AIBU to want spending cuts rather than more tax rises?

[PinkFruitbat]

The foundations are being laid for more tax rises in the October Budget.

https://www.ft.com/content/6d43b599-3d7c-471c-88c2-0f056475a840?syn-25a6b1a6=1

AIBU to ask for savings in spending to help balance the budget rather than more taxes.

With welfare spending at nearly £1bn each day, when is enough, enough?

But what's the point?

Add alcoholics and drug users into that as well. The amounts they get are shocking and just enable them to drink themselves to an even earlier death. It does no-one any favours to give large amounts of benefits to alcoholics.

I have answered your question already. Provided examples indicated with data what 25% cuts represents in terms of former CS levels (2021). I chose 25% as it warrants actual meaningful change. Cutting managers, cutting admin, cutting fringe personnel. In the private sector we can face cuts like this, and we just get on with it.

Can you elaborate on 9?

Because to eliminate the fraud, all must be reviewed.

I think it would be nice to close some loop holes. I have a team leader who openly tells us he puts as much as he can in his pension that he take home the same wage as a general op. His partner doesnt work and they get top ups. If his wage is 40k a year why isnt he using this instead? A few people have stopped working Fridays as "they now get uc because of child so they dont lose much"

Didn't fit around the needs of the family. You know the one that involved school runs and dhs health issues which were basically having to look after 4 people, with the associated numerous medical appts.
BTW they were all "proper" jobs. Contributing to society and the economy.

You're incredibly patronising for someone who is so wrong in their view! Almost Liz Truss levels of reverse imposter syndrome!

I agree with this - there are threads on here where small private business are absolutely derided and slated for struggling to maintain endless employment benefits to their workers yet the same accountability is never a consideration for the private sector and, somehow, this is deemed absolutely acceptable.

There are layers upon layers of people working in local authorities thiat can be cut without any affect on services. Literally zero. They could also consider the hierarchy of councils. My area for example has bins which are doubled up 1 bin emptied by the borough, 1 next to it emptied by the parish council. I know a bin to purchase is £500 and to empty each one is £900 per year. Neither bin is particularly used, never full ever. Across my area there are 128 bins, just reducing those to half yields a saving of £58k and if they were never purchased that would be another saving of £32k. There are more than 10k parishes in the UK, if all looked at and rationalised their bins alone what saving could be made? If everywhere is as wasteful could be as much as 570m - just wasted on bins per year.

This doubling up is all over the place in the split between parish and borough, town councils. Look where you live you will start to see it, two different coloured bins one will be parish or town and the other borough. And as I say that is just bins. No one would suffer no one would even notice.

You're deluded if you think a 40 minute"assessment" will weed out fraudsters. They know what to say and how to play the system

there is no child poverty in the uk

What do you mean by that? You don’t believe that there’s children living in poverty? Or you think that their caregivers are choosing to not work so the poverty is a choice?

Thank you for confirming there are fraudsters in the system.

Yes, there are no children living in poverty in the UK.

Absolutely! Total reciprocity - we don't get treatment there, totally fair. If we want to be treated there, then we should pay. Likewise they should

Can you post what you’re basing this on please?

So an EU national resident and paying tax in the UK their entire adult life should not get treatment on the NHS? That doesn’t seem particularly fair when they’ve contributed here.

I think i could agree to some of these suggestions....

As long as we base poverty figures less than a percentage of the average income, there will always be 'poverty' even if the average income was £1m.
I don't think true poverty exists in the UK. What I do believe is there are many children growing up in poverty of aspiration, and that's the poverty that money can't fix, so throwing extra benefits at these families has no effect.
I do think there is a tendency for the liberal left to think that the only thing missing from these families is money, so more money will fix it.
These are the families who didn't bother to access Sure Start and don't bother to get their children to school for breakfast club. I'm not sure what the answer is but money is not. How much of the extra money from lifting the two-child benefit cap went on books, healthier food or activities? Very little I suspect, yet we never learn.

All our bins are emptied by the borough council, no splitting of bins here.

From seeing actual poverty in Africa and
SE Asia.

Except when the person you are reviewing gets distressed and they and possibly you get hurt.

Everything got out of control in 2008.
Raise the personal allowance to £24000, no benefit entitlement above this.
One issue is that people can charge, knowing that their charges will be subsidised. Think about this.
Income tax at 20% for everyone above the personal allownace.
Works in other countries.

It isn’t a race to the bottom.

Having worked in a pupil referral unit I can tell you there are absolutely children living in poverty in this country and I’ve seen it first hand. We provided breakfast for every pupil because we could at least guarantee they were getting fed for the day. So many children would come in and tell us they hadn’t eaten the night before.

We also had an onsite laundrette to help encourage kids skills to wash clothes but in reality we were making sure they had clean clothes. A lot of the children were malnourished and didn’t get fed at home. Yes, there were a lot of children who were victims of their parents actions, alcoholics and drug addicts but not everyone was. The majority of children had social and support workers, some parents engaged, some didn’t. Many were in temporary accommodation so technically homeless. I’m so glad poverty doesn’t exist like it does in Africa and Asia but we still have it in this country and it’s a very privileged to never have seen or experienced it.

The provided examples don't work with this because:

• Some of the targeted groups (such as administrators) are too nebulous a concept to be targeted, because they range from front line operational delivery to the people working in No.10. You've said MOD procurement because you've had bad experiences with them but you can't cut 25% of the Civil Service (approx 140k) by getting rid of MOD procurement.
• Some of the targeted groups cover a wide range of functions, i.e. HR. Do you apply a blanket figure or do you target specific sub-groups?
• There is no data provided on the number of diversity/social media/interpreter professionals in the Civil Service who have diversity as their sole full time job, so we cannot assess how far this would go towards meeting your target of 25%.

Because we can't identify the targeted groups, we can't model through what the impact on delivery would be to see if it's realistic, or assess whether this would get you to the 25% target. 'Actual meaningful change' could be 'actual meaningful chaos'.