

Find a cost neutral way to build more social housing for working people on low incomes

Surely if it were that straightforward they’d have done it ages ago?!

I dunno, I think there are a lot of vested interests in keeping the cost of houses high. The whole of europe was devastated after WW2 but managed to build lots of social housing, so why can't we now?

marathonmumm · 28/11/2025 10:05

LoyalMember · 27/11/2025 22:26

Pull the plug on all overseas aid and spend it on the needy here. Not one solitary pound should go abroad while our own people are sleeping rough and homeless.

This is so shortsighted. Due to the cuts to USAID there will be thousands more refugees attempting to come to Europe and the UK in the years to come.

UserNumber56 · 28/11/2025 10:09

LoyalMember · 27/11/2025 22:26

Pull the plug on all overseas aid and spend it on the needy here. Not one solitary pound should go abroad while our own people are sleeping rough and homeless.

Do you not think though that it could be the lack of overseas aid that is the problem in many cases?

Surely a way to reduce the numbers of people fleeing their home countries and attempting to reach the UK (and other European countries) would be to improve the living conditions in those poorer countries, so that their populations wouldn't feel that emigration is their only option? Withdrawing aid just exacerbates the problem.

isthesolution · 28/11/2025 10:12

I’d do away with all benefit and I’d give every adult a basic living amount. Then people can choose how to spend it - those who don’t work will have to spend it on housing and daily living but those who do work will spend/save it and hugely boost the economy.

Id make childcare free from 1 year old allowing people to get back to work ensuring that children were fed, educated and looked after well for the majority of the day.

I’d charge a small amount for healthcare - maybe £5 for a doctor’s appointment or similar.

Im not sure how tax on companies work but I’d learn and make sure it was a fairer balance between online and high street stores.

GasPanic · 28/11/2025 10:24

Raise the tax free personal allowance.

Increase the minimum wage.

Build more social housing.

Work to encourage more private house building.

Cap mortgage lending to 3x income.

Increase wealth taxes on unearned income, higher rates of CGT etc.

Increase inheritance taxes.

LizzieW1969 · 28/11/2025 10:32

Genevieva · 28/11/2025 09:51

Your brother is British by descent not naturalisation, so was British from birth. The suggestion was very loose. More a general principle of if adults move to a country they shouldn’t expect that country to support them. If they can’t support themselves they should go home.

Ok, that makes more sense but you could have been clearer and not mentioned those who weren’t born here. Arriving as adults is very different and I can see the point.

A more interesting case would be my F who was Czech but married to a British woman. He didn’t live here until he was in his 30s. But he had Parkinson’s for many years, so was a heavy user of the NHS and in later years he claimed benefits too. At the same time, he and my DM were business owners so paid a lot of tax during their working lives and provided work, too.

I wouldn’t have particular sympathy for him on a personal level (he was an abuser), but it’s a very interesting question whether a refugee, as he was from Communism, should be entitled to the NHS and benefits when they arrived as adults, put down roots and paid a lot of tax?

whatsnewpussycat34 · 28/11/2025 11:27

222days · 28/11/2025 04:37

The difference in the countries that have the public services the UK population covets is that lower and middle earners pay far more tax. It’s simple mathematics: there’s no other way to fund it because of the numbers of people in each earning bracket.

The UK population needs to decide whether it will have European levels of public services and everyone will pay what that costs (and no, it won’t be an extra £50 per month. It will mean raising the basic rate tax by 7-8% and hugely decreasing the personal allowance which is several times what it is in most such countries so that everyone contributes a sensible amount) or having much reduced public services and bringing down taxes for higher earners to be proportionate to the state services available.

You cannot have both. The “someone else will pay” model has already gone far beyond the limits of the laffer curve, hence the exodus of skilled workers.

If the population is dumb enough to vote in a Reform “government” that will be the final nail in the coffin and it’ll be half a decade at least until the UK can recover, if at all.

People need to start being realistic. Continually voting for whomever promises you the largest and most glittery completely fictional cake that you can eat forever and will still be whole and you never have to pay a penny for may be a nice dream but it’s not going to result in you actually receiving any cake at all.

How do I vote for you as prime minister @222days 😂

Genevieva · 28/11/2025 11:57

LizzieW1969 · 28/11/2025 10:32

Ok, that makes more sense but you could have been clearer and not mentioned those who weren’t born here. Arriving as adults is very different and I can see the point.

A more interesting case would be my F who was Czech but married to a British woman. He didn’t live here until he was in his 30s. But he had Parkinson’s for many years, so was a heavy user of the NHS and in later years he claimed benefits too. At the same time, he and my DM were business owners so paid a lot of tax during their working lives and provided work, too.

I wouldn’t have particular sympathy for him on a personal level (he was an abuser), but it’s a very interesting question whether a refugee, as he was from Communism, should be entitled to the NHS and benefits when they arrived as adults, put down roots and paid a lot of tax?

It’s a really tricky problem. Most countries are far more ruthless than us and we are currently seeing the problems that come with being too kind. My husband is a naturalist British citizen. He moved here when he was two. He’s mixed race with some British ancestry, but the most recent relative born in Britain was a great grandparent. If there was a British from birth requirement he’d have no entitlement for working age benefits, but he’d accept that because the alternative seems to be the potential breakdown of the entirely benefits system, leaving less for those who really need it and causing an exodus of tax refugees.

InveterateWineDrinker · 28/11/2025 12:34

I guess it depends whether you think the COL crisis is on the supply side (i.e. the cost base in the UK is too high) or whether you think it's on the demand side (people don't have enough money in their pockets to pay what are often global market prices.)

The UK utterly depends on its state-funded public services. Cutting them meaningfully is impossible and we cannot afford them anyway, so reducing taxes is a total non-starter. Diverting demand away from the state sector would be another way, but British class warriors cheered the imposition of VAT on private schools which did the exact opposite; the political will seems to say that everyone should enjoy crap services together.

Net zero is a red herring. It looks like low-hanging fruit in the UK's cost base but I can see with my own eyes that climate change is real, we've got fairly incontrivertable science about it, and more short-termism isn't going to help at all. It's a cost we have to suck up.

One of the biggest costs of all is the price of land, which the government controls not through tax but through the planning system. Torpedoing commercial and residential property costs would be my first priority and if you've planned your entire net worth trajectory based on the price of your house, tough. In the UK, I believe £23 is spent on housing for every £1 which goes into actual productive investment, and that is madness.

Next, I'd have a serious look at infrastructure. I've spent over £400 on parts alone in the last 18 months repairing pothole damage to cars - that's £400 going to factories in Romania and the Czech Republic, rather than to cafés and hairdressers here in the UK. Poor British infrastructure is also one of the biggest causes of poor productivity: put bluntly, you can't be creating wealth when you're sitting in traffic, or standing on a platform waiting for a cancelled/delayed train.

Third, I'd have a serious look at workforce skills, which is the other major barrier to poor productivity (besides British workers simply not working as hard as European or American peers - that's a management rather than government issue though). There's probably something that government could do through the tax system to help with technical skills (which I also view as an industry or business issue, not a government spending one), but equally it cannot be right that senior managers sit around correcting other people's English or Maths when their time should be spent creating value. Literacy and numeracy among school-leavers are really, really piss-poor here, and it is a major impediment to workers getting paid more because often they are just not worth it.

ByQuaintAzureWasp · 28/11/2025 12:44
  1. Half foreign aid
  2. Cancel net Zero
  3. Stop hammering small/medium pbusinesses moving forward
  4. Bring back in the 2 child benefit cap
  5. Raise tax thresholds and out 1p on VAT
  6. Raise taxes on big businesses (Tesco level).
  7. Get the asylum seekers fiasco under control ... sharpish
DdraigGoch · 28/11/2025 13:02

Realistically it's going to take more than a year to change things.

We are heavily reliant upon PAYE taxes while billionaires accumulate more and more wealth tax-free. We need to start taxing wealth. Taxing property portfolios over £3m might encourage the utilisation of that empty housing stock in the most expensive parts of London. More housing supply means lower housing costs - housing being the biggest cause of cost-of-living woes. No more council tax exemptions for second homes, charge a surcharge like we do in Wales. AirBnBs need properly regulating too.

Cliff edges need sorting out, no marginal tax rate should exceed 50%. In the long run I expect that removing the Personal Allowance taper and the children cut offs would be revenue neutral. Merge NI into Income Tax, that closes a few loopholes and should raise some revenue.

We should invest in improving active travel and quiet streets provision. It needs to be done competently (no bike lanes that just end abruptly and throw you into an A road) so a national manual needs agreeing upon. Car ownership is expensive, viable alternatives to driving allow people to save a fortune.

Build more electricity transmission capacity between the north of Scotland and the rest of the country. We have all of that lovely cheap wind that we can't actually use because the grid can't send it to where the demand is.

EspanaPorfavor · 28/11/2025 13:44

@Genevieva im a British born British citizen but live abroad.

Should I be allowed to use the NHS rather than the equivalent of the country I live in and pay tax in?

If I lost my job, isn’t it preferable for me to access Spanish dole that I’ve contributed to, rather than go home and enjoy British benefits for free?

DdraigGoch · 28/11/2025 15:49

whatsnewpussycat34 · 27/11/2025 23:36

I’m a bit dumb. How does trump affect what happens with the COL in the UK?

He's causing a recession

Ablushingcrow · 28/11/2025 16:15

CrazyGoatLady · 27/11/2025 23:28

I'd get rid of all the whining racists like you.

And I'd get rid of the whining 'you can't say that, it's racist!' like you.

Friendlygingercat · 28/11/2025 16:46

Benefits for British Born citizens only.
Social housing for British born citizens only
NHS only free for British Born citizens. You must pay a fee to go to A&E, GP etc if not British.
Evict all faux asylum seekers from accommodation and cease supporting them.
Defund human rights lawyers
Scrap all overseas aid including Ukraine
Cut down allowances/perks/subsidesed bars for MPs – you get a studio flat and that’s it.

WeJustWantYouToBeHappy · 28/11/2025 17:04

Friendlygingercat · 28/11/2025 16:46

Benefits for British Born citizens only.
Social housing for British born citizens only
NHS only free for British Born citizens. You must pay a fee to go to A&E, GP etc if not British.
Evict all faux asylum seekers from accommodation and cease supporting them.
Defund human rights lawyers
Scrap all overseas aid including Ukraine
Cut down allowances/perks/subsidesed bars for MPs – you get a studio flat and that’s it.

Which human rights would you prefer not to have?

XDownwiththissortofthingX · 28/11/2025 17:07

Friendlygingercat · 28/11/2025 16:46

Benefits for British Born citizens only.
Social housing for British born citizens only
NHS only free for British Born citizens. You must pay a fee to go to A&E, GP etc if not British.
Evict all faux asylum seekers from accommodation and cease supporting them.
Defund human rights lawyers
Scrap all overseas aid including Ukraine
Cut down allowances/perks/subsidesed bars for MPs – you get a studio flat and that’s it.

This is interesting.

So all the foreign born NHS doctors and consultants busy saving British lives currently, would have to pay to use their own service?

Presumably, since you are excluding foreign-born from accessing Welfare, Social Housing, and god alone knows what else, you'll at least have the courtesy to exempt them from paying NI, PAYE, and Council Tax?

NautilusLionfish · 28/11/2025 17:52

SJone0101 · 27/11/2025 22:37

Benefits for British Born citizens only.

NHS only free for British Born citizens. You must pay a fee to go to A&E, GP etc if not British.

Lower Corp Tax and VAT to encourage people to start and run businesses.

Free Stamp Duty for over 60s to encourage downsizing.

As immigrants we pay a health surcharges calculated for each year your visa is valid.

Hoodlumboodlum · 28/11/2025 18:11

I'd incentivise more communal living e.g. people renting out a room in their house or extended families house sharing.

I'd tackle social mobility and poor attitudes to community spirit/anti social behaviour. Antisocial behaviour would be heavily fined and ploughed back into clearing up the mess it can cause. I'd have a more personal approach to benefits whereby it's more of an assessed system. Long term benefits would only be allowed in a small minority of cases e.g. severe illness or special needs.

I'd tackle the tax dodging big companies who could pretty much solve the crisis by themselves if they just paid tax.