Taxpayers to get a spending statement - good idea? Or is it a gimmick?

[Codandchops]

Story is here.

Not sure what to think about it tbh. In principle it seems a good isea but I am so wary of this Govt over spending cuts that part of me feels they could massage the figures to suggest the spending in any way they like....or am I wrong?

I think your suspicion is unfounded. The information is already available in tables like this one. Councils already send out summaries of the main areas of expenditure with council tax bills... no-one seems to think those are massaged.

Found the other thread now - good links on there wwhich is putting my mind at rest a bit. Think it could be done more cheaply online though.

IME HMRC send various brown envelopes through the year, some of which are a duplicates or other waste of paper. It would be no big change to add a simple 'how your tax is spent' table to the bottom of a statement showing your end of year tax and NI contribs. A sort of 'P60 Plus'

I dont think my husband needs reminding, it will probably flip him over the edge!

i hate it, it is divisive, and meant to be, in a way that a list of council expenditures is not - it unecessarily personalises how revenue is spent

what good does it do me to know that i contributed exactly £652 or whatever to someone else's benefits? how is that not meant to encourage me to resent 'them' and construct them as literal leeches on my hard earned blah blah

i would really really like to know the rationale for this so i can laugh a hollow and cynical laugh

I think it's a great idea as long as it doesn't cost too much to produce the stats per taxpayer.

One of the problems is that once you start talking millions and billions, people switch off and it all becomes the government's problem. The numbers practically become meaningless to the average person.

However, if we can see "Hang on a minute....I'm paying nearly £2000 out of £5700 towards welfare." then people can relate to that some more readily and see that as a proportion it's a lot of money. Then they can decide based on their politics what to do with that information.

Furthermore hopefully it will make it abundantly clear where our debts are. So using the article as an example, we can see that the average earner will be paying £363 towards interest. Next year he/she can see that figure go up/down.

I hope we also get a personal statement on how much money the government have borrowed. So "you paid £5700 this year in tax and we've borrowed £2000 on your behalf"

In my view, anything that helps ordinary people understand where our money goes and promotes holding our politician's to account for their actions can only be a good thing.

well if it is context-free numbers you want let's also put on there how much of government revenues went towards bailing out banks, paying for mp allowances, subsidising corrupt regimes, maintaining wars, bankrolling the thinktanks that come up with bilge like this...

It can't cost that much niceguy2. All they do is tot up the total tax and NI and apply the same percentage split across the main departments to everyone's final bill. Thetable linked earlier only shows 11 main headings. Anyone know what 'Protection' covers... ?

Chibi, i suspect the bank bailout would come under debts and maintaining wars would come under defence.

If you need more specific information then you can probably raise a FOI request.

Cogito, hope you are right. I just know that what should cost £1 for some reason always costs £10 when the government gets involved.

...amd you've just proved my point nicely niceguy by focusing straight in on Welfare - even if it IS a figure you just pulled out of the air.

That IS why I feel uneasy about this......

great idea, anything that makes things more transparent is likely to encourage politicians to spend our money more wisely. doesn't need to be done per individual - just for a range of different salaries.

this about sums it up for me

...especially the bit about cretinous world view.

Actually Cod, the figures were based around the article you linked so weren't made up. I did take the liberty to round the figures rather than to the last pound but the gist is there.

As for focussing on how much I'm spending on welfare, it's because that's probably what most people will look at. And As I said, how you interpret the figures will depend upon your personal politics. Some will think that's way too high, others will think it's perfectly fine.

What I do support though is having the information. As said by someone else on another thread, it seems totally wrong to deny people the information because you fear they are too stupid to interpret the figures 'correctly'.

it seems to me like a fairly fundamental part of democracy that voters get to see how the country's money is spent & why not allow them to see how their own contribution is spent?

It seems anti democratic to deny voters information which may change their voting patterns and/or the political agenda.

I agree with the people who have said it is divisive and a tool to stir up bad feeling towards various groups.

They can easily manipulate the presentation to change how the numbers are perceived. On that example the item at the top is Welfare. That will trigger a certain reaction in people. A different reaction to if the item at the top was Health or Infrastructure or whatever.

There is a guardian piece about it as well.

here

Fair enough - no need to deny information to people but I still feel concerns about the cost - I rarely if ever get anything from the Tax Office, apart from an occasional letter regarding my lease car (which I now no longer have so will not apply).
I really do not need to know how much is being spent on Welfare although it might shut up those who think far more is going on welfare from their tax than is actually the case.
How much will this cost to implement?
And the information is already there - okay you cannot see ghow much YOU personally spend but it is possible to see what percentage of tax goes where.
Why do we need to go into more depth? What will this achieve?

sardine - people will always be angry about spongers on the dole, who could work and won't; and sad about people who are genuinely too ill to work. whether they see the figs printed or not won't change that

I don't think that view of how people behave about these issues is accurate.

"Why do we need to go into more depth? What will this achieve?"

It's a convenient way of enabling taxpayers to be better-informed. Yes, the information is available elsewhere if we bother to look but a simple statement of the main areas of government spending, similar to the one I linked earlier, saves everyone the trouble. If I pro-rata the information in that table to my own tax-bill, around £1000 went on servicing the national debt. That's an easier number for me to comprehend than the ones with lots of zeros thrown around in various political debates on deficit reduction.

Okay - I can see why it might be good to know these things. Have to say that I din't HATE the idea but was just wary if the motives for it.

At the moment I am not working although this is about to change as I have a new job - found out yesterday so it will affect me.

I think you're right to doubt the motives of it, Cod. Surely this is going to cost quite a bit at a time when the government is trying to save money. I can't understand why this needs to be done now, particularly as more detailed government spending figures are already in the public domain.

Even in a year of high unemployment, HMRC estimates that just £56 of Mr Smith's £5,702 in tax went to pay unemployment benefits

The guardian article I think illustrates very well why I think this personal statement idea is a good one.

When people hear billions are being spent on the workshy then that gets people's back up. Probably the very intent by the tabloids. But if we got a statement which puts it much more into context like above, we can easily understand that actually unemployment isn't really costing us a lot and there are bigger fish to fry.

Again depending on our personal politics we may decide to focus instead of the education budget....or defence....or pensions...

Yes it will no doubt cost a fair bit to send everyone their itemised statement but then in the grandscale of things it's probably peanuts....probably about 30p in the "other" section of the statement!