Income tax- Burnam

[Niftywigglesheep899]

Does anyone know if Andy Burnam is planning to raise income tax , so we have less money coming in each month?

Im quite concerned - stretched as it is and can’t cope with anymore.

Sorry that was in reply to this quote

People do want you if you show you have the skills. The majority of the people that have gone were both earning six figures. We have looked into it - it’s easy enough with our skills to go to Singapore, Hong Kong, New York, Bermuda or some European countries. We don’t have language skills so it would need to be those that have business English

Yes and same as this, people I know aren’t boarding their children. They go to local schools

But you are cherry picking to support your claim everyone will leave.

There is only a small cohort where it makes sense, or are able to leave.

So what do the civil service and council pensions cost us?

I read he might raise the personal allowance. And put the higher tax up to 50%. I don't think that's too bad.

But he's doing things that were NOT in any manifesto. Not on. We've got a back door leftie in charge.

Definitely but there are lots of people on mumsnet that seem to think the higher earners won’t leave the country and good riddance. Also lots who say they’re happy to pay more tax.
Maybe instead of just taxing more more people are supported into work so there are a larger number of taxable individuals.
Yes the job market is awful but that might be as a result of more tax to businesses? Can’t really have both .

That is a key issue that many ignore. They often assume that moving abroad also entails finding work when that often isn’t the case.

I work for a medium sized plc who operate globally but are based in the UK. Most of the people I work earn between 150k and about 500k. I’d estimate that well over half of them could be based anywhere in the world and still do their same job. The limitations are normally time zones as you don’t want to be too far away from GMT, and schools for children. Other than that most of us have 100% flexibility.

The ones who are not UK citizens have already moved or are planning to move. I doubt any of them will still be UK based in 12 months time. Of the others I’d estimate somewhere around 1/3 will move. Others will follow once kids have finished school.

Each of them currently pays an average of around 100k income tax and NI. You’d need 20 people earning 30k pa to match their tax payments. I think about 50 will move. To compensate for that you’d need an additional 1000 workers on 30k pa. The sums are frightening and will soon become apparent to all.

I'm against raising the personal allowance. I'd make people pay tax at an even lower rate. People need to see tax being taken out of their pay packets every week/month and understand that their tax pays for services. It might make people think twice about being arseholes and not turning up to NHS appointments, or dropping litter everywhere etc. I'd be in favour of dropping some of the stealth taxes - we are taxed to shit with stealth taxes. VAT, duty on booze, road tax, it's like pacman taking a bite every time you leave the house and do something. In fact, you don't even have to leave the house. Insurance Premium Tax on your buildings and contents insurance! what the fuck is that all about? Get rid! If we got rid of all these little 'they won't notice' taxes all over the sodding place, people would instantly have more money in their pockets. Just raising the personal allowance destroys the link between liviing in a civilised society and paying your bit towards it.

@ChloeHH ”I work for a medium sized plc who operate globally but are based in the UK. Most of the people I work earn between 150k and about 500k. I’d estimate that well over half of them could be based anywhere in the world and still do their same job. ”

I work for a huge global company (200k people) and we can’t pick where we want to work, no one can.
Yes, we could all work from anywhere, but we cannot, the company doesn’t allow it.
It’s near impossible to change countries, and you certainly aren’t taking your higher salary with you.

I read that if they increase the personal allowance by £500 it costs £5bn and means most people save £100 a year. £2 a week.

if they take a penny (I think it was) off National insurance then it means some people won’t see the benefit but will save most people £230 a year.

id like to see the tax thresholds changed. The fiscal drag absolutely kills us. We’ve got no money to spend, get hammered at every turn

Well maybe being a smaller plc allows for more bespoke flexibility. I can imagine fairness and consistency being a bigger issue in a larger organisation as many more people would be impacted.

Our company pretty much encourages it as a means to retain talent. Plenty have already taken up the offer and have retained their UK salaries overseas in more favourable tax jurisdictions.

I suspect many more organisations will be adopting a similar approach. Why wouldn’t they?

Also, if big businesses can't find staff willing to work in the UK then they will go, and take the jobs with them. We haven't invested in anything in this country at all. Instead of living in a fantasy land when people were still down coal mines and had jobs in manufacturing, why have we not invested in tech, or pharma or other newer industries. Starmer promised to do that but then failed.
Throwing more money at people will not solve the problems we have when we have such shitty infrastructure, nothing works properly and our services are completely inefficient and ineffectual. We need to be an economy that encourages jobs, growth and for money to stay here.

What am I cherry picking? I haven’t said everyone will leave. I have said I’ve had a number of leaving drinks and parties for friends, colleagues and clients who have decided to leave in the last couple of years. They’ve managed to very easily get jobs. I myself have been approached about jobs abroad by recruiters. My partner has been asked if he’d be up for an internal move to another country at his existing global company.

What is concerning is if this is wider and many more higher earners are leaving. Especially with @ChloeHHfigures about how many £30k earners are needed for one higher earner

Yes they have already invested and committed billions to research and industry! Remember that’s it’s only been 3 years and these things take time.

– expansion of AI and cloud infrastructure.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) – multi-billion-pound UK data centre investment.

Blackstone – large AI data centre investment in North East England.

Eli Lilly – expansion of UK life sciences research.

Moderna – continued investment in vaccine manufacturing and research.

BioNTech – expansion of cancer and mRNA research in partnership with the NHS.

Also The Industrial Strategy focuses on advanced manufacturing, including aerospace, automotive (especially electric vehicles and batteries), steel, defence manufacturing, clean energy technologies, advanced materials and industrial robotics. The government pledged support through investment in research and development, lower industrial energy costs, skills training and supply chains, with the aim of increasing UK productivity, encouraging private investment and creating high-value manufacturing jobs across the country.

These are just meaningless soundbytes - they look like they were taken directly from Labour generated comms. Unless Healey can quickly demonstrate he has a credible strategy to stimulate economic growth and the public can see this is working, Labour will not win the next GE. It's that simple.

£500? I read that if the personal allowance had gone up with inflation then the lower threshold would be around £16,000 by now.

It’s no wonder people are fed up and pissed off.

Yep, I’m not a big fan of ‘there’s no magic money tree’ as an excuse but they definitely won’t be able to increase it by much. What’s the point for £2 a week?! Stuff we like in the supermarket seems to go up by that sort of amount every week, £2 a week won’t be life changing to anyone!

How many are there?

There are 9.1 million economically inactive people currently in the U.K. incidentally this number has barely changed since the 70s, according to ONS. It’s about 4% higher than average at the moment, but that only accounts for about 200k of a difference.

2.4m are in full time education
2.3m are long term sick or disabled ( no that’s not someone who cites mild mental health issues and signs off sick for years it is someone who has been designated unable to ever work, profoundly disabled, terminally ill etc)
2m are caring for family
1.1m have taken early retirement.

That leaves about a million people who “could work but don’t” (according to you) this includes:- people living off trust funds, women who have been SAHM and their children are now adults, but they neither want nor need to work, people who are volunteers etc. I’m sure within this group there are some who are workshy young healthy adults, those have always existed. But what is definitely the case is, this number is way, way lower than the Daily Mail would have you believe. Even if they managed to get all of them in to work, the number of people who are not working and won’t ever be working would still be about average for the past half century.

It’s lower earners in the UK that pay less tax than much of Europe. It doesn’t feel like it though when rants and fuel bills are so high. Tax more fine but sort out the cost of those essentials.

This is also my experience. I’ve worked for many companies who claimed working for them was brilliant because you could re-locate to any one of their global offices. In fact, an incredibly small number of people ever did that and any I knew of who tried, found so many road blocks in their way, it was virtually impossible. You could never just pick an office and go there. Trying to get a transfer to New York or Melbourne or Paris or Vancouver was hopeless. But if you wanted to move to Tripoli or Kiev or Abuja, the process was suddenly much easier. You might find it do-able as a single person but if you wanted to move your whole family, there was no help at all. Their “company housing” was a single roomed flat an hour away from the office.

We’ve heard this for so long “we’ll all leave”. I say, call their bluff. Let’s see what happens. If it doesn’t work then we can review it, but in the short term, taxing wealth and risking a few people moving away has to be a better solution than tinkering with benefits which only makes poor people poorer and is clearly making very little difference to the economy. If they won’t target pensioners, which is the only thing that will do anything meaningful to the benefits bill, they need to target very wealthy people. We could even add a tweak to the tax laws which means that leaving the country wouldn’t make a difference, the tax would still be due.

The days of people being based on offices is long gone. You don’t apply to work in a company office overseas, you simply tell them where you’re relocating to and ask to be paid as a resident of that jurisdiction.

Most people where I work are based remotely anyway so it matters little whether they are sat in an office at home in the UK or at home overseas.

So not true. The majority of people I know who emigrate send their kids to state school and spouses continue to work. Language is not an issue if you work for multinationals, and there are plenty of English native options as well.

Yes, I work in pharma (many of the examples cited) and the general trend is disinvestment from the uk. Convenient to cite the wins, but the losses are higher. Lilly has paused any investment, AZ and MSD are pulling out. And when it comes to clinical research, the uk is falling fast.

Three people in my team have moved to UAE - they were based in UK, Spain, and Italy respectively. They took the job with them - they haven’t been backfilled. I think that you’ll find this is more common than you might think, especially in tech and consulting.