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?

As i said up thread, we do not have enough money to fund the things we want.
Apparently we wont give up Trident, something our european neighbours don't have to fund, so where do we get the money from for our wish lists?

Raise taxes or cut the things we like?

btw the Tories have thrown our money away with abandon, billions poured away, PPE, Covid loans, furlough fraud, HS2, they ve also borrowed at an alarming rate yet we don't have anything for all this spending.

Tbf Labour supported all of these and wanted even longer lock downs which would have had to be further funded by the public purse.

So what? they didn't do the LDs, they weren't in power.
the Tories supported the Iraq war but i don't see Tory supporters acknowledging that, Blair was PM, its on him, not the Tories, same with LD.

To be factual, Labour wanted earlier LDs, not longer ones, earlier might well have led to shorter ones... we'll never know - the UK had the longest initial LD of any european country.

Anyway, i'm talking about fraud, furlough - companies took advantage of this and put people on furlough who they were never going to let go, Business support loans - bogus businesses claimed billions, very little recovered, Sunak even wrote off £11billion....

PPE - well the list is endless on that one.

The HS2 scandal - £29 billion spend on the the Birmingham north section, then he cancelled it, £29bn wasted..... imagine £29bn invested into roads/GP services/scanners/nhs staff?

They also introduced the winter fuel allowance for everyone with no means testing.

Labour introduced the idea of HS2 in 2009 and was given the go ahead in 2012 during their tenure.
It was backed by all parties in an attempt to ‘level up the North’.

Covid and how it was handled is a complete anomaly as we’ve never had a pandemic before and have no idea how other party’s would have handled it, irrespective of what they said at the time.

What I do want is my taxes to be used for is to build high quality cheap social housing

You can have high quality. You can have cheap. What you can't have is both because guess what, high quality costs money.

I agree re Covid.

The opposition parties and devolved nations just argued against the Tory's actions just for argument's sake. They couldn't bring themselves to work collaboratively with the Tories nor to agree with what the Tories did. It was ALL about arguing in Parliament and in the devolved nations, to do something different, i.e. masks, which shops allowed to open, what they were allowed to sell, tiers, etc. Same happened with Andy Burnham, Labour mayor of Manchester, who just wanted to preen his feathers and get media attention by arguing against the Tories which caused delays in imposing the eventual precautions at various points over the Covid period.

Depends on how you define "high quality".

If you mean in terms of building materials, fixtures and fittings, etc., then, yes, there is obviously a relationship between cost and quality, although you can often get good deals if you have a good procurement department who know what they're doing and understand product specifications and not just price! There are lots of alternative/cheaper building materials that give just as good an end result and that would last long enough, hence you need an experience architect/quantity surveyor who deals with "normal" properties. There's a massive "middle ground" between a cheap/crap MDF kitchen worktop and a polished granite worktop!

If you mean in terms of other aspects, i.e. living standards such as room sizes, layouts, locations, etc., then better planning can mean higher living standards can come at minimum extra cost, just by giving more thought to the practical aspects.

It's certainly not a given that a window costing a tenth of the price of a top notch one will last a tenth of the lifespan of the top one. It may not last as long, but there's a "sweet spot" that will be acceptable. I.e. if the one costing ten times as much will last 50 years, but the one costing a tenth of that lasts 25 years, then it's still long enough, and in reality, even the top one with a life of 50 years will probably have needed to be replaced for one reason or another before it's been fitted for 50 years! What you have to guard against is the cheaper one only lasting a ridiculously short amount of time, i.e. 2 years!

They managed after WW2 (and also brought in the welfare state) despite huge debt and lack of money due to the war.

What's that saying, buy cheap, pay twice. Good quality means lower maintenance and repair costs.

These Help to Buy inflate house prices schemes that both the Tories and Labour seem to like (Tories already did it, Labour apparently plan to) cost billions. So the money's obviously there, just being misspent.

Decent and affordable social housing would significantly cut costs elsewhere. Housing, poverty and health are interlinked. So good quality and affordable social housing would save a lot of money off the welfare benefits and NHS bill.

Then build it? don't say you will, spend £29 billion and then cancel it!!! money down the drain.
The Cons were in by 2012, the HS 2 debacle is purely on them, no one else.

What an opposition party agrees too or not, is irrelevant, its on the Govt of the day, as it will be on Starmer if he messes up.

Anti fraud and due diligence are not once in a century things... the Tories handed out billions of tax payers money with little control & then wrote off what was clearly fraud.

The Treasury has revealed that it expects its anti-fraud taskforce to write off £4.3bn ($5.9bn) in COVID-19 payments lost to fraud during the pandemic
A total of £5.8bn is believed to have been unlawfully taken. The treasury said it will recover just £1 for every £4 stolen by scammers

Other countries have bounced back a lot better than we have, especially on numbers in work.

FFS the tories have had 14 years to change this, stop blaming Lab for your parties failures.

Good point

The way to easily reduce building costs and reduce energy usage in the long term is to build terraces. Town houses for example use up less ground space and terraced means a reduction in heat loss and less use of finished materials and insulation.
Flats are even more cost effective in both terms.

Well clearly it was never priced out correctly or fully thought through at its inception.

Of course there are some well off pensioners there are also some working pp very comfortable but thanks to Gordon Brown there are very few final salary schemes left in the private sector, perhaps you are lucky enough to work for the public sector. Why should pensioners who paid NI and tax all their working life now pay NI