Welfare spending to rise by £73.2bn to £406.2bn

[topicalaffair]

Over the next five years, the OBR is forecasting that UK welfare spending will rise by £73.2bn to £406.2bn.

How does everyone feel about this? I’m livid because I pay lots of tax. I don’t mind paying tax to maintain a civilised society - but this? This is surely taking the piss and will result in weaker and weaker services as the amount of £ available reduces day by day.

YANBU - it’s totally deranged. The every growing uk population can’t function effectively on such a benefits for all basis.

YABU - this welfare spending bill is truly representative of need.

In which case, foreign nationals would have to be permitted to accumulate savings and to repatriate the nest egg in retirement.

🤔

Harsh but true

That will be great for the NHS!

What do you mean by "economically underachieving people"?

I will genuinely be astonished if state pension (at least in its current form) still exists when I reach retirement age! As such I have taken my own steps to actively plan for retirement so that I can sustain myself at the time, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to give younger people a lot of notice that they need to do the same and to therefore incentivise doing so

People have prioritised tax cuts over investment and now they need pensions / healthcare / social care and its not there and due to the falling birth rate , anti immigration etc sufficient workers are not there to pay the tax to support

this is the crux of it.

I don’t disagree but I do think there’s a balance between what is achievable without insane backlash (look at the winter fuel payment fiasco) and what is the best plan overall

By moving to means testing in the near future, followed by further reforms staggered over years with much notice, I think it’s a ‘best of both’ method.

No government will do a total overhaul as it will be so unpopular they will essentially have thrown their own funeral

I found this in the Age Uk webiste so I guess they are correct, the payment only benefits pensioners on £35k p. a.or less

The Winter Fuel Payment is an annual payment to help you with heating costs during the colder months. You must have reached State Pension age. Your Winter Fuel Payment will be recovered through the tax system if your taxable income is over £35,000.

I'm in the LCWRA group. I think I could probably work full time from home, or part time close to home.

Every single job currently available in a 10 mile radius of my house requires either a driving licence, or a significant amount of physical activity that I'd be unable to do. The government is obsessed with companies getting people back to the office so home working jobs are few and far between.

What am I supposed to do? I'm retraining into an industry with more work from home jobs, but that'll be a good few years until I'm qualified.

This.

Everyone seems to say 'yes but it's mostly pensions' but I'd like to see more of a breakdown in the figures. Every single elderly person that I know also has a private or occupational pension of some kind in addition to the state pension. Even my mum who didn't work after she got married has inherited my dad's (small) private pension.

I would imagine that a lot of these pensioners are paying tax (even my mum is with the tiny amount of private pension) so does the pension pay out figure take into account the amount of tax that many pensioners are paying?

If not I think it's a crock of shit.

@lifeonmars100 its per person so household could be up to 70k if two of you living there & still qualify.

Yes but other benefits need to treated the same. Contribution based and taxable.

I think this thread happens every year and as angry as many posters are, nothing seems to change.

They don't pay 40% on £100k though, that's misleading. Like everybody else, the first £12k is tax free, the next chunk of income up to £50k is taxed at 20%, and its only everything over £50k that is taxed at 40%.

People who insist they can’t work for XYZ nebulous reason

@Jan1205 I agree that any government that tries to reform is out. I still think the triple lock should be paused now.

One issue with putting more burden on younger generations is that more will emigrate as other countries will need younger workers too.

Which is still an awful lot.

Or to warm us up for another go at the disabled.

@Cappuccinodelight I don’t have an issue with linking benefits to what is paid in or taxing them.

Well said !

Not in Scotland, we pay more than the rest of the UK in taxes.

It's still a lot of money in tax even thought it's not 40% on the full amount.

Evil greedy selfsh pensioner here hanging my head in shame despite the fact that I still pay income tax and of course full council tax and worked for 50 years before retiring. Of course during those 50 years I paid income tax and NI. When someone retires their state pension is calculated from the number of years they have paid NI contributions, the less you have paid the less you get and it is worth remembering that the UK state pension even if paid at the full rate is not enough to live on so of course people need a work place pension to have any reasonable standard of living. It woud help if the headline figure was broken down to show what is spent where.

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