To want the Government to do more about the Cost of Living crisis?

[user365241987]

I just cannot see what the Government is doing to support the insane rise in CoL. Our income is higher than it has ever beautiful we just scrape by every month. It's so depressing. Don't qualify for any benefits. So tired of it. I have written to my MP. I can't understand why they don't increase the lowest tax threshold as that would at least help everyone at the lower end. I don't see any improvement ahead.

The job market is awful here right now. 2.6 job seekers to every vacancy.
Employers want the best of the best.

That is such an silly and childish thing to say.
I assume you have never run or worked in a small business.
My DH and i literally paid ourselves notning so we could pay our staff. And i mean quite literally not one penny.
Sheer ignorance

Ultimately having an aging population is not sustainable. Unfortunately politicians are too scared of losing the grey vote that they maintain unsustainable policies like the triple lock. Look at the furore when Starmer tried to limit the WFA to only those who actually needed it. That's why people are pissed off.

I have to pay the same bills as everyone else
But your income is not subject to NI, despite the fact that someone of working age who is earning exactly the same as you is liable for this tax.

I don’t think it’s about the government ‘helping out’. People simply want to be able to keep more of the money they have earned, instead of paying ever increasing taxes for an ever increasing proportion of the population who do not work.

People in full time work shouldn’t need to cut back, they should be allowed to enjoy the fruits of their labour.

Try booking an appointment at a hair or beauty salon around here. You have to book months in advance and always fully booked. I live on a social housing estate.

Yes its difficult to see this cost of living crisis. Where i am cafe / restaurants etc always full.

Op, usually with these threads, we get drip feeds that the poster is in debt, or has a car on finance. To which I roll my eyes. Live within your means.

Countil Tax needs to be completely reformed and replaced by a form of local taxation based upon income and not upon property.

Then all the PAYE people would get fucked over and pay at the expense of those who fiddle their taxes.

There are practical steps the Government could take, I’m in australia and whilst it has its own challenges with cost of living but the speed at which the government halved the fuel duty astonished me and was a huge practical help to millions. I quite often think how much more future focussed the thinking is here in many ways but also - benefits are incredibly difficult to get, obviously migration is closely controlled and it is expensive and difficult to get here but they import the skills they need not boatloads of immigrants who will in all likelihood not be a bet contributor to the economy and I say that as an economic migrant myself - we moved here for a better life but had to pay and bring skills with us and accept we have no rights to benefits.

No it doesn’t. That’s ridiculous.

QFT.

I think I know too many people who don’t work full time but think the gov should help. People perfectly capable of working more but are choosing a better work life balance. You can’t have your cake and eat it.

There was nothing wrong with the system we had previously, namely the rates. Each individual property had a rateable value, ( RV), every year the rates were set and a formula worked out what was charged for each property. If the owner had an extension built then the RV would be reassessed. But the Tories decided to implement the Community Charge then the Council Tax and it's been a disaster since. There was nothing wrong with the rates system but the Tories decided to waffle on about widows in large family homes being penalised, instead of reforming the rebate system..

This is specifically what I would like the government to do;

• Reverse the NI increase for employers so cost of employing is more affordable and increased costs do not get passed to consumers
• Introduce temporary guidance to employers to allow working from home if one can and wishes to in order to reduce demand for fuel and thus hopefully prices in the short term whilst the Iran war continues
• Remove VAT from hospitality and restaurant businesses so it is more affordable for people to support these businesses
• Regulate comms providers more, it is great that they can no longer raise prices by RPI half way through a persons contract but they are able to raise prices by £3 each year throughout a contract - the price should be fixed for the contract term
• Regulate leasehold and freehold building and estate charges and in particular the amount these companies are able to charge for administration and management on top of the actual cost of maintenance (as well as their profit margin) so residents are not overcharged for these services
• Introduce more customer service regulation and greater consumer rights; make it a requirement for all consumer goods and service providers to offer a customer service email address or online form to allow quick and easy resolution, require longer warranties on electrical goods, more redress schemes in general
• Regulate subscription prices for cloud services and VPN etc.
• Standardise school uniform across the UK so that it can be purchased cheaply from supermarkets and mainstream retailers
• Regulate pricing of baby formula and healthier baby, toddler and children’s foods
• Means test those in social housing and on secure tenancies annually and if their earnings increase over a certain level, charge them the full market rate for renting their properties rather than the usual reduced rental charge. The increased revenue should go towards lowering council tax for everyone
• Provide more funding for doctors surgeries and other NHS services. Currently my doctors surgery receives a pitiful proportion of the tax and NI that I pay each year
• Allow more medicines to be available on an NHS prescription and fund more procedures on the NHS such as ear syringing so people are not having to pay for that separately
• Recognise that often council tax is the household’s largest bill and efforts should be made to reduce this or at the very least freeze future rises
• Consider turning TV license into an optional pay for streaming service for the BBC
• I hate to say it (and many will disagree) but freeze any non-essential local authority spending in the short term such as play area refurbishment, new cycle paths etc. to lower the council tax bill for households
• Regulate and cap the management charge allowed on pension accounts
• Ban service charges in restaurants and allow optional tipping only
• Remove the triple lock; increase pensions by average wage increase only
• Reduce rates for independent high street retailers
• Freeze any increases on prescription costs, garden waste bin collections, council tax, TV license, NHS dentistry until the freeze in tax thresholds has been lifted!

This basically. DH and I are considered high earners so on paper look like we should be doing amazingly well. The reality, on the other hand, is far more bleak. I can see why people hate Labour.

Healthy life expectancy has declined in recent years too. Health issues just as a result of covid infections cost the economy billions - look how many waves there have been and with each wave many adults have had to stop work as a result of an infection or to care for a spouse or child who now has health issues. That’s just covid, let alone all the other pressures on healthcare.

@loislovesstewie I really like some of your suggestions.

I also think the gov should make it easy to volunteer and run clubs. Our local area used to have so many community things done for free - my kids benefited massively from the local church toddler group. The lady who runs it is stepping down after 20 years. I could step in and run it for the 2 hours a week the way she has but I’’d guess that the things that should really be done probably haven’t. Risk assessments; paperwork recording who is there, DBS checks for all volunteers and coordinating that, keeping the dairy allergy child’s biscuits separate. Gone are the days where you could open the doors and offer a chat and a cup of tea.

The council also spend a fortune on things like checking grave stability and tree removal. Firstly the companies who do this charge through the nose because they can. Also, what happened to common sense - don’t walk under an old tree during a storm. Parent, your child shouldn’t be swinging on a gravestone. We are mollycoddling society and we can’t afford it

I agree when I look at the amounts coming in I think “thats good” but then I see it go so quickly on just living and thats without coffees, eating out, holidays etc etc just on living!

@PinkElephants356 you do realize that social housing is often provided by housing associations which may well be charities and as such have nothing to do with the local authority? So effectively you want them to send their profits to the local authority to reduce council tax rather than use those profits to improve stock or help towards building more homes?

But those "widows in large family homes" are still paying plenty under council tax, like they were under the rates system, and removing the 25% sole occupier "discount" would impact single parents as well as widows. The only other real difference between the two is that rateable values weren't banded, like they are under council tax. And it required loads of people in the district valuer's office to assess individual rateable values.

Iirc, there were initially only 5 council tax bands, A-E. They now go up to H, which is £320k upwards. I think there needs to be complete revaluation as property prices have changed dramatically since those thresholds were set. A small semi where I live is now going to cost £400k plus, and my former boss's old house, which was valued at £350k 20 years ago, is now on the market for £1.6m.

@LakieLady I'm not disputing that. I'm saying it was a complete dog's breakfast. The aim was for all adults to pay regardless of who owned the property but it was so widely hated that it was replaced by council tax which is no better.
My point was that the elderly widow argument was used by the Tories as propaganda, when they knew that reforming the rate rebate system would not bring in extra income, and that was the aim. I can remember the argument from the Tories at the time. The rates were, to my mind, fairer as it did apply to variations in each property, now we have banding which is ludicrous in my opinion.
There will never be a system that all agree on.

Well either really improving housing stock would also be really helpful. It doesn’t seem right that someone pays a reduced rent for life regardless of how much they earn, especially when there are lots of people waiting for housing that really need it. Tenants should have a secure tenancy but not a never ending reduced rent.

Because the narrative is always people on benefits being the problem and scapegoating for wider issues within society and basically amounts to saying we shouldn't support disabled people, and that people with low incomes are deliberately earning less than they should which I simply don't agree with. Are there people absuing the system? Sure! But are broad strokes the way to go? What do we do with disabled people and what do we do with elderly people needing care?
Should the government crack down on people abusing the system? Hell yeah! I'm a single mum and I claim UC, however I work full time and as hard as I can. At one point did I consider not working? Yes! Because nursery fees (even with UC) were crippling me but I knew long term it would be better.
I'm the only one in my family to claim UC I have parents and siblings who've paid in their whole working lives. I pay taxes and income tax and I firmly believe that UC is for people like me. Contributing to society and raising children who work hard and will contribute too.
Would you not agree? Or am I a leech?

Council tax makes up only about a third of a councils budget. Most comes from direct government funding.

I agree it should be reformed but it should be scrapped and income tax raised to cover the full cost of running services.

The current value is of little relevance though, since in most areas broadly property prices will have risen by similar amounts. It is simply a mechanism for dividing up the cost of local services between the residents and there are already exemptions from payment for those who are poor. The disparaties in property prices across the country are not relevant because it is a measure to determine the proportion that each local person should pay towards their local services and priorities for which they have voted. The relative cost of a similar property somewhere else in another council area makes no difference at all.

And ultimately, since these charges are specifically for local services, the size of the house/ property value is not really the relevant basis upon which the local community’s costs should be divided therefore spending an enormous amount reforming an already illogical system by revaluing everything, at enormous expense. It would be an unmitigated disaster and take years and no doubt result in tens of thousands (at least) of legal challenges to updated valuations. It isn’t houses that consume local services, but people. It’d actually make far more sense to revert to a charge per person to reflect better the costs of care home, HMOs, houses with multiple children etc, with exemptions for those who can prove they cannot pay anything at all towards it.

Regardless, Council Tax is an extremely peripheral issue to the economic mess that the UK is in and should be way, way down the Government’s list of priorities.

It’s depressing to see yet another thread on this topic where the majority of posts seem to show no grasp at all of economics or why the UK economy is in such a mess (many making comments about trivial and immaterial issues and some making utterly insane suggestions which demonstrate that they have no grasp whatsoever of cause and effect, like the poster who suggested the Treasury confiscate 100% of people’s estatwa upon death - that one was so absurd it made me laugh out loud!) so in I suppose it’s no surprise that people keep voting in Governments who are equally as clueless about the obvious steps that could be taken to improve things.