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.

Yep

A house is the one thing you can’t hide between shadow companies or what not.

Well then you’d have to disband local councils. The counsellors would just endlessly demand more money from central government and make completely unrealistic promises to their local electorate to get elected, having no accountability to actually raise the revenue for covering local services. And they would become even more inefficient in how they spend the money they are allocated as well.

It would completely break the model of there being any valid local democracy at all because it would turn council elections into a farce with many areas who already get huge subsidies simply voting for whichever party promised the most money from other people hundreds of miles away to pay for their local demands (much like in national elections!) but with the added fact that the local councillors would have no power whatsoever to actually implement any of their manifestos. There has to be financial accountability and responsibility alongside power otherwise… well look what’s happened nationally.

@user365241987the answer to your original question is yes of course they should be doing a hell of a lot more to actually fix the economy.

If, however, by “doing more” you mean more of the idiotic policies that decrease productivity and growth like paying people’s bills for them, then no, obviously not.

I’ll add to this that we already have one of the most centralised systems in the developed world for raising revenue and allocating spending (most of which have far higher GDP per capita and therefore much higher standards of living) so the suggestions from some that local services should be added to national taxation are the precise opposite of the direction of travel we should be taking on this issue.

I don’t know why people in the UK refuse to learn even the very basics about economics, it’s bizarre. Or why successive UK Governments behave as though they need to reinvent the wheel rather than simply looking at what used to be our comparator countries (largely all now racing ahead of us in terms of living standards) and using the undeniable, proven evidence of what works to adapt our own systems to emulate them. It’s really not that difficult.

Don’t be silly. Other than debt, most of their funding comes from government grants. Did you really not know this or are you being disingenuous? In effect it is just another outsourced/ semi-privatised service with all of the negative effects remaining on the taxpayer and now some private debt holders also making a profit.

The UK emulating Australia’s pensions system, with far higher and mandatory (not opt out) contributions to personal pensions and means-testing the state pension would be a good start!

Indeed. And rent/ mortgage which the vast majority of pensioners do not (either their rent is subsidised or their mortgages paid off) and childcare, and commuting, and all of the other costs involving children, as well as more tax.

The bottom line is on average the current cohort of retirees are costing the state over £200k more in real terms per head (primarily in healthcare, social care and state pension welfare) than they paid in taxes over their lifetime. Young people are having to pick up the tab for this entitlement and those of working age now are forecast to pay £300k more in real-terms lifetime tax than they receive in state services and benefits, which is one of the primary reasons that living standards are dropping like a stone and all other services are collapsing.

15% of the population (the over 65s) are consuming almost 50% of public spending. This is not sustainable and they’ve paid nowhere near enough to fund their demands. If they care at all about this country having a prosperous future then they’d stop deflecting blame and claiming young people are “lazy” (welfare benefits to those of working age have been relatively constant as a percentage of GDP over the last 50 years) and the very large numbers of them who are well off would scale down their unnecessary demands on the state.

Unfortunately, there seems to be little prospect of this happening due to the supremely entitled attitude of the proportion of that cohort who behave like this who think it’s outrageous to suggest they shouldn’t receive huge welfare payments that they do not require. The way many of them contort themselves grasping for a way to try to justify it and their self-righteous indignation at any suggestion they should make any sacrifice at all would be extremely amusing if it wasn’t one of the main contributors to the UK’s rapid decline.

I'm not sure how old you are but when you retire there will be even more retired people as people live longer and longer. I suppose the only answer is for either the state pension to be means tested or there won't be a state pension and people will have to pay into a private pension and rely on that. Extending retirement age won't help as that will put pressure on the job market.

Difficult times ahead I think.

The country can’t afford to keep bailing people out. It’s that simple. Ideally, they would lower tax, so that workers etc kept more of their own income, but they keep borrowing to increase benefits. Makes no sense.

If any previous government had half a brain then either:
A proportion of NI contributions could have been ring fenced and invested solely for state pensions.
Or:
The revenue from North Sea Oil could have been invested by the government in pensions funding. As Norway did. Instead it went into the general fund.

I live in a mix of social housing and real wealth. Either way, “luxury” treats like nails, hair and coffees/takeaways/bars/restaurants are always rammed.

Not many signs of a COL crisis here. 🤷‍♀️

What puzzles me is the fact that child maintenance payments are disregarded when claiming UC.

Cycle paths are really useful for cost of living though as cycling is a very cheap form of travel. The biggest blocker to its uptake is a lack of safe routes. The Active Travel share of the roads budget really is tiny.

If you really want to save money from the roads budget it would be much more effective to stop building new roads as they don’t ease congestion (redeploying National Highways to fill potholes might well be popular); ban pavement parking (as it cracks paving stones which need to be replaced) so that the London rules apply to the whole country or even tax the very heaviest SUVs as they cause greater wear and tear on the roads (as Sadiq Khah is considering in London). Or you could consider issuing more tickets from speed cameras so that all offences get a ticket.

Play parks (at least where I live) also get very little funding & rely on crowdfunders, but again they are really useful re cost of living as they are free. They are also essential for children living in older inner city areas or flats where there is very little space for outdoor play. Cutting essential services for children (eg Sure Start or Youth Clubs at the beginning of Austerity) has been tried before & proved to be a false economy.

Exactly why I said we should emulate the Australian state pension system. They used to have a system similar to ours but changed it decades ago due to exactly the same foreseeable and entirely foreseen demographic time bomb, rather than burying their heads in the sand about the known fact that a system like ours is not affordable with an ageing population. It’s basic mathematics.

Nothing will improve in the UK until many people accept the reality that they are not entitled to the largesse which they’ve come to expect and that it literally cannot be funded. See also public sector pension liabilities: if either public sector pensions or state pensions continue without signifiant reforms then it is not an exaggeration to say they will bankrupt the country.

There’s also a very good reason other countries aren’t copying the NHS model. We need to adopt a system similar to France or Germany which pound for pound have far superior outcomes.

And low and middle earners in the UK need to accept that of they want European levels of state services they are going to have to start paying significantly more tax. Our tax system has some of the very highest rates in the world, starting at relatively low levels of income comparatively, for our “higher earners” and while low and middle earners pay far, far less than those in comparator countries. The cliff edges need removing (e.g. scrap the removal of the personal allowance (that one is causing SO much damage to growth and tax revenue)/ childcare funding/ child benefit to make them all universal again (evidence shows this would more than pay for itself in a very short time) and lower the universal credit taper rate to incentivise work) and the unstable tax base needs redistributing to make it more stable, restore the social contract to maintain buy-in for public service funding, and restore the incentives for work and higher productivity. We need to remove anomalies in the taxation system that distort the economy and disincentivise work e.g. we should levy tax on a household unit basis like pretty much every other developed country. We urgently need to reform business rates.

We need to redistribute a significant amount of public spending from the old to the young and invest twice as much on education and also fund energy infrastructure, food and water security better. Growth is being strangled by our high energy costs. We need to have a proper industrial strategy investing in technology and key UK high productivity sectors to restore growth and ensure there are worthwhile career paths and restore our balance of payments and investment. All of this is blatantly obvious to anybody who wants rising living standards and growth because it is essential for rising productivity which is the only way to achieve that. Redistribution of an ever shrinking cake with no effort whatsoever to address why it is shrinking will simply accelerate the decline.

This is all very basic economics. The question is why our Governments refuse to do any of it and why they electorate moan constantly rather than demanding that their politicians do the above.

It’s not puzzling at all.

In most countries absent/ non-resident parents are forced to pay 50% of the cost of housing and raising their child including childcare and if they do not there are severe penalties, similar to how HMRC treats tax evasion in the UK (as a criminal matter). All welfare benefits will be withdrawn for unpaid childcare support, it will be recorded as an unpaid debt with the equivalent of a CCJ and mean your credit rating is wrecked and you cannot rent a property or get a mortgage or loan or credit card, penalties include removing driving licences and passports and even prison sentences.

In the UK there is no enforcement like this so many people simply do not pay and, even if they do, it is nothing close to the 50% of the costs of raising a child for which they should be liable.

Therefore, it is clearly not possible to count unenforceable and often unreliable child maintenance as part of income when making monthly income calculations for the purposes of benefits as there is an extremely high prevalence pf these not being received consistently or at all.

Once a functional system with the above penalties and requiring absent parents/ non-resident parents to pay their true share of 50% of their children’s living costs is put in place perhaps it could be revisited, but not until such a system was in place.

I wish you were in charge to implement these!

@Eridian - agree, the public sector and state pension funding situation is frightening.
https://www.if.org.uk/research-posts/can-the-uk-afford-to-pay-pensions/

Ah because blokes can be bloody u reliable at paying it. So if they didn't cough up it would leave the parent with care below the amount needed to live on by law id they decided not to cough up

It used to be the case parent with the child could keep the first £15 but the rest was taken off any benefits

Sorry this DOES need reform.
It looks like about 37% of parents do not pay up, which is awful, but it does mean that 63% DO pay up, so we have an extremely generous safety net in place for something that is more likely not to happen than to happen.
Posters on MN are always very eager to cull pensions and benefits to pensioners but are strangely reluctant to engage with anything that affects their age group.
The current system permits someone to claim full benefits for being a single parent then potentially a generous maintenance payment on top, untaxed.
Pensioners quite rightly pay tax on anything they get above the basic allowance amount - why can't everyone?
Completely agree about the public sector pensions though. That and the ability to retire a whole decade earlier than SP age.How they have managed to convince the country that their jobs are uniquely stressful and their pay is massively lower than private sector I will never know.

My DH used to work for Ofwat and led a team that got that subsidy for South West. He has retired now but was livid when he saw it was now being scrapped.

Maybe they should get the NRP to pay directly to the state then to ensure what I said doesn't happen. Else you are plunging over a third of people into below the law poverty

The NRP should be forced to contribute a set minimum regardless of their own declared means. Far too many sit unemployed or work for cash in order to shirk their responsibilities to the children they had a part in creating.

And yes, this should go via HMRC with real sanctions for non-compliance.

Tell me about it. For 16 years and 2 kids my ex paid the grand sum of £28

In the end the csa scrapped the claim when youngest DD was 21

Economists have been pointing out the sheer impossibility of these systems being funded as they stand for over 30 years (despite the half-hearted reforms to public sector pensions in the meantime which are nowhere near sufficient). It’s a mathematical fact that the promises made at present cannot be paid, so they won’t be. It would be far better to be upfront with people about this now so they have time to plan, but of course our politicians don’t want to address unpopular truths so they deflect and try to find scapegoats or focus on irrelevancies in comparison like single mothers caring for children or disabled people or immigrants or whatever to deflect attention from this huge, grey, big earred animal sitting there in the corner.

Until the structure and funding models for healthcare and pensions in the UK are addressed (by far the two largest and most wasteful items of expenditure) and our tax system is reformed to remove the well-evidenced perverse incentives stifling any prospect of growth living standards will continue to decline because there will not be sufficient money to fund the productive investment in areas of the economy that will actually improve productivity and raise living standards: education, infrastructure, energy security etc.

These are basic economic realities but the electorate do not wish to hear it so keep voting for people who are pursuing policies which will accelerate the decline.

Lowest pension in Europe I think