Labour and Pensioners

[Mycatsmudge]

So Labour has declared they will not increase taxes and NI on working people, but they need to raise money for their manifesto promises such as free breakfast clubs, more teachers, dentists etc. To help pay for it all would it be a good idea if they remove the triple lock on state pensions and make pensioners pay NI?

@ArseInTheCoOpWindow You are single. My family members are also single and work part time. The state pays benefits . DC got full loans for uni. Bursaries on top. Years ago I didn’t have friends who were single mums. We all managed to stay married - somehow. Not one worked full time with dc. A generations before me few were full time that we knew. A GP and a few highly paid professional women. Most went back to teaching part time or similar. They had nice enough houses and holidays. The majority of families with two parents could afford a house 40 years ago.

@TizerorFizz You have to go back to about 1970 to arrive at a time when work women were in the minority. Those women will be in their 70s now. Since 1975 more than half of women have worked and paid tax, and that number has risen year on year, so the majority of women approaching retirement age will have worked.

None of which had anything to do with the subject under discussion. More obfuscation.

Tell that to Ukraine. They agreed to transfer their nuclear weapons to Russia and became a party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, in exchange for assurances from Russia, the United States and United Kingdom to respect the Ukrainian independence and sovereignty in the existing borders. That went well for Ukraine!

That’s not everyone’s experience though.
When I started work in the 80s women in the office didn’t return after having babies except for the odd architect. Other staff members ie secretaries and HR never came back. The same in the 90s and 2000s. When I had my first son in 2000 I was the only one dropping off at the school gates and dashing to work. The only one missing all the plays and assemblies. None of the other mothers worked except for one who had a mobile hairdressing business.
The change has happened much more recently except, in my experience, with certain professions.

Pensioners used to get an increased tax allowance called Age Allowance until George Osborne stopped it in 2013. It meant that most pensioners had some tax-free allowance left after their State Pension was deducted which went towards any occupational or private pensions. When it was stopped my dad was 61 days too young to keep it.

The stats don’t back up your anecdote.

https://ifs.org.uk/publications/rise-and-rise-womens-employment-uk

My experience is that most women went back to work after maternity leave - certainly everyone in my family and most of my work colleagues at the time, in the 80s and 90s. At my first job, two women got pregnant in the 3 years I worked there, one a secretary and the other a qualified accountant - both returned full time after what seemed minimal maternity leave. My mother went straight back to work pretty quickly after having my brother and myself in the 70s and she was a teacher. My sister went back to work full time in the 90s - a dental nurse. I find it actually quite hard to think of people who didn't return to work after maternity leave, and most returned on a full time basis.

Perhaps people are harking back to earlier times - it did seem to be more normal in the 50s and 60s to have stay at home Mums, but that was probably more a matter of men coming home after war/national service and needing the jobs, so we needed women to vacate the job market, especially as it was women who moved into male dominated jobs during the war years to keep things going.

Ukraines problem wasn't lack of nuclear it was that it wasn't in NATO and that Russia doesn't see it as a "country".
26 EU countries do not have nukes but don't get invaded, has China invaded Australia to get its mineral wealth?

The point is the UK cannot afford Nuclear IF it cannot afford a decent standard of living for many of its elderly.

We are simply living beyond our means, given we wont or can't increase taxes on many people living here.

@taxguru

You re harking back to an age that no longer exists.

Mothers now, have to go back to work, they simply cannot afford not too, same as many people are working beyond retirement age, bills and dentistry costs are have rocketed in recent years.

No one can plan for a tripling in energy costs, the removal of nhs dentistry (inc for children) and the triple lock has not kept up with food or energy cost inflation.

I started work in 1983 and worked in HR management and consultancy across a range of organisations for 35 years.

My experience of women in the workplace doesn't tally at all with your yours. My experience reflects the findings of the IFL i.e. in all my working life more women have returned to work after maternity leave than have not.

In 1985 60% of mothers returned to work. The rate now now is around 70% and 80%.

https://ifs.org.uk/sites/default/files/output_url_files/BN234.pdf

I used to work for a design consultancy. After women became mothers, they tended to go self-employed if they were client-facing, or they joined the buy side companies; they became freelance if they were on the creative side. Few found themselves able to cope with the erratic demands of agency life unless they were very senior and could pay for a nanny.

People also forget that well paid employment for mothers was rare until recently. The opportunity to save for a decent pension was minimal for a lot of women.

Thats exactly what I had to do as an architect.
I set up on my own as I couldn’t coordinate school times with working for others in practice and three in nursery was financially crippling.
Eventually my husband and I set up our own practice specialising in educational and health buildings.
Other female architects we know became teachers, landscape architects working for themselves, set up on their own or for those lucky enough to afford or have full time childcare carried on working. But they were very few and all never had more than one child.

When your job doesn’t stop at 9-5 there was little choice for us and our friends and colleagues. I’m sure for many that’s still very much the case.

Depends on what you mean by "recently". In my first stint at working in accounting practices between 1983 and 1995, plenty of qualified accountants I worked alongside were women, I dealt with female tax inspectors and female bank managers, one of our clients was a GP practice who had a female partner GP, another client was a small solicitors firm with a few female qualified solicitors and a female partner, and lots of our clients were females running all kinds of small businesses. I'd say as far back as the mid 80s, "well paid" employment was actually an option. I'm not saying it was anywhere near 50:50 between men/women in the "professional" people I was working for/working with, but there was definitely a female presence throughout all the organisations, including at ownership/management level.

I have no relevant experience of what it was like a bit further back into 70s and 60s, but my mother was a teacher and returned to work full time after having both my brother and myself and worked full time for 3 years between us being born.

I also worked as a accountant in the 90s. My experience was of a massively male dominated environment. Yes, there were females (I was one) but there was always an assumption I was the office junior, the secretary or typist and the average pay for a female was massively lower than the average pay for males in the industry. It was absolutely not the norm (rare) for mothers to be in high paid employment in the 80s/90s.

The IFS says employment. The full time rate is now higher but it’s not 50%. It’s much lower in the 80s. This is nearer the time we are discussing. The majority of women didn’t return to full time work. Clearly what dh earned made a difference and whether they could get suitable child care. Plus their own feelings. Yes women work but the majority are part time after dc are born. Even now.

This was my experience in the 80’s too.

I knew no mothers of young children who worked in my company. They were either young and child free or in their 50’s and kids had gone.

My parents, pensioners, are really hard-up. It's not fair to target one demographic.

We had few part timers in the 70s that’s for sure. By the 80s more common but lower paid roles. When I returned to part time work in the early 90s, I was part time doing a professional role. No other women I knew of was offered this. Since then job shares have become far more common so organisations don’t lose valuable skills. I’d worked for years and they had invested in training me. It was short sighted to lose skills. Before then we even had all the professional roles in education management taken by teachers. So no HR, building or finance qualifications were valued until the mid 1980s. In my lifetime we’ve gone from women taking men’s work to women having very influential and important roles as the norm.

I don't think people are. The poorer pensioners wouldn't be affected by adding NIC to pension incomes (as there's a lower threshold where you pay nothing). They wouldn't be affected by means tested pensioner state benefits (because the threshold would be set pretty high).

What people are objecting to is that fact that a pensioner on exactly the same income as a worker will pay less tax (because of NIC) than the worker.

Low income pensioners need to be left alone. High income pensioners (certainly at income levels over national average) should be paying the same level of taxes as workers earning similar amounts and/or shouldn't be receiving all the pensioner benefits that they are currently eligible for.

Agree.
3 women on my degree course 85-88.
More in my postgrad probably 20%.
Im the only one that stayed in the UK and kept practicing architecture. One other moved to Canada and is still working as an architect.

I left one practice in 1999 after I found out the newly qualified male students working on my project that I was running as a project architect were being paid thousands more than me whilst I was teaching them what to do and running a job worth millions.

What pensioner benefits @Badbadbunny? Free prescriptions kick in at 60 and are worth £114.50 a year (the cost of a prepayment certificate). Bus passes are used only by pensioners who can’t/don’t drive because bus services are dreadful/nonexistent and only incur a cost for journeys actually taken. There’s the annual £200 heating allowance which lots of people give to charity (where it often helps make up for government’s underfunding). What other universal pensioner benefits are there? If I’m missing out on any I’d love to know!

All of this is predicated on some people’s objection to a particular sector of society getting something they aren’t. That’s always been the case and always will be. Doubtless if any government committed political suicide by imposing NI on pension income those people would come up with another societal unfairness to complain about.

Yes the case for higher rate tax pensioners to pay NI is strong, the trouble with this is that it will become increasingly tempting for Govts to start putting NI on lower rate tax payers too and/or keep freezing thresholds so moe and more pensioners caught in the NI trap.

But it wont happen, pensioners vote and they will not back this.

I never understood the universal heating allowance, someone with a pension of 50k gets it, a single parent family on NMW, doesn't or that matter free TV licences.

My sentiments entirely @Blossomtoes. I'm only recently a pensioner, yet because I haven't been in employment since 1990, and because DH has an SME, we have had to save for our retirement because the state pension and all its valuable benefits looked like a threadbare existence even then.

So now, we still pay tax on our SIPP and tiny occupational pension income and the interest on our savings (which didn't go above £50 pa until the last year). We don't use public transport so the bus passes are irrelevant. Only the annual heating allowance and the free prescriptions count.