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?

I do hope they are wrong. My 90 year old mum who is very deaf spends about £2000 every other year on being able to hear the family dinner conversation. She's not compromised intellectually otherwise, but she definitely doesn't have any access to big cash resources. But she does own a very modest two up, two down terraced house outright, because 20 years ago I was able to help her buy it. It's miraculously worth about £240k on the local land Registry prices.

@Papyrophile

It discounts council tax up to the extent of 100% for low earners and those on benefits.

Not always the case. It's dependant on individual councils. Some only give a partial discount even for the very poorest.

To do this it taxes some middle class earners at marginal rates of tax of over 60% (in fact over 90% marginal tax between 100k and 120k). The so called austere "tories" borrowed 1.6 trillion pounds to fund this situation. What exactly was so shitty and unfair that you think people should be paying more towards? Who do you think should be paying for it?

I know I'm like a broken record but the high tax burden and, at the other end of income scale, increasing poverty is the consequence of the false economy approach.

One of the biggest ways to cut taxes and improve the economy is through housing. Massive social housing build. Housing, health, and poverty are all interlinked. So people in insecure and substandard housing need more benefits and more healthcare.

Add in good well-funded public services, supportive benefits system, improved child support system, and jobs and training opportunities. Then people get timely and effective help. So they need less state help and for shorter periods of time.

All the things you have listed are pretty long term state help. None are cheap. Nhs is £170 billion a year. Housing - so little built and we have a massive skills shortage. There are loads of jobs. People don’t want them. Lots of training. That’s not taken up either. Self help isn’t whet people want.

You want Nukes, they have to be paid for and that means less for all the other goodies we want.... Trident replacement is 200 billion and like everything else, will be a gross underestimate.

I'll you what i asked the other poster "what scenario would we use nuclear weapons without the USA?"

Anyway, so you want to force people into work? to do what? most job vacancies are for semi or skilled work and i inc care in that, i don't want a disgruntled person looking after my Gran, do you?

Driving jobs? how many unemployed even have a licence?

Most long term unemployed people are unemployable (the rest are churn and will get another job) they need training and they need to get back into the work ethic, threatening them will not work.

Someone said recently they are 6m people on out of work benefits of some sort or another but only 1m job vacancies?

Looking at all the main parties, no one is prepared to raise taxes and we cannot borrow, so we simply cannot have all what we want and no one is acknowledging this :(

I agree with you. Although there are 1m looking for work and 5 m on sick. There are also rising numbers of economically inactive. I agree there are some if the unemployed who are long term unemployed and need training and huge amounts of support to get back to work. Adult education needs to be staffed and funded to be able to do that. The same with sick. Some of them are on sick because they are stuck on NHS waiting lists. Some need support with their mental health in order to get back to work. Again, that needs money and support. All need staff. The 1m job vacancies- how many are zero hours contracts? Fine for students or people who want a few hours here and there, not people who need to pay the rent.

Nearly 22% of working age UK population is economically inactive. This is at the same time as there are significant labour shortages across all industries.

More than a fifth of UK adults not looking for work - BBC News

All of them unemployable?
Like on this thread? where immediate answer was "to claim" and OP got defensive when her young adult DS was called lazy?
To push ds into claiming | Mumsnet

I believe that people would be making different choice in life if they knew there is no option for not working and taxpayer won't bale them out.

Dramatic increase in housebuilding combined with drastic decrease in benefits would allow us to focus funding on those who really need it due to real health issues and finally give breathing space to middle/higher earners who make effort to better themselves, not to drag everyone down.

Did you read the article you linked too? the retired, the sick, students, SAHM's make up the vast majority of these 9m people.

So who does that leave? they don't want to work, so they wont be on benefits, will be on their pensions and or savings.

Perhaps if the tories hadn't trashed the NHS and MH services, there would be less people off sick.

I ve worked in Job Centres, the long term unemployed are very often unemployable, they'll be looking for work but they have no skills that employers want and have no recent history of work.

e.g a young man down the street from me, is 26, never worked, MH issues (still on a 3 year waiting list for help) can't drive, is physically weak, zero drive or ambition - what can he do? he lives at home and receives about £80 per week UC, most of which his stressed out FT working mum gets.

If his benefits were stopped (as you want to do) he would have to leave home and go where? presumably you wouldn't house him, so he'd live on the streets, then what? drugs/crime/early death.....

and no, I absolutely do not want any "disgruntled person looking after your Gran", of course not, but I do want this disgruntled person to pick strawberries at a farm, make sandwiches at a factory, wipe streets or clean toilets.

I do not want my taxes to provide for their living.

What I do want is my taxes to be used for is to build high quality cheap social housing so the carer looking after your Gran could house themselves on their salary in a decent home/flat and be happy and content. I do want my taxes to pay decent salaries to nurses (and for sufficient numbers of them) so really brightest and driven are attracted to profession and then they are happy and content.

And I do want some of my taxes to be spent on nukes - this is the only language with Putin understands

You don’t need the brightest to go into nursing. This is a mistake we have made. It should attract the right people not the most academic. Too many nurses are like automatons. From what I’ve seen anyway.

We need a big rethink on how the nhs is run. It’s inefficient. I found it amazing the Newsnight audience last night wouldn’t entertain insurance but wanted everyone to pay more tax. No one ever looks at where the money goes. It’s a black hole of inefficiency.

There are jobs out there but non skilled ones rarely pay a living wage so it’s very difficult for people to give up welfare benefits in order to take a low skill low pay job. I can understand why people with physical and mental health challenges feel it’s a gamble to work because if they can’t cope with the job they lose the safety net of welfare and face the hurdles of reapplying for them.

I’ve noticed for the past 3 weeks our groceries have been delivered by a man who recently arrived from Hong Kong. I got talking to him and he told me he arrived 3 months ago with his wife and 2 young children on a BNO visa and was renting a 2 bed room house. He had been a civil servant and his wife a teacher in Hong Kong but he needed to work immediately as they had some savings but no recourse to public funds or social housing. He was happy to have got a job so quickly and through it he was getting to know the town and improving his English. He said they wouldn’t be able to live on the wages from his job alone but with their saving they were ok for a while. He was also applying for professional jobs but he said deliveroo probably wouldn’t be successful until his language skills were better and he took an English proficiency exams.

whilst I agree with most of your post @TizerorFizz , brightest doesn't always mean academic as such. I'm really sorry to say but being unfortunate enough to spend a lot of time with NHS I can say that the average IQ of many healthcare professionals is well ... average. The level of incompetence and indifference is horrifying in many cases. So I stand by my point - professions like this should be elevated and made attractive.
And if it means that 26 years old with no drive and ambition has to be made to work in whatever capacity and his benefits to be stopped, I'm all up for it.

That immigrant delivery driver would be able to live on two FT working adults wages if housing costs weren't so astronomical. So again, I want my taxes to be spent on cheap quality social housing and for this to drive house prices across the country for private sector as well.

@nearlylovemyusername Well yes. I agree with you! I’ve seen massive indifference. Spending weeks visiting DM was a shocker. Awful. So it’s not really a knowledge issue for me, it’s how you deal with patients. I assume some nurses won’t ever work on a ward with the elderly. They want an easier life! But the nurses were so detached it felt like patients were inanimate objects on a conveyor belt. Also pain relief was largely absent. The Pain relief assessment was never done - in 7 weeks! I bet a younger person was seen.

I do think the non working are left to get on with it. Most of us can see parents still maintaining a cuckoo. Not my friends but relatives have. It’s too easy to not leave the cosy home.

Headline page from the Centre For Disease Control

You don't get it do you? many of the long term unemployed wont be able to make sandwiches (much of which is automated in anycase) they are as i said "unemployable"

The jobs you list don't get done by anyone, so you'll have to set up a whole new local team above this road sweeper... as you'll have many roadsweepers in area, so a team leader, a manager, equipment.... strawberries? very short season, so your idea, will actually cost more than it saves, esp as the poor person who the council was paying to clean toilets has now lost their job because the CC can get it done for free.....

But you want more nurses, radiographers, physio's and well paid ones plus Nukes? then as i said, tax more but you re like everyone else, want all the goodies, but don't want to pay for them.

The west having nukes hasn;'t stopped Putin going into Ukraine nor threatening to widen the war - conventional weapons is what has stopped him.

Quite, so stop handing money to v wealthy pensioners and give more to less well off ones?

I was simply explaining why there is the need to support older people in winter.

Recently when the payment was made the Government stated it wasn’t cost effective to means test people for the payment ie it would cost more to means test people than just give a flat payment to all.

Its always better to go for the cheapest option.

I think they could target the elderly who pay 40% tax to not receive the winter fuel allowance. HMRC does have this info! My pension is taxed before I get it. So it’s not that difficult to isolate tax codes.

You believe them? as @TizerorFizz says, pretty easy to stop giving it to 40% tax payers, they ve done that with child benefit taper.

the allowance could then be increased for pensioners who don't pay tax ie the worst off.

Think of all the paperwork.
Who lives with who.
One high tax payer lives with someone on state pension only…..do they get it or get a % of it.
Yes I believe it’s probably just too costly to deal with.

Thats not to say I don’t think it could be looked at, to find an easy way to assess need. But then PIP isn’t means tested and also needed for potentially higher utility bills, so where does it stop.

Lets not also forget people in properties with low insulation single glazing etc. Some of which can’t be upgraded…..I’m sure there are other areas for consideration as well.

They didn't think twice when they imposed it on child benefit!

It’s a fairly easy one though isn’t it. I can’t see that’s it’s difficult to assess how many kids people have.

The only anomaly area would be people having kids via IVF and proving how many eggs are put back.

Apologies @taxguru Just realised you mean the upper earnings limit.
on this I have no idea how it’s assessed so can’t comment I’m afraid

For child benefit, they assess the resident parent or mum. It’s possible to assess the higher tax payer in a household.

It’s not complicated at all. Pensions, like tax, are calculated for individuals. In your example the higher rate tax payer doesn’t get it, the one on state pension only does.

Once we start means testing benefits where does it stop.
Child benefit is now means tested.
Some want the one off winter fuel allowance means tested
Next it will be disability allowance.
One could say if some benefits are subject to means testing they all should be.

This article re taxing the winter fuel allowance ( but theoretically the principle could apply to all benefits ) is interesting.

I can’t link so do screen shots