Andy Burnham should put the damn social care tax on landlords and big occupational pensions

[CurdinHenry]

Why is it always workers who pay

Why is this only an argument when it comes to social care?

People have more dc than me & get benefits. People rent & get a council house or housing benefit. People don’t pay into a pension but get pension credit.

We all pay tax for things we don’t necessarily use but the vast majority aren’t covering their own costs let alone paying for others!

And yet workers today don’t have access to the same pension schemes because they are unaffordable.

The people with those pensions are likely to be those with savings who are going to pay for their own social care. And they will have paid tax through their lives, and will pay tax on their pension on receipt, and may hand down an inheritance which will get taxed, if its not all taken in their social care bill.

People like my Grandma lived their whole life in a council house, worked a few hours a week cash in hand, never paid in any taxes, then moved into taxpayer funded residential care. No reason why she couldnt work, she just decided not too. Offered a 1 bed council property but insisted on staying in her 4 bed, as she was 'entitled'.

The first group cannot keep being asked to pay for the 2nd group.

I think there should just be a 10% ( maybe even 5% ) tax on all estates. It's low enough for people not to bother with tax evasion and is fair. Especially when our main problem is the sheer volume of elderly people in the UK, many of whom have unearned cash through massive house price increases. The other problem is that the councils pay minimum to put people into private care homes, meaning people ineligible for care have to subsidise those people. So we should have far more care homes run on a not for profit basis that if people need care will be reasonably priced. If people want more then they can pay to top up their own care, but don't have to pay to top up others.

Wot the same occupational pensions that had big holes in them not that long ago

OP is definitely a millennial…

@Desperatelyseekinglazysusanagree

@UniquePinkSwanis definitely a boomer! Millennials aren’t even that young anymore 😆

2,750 are getting fed according to the figures I can find.

families may have been bigger but child mortality was much greater -

Since the 1930s, infant mortality in England followed a marked downward trend except for 1940 and 1941. Between 1939 and 1942, infant deaths rose from 50 per thousand births in 1939 to 59 per thousand births in 1941 and the dropped back to 49 per thousand births in 1942. The deviation from trend in 1940 and 1941 is arguably the result of the interaction of food rationing policies, crowding and poor conditions in day nurseries, and the unusually harsh winters of 1940.

Because landlords are social pariahs on MN. Even though they’re a necessary evil, especially with such little social housing.

isn’t it awful that people have worked all their life and sacrificed salary into pensions and then actually get to benefit from it. How dare they retire and be well off!

Someone left disabled after a stroke is going to cost more in care than someone just popping pills to keep their blood pressure under control.

😆

Actually the NHS Pension scheme makes a lot of money for the government. Over the last 5 years or so it’s made around £7billion in profit (ie £7billion more has been paid in by the current contributors than has been claimed by the current recipients). We talk about scrapping pension schemes like this because they’re apparently “unsustainable” but that would leave a huge hole in the government finances. £7billion probably goes a long way to financing social care already…

So housing associations and councils too?

Or just the people with a few properties who streamline things by not having huge central offices?

And where do you think landlords get their income from?
It's from running a viable business. If the business ceases to be viable they will stop running that in that way.

Locally there are people changing the way they work - some corporate lets - they need 2 months a year, more holiday lets (we're close enough to Manchester to make that quite profitable) or just HMO which is good for absolutely no one and destroys family houses.

You want a stable community above everything else. You want good people renting or owning on your street. You don't want many people on short term lets or overcrowded HMO and the huge number of issues that come with fitting 6 unrelated adults into one house.

We need more people paying tax - which actually means more people working.
We need full employment of the people here.

Same here. I pay a (very) small amount of tax on my state pension, because the personal allowance is a little less that my state pension.

MIL gets pension credit, housing benefit and 75% reduction in council tax, so shedloads more than I do and none of it taxable, and she only worked for 10 years compared to my 53 years of grafting and paying tax.

I'm 68. I'm very fit and healthy, with a great BMI and I take excellent care of myself. I'm retired, but am a governor for 3 primary schools and also volunteer in the schools regularly, doing teaching and giving other support. I try to give back as much as I can.

Despite having lived a very healthy lifestyle for decades, I was diagnosed during routine tests with (genetically predisposed) hypertension 18 months ago and take a low dose of medication daily. Are you actually suggesting that the NHS shouldn't give me such medication and that I should be left to the possibility of a stroke, because "we are keeping people alive too long"? Or is it that you think they should let me get to a specific age and then refuse me the medication, hoping I'll die quickly?

A ten percent tax on all estates seems fair to me.
If your estate is say £200000 would you rather pay £20k in death tax and leave £180 to your kids or risk having to spend all but £20k on care?

Nobody pays while they are alive and need the money.
Everyone pays in proportion.

Yes, my mother said it was to encourage people to have more than one child.

The social care in Scotland is only the 'personal care' element and - my experience, anyway, is that care home companies simply slap on another £200 a week onto the price in order to benefit from that. (We looked after Mum at home, but did pay for respite care from time to time.)

I'll add that we do pay more tax in Scotland, by and large. There's an 'Intermediate rate' which I have paid for the past while - that's 21%.

Our higher rate kicks in sooner than the rest of the UK - 40 something and is 42%. I have my work pension and inherited a percentage of my husband's pension. I got my first state pension a month ago and that apparently now means that part of my work pension will be taxed at 42%. (I'm not complaining - though I admit I'd rather pay less tax - just explaining.)

As I recall Teresa May’s death tax required a universal £30k contribution for free adult social care for life. I would absolutely have snapped her hand off for that as should anyone who had any genuine understanding of the cost of social care and how the system works.

Yes, my mum got nothing for me until the rules changed when I was about 17 (and still at school).

I don’t disagree, but the argument is the home owners who rent out properties will sell up and the big companies will move abroad.
However, the ones who own more than say 5 properties should maybe pay more. One man on a property show I was watching once had 21 properties.
It’s a complex situation though and not easy to see how to do any of it fairly.

And even if they are, they still pay tax on it. I think @CurdinHenry has mistaken income from rental properties as being free money.

Landlords will have bought their houses with money that they paid tax on. Then they pay tax on the income generated. When they sell the property, they'll pay capital gains tax, and if they die and leave it to someone else, that person will pay inheritance tax.

If not privately owned, then there is corporation tax etc.

So actually, the landlords are paying a reasonable amount of tax anyway.

Why? Why would you single out one or two classes of people/institutions to pay for social care? I’ll be banging on to the Casey commission at length about this but briefly: what is wrong with a compulsory contribution to social care insurance fund, as happens in Japan, another wealthy country with an aging population? Pool risks, as we do with healthcare, and as with any other kind of insurance, you count yourself lucky if you don’t have to use it.

Also- having seen a lot of care homes in the last few years, both for residential and nursing care, I would say that bigger, better funded enterprises offer a better service, not least because they can reinvest in training and facilities and they can offer staff a career progression. So I have no objection to profits provided they go back into the business and staff as well. The kind of council run homes that were on offer to my grandmother, back in the eighties, were not places you’d choose to be, or work.