Are Labour really going to bring in the school fees VAT in January mid way through a school year?
That feels bizarre to me.
They’re attempting to make it retrospective to this September, but can’t get the legislation through in time.
Which I suspect will lead to a well-funded legal challenge.
Any evidence to back the September claim up?
Because if they were doing that they would have had to do it yesterday and instead all they said January.. (Remember this sort of trick is something I'm very aware of - so the wording yesterday was interesting and carefully created a distinct line)...
Reality is that by implementing it in January and announcing yesterday after the school year and finished it's designed to minimise the number of people able to move schools before September which is probably a relief to both State and Private schools...
Although it does rather mess up people who are already struggling to pay school fees...
So we’ll get a winter of freezing pensioner headlines followed by a January of taking the little darlings out of school/could state schools be overwhelmed headlines. Plus whatever comes down the line in the budget in October.
I don’t think we’ll be seeing much by way of a Labour honeymoon. That doesn’t mean that the Tories are going to suddenly look amazing (they’re not). But it will be interesting to see what the polls are coming out with early next year.
Not optimal… but then I guess they’re getting these hits out of the way early.
I LOL at Labour for the private school fees move.
I think Starmer reckons it'll be another foxhunting ban moment. But foxhunting was directly supported by very few people, and this move will affect many, many more people directly. It'll cheer those who hate people who are richer than them; but dismay many more.
Personally I’m a VAT supremacist, so this is grist to the mill. VAT on everything!
Labour have an opportunity here at the start of Parliament and with a massive landslide majority.
Merge National Insurance and Income Tax and create a single Income Tax rate that is paid by all adults of all ages on the same income equitably.
No increase at all in Income Tax for those who are working and on PAYE.
Doubt they will do this. Will burn lots of political capital, will inevitably increase taxes for some groups, and althoygh logical, isn't a top priority.
I think they need to find a way of raising more money that isn't too unpopular. Reducing the very generous pension tax reliefs for higher earners is the obvious move imo.
Except that will result in a lot of people doing less work - little point doing a full 5 day week if tax makes it more sensible to work a 4 or even 3 day week...
The people who are impacted by those sort of changes aren't earning day to day living expenses they have savings and options...
Doubt it would be a major factor honestly. Anyone earning over £50k is a higher rate taxpayer.
Most of those are not so wealthy that they could easily afford a 20 or 40% drop in income.
Doing so because they only get 20% pension relief rather than 40% would be a very strange financial decision to make.
And yet that is what @MisterBedfordshire said earlier and is the experience of many others.
I carefully kept my income below £50,000 to ensure I kept child benefit for many years and last year played similar games to keep my income below £100,000...
Remove full tax relief on my large pension contribution and a 4 day week sounds very nice...
I may need to look at these games, and pulling my kids out of private school, when we get to the Autumn and we know the lie of the land in the budget. Already tough as it is. It will get harder.
Of course, that will mean much less tax for the exchequer, and a bigger burden on the State, but hey ho, that's what you get when you try and squeeze people dry.
There was an opportunity to reset the tax narrative for Labour and remove the cliff edges but they've failed to do so. Another 5 years at least with people going part time or using tax avoidance at £100k.
I've shifted down to 3.5 days per week in my new job to stay below the cliff edge from an earlier agreed 4 day week. I now get Wednesday afternoon and Fridays with my kids which I think is a better use of my time than working so I can give the government 62% of the increment.
This wasn't the budget though - so there is little surprise that the tax narrative has been reset.
However it's clear from the discussions this afternoon that any changes impact people who are well paid is going to have interesting (and unexpected by the Government) consequences..
But £100k isn't even a huge salary today, not the same as what it was in 2009 when Brown introduced the 62% marginal rate, it's £152k in equivalent money today just by inflation. I'd happily do a 4.5 day week with Friday afternoons off if there was no marginal rate. It's immoral for the state to ask me for more than half of my income, I go to work to provide for my family not to fund a huge payrise for public sector fatcats.
£100k is still nearly 3 times the median wage (£34,963) and over twice the average wage (£42,210)..
Although the rest of your argument is absolutely valid - the lack of indexing has forced way more people into it...
And it used to be 4x the median salary in 2009. £100k is relatively a much smaller salary than it was when the cliff edge was introduced. It has a third less purchasing power and the number of people who earn at least £100k has more than doubled in that time. It's no longer a huge salary, a senior developer or data engineer can earn more than that before part time or AVCs are taken into account. In 2009 it was C suite or directors of big companies who would be in that salary range.
It is both large and not as large as it was.
Governments have tended to avoid making explicit tax rises by letting inflation push more people into higher bands. It's a sleight of hand that voters shouldn't fall for, but seemingly do. I don't think that's ideal, but I don't know how to solve that problem.
That said, £100k is still a lot of money. It's the top 4% of the population. I am unmoved by their tears.
If that chart is slightly valid it seems the Conservatives need Jenrick.
In what way is Jenrick the change candidate?
Jenrick was caught up in questionable dealings with Richard Desmond (and others), was hopeless in his role as secretary of state for housing (described as "no help at all" by 90% of leaseholders), was caught out breaking lockdown rules during Covid, and is mostly remembered by the general public for painting over murals at a children's asylum seeker centre.
It seems to me, that in terms of giving the appearance of being venal, ineffectual, rule-flouting and cruel, Jenrick is very much the continuity candidate with respect to his party's perception by the general public.
Jenrick and Stride were the only 2 of the 6 who backed Sunak in the 2022 summer leadership election, so no change there albeit both were also the only 2 who backed Remain in 2016 unlike Sunak who backed Leave, so some change there. Though Jenrick is pushing immigration control harder
Stride at least had the balls to do the media rounds when the government was sinking fast. Jenrick has too many negatives. ETA but it's not my vote and I'm staying away from the betting markets.
Well, yes, always best to get the pain in first even if that means a prolonged mid term trough. If you have a majority of 170 and the main opposition party in disarray, so much the better.
The problem with increasing taxes is 50 years of almost constant propaganda that any and every tax rise is inherently wrong. I'm not sure that's true but nobody wants to be worse off though I would point out misery loves company and if we can see the next guy suffering to a similar or even greater extent that mitigates our discomfort to a degree.
I don't know what else Reeves could or should have done - in truth, £20 billion isn't a lot of money set against the totality of public expenditure. It's a third of what we spend on defence, a fifth of what we're paying in debt interest every year. In essence, she's tinkering at the edges to try to get the deficit down a little and there's nothing inherently wrong with that.
I do know the scrapping of the winter fuel allowance (which was absurd) for non-benefit paying pensioners will be sending some to the barricades or to the equal futility of supporting the Conservatives but it was an anomaly which needed to be rectified (the Conservatives could hardly do it given the age of their voters). It's not in itself a game changer but sends a signal.
CGT on all house sales is going to be one of the big changes - downsizing and taking the profit on the family home funds retirement (or at least the preferred retirement lifestyle) for many but to what extent is any of that "earned" or simply a function of the housing market and inflation? Mr & Mrs Stodge Senior bought their four bedroom house in the mid 60s for £10k and sold it nearly forty years for over £500k. Now, that's a decent return in anybody's language but to what extent was that anything other than supply and demand plus inflation?
My one disappointment with yesterday's announcements was social care. Perhaps Labour have their own ideas - the Dilnot commission has been around almost as long as the Conservatives were last in power but I presume the problem isn't a solution in and of itself but a politically sellable solution (any workable proposal can be a suicide note).
Labour are the ones holding the hot potato or more accurately the grenade with the pin out - IF CGT reduces or closes down the option of funding a retirement lifestyle from asset appreciation how do we get the various schemes and savings plans out there to provide the kind of retirement lifestyle to which most aspire or will that inherently force people to work well into their 70s?
They are not planning CGT on all house sales?
Naah. Complete clog on mobility (stamp duty is bad enough). No country does this, though they may have anti flipping provisions saying you have to live there for n years before the exemption kicks in
I suspect the CGT rate will go up in the autumn - as we know an increasing proportion of property is kept for investment purposes, I do think CGT could be a source of income for the Treasury.
On the subject of house sales, where I appear to have hit a bit of a nerve with some, serious question, the asset appreciation is surely the epitome of unearned profit as house prices were rising faster than inflation for years. Yes, you can spend on the property to increase value but we all know houses were increasing in value if they just had four walls and a roof (and sometimes not even then).
The problem there is that CGT on houses is based on the unindexed original purchase price - not the inflation indexed version of the price (I can't remember when it was implemented as we got burnt so badly on a rental property Mrs Eek vetos the idea).
So you couldn't use an indexed version of the purchase price for primary homes and a secondary price for others.
Equally I spent a fortune on an extension 20 years ago. I can tell you roughly what it cost but every builder involved in the project has died / closed down and I can't remember exactly what it cost only a very rough ballpark of £80,000...
Hence it really is a completely stupid idea...
The Government could change the system if it wanted and no Government has a monopoly on stupid ideas, I mean, we have a Council Tax system based on 1991 valuations.
I do think property is the elephant in the taxation room - if you can't impose CGT (or a sales tax) on house transactions, how about revisiting the valuations and making them more relevant to the actual value of the property now (that will mean more bands to cover the vast range of house values)? In addition, you have Land Value Taxation as an option - if you don't want to tax the property, tax the land it sits on (land is very hard to hide).
None of this is without substantial political risk but if you are looking to tap into unearned income to balance the books it's a place to start.
I think we will get a full revaluation quite quite quickly, with a taper limiting change.
Rationally because it is an absolutely f*cking obvious thing to do. Politically because big changes need to be soon to give recovery time, and because it will broadly be Tory (now Lib Dem) heartlands that have been given the most free money over decades by the revaluation not being say 25 years ago.
I'd prefer greater change. but I think this is the least we can expect.
Just chatting to a plumber I am babysitting installing a new boiler in a Tenant's, and his Council Tax recently jumped from £1200 to£3k a year as they noticed big PD extensions added years ago. That's a Council that could have had that extra revenue every year for more than a decade, and something about lack of capacity in Councils to carry out necessary work.
Um - what triggered the change in band because currently the band only changes when the occupier changes...
I know this as there has been a flag on our account for 18+ years that when we move the house shifts up 2 bands...
If that chart is slightly valid it seems the Conservatives need Jenrick.
In what way is Jenrick the change candidate?
Jenrick was caught up in questionable dealings with Richard Desmond (and others), was hopeless in his role as secretary of state for housing (described as "no help at all" by 90% of leaseholders), was caught out breaking lockdown rules during Covid, and is mostly remembered by the general public for painting over murals at a children's asylum seeker centre.
It seems to me, that in terms of giving the appearance of being venal, ineffectual, rule-flouting and cruel, Jenrick is very much the continuity candidate with respect to his party's perception by the general public.
Jenrick and Stride were the only 2 of the 6 who backed Sunak in the 2022 summer leadership election, so no change there albeit both were also the only 2 who backed Remain in 2016 unlike Sunak who backed Leave, so some change there. Though Jenrick is pushing immigration control harder
Stride at least had the balls to do the media rounds when the government was sinking fast. Jenrick has too many negatives. ETA but it's not my vote and I'm staying away from the betting markets.
On the polling Jenrick has the second best net approval rating of the contenders after Tugendhat with voters (albeit that did not include Stride and forgot Tugendhat also backed Remain in 2016) https://x.com/keiranpedley/status/1816040577453973865
Are Labour really going to bring in the school fees VAT in January mid way through a school year?
That feels bizarre to me.
They’re attempting to make it retrospective to this September, but can’t get the legislation through in time.
Which I suspect will lead to a well-funded legal challenge.
Any evidence to back the September claim up?
Because if they were doing that they would have had to do it yesterday and instead all they said January.. (Remember this sort of trick is something I'm very aware of - so the wording yesterday was interesting and carefully created a distinct line)...
Reality is that by implementing it in January and announcing yesterday after the school year and finished it's designed to minimise the number of people able to move schools before September which is probably a relief to both State and Private schools...
Although it does rather mess up people who are already struggling to pay school fees...
So we’ll get a winter of freezing pensioner headlines followed by a January of taking the little darlings out of school/could state schools be overwhelmed headlines. Plus whatever comes down the line in the budget in October.
I don’t think we’ll be seeing much by way of a Labour honeymoon. That doesn’t mean that the Tories are going to suddenly look amazing (they’re not). But it will be interesting to see what the polls are coming out with early next year.
Not optimal… but then I guess they’re getting these hits out of the way early.
I LOL at Labour for the private school fees move.
I think Starmer reckons it'll be another foxhunting ban moment. But foxhunting was directly supported by very few people, and this move will affect many, many more people directly. It'll cheer those who hate people who are richer than them; but dismay many more.
Personally I’m a VAT supremacist, so this is grist to the mill. VAT on everything!
VAT on everything is a fair argument. But this is VAT on something very specific and targeted, mostly for ideological reasons rather than attempting to raise revenue.
It’s red meat to an activist base who think every private school is just like “Boris Johnson’s Eton”.
Are Labour really going to bring in the school fees VAT in January mid way through a school year?
That feels bizarre to me.
They’re attempting to make it retrospective to this September, but can’t get the legislation through in time.
Which I suspect will lead to a well-funded legal challenge.
Any evidence to back the September claim up?
Because if they were doing that they would have had to do it yesterday and instead all they said January.. (Remember this sort of trick is something I'm very aware of - so the wording yesterday was interesting and carefully created a distinct line)...
Reality is that by implementing it in January and announcing yesterday after the school year and finished it's designed to minimise the number of people able to move schools before September which is probably a relief to both State and Private schools...
Although it does rather mess up people who are already struggling to pay school fees...
So we’ll get a winter of freezing pensioner headlines followed by a January of taking the little darlings out of school/could state schools be overwhelmed headlines. Plus whatever comes down the line in the budget in October.
I don’t think we’ll be seeing much by way of a Labour honeymoon. That doesn’t mean that the Tories are going to suddenly look amazing (they’re not). But it will be interesting to see what the polls are coming out with early next year.
Not optimal… but then I guess they’re getting these hits out of the way early.
I LOL at Labour for the private school fees move.
I think Starmer reckons it'll be another foxhunting ban moment. But foxhunting was directly supported by very few people, and this move will affect many, many more people directly. It'll cheer those who hate people who are richer than them; but dismay many more.
Personally I’m a VAT supremacist, so this is grist to the mill. VAT on everything!
VAT on everything is a fair argument. But this is VAT on something very specific and targeted, mostly for ideological reasons rather than attempting to raise revenue.
It’s red meat to an activist base who think every private school is just like “Boris Johnson’s Eton”.
And it may well work out that Boris Johnson Eton comes out ahead on the changes, and it small / special needs schools that are the ones most effected.
If you want an extra £1bn from rich people there are much easier ways to get it.
Phoebe, Cressida.. soon getting arrested at a climate change demo and jailed will be as much a mark of being a member of the liberal upper middle classes as voting LD and shopping at Waitrose...
Now, now, that's a little mean spirited of you.
I'm sure the correlation between the preponderance of Waitrose and Gail's Bakeries and the existence of a LD MP is merely coincidential.
I was in Esher last Thursday - much improved since the election. Just so happens a Gail's opened a few months before the election.
There's a Gail's in Brentwood - presumably when you get a proper Waitrose you'll know the LDs will be targeting Alex's seat.
One more serious thought - "class" isn't the be all and end all, neither is education, nor how you voted in 2016. Perhaps if you and your party want to progress, you need to slaughter those three sacred cows and consider other reasons why so many deserted the Conservatives nearly a month ago.
The LDs already hold the majority of council seats in Brentwood itself, it is the rural part of the district and Ongar and North Weald and rural surroundings that give Alex B a clear majority and Reform a sizeable vote nationally.
Class isn't a big divide now between Tories and Labour no, the class divide is between LD and Reform voters if anything.
Age still is a big Tory v Labour divide however
You're not wrong, of course. I find Reform a complete paradox as I've said on here before. I'm not sure Farage and Tice are the same people as James McMurdock and the latter is perhaps more representative of the wider membership.
The demographic split is interesting and worth much more time and analysis.
Among those aged 60-69, the Conservatives got 33% (-24 on 2019), Labour 28% (+6), Reform 18% (+18)
Among those aged 70+, the Conservatives got 46% (-21), Labour 20% (+6), Reform 15% (+15)
If that chart is slightly valid it seems the Conservatives need Jenrick.
In what way is Jenrick the change candidate?
Jenrick was caught up in questionable dealings with Richard Desmond (and others), was hopeless in his role as secretary of state for housing (described as "no help at all" by 90% of leaseholders), was caught out breaking lockdown rules during Covid, and is mostly remembered by the general public for painting over murals at a children's asylum seeker centre.
It seems to me, that in terms of giving the appearance of being venal, ineffectual, rule-flouting and cruel, Jenrick is very much the continuity candidate with respect to his party's perception by the general public.
Jenrick and Stride were the only 2 of the 6 who backed Sunak in the 2022 summer leadership election, so no change there albeit both were also the only 2 who backed Remain in 2016 unlike Sunak who backed Leave, so some change there. Though Jenrick is pushing immigration control harder
Stride at least had the balls to do the media rounds when the government was sinking fast. Jenrick has too many negatives. ETA but it's not my vote and I'm staying away from the betting markets.
On the polling Jenrick has the second best net approval rating of the contenders after Tugendhat with voters (albeit that did not include Stride and forgot Tugendhat also backed Remain in 2016) https://x.com/keiranpedley/status/1816040577453973865
Lowest positives and second-lowest negatives suggest most don't know who Jenrick is. As a thought experiment, suppose he is elected and every news outlet needs to describe him. There are no positives. He'd be on the back foot before the first ball is bowled. (Other sports are available for this metaphor.)
Are Labour really going to bring in the school fees VAT in January mid way through a school year?
That feels bizarre to me.
They’re attempting to make it retrospective to this September, but can’t get the legislation through in time.
Which I suspect will lead to a well-funded legal challenge.
Any evidence to back the September claim up?
Because if they were doing that they would have had to do it yesterday and instead all they said January.. (Remember this sort of trick is something I'm very aware of - so the wording yesterday was interesting and carefully created a distinct line)...
Reality is that by implementing it in January and announcing yesterday after the school year and finished it's designed to minimise the number of people able to move schools before September which is probably a relief to both State and Private schools...
Although it does rather mess up people who are already struggling to pay school fees...
So we’ll get a winter of freezing pensioner headlines followed by a January of taking the little darlings out of school/could state schools be overwhelmed headlines. Plus whatever comes down the line in the budget in October.
I don’t think we’ll be seeing much by way of a Labour honeymoon. That doesn’t mean that the Tories are going to suddenly look amazing (they’re not). But it will be interesting to see what the polls are coming out with early next year.
Not optimal… but then I guess they’re getting these hits out of the way early.
I LOL at Labour for the private school fees move.
I think Starmer reckons it'll be another foxhunting ban moment. But foxhunting was directly supported by very few people, and this move will affect many, many more people directly. It'll cheer those who hate people who are richer than them; but dismay many more.
Personally I’m a VAT supremacist, so this is grist to the mill. VAT on everything!
VAT on everything is a fair argument. But this is VAT on something very specific and targeted, mostly for ideological reasons rather than attempting to raise revenue.
It’s red meat to an activist base who think every private school is just like “Boris Johnson’s Eton”.
And it may well work out that Boris Johnson Eton comes out ahead on the changes.
If you want an extra £1bn from rich people there are much easier ways to get it.
Encouraging them to work five days a week would probably do it, judging by the comments on this thread and from friends and acquaintances.
Well, yes, always best to get the pain in first even if that means a prolonged mid term trough. If you have a majority of 170 and the main opposition party in disarray, so much the better.
The problem with increasing taxes is 50 years of almost constant propaganda that any and every tax rise is inherently wrong. I'm not sure that's true but nobody wants to be worse off though I would point out misery loves company and if we can see the next guy suffering to a similar or even greater extent that mitigates our discomfort to a degree.
I don't know what else Reeves could or should have done - in truth, £20 billion isn't a lot of money set against the totality of public expenditure. It's a third of what we spend on defence, a fifth of what we're paying in debt interest every year. In essence, she's tinkering at the edges to try to get the deficit down a little and there's nothing inherently wrong with that.
I do know the scrapping of the winter fuel allowance (which was absurd) for non-benefit paying pensioners will be sending some to the barricades or to the equal futility of supporting the Conservatives but it was an anomaly which needed to be rectified (the Conservatives could hardly do it given the age of their voters). It's not in itself a game changer but sends a signal.
CGT on all house sales is going to be one of the big changes - downsizing and taking the profit on the family home funds retirement (or at least the preferred retirement lifestyle) for many but to what extent is any of that "earned" or simply a function of the housing market and inflation? Mr & Mrs Stodge Senior bought their four bedroom house in the mid 60s for £10k and sold it nearly forty years for over £500k. Now, that's a decent return in anybody's language but to what extent was that anything other than supply and demand plus inflation?
My one disappointment with yesterday's announcements was social care. Perhaps Labour have their own ideas - the Dilnot commission has been around almost as long as the Conservatives were last in power but I presume the problem isn't a solution in and of itself but a politically sellable solution (any workable proposal can be a suicide note).
Labour are the ones holding the hot potato or more accurately the grenade with the pin out - IF CGT reduces or closes down the option of funding a retirement lifestyle from asset appreciation how do we get the various schemes and savings plans out there to provide the kind of retirement lifestyle to which most aspire or will that inherently force people to work well into their 70s?
They are not planning CGT on all house sales?
Naah. Complete clog on mobility (stamp duty is bad enough). No country does this, though they may have anti flipping provisions saying you have to live there for n years before the exemption kicks in
I suspect the CGT rate will go up in the autumn - as we know an increasing proportion of property is kept for investment purposes, I do think CGT could be a source of income for the Treasury.
On the subject of house sales, where I appear to have hit a bit of a nerve with some, serious question, the asset appreciation is surely the epitome of unearned profit as house prices were rising faster than inflation for years. Yes, you can spend on the property to increase value but we all know houses were increasing in value if they just had four walls and a roof (and sometimes not even then).
The problem there is that CGT on houses is based on the unindexed original purchase price - not the inflation indexed version of the price (I can't remember when it was implemented as we got burnt so badly on a rental property Mrs Eek vetos the idea).
So you couldn't use an indexed version of the purchase price for primary homes and a secondary price for others.
Equally I spent a fortune on an extension 20 years ago. I can tell you roughly what it cost but every builder involved in the project has died / closed down and I can't remember exactly what it cost only a very rough ballpark of £80,000...
Hence it really is a completely stupid idea...
The Government could change the system if it wanted and no Government has a monopoly on stupid ideas, I mean, we have a Council Tax system based on 1991 valuations.
I do think property is the elephant in the taxation room - if you can't impose CGT (or a sales tax) on house transactions, how about revisiting the valuations and making them more relevant to the actual value of the property now (that will mean more bands to cover the vast range of house values)? In addition, you have Land Value Taxation as an option - if you don't want to tax the property, tax the land it sits on (land is very hard to hide).
None of this is without substantial political risk but if you are looking to tap into unearned income to balance the books it's a place to start.
I think we will get a full revaluation quite quite quickly, with a taper limiting change.
Rationally because it is an absolutely f*cking obvious thing to do. Politically because big changes need to be soon to give recovery time, and because it will broadly be Tory (now Lib Dem) heartlands that have been given the most free money over decades by the revaluation not being say 25 years ago.
I'd prefer greater change. but I think this is the least we can expect.
Just chatting to a plumber I am babysitting installing a new boiler in a Tenant's, and his Council Tax recently jumped from £1200 to£3k a year as they noticed big PD extensions added years ago. That's a Council that could have had that extra revenue every year for more than a decade, and something about lack of capacity in Councils to carry out necessary work.
Um - what triggered the change in band because currently the band only changes when the occupier changes...
I know this as there has been a flag on our account for 18+ years that when we move the house shifts up 2 bands...
That's odd because our house jumped a band following major work as a neighbour reported the work to the council and requested a check on our banding compared to their own.
There is a process to do this.
Of course, the council wouldn't tell us which neighbour.
~£10bn of the "blackhole" is due to Labour's bumper increase in public sector pay. It's completely optional and they could hold back more than half of that figure. If the public sector doesn't like it they can move to the private sector.
The problem is that they /have/ moved to the private sector - the NHS has something like 100k unfilled jobs, current teacher recruitment in secondary schools is running ~50% below the target.
At some point either you pay the going rate or you stop being able to recruit staff.
1 problem with teacher recruitment is that they've f***ed up teacher training so badly that remarkable few graduates are taking teacher training courses. My daughter would have happily done so via the local training school (they usually have 10 or so ex pupils returning for it). This year 2 are going to do teacher training...
Though it depends upon subject does it not?
The stats I've seen show that more people are doing PE Teacher Training than desired, but very few people are doing Physics or Maths etc
Which hardly seems surprising to me given that teachers are paid the same regardless of subject specialism and a qualified physicist can typically do better privately (or academically elsewhere) than teaching teenagers.
Adjusting teacher remuneration so in-demand specialists are paid more than less-demanded specialists seems logical to me. Why not pay a physics teacher more than a PE teacher?
Labour have an opportunity here at the start of Parliament and with a massive landslide majority.
Merge National Insurance and Income Tax and create a single Income Tax rate that is paid by all adults of all ages on the same income equitably.
No increase at all in Income Tax for those who are working and on PAYE.
Doubt they will do this. Will burn lots of political capital, will inevitably increase taxes for some groups, and althoygh logical, isn't a top priority.
I think they need to find a way of raising more money that isn't too unpopular. Reducing the very generous pension tax reliefs for higher earners is the obvious move imo.
Except that will result in a lot of people doing less work - little point doing a full 5 day week if tax makes it more sensible to work a 4 or even 3 day week...
The people who are impacted by those sort of changes aren't earning day to day living expenses they have savings and options...
Doubt it would be a major factor honestly. Anyone earning over £50k is a higher rate taxpayer.
Most of those are not so wealthy that they could easily afford a 20 or 40% drop in income.
Doing so because they only get 20% pension relief rather than 40% would be a very strange financial decision to make.
And yet that is what @MisterBedfordshire said earlier and is the experience of many others.
I carefully kept my income below £50,000 to ensure I kept child benefit for many years and last year played similar games to keep my income below £100,000...
Remove full tax relief on my large pension contribution and a 4 day week sounds very nice...
I may need to look at these games, and pulling my kids out of private school, when we get to the Autumn and we know the lie of the land in the budget. Already tough as it is. It will get harder.
Of course, that will mean much less tax for the exchequer, and a bigger burden on the State, but hey ho, that's what you get when you try and squeeze people dry.
There was an opportunity to reset the tax narrative for Labour and remove the cliff edges but they've failed to do so. Another 5 years at least with people going part time or using tax avoidance at £100k.
I've shifted down to 3.5 days per week in my new job to stay below the cliff edge from an earlier agreed 4 day week. I now get Wednesday afternoon and Fridays with my kids which I think is a better use of my time than working so I can give the government 62% of the increment.
This wasn't the budget though - so there is little surprise that the tax narrative has been reset.
However it's clear from the discussions this afternoon that any changes impact people who are well paid is going to have interesting (and unexpected by the Government) consequences..
But £100k isn't even a huge salary today, not the same as what it was in 2009 when Brown introduced the 62% marginal rate, it's £152k in equivalent money today just by inflation. I'd happily do a 4.5 day week with Friday afternoons off if there was no marginal rate. It's immoral for the state to ask me for more than half of my income, I go to work to provide for my family not to fund a huge payrise for public sector fatcats.
£100k is still nearly 3 times the median wage (£34,963) and over twice the average wage (£42,210)..
Although the rest of your argument is absolutely valid - the lack of indexing has forced way more people into it...
And it used to be 4x the median salary in 2009. £100k is relatively a much smaller salary than it was when the cliff edge was introduced. It has a third less purchasing power and the number of people who earn at least £100k has more than doubled in that time. It's no longer a huge salary, a senior developer or data engineer can earn more than that before part time or AVCs are taken into account. In 2009 it was C suite or directors of big companies who would be in that salary range.
It is both large and not as large as it was.
Governments have tended to avoid making explicit tax rises by letting inflation push more people into higher bands. It's a sleight of hand that voters shouldn't fall for, but seemingly do. I don't think that's ideal, but I don't know how to solve that problem.
That said, £100k is still a lot of money. It's the top 4% of the population. I am unmoved by their tears.
Governments plural? Wasn't index linking of the thresholds the default for a very long time?
Labour have an opportunity here at the start of Parliament and with a massive landslide majority.
Merge National Insurance and Income Tax and create a single Income Tax rate that is paid by all adults of all ages on the same income equitably.
No increase at all in Income Tax for those who are working and on PAYE.
Doubt they will do this. Will burn lots of political capital, will inevitably increase taxes for some groups, and althoygh logical, isn't a top priority.
I think they need to find a way of raising more money that isn't too unpopular. Reducing the very generous pension tax reliefs for higher earners is the obvious move imo.
Except that will result in a lot of people doing less work - little point doing a full 5 day week if tax makes it more sensible to work a 4 or even 3 day week...
The people who are impacted by those sort of changes aren't earning day to day living expenses they have savings and options...
Doubt it would be a major factor honestly. Anyone earning over £50k is a higher rate taxpayer.
Most of those are not so wealthy that they could easily afford a 20 or 40% drop in income.
Doing so because they only get 20% pension relief rather than 40% would be a very strange financial decision to make.
And yet that is what @MisterBedfordshire said earlier and is the experience of many others.
I carefully kept my income below £50,000 to ensure I kept child benefit for many years and last year played similar games to keep my income below £100,000...
Remove full tax relief on my large pension contribution and a 4 day week sounds very nice...
I may need to look at these games, and pulling my kids out of private school, when we get to the Autumn and we know the lie of the land in the budget. Already tough as it is. It will get harder.
Of course, that will mean much less tax for the exchequer, and a bigger burden on the State, but hey ho, that's what you get when you try and squeeze people dry.
There was an opportunity to reset the tax narrative for Labour and remove the cliff edges but they've failed to do so. Another 5 years at least with people going part time or using tax avoidance at £100k.
I've shifted down to 3.5 days per week in my new job to stay below the cliff edge from an earlier agreed 4 day week. I now get Wednesday afternoon and Fridays with my kids which I think is a better use of my time than working so I can give the government 62% of the increment.
This wasn't the budget though - so there is little surprise that the tax narrative has been reset.
However it's clear from the discussions this afternoon that any changes impact people who are well paid is going to have interesting (and unexpected by the Government) consequences..
But £100k isn't even a huge salary today, not the same as what it was in 2009 when Brown introduced the 62% marginal rate, it's £152k in equivalent money today just by inflation. I'd happily do a 4.5 day week with Friday afternoons off if there was no marginal rate. It's immoral for the state to ask me for more than half of my income, I go to work to provide for my family not to fund a huge payrise for public sector fatcats.
£100k is still nearly 3 times the median wage (£34,963) and over twice the average wage (£42,210)..
Although the rest of your argument is absolutely valid - the lack of indexing has forced way more people into it...
And it used to be 4x the median salary in 2009. £100k is relatively a much smaller salary than it was when the cliff edge was introduced. It has a third less purchasing power and the number of people who earn at least £100k has more than doubled in that time. It's no longer a huge salary, a senior developer or data engineer can earn more than that before part time or AVCs are taken into account. In 2009 it was C suite or directors of big companies who would be in that salary range.
it's a silly anomaly if it can be sorted at neutral cost. What would your preferred method for getting rid of the cliff edge - without costing the Exchequer (otherwise it won't happen) ?
Labour have an opportunity here at the start of Parliament and with a massive landslide majority.
Merge National Insurance and Income Tax and create a single Income Tax rate that is paid by all adults of all ages on the same income equitably.
No increase at all in Income Tax for those who are working and on PAYE.
Doubt they will do this. Will burn lots of political capital, will inevitably increase taxes for some groups, and althoygh logical, isn't a top priority.
I think they need to find a way of raising more money that isn't too unpopular. Reducing the very generous pension tax reliefs for higher earners is the obvious move imo.
Except that will result in a lot of people doing less work - little point doing a full 5 day week if tax makes it more sensible to work a 4 or even 3 day week...
The people who are impacted by those sort of changes aren't earning day to day living expenses they have savings and options...
Doubt it would be a major factor honestly. Anyone earning over £50k is a higher rate taxpayer.
Most of those are not so wealthy that they could easily afford a 20 or 40% drop in income.
Doing so because they only get 20% pension relief rather than 40% would be a very strange financial decision to make.
And yet that is what @MisterBedfordshire said earlier and is the experience of many others.
I carefully kept my income below £50,000 to ensure I kept child benefit for many years and last year played similar games to keep my income below £100,000...
Remove full tax relief on my large pension contribution and a 4 day week sounds very nice...
I may need to look at these games, and pulling my kids out of private school, when we get to the Autumn and we know the lie of the land in the budget. Already tough as it is. It will get harder.
Of course, that will mean much less tax for the exchequer, and a bigger burden on the State, but hey ho, that's what you get when you try and squeeze people dry.
There was an opportunity to reset the tax narrative for Labour and remove the cliff edges but they've failed to do so. Another 5 years at least with people going part time or using tax avoidance at £100k.
I've shifted down to 3.5 days per week in my new job to stay below the cliff edge from an earlier agreed 4 day week. I now get Wednesday afternoon and Fridays with my kids which I think is a better use of my time than working so I can give the government 62% of the increment.
This wasn't the budget though - so there is little surprise that the tax narrative has been reset.
However it's clear from the discussions this afternoon that any changes impact people who are well paid is going to have interesting (and unexpected by the Government) consequences..
But £100k isn't even a huge salary today, not the same as what it was in 2009 when Brown introduced the 62% marginal rate, it's £152k in equivalent money today just by inflation. I'd happily do a 4.5 day week with Friday afternoons off if there was no marginal rate. It's immoral for the state to ask me for more than half of my income, I go to work to provide for my family not to fund a huge payrise for public sector fatcats.
£100k is still nearly 3 times the median wage (£34,963) and over twice the average wage (£42,210)..
Although the rest of your argument is absolutely valid - the lack of indexing has forced way more people into it...
And it used to be 4x the median salary in 2009. £100k is relatively a much smaller salary than it was when the cliff edge was introduced. It has a third less purchasing power and the number of people who earn at least £100k has more than doubled in that time. It's no longer a huge salary, a senior developer or data engineer can earn more than that before part time or AVCs are taken into account. In 2009 it was C suite or directors of big companies who would be in that salary range.
It is both large and not as large as it was.
Governments have tended to avoid making explicit tax rises by letting inflation push more people into higher bands. It's a sleight of hand that voters shouldn't fall for, but seemingly do. I don't think that's ideal, but I don't know how to solve that problem.
That said, £100k is still a lot of money. It's the top 4% of the population. I am unmoved by their tears.
There's no tears, I get an extra day with my family and the government loses ~£13k in tax from me not doing the extra day if the rate was 45% rather than 60%.
Well, yes, always best to get the pain in first even if that means a prolonged mid term trough. If you have a majority of 170 and the main opposition party in disarray, so much the better.
The problem with increasing taxes is 50 years of almost constant propaganda that any and every tax rise is inherently wrong. I'm not sure that's true but nobody wants to be worse off though I would point out misery loves company and if we can see the next guy suffering to a similar or even greater extent that mitigates our discomfort to a degree.
I don't know what else Reeves could or should have done - in truth, £20 billion isn't a lot of money set against the totality of public expenditure. It's a third of what we spend on defence, a fifth of what we're paying in debt interest every year. In essence, she's tinkering at the edges to try to get the deficit down a little and there's nothing inherently wrong with that.
I do know the scrapping of the winter fuel allowance (which was absurd) for non-benefit paying pensioners will be sending some to the barricades or to the equal futility of supporting the Conservatives but it was an anomaly which needed to be rectified (the Conservatives could hardly do it given the age of their voters). It's not in itself a game changer but sends a signal.
CGT on all house sales is going to be one of the big changes - downsizing and taking the profit on the family home funds retirement (or at least the preferred retirement lifestyle) for many but to what extent is any of that "earned" or simply a function of the housing market and inflation? Mr & Mrs Stodge Senior bought their four bedroom house in the mid 60s for £10k and sold it nearly forty years for over £500k. Now, that's a decent return in anybody's language but to what extent was that anything other than supply and demand plus inflation?
My one disappointment with yesterday's announcements was social care. Perhaps Labour have their own ideas - the Dilnot commission has been around almost as long as the Conservatives were last in power but I presume the problem isn't a solution in and of itself but a politically sellable solution (any workable proposal can be a suicide note).
Labour are the ones holding the hot potato or more accurately the grenade with the pin out - IF CGT reduces or closes down the option of funding a retirement lifestyle from asset appreciation how do we get the various schemes and savings plans out there to provide the kind of retirement lifestyle to which most aspire or will that inherently force people to work well into their 70s?
They are not planning CGT on all house sales?
Naah. Complete clog on mobility (stamp duty is bad enough). No country does this, though they may have anti flipping provisions saying you have to live there for n years before the exemption kicks in
I suspect the CGT rate will go up in the autumn - as we know an increasing proportion of property is kept for investment purposes, I do think CGT could be a source of income for the Treasury.
On the subject of house sales, where I appear to have hit a bit of a nerve with some, serious question, the asset appreciation is surely the epitome of unearned profit as house prices were rising faster than inflation for years. Yes, you can spend on the property to increase value but we all know houses were increasing in value if they just had four walls and a roof (and sometimes not even then).
The problem there is that CGT on houses is based on the unindexed original purchase price - not the inflation indexed version of the price (I can't remember when it was implemented as we got burnt so badly on a rental property Mrs Eek vetos the idea).
So you couldn't use an indexed version of the purchase price for primary homes and a secondary price for others.
Equally I spent a fortune on an extension 20 years ago. I can tell you roughly what it cost but every builder involved in the project has died / closed down and I can't remember exactly what it cost only a very rough ballpark of £80,000...
Hence it really is a completely stupid idea...
The Government could change the system if it wanted and no Government has a monopoly on stupid ideas, I mean, we have a Council Tax system based on 1991 valuations.
I do think property is the elephant in the taxation room - if you can't impose CGT (or a sales tax) on house transactions, how about revisiting the valuations and making them more relevant to the actual value of the property now (that will mean more bands to cover the vast range of house values)? In addition, you have Land Value Taxation as an option - if you don't want to tax the property, tax the land it sits on (land is very hard to hide).
None of this is without substantial political risk but if you are looking to tap into unearned income to balance the books it's a place to start.
I think we will get a full revaluation quite quite quickly, with a taper limiting change.
Rationally because it is an absolutely f*cking obvious thing to do. Politically because big changes need to be soon to give recovery time, and because it will broadly be Tory (now Lib Dem) heartlands that have been given the most free money over decades by the revaluation not being say 25 years ago.
I'd prefer greater change. but I think this is the least we can expect.
Just chatting to a plumber I am babysitting installing a new boiler in a Tenant's, and his Council Tax recently jumped from £1200 to£3k a year as they noticed big PD extensions added years ago. That's a Council that could have had that extra revenue every year for more than a decade, and something about lack of capacity in Councils to carry out necessary work.
Um - what triggered the change in band because currently the band only changes when the occupier changes...
I know this as there has been a flag on our account for 18+ years that when we move the house shifts up 2 bands...
That's odd because our house jumped a band following major work as a neighbour reported the work to the council and requested a check on our banding compared to their own.
There is a process to do this.
Of course, the council wouldn't tell us which neighbour.
If that chart is slightly valid it seems the Conservatives need Jenrick.
In what way is Jenrick the change candidate?
Jenrick was caught up in questionable dealings with Richard Desmond (and others), was hopeless in his role as secretary of state for housing (described as "no help at all" by 90% of leaseholders), was caught out breaking lockdown rules during Covid, and is mostly remembered by the general public for painting over murals at a children's asylum seeker centre.
It seems to me, that in terms of giving the appearance of being venal, ineffectual, rule-flouting and cruel, Jenrick is very much the continuity candidate with respect to his party's perception by the general public.
Jenrick and Stride were the only 2 of the 6 who backed Sunak in the 2022 summer leadership election, so no change there albeit both were also the only 2 who backed Remain in 2016 unlike Sunak who backed Leave, so some change there. Though Jenrick is pushing immigration control harder
Stride at least had the balls to do the media rounds when the government was sinking fast. Jenrick has too many negatives. ETA but it's not my vote and I'm staying away from the betting markets.
On the polling Jenrick has the second best net approval rating of the contenders after Tugendhat with voters (albeit that did not include Stride and forgot Tugendhat also backed Remain in 2016) https://x.com/keiranpedley/status/1816040577453973865
Lowest positives and second-lowest negatives suggest most don't know who Jenrick is. As a thought experiment, suppose he is elected and every news outlet needs to describe him. There are no positives. He'd be on the back foot before the first ball is bowled. (Other sports are available for this metaphor.)
Well, yes, always best to get the pain in first even if that means a prolonged mid term trough. If you have a majority of 170 and the main opposition party in disarray, so much the better.
The problem with increasing taxes is 50 years of almost constant propaganda that any and every tax rise is inherently wrong. I'm not sure that's true but nobody wants to be worse off though I would point out misery loves company and if we can see the next guy suffering to a similar or even greater extent that mitigates our discomfort to a degree.
I don't know what else Reeves could or should have done - in truth, £20 billion isn't a lot of money set against the totality of public expenditure. It's a third of what we spend on defence, a fifth of what we're paying in debt interest every year. In essence, she's tinkering at the edges to try to get the deficit down a little and there's nothing inherently wrong with that.
I do know the scrapping of the winter fuel allowance (which was absurd) for non-benefit paying pensioners will be sending some to the barricades or to the equal futility of supporting the Conservatives but it was an anomaly which needed to be rectified (the Conservatives could hardly do it given the age of their voters). It's not in itself a game changer but sends a signal.
CGT on all house sales is going to be one of the big changes - downsizing and taking the profit on the family home funds retirement (or at least the preferred retirement lifestyle) for many but to what extent is any of that "earned" or simply a function of the housing market and inflation? Mr & Mrs Stodge Senior bought their four bedroom house in the mid 60s for £10k and sold it nearly forty years for over £500k. Now, that's a decent return in anybody's language but to what extent was that anything other than supply and demand plus inflation?
My one disappointment with yesterday's announcements was social care. Perhaps Labour have their own ideas - the Dilnot commission has been around almost as long as the Conservatives were last in power but I presume the problem isn't a solution in and of itself but a politically sellable solution (any workable proposal can be a suicide note).
Labour are the ones holding the hot potato or more accurately the grenade with the pin out - IF CGT reduces or closes down the option of funding a retirement lifestyle from asset appreciation how do we get the various schemes and savings plans out there to provide the kind of retirement lifestyle to which most aspire or will that inherently force people to work well into their 70s?
They are not planning CGT on all house sales?
Naah. Complete clog on mobility (stamp duty is bad enough). No country does this, though they may have anti flipping provisions saying you have to live there for n years before the exemption kicks in
I suspect the CGT rate will go up in the autumn - as we know an increasing proportion of property is kept for investment purposes, I do think CGT could be a source of income for the Treasury.
On the subject of house sales, where I appear to have hit a bit of a nerve with some, serious question, the asset appreciation is surely the epitome of unearned profit as house prices were rising faster than inflation for years. Yes, you can spend on the property to increase value but we all know houses were increasing in value if they just had four walls and a roof (and sometimes not even then).
The problem there is that CGT on houses is based on the unindexed original purchase price - not the inflation indexed version of the price (I can't remember when it was implemented as we got burnt so badly on a rental property Mrs Eek vetos the idea).
So you couldn't use an indexed version of the purchase price for primary homes and a secondary price for others.
Equally I spent a fortune on an extension 20 years ago. I can tell you roughly what it cost but every builder involved in the project has died / closed down and I can't remember exactly what it cost only a very rough ballpark of £80,000...
Hence it really is a completely stupid idea...
The Government could change the system if it wanted and no Government has a monopoly on stupid ideas, I mean, we have a Council Tax system based on 1991 valuations.
I do think property is the elephant in the taxation room - if you can't impose CGT (or a sales tax) on house transactions, how about revisiting the valuations and making them more relevant to the actual value of the property now (that will mean more bands to cover the vast range of house values)? In addition, you have Land Value Taxation as an option - if you don't want to tax the property, tax the land it sits on (land is very hard to hide).
None of this is without substantial political risk but if you are looking to tap into unearned income to balance the books it's a place to start.
I think we will get a full revaluation quite quite quickly, with a taper limiting change.
Rationally because it is an absolutely f*cking obvious thing to do. Politically because big changes need to be soon to give recovery time, and because it will broadly be Tory (now Lib Dem) heartlands that have been given the most free money over decades by the revaluation not being say 25 years ago.
I'd prefer greater change. but I think this is the least we can expect.
Just chatting to a plumber I am babysitting installing a new boiler in a Tenant's, and his Council Tax recently jumped from £1200 to£3k a year as they noticed big PD extensions added years ago. That's a Council that could have had that extra revenue every year for more than a decade, and something about lack of capacity in Councils to carry out necessary work.
Um - what triggered the change in band because currently the band only changes when the occupier changes...
I know this as there has been a flag on our account for 18+ years that when we move the house shifts up 2 bands...
That's odd because our house jumped a band following major work as a neighbour reported the work to the council and requested a check on our banding compared to their own.
There is a process to do this.
Of course, the council wouldn't tell us which neighbour.
The other possibility is that the neighbour - by coincidence - thought that their house was *overvalued* and wanted a reduction. This does happen, but the risk is that when the council checks it may find that the house is in fact undervalued and jumps a band, together with other houses in the street.
Well, yes, always best to get the pain in first even if that means a prolonged mid term trough. If you have a majority of 170 and the main opposition party in disarray, so much the better.
The problem with increasing taxes is 50 years of almost constant propaganda that any and every tax rise is inherently wrong. I'm not sure that's true but nobody wants to be worse off though I would point out misery loves company and if we can see the next guy suffering to a similar or even greater extent that mitigates our discomfort to a degree.
I don't know what else Reeves could or should have done - in truth, £20 billion isn't a lot of money set against the totality of public expenditure. It's a third of what we spend on defence, a fifth of what we're paying in debt interest every year. In essence, she's tinkering at the edges to try to get the deficit down a little and there's nothing inherently wrong with that.
I do know the scrapping of the winter fuel allowance (which was absurd) for non-benefit paying pensioners will be sending some to the barricades or to the equal futility of supporting the Conservatives but it was an anomaly which needed to be rectified (the Conservatives could hardly do it given the age of their voters). It's not in itself a game changer but sends a signal.
CGT on all house sales is going to be one of the big changes - downsizing and taking the profit on the family home funds retirement (or at least the preferred retirement lifestyle) for many but to what extent is any of that "earned" or simply a function of the housing market and inflation? Mr & Mrs Stodge Senior bought their four bedroom house in the mid 60s for £10k and sold it nearly forty years for over £500k. Now, that's a decent return in anybody's language but to what extent was that anything other than supply and demand plus inflation?
My one disappointment with yesterday's announcements was social care. Perhaps Labour have their own ideas - the Dilnot commission has been around almost as long as the Conservatives were last in power but I presume the problem isn't a solution in and of itself but a politically sellable solution (any workable proposal can be a suicide note).
Labour are the ones holding the hot potato or more accurately the grenade with the pin out - IF CGT reduces or closes down the option of funding a retirement lifestyle from asset appreciation how do we get the various schemes and savings plans out there to provide the kind of retirement lifestyle to which most aspire or will that inherently force people to work well into their 70s?
They are not planning CGT on all house sales?
Naah. Complete clog on mobility (stamp duty is bad enough). No country does this, though they may have anti flipping provisions saying you have to live there for n years before the exemption kicks in
I suspect the CGT rate will go up in the autumn - as we know an increasing proportion of property is kept for investment purposes, I do think CGT could be a source of income for the Treasury.
On the subject of house sales, where I appear to have hit a bit of a nerve with some, serious question, the asset appreciation is surely the epitome of unearned profit as house prices were rising faster than inflation for years. Yes, you can spend on the property to increase value but we all know houses were increasing in value if they just had four walls and a roof (and sometimes not even then).
The problem there is that CGT on houses is based on the unindexed original purchase price - not the inflation indexed version of the price (I can't remember when it was implemented as we got burnt so badly on a rental property Mrs Eek vetos the idea).
So you couldn't use an indexed version of the purchase price for primary homes and a secondary price for others.
Equally I spent a fortune on an extension 20 years ago. I can tell you roughly what it cost but every builder involved in the project has died / closed down and I can't remember exactly what it cost only a very rough ballpark of £80,000...
Hence it really is a completely stupid idea...
The Government could change the system if it wanted and no Government has a monopoly on stupid ideas, I mean, we have a Council Tax system based on 1991 valuations.
I do think property is the elephant in the taxation room - if you can't impose CGT (or a sales tax) on house transactions, how about revisiting the valuations and making them more relevant to the actual value of the property now (that will mean more bands to cover the vast range of house values)? In addition, you have Land Value Taxation as an option - if you don't want to tax the property, tax the land it sits on (land is very hard to hide).
None of this is without substantial political risk but if you are looking to tap into unearned income to balance the books it's a place to start.
I think we will get a full revaluation quite quite quickly, with a taper limiting change.
Rationally because it is an absolutely f*cking obvious thing to do. Politically because big changes need to be soon to give recovery time, and because it will broadly be Tory (now Lib Dem) heartlands that have been given the most free money over decades by the revaluation not being say 25 years ago.
I'd prefer greater change. but I think this is the least we can expect.
Just chatting to a plumber I am babysitting installing a new boiler in a Tenant's, and his Council Tax recently jumped from £1200 to£3k a year as they noticed big PD extensions added years ago. That's a Council that could have had that extra revenue every year for more than a decade, and something about lack of capacity in Councils to carry out necessary work.
Um - what triggered the change in band because currently the band only changes when the occupier changes...
I know this as there has been a flag on our account for 18+ years that when we move the house shifts up 2 bands...
That's odd because our house jumped a band following major work as a neighbour reported the work to the council and requested a check on our banding compared to their own.
There is a process to do this.
Of course, the council wouldn't tell us which neighbour.
Many homes in England and Wales are renovated and extended. In this blog, we explain what happens to your Council Tax band when you make changes to your home. We also explain what an improvement indicator means and what you need to consider when purchasing a new home.
The VOA follows strict laws around valuation. This means, legally, we cannot change the Council Tax band of a property that has been improved until it is sold, or there is a general revaluation of all domestic properties. This helps to make sure homeowners are not penalised for improving or maintaining their home.
Instead, we give the property an improvement indicator.
So I love to know what your council was thinking because I think you are due a large refund and an apology....
Labour have an opportunity here at the start of Parliament and with a massive landslide majority.
Merge National Insurance and Income Tax and create a single Income Tax rate that is paid by all adults of all ages on the same income equitably.
No increase at all in Income Tax for those who are working and on PAYE.
Doubt they will do this. Will burn lots of political capital, will inevitably increase taxes for some groups, and althoygh logical, isn't a top priority.
I think they need to find a way of raising more money that isn't too unpopular. Reducing the very generous pension tax reliefs for higher earners is the obvious move imo.
Except that will result in a lot of people doing less work - little point doing a full 5 day week if tax makes it more sensible to work a 4 or even 3 day week...
The people who are impacted by those sort of changes aren't earning day to day living expenses they have savings and options...
Doubt it would be a major factor honestly. Anyone earning over £50k is a higher rate taxpayer.
Most of those are not so wealthy that they could easily afford a 20 or 40% drop in income.
Doing so because they only get 20% pension relief rather than 40% would be a very strange financial decision to make.
And yet that is what @MisterBedfordshire said earlier and is the experience of many others.
I carefully kept my income below £50,000 to ensure I kept child benefit for many years and last year played similar games to keep my income below £100,000...
Remove full tax relief on my large pension contribution and a 4 day week sounds very nice...
I may need to look at these games, and pulling my kids out of private school, when we get to the Autumn and we know the lie of the land in the budget. Already tough as it is. It will get harder.
Of course, that will mean much less tax for the exchequer, and a bigger burden on the State, but hey ho, that's what you get when you try and squeeze people dry.
There was an opportunity to reset the tax narrative for Labour and remove the cliff edges but they've failed to do so. Another 5 years at least with people going part time or using tax avoidance at £100k.
I've shifted down to 3.5 days per week in my new job to stay below the cliff edge from an earlier agreed 4 day week. I now get Wednesday afternoon and Fridays with my kids which I think is a better use of my time than working so I can give the government 62% of the increment.
This wasn't the budget though - so there is little surprise that the tax narrative has been reset.
However it's clear from the discussions this afternoon that any changes impact people who are well paid is going to have interesting (and unexpected by the Government) consequences..
But £100k isn't even a huge salary today, not the same as what it was in 2009 when Brown introduced the 62% marginal rate, it's £152k in equivalent money today just by inflation. I'd happily do a 4.5 day week with Friday afternoons off if there was no marginal rate. It's immoral for the state to ask me for more than half of my income, I go to work to provide for my family not to fund a huge payrise for public sector fatcats.
£100k is still nearly 3 times the median wage (£34,963) and over twice the average wage (£42,210)..
Although the rest of your argument is absolutely valid - the lack of indexing has forced way more people into it...
And it used to be 4x the median salary in 2009. £100k is relatively a much smaller salary than it was when the cliff edge was introduced. It has a third less purchasing power and the number of people who earn at least £100k has more than doubled in that time. It's no longer a huge salary, a senior developer or data engineer can earn more than that before part time or AVCs are taken into account. In 2009 it was C suite or directors of big companies who would be in that salary range.
it's a silly anomaly if it can be sorted at neutral cost. What would your preferred method for getting rid of the cliff edge - without costing the Exchequer (otherwise it won't happen) ?
Bring the 45% rate down to £100k remove the cliff edge. Enough people will add an extra day or half day to their working week to more than make up for the 15% difference between the 60% effective rate and 45%. At my last company we did the sums and it was something mad like net gain of £2.4bn by removing the cliff edges at £100k.
#BreakingNews Islamist preacher Anjem Choudary has been jailed at Woolwich Crown Court for life with a minimum term of 28 years for directing the terrorist organisation Al-Muhajiroun and encouraging support for it through online meetings
Labour have an opportunity here at the start of Parliament and with a massive landslide majority.
Merge National Insurance and Income Tax and create a single Income Tax rate that is paid by all adults of all ages on the same income equitably.
No increase at all in Income Tax for those who are working and on PAYE.
Doubt they will do this. Will burn lots of political capital, will inevitably increase taxes for some groups, and althoygh logical, isn't a top priority.
I think they need to find a way of raising more money that isn't too unpopular. Reducing the very generous pension tax reliefs for higher earners is the obvious move imo.
Except that will result in a lot of people doing less work - little point doing a full 5 day week if tax makes it more sensible to work a 4 or even 3 day week...
The people who are impacted by those sort of changes aren't earning day to day living expenses they have savings and options...
Doubt it would be a major factor honestly. Anyone earning over £50k is a higher rate taxpayer.
Most of those are not so wealthy that they could easily afford a 20 or 40% drop in income.
Doing so because they only get 20% pension relief rather than 40% would be a very strange financial decision to make.
And yet that is what @MisterBedfordshire said earlier and is the experience of many others.
I carefully kept my income below £50,000 to ensure I kept child benefit for many years and last year played similar games to keep my income below £100,000...
Remove full tax relief on my large pension contribution and a 4 day week sounds very nice...
I may need to look at these games, and pulling my kids out of private school, when we get to the Autumn and we know the lie of the land in the budget. Already tough as it is. It will get harder.
Of course, that will mean much less tax for the exchequer, and a bigger burden on the State, but hey ho, that's what you get when you try and squeeze people dry.
There was an opportunity to reset the tax narrative for Labour and remove the cliff edges but they've failed to do so. Another 5 years at least with people going part time or using tax avoidance at £100k.
I've shifted down to 3.5 days per week in my new job to stay below the cliff edge from an earlier agreed 4 day week. I now get Wednesday afternoon and Fridays with my kids which I think is a better use of my time than working so I can give the government 62% of the increment.
This wasn't the budget though - so there is little surprise that the tax narrative has been reset.
However it's clear from the discussions this afternoon that any changes impact people who are well paid is going to have interesting (and unexpected by the Government) consequences..
But £100k isn't even a huge salary today, not the same as what it was in 2009 when Brown introduced the 62% marginal rate, it's £152k in equivalent money today just by inflation. I'd happily do a 4.5 day week with Friday afternoons off if there was no marginal rate. It's immoral for the state to ask me for more than half of my income, I go to work to provide for my family not to fund a huge payrise for public sector fatcats.
£100k is still nearly 3 times the median wage (£34,963) and over twice the average wage (£42,210)..
Although the rest of your argument is absolutely valid - the lack of indexing has forced way more people into it...
And it used to be 4x the median salary in 2009. £100k is relatively a much smaller salary than it was when the cliff edge was introduced. It has a third less purchasing power and the number of people who earn at least £100k has more than doubled in that time. It's no longer a huge salary, a senior developer or data engineer can earn more than that before part time or AVCs are taken into account. In 2009 it was C suite or directors of big companies who would be in that salary range.
it's a silly anomaly if it can be sorted at neutral cost. What would your preferred method for getting rid of the cliff edge - without costing the Exchequer (otherwise it won't happen) ?
Bring the 45% rate down to £100k remove the cliff edge. Enough people will add an extra day or half day to their working week to more than make up for the 15% difference between the 60% effective rate and 45%. At my last company we did the sums and it was something mad like net gain of £2.4bn by removing the cliff edges at £100k.
and if you really want to remove the tax allowance do it at £175,000 or similar...
Well, yes, always best to get the pain in first even if that means a prolonged mid term trough. If you have a majority of 170 and the main opposition party in disarray, so much the better.
The problem with increasing taxes is 50 years of almost constant propaganda that any and every tax rise is inherently wrong. I'm not sure that's true but nobody wants to be worse off though I would point out misery loves company and if we can see the next guy suffering to a similar or even greater extent that mitigates our discomfort to a degree.
I don't know what else Reeves could or should have done - in truth, £20 billion isn't a lot of money set against the totality of public expenditure. It's a third of what we spend on defence, a fifth of what we're paying in debt interest every year. In essence, she's tinkering at the edges to try to get the deficit down a little and there's nothing inherently wrong with that.
I do know the scrapping of the winter fuel allowance (which was absurd) for non-benefit paying pensioners will be sending some to the barricades or to the equal futility of supporting the Conservatives but it was an anomaly which needed to be rectified (the Conservatives could hardly do it given the age of their voters). It's not in itself a game changer but sends a signal.
CGT on all house sales is going to be one of the big changes - downsizing and taking the profit on the family home funds retirement (or at least the preferred retirement lifestyle) for many but to what extent is any of that "earned" or simply a function of the housing market and inflation? Mr & Mrs Stodge Senior bought their four bedroom house in the mid 60s for £10k and sold it nearly forty years for over £500k. Now, that's a decent return in anybody's language but to what extent was that anything other than supply and demand plus inflation?
My one disappointment with yesterday's announcements was social care. Perhaps Labour have their own ideas - the Dilnot commission has been around almost as long as the Conservatives were last in power but I presume the problem isn't a solution in and of itself but a politically sellable solution (any workable proposal can be a suicide note).
Labour are the ones holding the hot potato or more accurately the grenade with the pin out - IF CGT reduces or closes down the option of funding a retirement lifestyle from asset appreciation how do we get the various schemes and savings plans out there to provide the kind of retirement lifestyle to which most aspire or will that inherently force people to work well into their 70s?
They are not planning CGT on all house sales?
Naah. Complete clog on mobility (stamp duty is bad enough). No country does this, though they may have anti flipping provisions saying you have to live there for n years before the exemption kicks in
I suspect the CGT rate will go up in the autumn - as we know an increasing proportion of property is kept for investment purposes, I do think CGT could be a source of income for the Treasury.
On the subject of house sales, where I appear to have hit a bit of a nerve with some, serious question, the asset appreciation is surely the epitome of unearned profit as house prices were rising faster than inflation for years. Yes, you can spend on the property to increase value but we all know houses were increasing in value if they just had four walls and a roof (and sometimes not even then).
The problem there is that CGT on houses is based on the unindexed original purchase price - not the inflation indexed version of the price (I can't remember when it was implemented as we got burnt so badly on a rental property Mrs Eek vetos the idea).
So you couldn't use an indexed version of the purchase price for primary homes and a secondary price for others.
Equally I spent a fortune on an extension 20 years ago. I can tell you roughly what it cost but every builder involved in the project has died / closed down and I can't remember exactly what it cost only a very rough ballpark of £80,000...
Hence it really is a completely stupid idea...
The Government could change the system if it wanted and no Government has a monopoly on stupid ideas, I mean, we have a Council Tax system based on 1991 valuations.
I do think property is the elephant in the taxation room - if you can't impose CGT (or a sales tax) on house transactions, how about revisiting the valuations and making them more relevant to the actual value of the property now (that will mean more bands to cover the vast range of house values)? In addition, you have Land Value Taxation as an option - if you don't want to tax the property, tax the land it sits on (land is very hard to hide).
None of this is without substantial political risk but if you are looking to tap into unearned income to balance the books it's a place to start.
I think we will get a full revaluation quite quite quickly, with a taper limiting change.
Rationally because it is an absolutely f*cking obvious thing to do. Politically because big changes need to be soon to give recovery time, and because it will broadly be Tory (now Lib Dem) heartlands that have been given the most free money over decades by the revaluation not being say 25 years ago.
I'd prefer greater change. but I think this is the least we can expect.
Just chatting to a plumber I am babysitting installing a new boiler in a Tenant's, and his Council Tax recently jumped from £1200 to£3k a year as they noticed big PD extensions added years ago. That's a Council that could have had that extra revenue every year for more than a decade, and something about lack of capacity in Councils to carry out necessary work.
Um - what triggered the change in band because currently the band only changes when the occupier changes...
I know this as there has been a flag on our account for 18+ years that when we move the house shifts up 2 bands...
That's odd because our house jumped a band following major work as a neighbour reported the work to the council and requested a check on our banding compared to their own.
There is a process to do this.
Of course, the council wouldn't tell us which neighbour.
Many homes in England and Wales are renovated and extended. In this blog, we explain what happens to your Council Tax band when you make changes to your home. We also explain what an improvement indicator means and what you need to consider when purchasing a new home.
The VOA follows strict laws around valuation. This means, legally, we cannot change the Council Tax band of a property that has been improved until it is sold, or there is a general revaluation of all domestic properties. This helps to make sure homeowners are not penalised for improving or maintaining their home.
Instead, we give the property an improvement indicator.
So I love to know what your council was thinking because I think you are due a large refund and an apology....
Hmm. Very interesting. It is a long time ago so my memory is hazy. I will have to see if I kept any paper work. But thanks for the tip off.
Labour have an opportunity here at the start of Parliament and with a massive landslide majority.
Merge National Insurance and Income Tax and create a single Income Tax rate that is paid by all adults of all ages on the same income equitably.
No increase at all in Income Tax for those who are working and on PAYE.
Doubt they will do this. Will burn lots of political capital, will inevitably increase taxes for some groups, and althoygh logical, isn't a top priority.
I think they need to find a way of raising more money that isn't too unpopular. Reducing the very generous pension tax reliefs for higher earners is the obvious move imo.
Except that will result in a lot of people doing less work - little point doing a full 5 day week if tax makes it more sensible to work a 4 or even 3 day week...
The people who are impacted by those sort of changes aren't earning day to day living expenses they have savings and options...
Doubt it would be a major factor honestly. Anyone earning over £50k is a higher rate taxpayer.
Most of those are not so wealthy that they could easily afford a 20 or 40% drop in income.
Doing so because they only get 20% pension relief rather than 40% would be a very strange financial decision to make.
And yet that is what @MisterBedfordshire said earlier and is the experience of many others.
I carefully kept my income below £50,000 to ensure I kept child benefit for many years and last year played similar games to keep my income below £100,000...
Remove full tax relief on my large pension contribution and a 4 day week sounds very nice...
I may need to look at these games, and pulling my kids out of private school, when we get to the Autumn and we know the lie of the land in the budget. Already tough as it is. It will get harder.
Of course, that will mean much less tax for the exchequer, and a bigger burden on the State, but hey ho, that's what you get when you try and squeeze people dry.
There was an opportunity to reset the tax narrative for Labour and remove the cliff edges but they've failed to do so. Another 5 years at least with people going part time or using tax avoidance at £100k.
I've shifted down to 3.5 days per week in my new job to stay below the cliff edge from an earlier agreed 4 day week. I now get Wednesday afternoon and Fridays with my kids which I think is a better use of my time than working so I can give the government 62% of the increment.
This wasn't the budget though - so there is little surprise that the tax narrative has been reset.
However it's clear from the discussions this afternoon that any changes impact people who are well paid is going to have interesting (and unexpected by the Government) consequences..
But £100k isn't even a huge salary today, not the same as what it was in 2009 when Brown introduced the 62% marginal rate, it's £152k in equivalent money today just by inflation. I'd happily do a 4.5 day week with Friday afternoons off if there was no marginal rate. It's immoral for the state to ask me for more than half of my income, I go to work to provide for my family not to fund a huge payrise for public sector fatcats.
£100k is still nearly 3 times the median wage (£34,963) and over twice the average wage (£42,210)..
Although the rest of your argument is absolutely valid - the lack of indexing has forced way more people into it...
And it used to be 4x the median salary in 2009. £100k is relatively a much smaller salary than it was when the cliff edge was introduced. It has a third less purchasing power and the number of people who earn at least £100k has more than doubled in that time. It's no longer a huge salary, a senior developer or data engineer can earn more than that before part time or AVCs are taken into account. In 2009 it was C suite or directors of big companies who would be in that salary range.
it's a silly anomaly if it can be sorted at neutral cost. What would your preferred method for getting rid of the cliff edge - without costing the Exchequer (otherwise it won't happen) ?
Bring the 45% rate down to £100k remove the cliff edge. Enough people will add an extra day or half day to their working week to more than make up for the 15% difference between the 60% effective rate and 45%. At my last company we did the sums and it was something mad like net gain of £2.4bn by removing the cliff edges at £100k.
and if you really want to remove the tax allowance do it at £175,000 or similar...
That just creates a new cliff edge.
If you need to raise revenues better to make the 45p into 46p and keep it consistent across the board, than pretend its 45p but actually make it 62p (or whatever) for those at the cliff edge and then dropping it back down to 45p for those past the cliff edge.
Labour have an opportunity here at the start of Parliament and with a massive landslide majority.
Merge National Insurance and Income Tax and create a single Income Tax rate that is paid by all adults of all ages on the same income equitably.
No increase at all in Income Tax for those who are working and on PAYE.
Doubt they will do this. Will burn lots of political capital, will inevitably increase taxes for some groups, and althoygh logical, isn't a top priority.
I think they need to find a way of raising more money that isn't too unpopular. Reducing the very generous pension tax reliefs for higher earners is the obvious move imo.
Except that will result in a lot of people doing less work - little point doing a full 5 day week if tax makes it more sensible to work a 4 or even 3 day week...
The people who are impacted by those sort of changes aren't earning day to day living expenses they have savings and options...
Doubt it would be a major factor honestly. Anyone earning over £50k is a higher rate taxpayer.
Most of those are not so wealthy that they could easily afford a 20 or 40% drop in income.
Doing so because they only get 20% pension relief rather than 40% would be a very strange financial decision to make.
And yet that is what @MisterBedfordshire said earlier and is the experience of many others.
I carefully kept my income below £50,000 to ensure I kept child benefit for many years and last year played similar games to keep my income below £100,000...
Remove full tax relief on my large pension contribution and a 4 day week sounds very nice...
I may need to look at these games, and pulling my kids out of private school, when we get to the Autumn and we know the lie of the land in the budget. Already tough as it is. It will get harder.
Of course, that will mean much less tax for the exchequer, and a bigger burden on the State, but hey ho, that's what you get when you try and squeeze people dry.
There was an opportunity to reset the tax narrative for Labour and remove the cliff edges but they've failed to do so. Another 5 years at least with people going part time or using tax avoidance at £100k.
I've shifted down to 3.5 days per week in my new job to stay below the cliff edge from an earlier agreed 4 day week. I now get Wednesday afternoon and Fridays with my kids which I think is a better use of my time than working so I can give the government 62% of the increment.
This wasn't the budget though - so there is little surprise that the tax narrative has been reset.
However it's clear from the discussions this afternoon that any changes impact people who are well paid is going to have interesting (and unexpected by the Government) consequences..
But £100k isn't even a huge salary today, not the same as what it was in 2009 when Brown introduced the 62% marginal rate, it's £152k in equivalent money today just by inflation. I'd happily do a 4.5 day week with Friday afternoons off if there was no marginal rate. It's immoral for the state to ask me for more than half of my income, I go to work to provide for my family not to fund a huge payrise for public sector fatcats.
£100k is still nearly 3 times the median wage (£34,963) and over twice the average wage (£42,210)..
Although the rest of your argument is absolutely valid - the lack of indexing has forced way more people into it...
And it used to be 4x the median salary in 2009. £100k is relatively a much smaller salary than it was when the cliff edge was introduced. It has a third less purchasing power and the number of people who earn at least £100k has more than doubled in that time. It's no longer a huge salary, a senior developer or data engineer can earn more than that before part time or AVCs are taken into account. In 2009 it was C suite or directors of big companies who would be in that salary range.
it's a silly anomaly if it can be sorted at neutral cost. What would your preferred method for getting rid of the cliff edge - without costing the Exchequer (otherwise it won't happen) ?
Bring the 45% rate down to £100k remove the cliff edge. Enough people will add an extra day or half day to their working week to more than make up for the 15% difference between the 60% effective rate and 45%. At my last company we did the sums and it was something mad like net gain of £2.4bn by removing the cliff edges at £100k.
and if you really want to remove the tax allowance do it at £175,000 or similar...
No just don't do anything stupid like that at all, if you want higher tax rates then just have higher tax rates at that level, go from 45% to 48% or something.
Well, yes, always best to get the pain in first even if that means a prolonged mid term trough. If you have a majority of 170 and the main opposition party in disarray, so much the better.
The problem with increasing taxes is 50 years of almost constant propaganda that any and every tax rise is inherently wrong. I'm not sure that's true but nobody wants to be worse off though I would point out misery loves company and if we can see the next guy suffering to a similar or even greater extent that mitigates our discomfort to a degree.
I don't know what else Reeves could or should have done - in truth, £20 billion isn't a lot of money set against the totality of public expenditure. It's a third of what we spend on defence, a fifth of what we're paying in debt interest every year. In essence, she's tinkering at the edges to try to get the deficit down a little and there's nothing inherently wrong with that.
I do know the scrapping of the winter fuel allowance (which was absurd) for non-benefit paying pensioners will be sending some to the barricades or to the equal futility of supporting the Conservatives but it was an anomaly which needed to be rectified (the Conservatives could hardly do it given the age of their voters). It's not in itself a game changer but sends a signal.
CGT on all house sales is going to be one of the big changes - downsizing and taking the profit on the family home funds retirement (or at least the preferred retirement lifestyle) for many but to what extent is any of that "earned" or simply a function of the housing market and inflation? Mr & Mrs Stodge Senior bought their four bedroom house in the mid 60s for £10k and sold it nearly forty years for over £500k. Now, that's a decent return in anybody's language but to what extent was that anything other than supply and demand plus inflation?
My one disappointment with yesterday's announcements was social care. Perhaps Labour have their own ideas - the Dilnot commission has been around almost as long as the Conservatives were last in power but I presume the problem isn't a solution in and of itself but a politically sellable solution (any workable proposal can be a suicide note).
Labour are the ones holding the hot potato or more accurately the grenade with the pin out - IF CGT reduces or closes down the option of funding a retirement lifestyle from asset appreciation how do we get the various schemes and savings plans out there to provide the kind of retirement lifestyle to which most aspire or will that inherently force people to work well into their 70s?
They are not planning CGT on all house sales?
Naah. Complete clog on mobility (stamp duty is bad enough). No country does this, though they may have anti flipping provisions saying you have to live there for n years before the exemption kicks in
I suspect the CGT rate will go up in the autumn - as we know an increasing proportion of property is kept for investment purposes, I do think CGT could be a source of income for the Treasury.
On the subject of house sales, where I appear to have hit a bit of a nerve with some, serious question, the asset appreciation is surely the epitome of unearned profit as house prices were rising faster than inflation for years. Yes, you can spend on the property to increase value but we all know houses were increasing in value if they just had four walls and a roof (and sometimes not even then).
The problem there is that CGT on houses is based on the unindexed original purchase price - not the inflation indexed version of the price (I can't remember when it was implemented as we got burnt so badly on a rental property Mrs Eek vetos the idea).
So you couldn't use an indexed version of the purchase price for primary homes and a secondary price for others.
Equally I spent a fortune on an extension 20 years ago. I can tell you roughly what it cost but every builder involved in the project has died / closed down and I can't remember exactly what it cost only a very rough ballpark of £80,000...
Hence it really is a completely stupid idea...
The Government could change the system if it wanted and no Government has a monopoly on stupid ideas, I mean, we have a Council Tax system based on 1991 valuations.
I do think property is the elephant in the taxation room - if you can't impose CGT (or a sales tax) on house transactions, how about revisiting the valuations and making them more relevant to the actual value of the property now (that will mean more bands to cover the vast range of house values)? In addition, you have Land Value Taxation as an option - if you don't want to tax the property, tax the land it sits on (land is very hard to hide).
None of this is without substantial political risk but if you are looking to tap into unearned income to balance the books it's a place to start.
I think we will get a full revaluation quite quite quickly, with a taper limiting change.
Rationally because it is an absolutely f*cking obvious thing to do. Politically because big changes need to be soon to give recovery time, and because it will broadly be Tory (now Lib Dem) heartlands that have been given the most free money over decades by the revaluation not being say 25 years ago.
I'd prefer greater change. but I think this is the least we can expect.
Just chatting to a plumber I am babysitting installing a new boiler in a Tenant's, and his Council Tax recently jumped from £1200 to£3k a year as they noticed big PD extensions added years ago. That's a Council that could have had that extra revenue every year for more than a decade, and something about lack of capacity in Councils to carry out necessary work.
Um - what triggered the change in band because currently the band only changes when the occupier changes...
I know this as there has been a flag on our account for 18+ years that when we move the house shifts up 2 bands...
That's odd because our house jumped a band following major work as a neighbour reported the work to the council and requested a check on our banding compared to their own.
There is a process to do this.
Of course, the council wouldn't tell us which neighbour.
Many homes in England and Wales are renovated and extended. In this blog, we explain what happens to your Council Tax band when you make changes to your home. We also explain what an improvement indicator means and what you need to consider when purchasing a new home.
The VOA follows strict laws around valuation. This means, legally, we cannot change the Council Tax band of a property that has been improved until it is sold, or there is a general revaluation of all domestic properties. This helps to make sure homeowners are not penalised for improving or maintaining their home.
Instead, we give the property an improvement indicator.
So I love to know what your council was thinking because I think you are due a large refund and an apology....
Hmm. Very interesting. It is a long time ago so my memory is hazy. I will have to see if I kept any paper work. But thanks for the tip off.
PM me your address (postcode and house name / number) and I'll see what the system says - as it's all public records just a pain to access and read.
In my case one reason we kept very quiet is that my house is a lower band to the house we are attached to. It's on a different road and they did very broad brush valuations...
Are Labour really going to bring in the school fees VAT in January mid way through a school year?
That feels bizarre to me.
They’re attempting to make it retrospective to this September, but can’t get the legislation through in time.
Which I suspect will lead to a well-funded legal challenge.
Any evidence to back the September claim up?
Because if they were doing that they would have had to do it yesterday and instead all they said January.. (Remember this sort of trick is something I'm very aware of - so the wording yesterday was interesting and carefully created a distinct line)...
Reality is that by implementing it in January and announcing yesterday after the school year and finished it's designed to minimise the number of people able to move schools before September which is probably a relief to both State and Private schools...
Although it does rather mess up people who are already struggling to pay school fees...
It was in Reeves’s statement yesterday IIRC. Let me try and find it.
Edit: it’s actually slightly more complex. The VAT comes in in January, but any invoices sent from now *for education delivered after January 1*, will be expected to include the VAT, even though the legislation is not yet passed. So the schools are expected to include VAT in next year’s invoices if sent out over the summer. Which is retrospective taxation.
It has also been announced that fees invoiced or paid on or after 29 July 2024 that relate to the school terms after 1 January 2025 will be subject to the standard rate of VAT at the beginning of that term.
School fees paid before 29 July 2024 will follow the VAT treatment in force at the time of the normal tax point for these supplies, where the fee rate for the relevant term has been set and was known at the time of payment.
Draft legislation (VAT on Private School Fees & Removing the Charitable Rates Relief for Private Schools), an explanatory note and an accompanying technical note on these changes is available.
Labour have an opportunity here at the start of Parliament and with a massive landslide majority.
Merge National Insurance and Income Tax and create a single Income Tax rate that is paid by all adults of all ages on the same income equitably.
No increase at all in Income Tax for those who are working and on PAYE.
Doubt they will do this. Will burn lots of political capital, will inevitably increase taxes for some groups, and althoygh logical, isn't a top priority.
I think they need to find a way of raising more money that isn't too unpopular. Reducing the very generous pension tax reliefs for higher earners is the obvious move imo.
Except that will result in a lot of people doing less work - little point doing a full 5 day week if tax makes it more sensible to work a 4 or even 3 day week...
The people who are impacted by those sort of changes aren't earning day to day living expenses they have savings and options...
Doubt it would be a major factor honestly. Anyone earning over £50k is a higher rate taxpayer.
Most of those are not so wealthy that they could easily afford a 20 or 40% drop in income.
Doing so because they only get 20% pension relief rather than 40% would be a very strange financial decision to make.
And yet that is what @MisterBedfordshire said earlier and is the experience of many others.
I carefully kept my income below £50,000 to ensure I kept child benefit for many years and last year played similar games to keep my income below £100,000...
Remove full tax relief on my large pension contribution and a 4 day week sounds very nice...
I may need to look at these games, and pulling my kids out of private school, when we get to the Autumn and we know the lie of the land in the budget. Already tough as it is. It will get harder.
Of course, that will mean much less tax for the exchequer, and a bigger burden on the State, but hey ho, that's what you get when you try and squeeze people dry.
There was an opportunity to reset the tax narrative for Labour and remove the cliff edges but they've failed to do so. Another 5 years at least with people going part time or using tax avoidance at £100k.
I've shifted down to 3.5 days per week in my new job to stay below the cliff edge from an earlier agreed 4 day week. I now get Wednesday afternoon and Fridays with my kids which I think is a better use of my time than working so I can give the government 62% of the increment.
This wasn't the budget though - so there is little surprise that the tax narrative has been reset.
However it's clear from the discussions this afternoon that any changes impact people who are well paid is going to have interesting (and unexpected by the Government) consequences..
But £100k isn't even a huge salary today, not the same as what it was in 2009 when Brown introduced the 62% marginal rate, it's £152k in equivalent money today just by inflation. I'd happily do a 4.5 day week with Friday afternoons off if there was no marginal rate. It's immoral for the state to ask me for more than half of my income, I go to work to provide for my family not to fund a huge payrise for public sector fatcats.
£100k is still nearly 3 times the median wage (£34,963) and over twice the average wage (£42,210)..
Although the rest of your argument is absolutely valid - the lack of indexing has forced way more people into it...
And it used to be 4x the median salary in 2009. £100k is relatively a much smaller salary than it was when the cliff edge was introduced. It has a third less purchasing power and the number of people who earn at least £100k has more than doubled in that time. It's no longer a huge salary, a senior developer or data engineer can earn more than that before part time or AVCs are taken into account. In 2009 it was C suite or directors of big companies who would be in that salary range.
it's a silly anomaly if it can be sorted at neutral cost. What would your preferred method for getting rid of the cliff edge - without costing the Exchequer (otherwise it won't happen) ?
Bring the 45% rate down to £100k remove the cliff edge. Enough people will add an extra day or half day to their working week to more than make up for the 15% difference between the 60% effective rate and 45%. At my last company we did the sums and it was something mad like net gain of £2.4bn by removing the cliff edges at £100k.
and if you really want to remove the tax allowance do it at £175,000 or similar...
No just don't do anything stupid like that at all, if you want higher tax rates then just have higher tax rates at that level, go from 45% to 48% or something.
Oh I know it's a f***ing stupid idea but there are politics involved...
~£10bn of the "blackhole" is due to Labour's bumper increase in public sector pay. It's completely optional and they could hold back more than half of that figure. If the public sector doesn't like it they can move to the private sector.
The problem is that they /have/ moved to the private sector - the NHS has something like 100k unfilled jobs, current teacher recruitment in secondary schools is running ~50% below the target.
At some point either you pay the going rate or you stop being able to recruit staff.
1 problem with teacher recruitment is that they've f***ed up teacher training so badly that remarkable few graduates are taking teacher training courses. My daughter would have happily done so via the local training school (they usually have 10 or so ex pupils returning for it). This year 2 are going to do teacher training...
Though it depends upon subject does it not?
The stats I've seen show that more people are doing PE Teacher Training than desired, but very few people are doing Physics or Maths etc
Which hardly seems surprising to me given that teachers are paid the same regardless of subject specialism and a qualified physicist can typically do better privately (or academically elsewhere) than teaching teenagers.
Adjusting teacher remuneration so in-demand specialists are paid more than less-demanded specialists seems logical to me. Why not pay a physics teacher more than a PE teacher?
There are messy points that need thinking through though. Party because teachers don't come in tidy categories (you get PE qualified teachers teaching science because they know enough biology... and doing a decent job) and partly because of the perverse knock on incentives. If a school's budget is squeezed, should they replace someone physics-qualified with someone cheaper?
Are Labour really going to bring in the school fees VAT in January mid way through a school year?
That feels bizarre to me.
They’re attempting to make it retrospective to this September, but can’t get the legislation through in time.
Which I suspect will lead to a well-funded legal challenge.
Any evidence to back the September claim up?
Because if they were doing that they would have had to do it yesterday and instead all they said January.. (Remember this sort of trick is something I'm very aware of - so the wording yesterday was interesting and carefully created a distinct line)...
Reality is that by implementing it in January and announcing yesterday after the school year and finished it's designed to minimise the number of people able to move schools before September which is probably a relief to both State and Private schools...
Although it does rather mess up people who are already struggling to pay school fees...
So we’ll get a winter of freezing pensioner headlines followed by a January of taking the little darlings out of school/could state schools be overwhelmed headlines. Plus whatever comes down the line in the budget in October.
I don’t think we’ll be seeing much by way of a Labour honeymoon. That doesn’t mean that the Tories are going to suddenly look amazing (they’re not). But it will be interesting to see what the polls are coming out with early next year.
Not optimal… but then I guess they’re getting these hits out of the way early.
I LOL at Labour for the private school fees move.
I think Starmer reckons it'll be another foxhunting ban moment. But foxhunting was directly supported by very few people, and this move will affect many, many more people directly. It'll cheer those who hate people who are richer than them; but dismay many more.
Rayner gets blamed but if you look at Reeves background, and the glee she took at beating private-school kids at chess when she was younger, some of whom no doubt mocked her, it's personal.
Labour have an opportunity here at the start of Parliament and with a massive landslide majority.
Merge National Insurance and Income Tax and create a single Income Tax rate that is paid by all adults of all ages on the same income equitably.
No increase at all in Income Tax for those who are working and on PAYE.
Doubt they will do this. Will burn lots of political capital, will inevitably increase taxes for some groups, and althoygh logical, isn't a top priority.
I think they need to find a way of raising more money that isn't too unpopular. Reducing the very generous pension tax reliefs for higher earners is the obvious move imo.
Except that will result in a lot of people doing less work - little point doing a full 5 day week if tax makes it more sensible to work a 4 or even 3 day week...
The people who are impacted by those sort of changes aren't earning day to day living expenses they have savings and options...
Doubt it would be a major factor honestly. Anyone earning over £50k is a higher rate taxpayer.
Most of those are not so wealthy that they could easily afford a 20 or 40% drop in income.
Doing so because they only get 20% pension relief rather than 40% would be a very strange financial decision to make.
And yet that is what @MisterBedfordshire said earlier and is the experience of many others.
I carefully kept my income below £50,000 to ensure I kept child benefit for many years and last year played similar games to keep my income below £100,000...
Remove full tax relief on my large pension contribution and a 4 day week sounds very nice...
I may need to look at these games, and pulling my kids out of private school, when we get to the Autumn and we know the lie of the land in the budget. Already tough as it is. It will get harder.
Of course, that will mean much less tax for the exchequer, and a bigger burden on the State, but hey ho, that's what you get when you try and squeeze people dry.
There was an opportunity to reset the tax narrative for Labour and remove the cliff edges but they've failed to do so. Another 5 years at least with people going part time or using tax avoidance at £100k.
I've shifted down to 3.5 days per week in my new job to stay below the cliff edge from an earlier agreed 4 day week. I now get Wednesday afternoon and Fridays with my kids which I think is a better use of my time than working so I can give the government 62% of the increment.
This wasn't the budget though - so there is little surprise that the tax narrative has been reset.
However it's clear from the discussions this afternoon that any changes impact people who are well paid is going to have interesting (and unexpected by the Government) consequences..
But £100k isn't even a huge salary today, not the same as what it was in 2009 when Brown introduced the 62% marginal rate, it's £152k in equivalent money today just by inflation. I'd happily do a 4.5 day week with Friday afternoons off if there was no marginal rate. It's immoral for the state to ask me for more than half of my income, I go to work to provide for my family not to fund a huge payrise for public sector fatcats.
£100k is still nearly 3 times the median wage (£34,963) and over twice the average wage (£42,210)..
Although the rest of your argument is absolutely valid - the lack of indexing has forced way more people into it...
And it used to be 4x the median salary in 2009. £100k is relatively a much smaller salary than it was when the cliff edge was introduced. It has a third less purchasing power and the number of people who earn at least £100k has more than doubled in that time. It's no longer a huge salary, a senior developer or data engineer can earn more than that before part time or AVCs are taken into account. In 2009 it was C suite or directors of big companies who would be in that salary range.
it's a silly anomaly if it can be sorted at neutral cost. What would your preferred method for getting rid of the cliff edge - without costing the Exchequer (otherwise it won't happen) ?
Eliminate all cliff edges and put rates up by the commensurate amount to ensure that it is revenue neutral. If the 45p rate needs to become 48p or 50p so be it, so long as the cliff edges are gone.
Laffer curve effect will kick in as people stop engaging in avoidance/work extra hours and that will increase revenues which will then enable either extra spending or tax cuts depending upon your political preference.
If that chart is slightly valid it seems the Conservatives need Jenrick.
In what way is Jenrick the change candidate?
Jenrick was caught up in questionable dealings with Richard Desmond (and others), was hopeless in his role as secretary of state for housing (described as "no help at all" by 90% of leaseholders), was caught out breaking lockdown rules during Covid, and is mostly remembered by the general public for painting over murals at a children's asylum seeker centre.
It seems to me, that in terms of giving the appearance of being venal, ineffectual, rule-flouting and cruel, Jenrick is very much the continuity candidate with respect to his party's perception by the general public.
Jenrick and Stride were the only 2 of the 6 who backed Sunak in the 2022 summer leadership election, so no change there albeit both were also the only 2 who backed Remain in 2016 unlike Sunak who backed Leave, so some change there. Though Jenrick is pushing immigration control harder
Stride at least had the balls to do the media rounds when the government was sinking fast. Jenrick has too many negatives. ETA but it's not my vote and I'm staying away from the betting markets.
On the polling Jenrick has the second best net approval rating of the contenders after Tugendhat with voters (albeit that did not include Stride and forgot Tugendhat also backed Remain in 2016) https://x.com/keiranpedley/status/1816040577453973865
Lowest positives and second-lowest negatives suggest most don't know who Jenrick is. As a thought experiment, suppose he is elected and every news outlet needs to describe him. There are no positives. He'd be on the back foot before the first ball is bowled. (Other sports are available for this metaphor.)
He isn't that bad, working class parents. provincial rather than London upbringing, Cambridge degree so reasonably bright.
He also does not have the huge net negatives Braverman had and Patel has, so if the Labour government becomes unpopular as LOTO he would inevitably benefit. I would prefer Tugendhat though
Labour have an opportunity here at the start of Parliament and with a massive landslide majority.
Merge National Insurance and Income Tax and create a single Income Tax rate that is paid by all adults of all ages on the same income equitably.
No increase at all in Income Tax for those who are working and on PAYE.
Doubt they will do this. Will burn lots of political capital, will inevitably increase taxes for some groups, and althoygh logical, isn't a top priority.
I think they need to find a way of raising more money that isn't too unpopular. Reducing the very generous pension tax reliefs for higher earners is the obvious move imo.
Except that will result in a lot of people doing less work - little point doing a full 5 day week if tax makes it more sensible to work a 4 or even 3 day week...
The people who are impacted by those sort of changes aren't earning day to day living expenses they have savings and options...
Doubt it would be a major factor honestly. Anyone earning over £50k is a higher rate taxpayer.
Most of those are not so wealthy that they could easily afford a 20 or 40% drop in income.
Doing so because they only get 20% pension relief rather than 40% would be a very strange financial decision to make.
And yet that is what @MisterBedfordshire said earlier and is the experience of many others.
I carefully kept my income below £50,000 to ensure I kept child benefit for many years and last year played similar games to keep my income below £100,000...
Remove full tax relief on my large pension contribution and a 4 day week sounds very nice...
I may need to look at these games, and pulling my kids out of private school, when we get to the Autumn and we know the lie of the land in the budget. Already tough as it is. It will get harder.
Of course, that will mean much less tax for the exchequer, and a bigger burden on the State, but hey ho, that's what you get when you try and squeeze people dry.
It wasn't a game. I was just damned if I was going to pay a marginal tax rate of over 70% (40% tax, 2% NI plus thick end of 30% child benefit withdrawal (the more kids you have the bigger the marginal rate %) so I stuck any earnings over £50k in Pension AVCs and paid 0% on it.
Phoebe, Cressida.. soon getting arrested at a climate change demo and jailed will be as much a mark of being a member of the liberal upper middle classes as voting LD and shopping at Waitrose...
Now, now, that's a little mean spirited of you.
I'm sure the correlation between the preponderance of Waitrose and Gail's Bakeries and the existence of a LD MP is merely coincidential.
I was in Esher last Thursday - much improved since the election. Just so happens a Gail's opened a few months before the election.
There's a Gail's in Brentwood - presumably when you get a proper Waitrose you'll know the LDs will be targeting Alex's seat.
One more serious thought - "class" isn't the be all and end all, neither is education, nor how you voted in 2016. Perhaps if you and your party want to progress, you need to slaughter those three sacred cows and consider other reasons why so many deserted the Conservatives nearly a month ago.
The LDs already hold the majority of council seats in Brentwood itself, it is the rural part of the district and Ongar and North Weald and rural surroundings that give Alex B a clear majority and Reform a sizeable vote nationally.
Class isn't a big divide now between Tories and Labour no, the class divide is between LD and Reform voters if anything.
Age still is a big Tory v Labour divide however
You're not wrong, of course. I find Reform a complete paradox as I've said on here before. I'm not sure Farage and Tice are the same people as James McMurdock and the latter is perhaps more representative of the wider membership.
The demographic split is interesting and worth much more time and analysis.
Among those aged 60-69, the Conservatives got 33% (-24 on 2019), Labour 28% (+6), Reform 18% (+18)
Among those aged 70+, the Conservatives got 46% (-21), Labour 20% (+6), Reform 15% (+15)
Yes, as with Macron Sunak did best with older pensioners. Farage and Reform, like Le Pen's party, did best with the middle aged and younger pensioners
"I suspect Reeves and Starmer are following the Thatcher/Cameron playbook which is to complete the unpopular policies at the start of the parliament and reap the rewards at the end of the parliament."
The problem will be if the 22% pay rise for doctors is just the start of above inflation wage increases for public sector workers, because we know how that ends up, don't we?
Well, yes, always best to get the pain in first even if that means a prolonged mid term trough. If you have a majority of 170 and the main opposition party in disarray, so much the better.
The problem with increasing taxes is 50 years of almost constant propaganda that any and every tax rise is inherently wrong. I'm not sure that's true but nobody wants to be worse off though I would point out misery loves company and if we can see the next guy suffering to a similar or even greater extent that mitigates our discomfort to a degree.
I don't know what else Reeves could or should have done - in truth, £20 billion isn't a lot of money set against the totality of public expenditure. It's a third of what we spend on defence, a fifth of what we're paying in debt interest every year. In essence, she's tinkering at the edges to try to get the deficit down a little and there's nothing inherently wrong with that.
I do know the scrapping of the winter fuel allowance (which was absurd) for non-benefit paying pensioners will be sending some to the barricades or to the equal futility of supporting the Conservatives but it was an anomaly which needed to be rectified (the Conservatives could hardly do it given the age of their voters). It's not in itself a game changer but sends a signal.
CGT on all house sales is going to be one of the big changes - downsizing and taking the profit on the family home funds retirement (or at least the preferred retirement lifestyle) for many but to what extent is any of that "earned" or simply a function of the housing market and inflation? Mr & Mrs Stodge Senior bought their four bedroom house in the mid 60s for £10k and sold it nearly forty years for over £500k. Now, that's a decent return in anybody's language but to what extent was that anything other than supply and demand plus inflation?
My one disappointment with yesterday's announcements was social care. Perhaps Labour have their own ideas - the Dilnot commission has been around almost as long as the Conservatives were last in power but I presume the problem isn't a solution in and of itself but a politically sellable solution (any workable proposal can be a suicide note).
Labour are the ones holding the hot potato or more accurately the grenade with the pin out - IF CGT reduces or closes down the option of funding a retirement lifestyle from asset appreciation how do we get the various schemes and savings plans out there to provide the kind of retirement lifestyle to which most aspire or will that inherently force people to work well into their 70s?
They are not planning CGT on all house sales?
Naah. Complete clog on mobility (stamp duty is bad enough). No country does this, though they may have anti flipping provisions saying you have to live there for n years before the exemption kicks in
I suspect the CGT rate will go up in the autumn - as we know an increasing proportion of property is kept for investment purposes, I do think CGT could be a source of income for the Treasury.
On the subject of house sales, where I appear to have hit a bit of a nerve with some, serious question, the asset appreciation is surely the epitome of unearned profit as house prices were rising faster than inflation for years. Yes, you can spend on the property to increase value but we all know houses were increasing in value if they just had four walls and a roof (and sometimes not even then).
The problem there is that CGT on houses is based on the unindexed original purchase price - not the inflation indexed version of the price (I can't remember when it was implemented as we got burnt so badly on a rental property Mrs Eek vetos the idea).
So you couldn't use an indexed version of the purchase price for primary homes and a secondary price for others.
Equally I spent a fortune on an extension 20 years ago. I can tell you roughly what it cost but every builder involved in the project has died / closed down and I can't remember exactly what it cost only a very rough ballpark of £80,000...
Hence it really is a completely stupid idea...
The Government could change the system if it wanted and no Government has a monopoly on stupid ideas, I mean, we have a Council Tax system based on 1991 valuations.
I do think property is the elephant in the taxation room - if you can't impose CGT (or a sales tax) on house transactions, how about revisiting the valuations and making them more relevant to the actual value of the property now (that will mean more bands to cover the vast range of house values)? In addition, you have Land Value Taxation as an option - if you don't want to tax the property, tax the land it sits on (land is very hard to hide).
None of this is without substantial political risk but if you are looking to tap into unearned income to balance the books it's a place to start.
I think we will get a full revaluation quite quite quickly, with a taper limiting change.
Rationally because it is an absolutely f*cking obvious thing to do. Politically because big changes need to be soon to give recovery time, and because it will broadly be Tory (now Lib Dem) heartlands that have been given the most free money over decades by the revaluation not being say 25 years ago.
I'd prefer greater change. but I think this is the least we can expect.
Just chatting to a plumber I am babysitting installing a new boiler in a Tenant's, and his Council Tax recently jumped from £1200 to£3k a year as they noticed big PD extensions added years ago. That's a Council that could have had that extra revenue every year for more than a decade, and something about lack of capacity in Councils to carry out necessary work.
Um - what triggered the change in band because currently the band only changes when the occupier changes...
I know this as there has been a flag on our account for 18+ years that when we move the house shifts up 2 bands...
That's odd because our house jumped a band following major work as a neighbour reported the work to the council and requested a check on our banding compared to their own.
There is a process to do this.
Of course, the council wouldn't tell us which neighbour.
Labour have an opportunity here at the start of Parliament and with a massive landslide majority.
Merge National Insurance and Income Tax and create a single Income Tax rate that is paid by all adults of all ages on the same income equitably.
No increase at all in Income Tax for those who are working and on PAYE.
Doubt they will do this. Will burn lots of political capital, will inevitably increase taxes for some groups, and althoygh logical, isn't a top priority.
I think they need to find a way of raising more money that isn't too unpopular. Reducing the very generous pension tax reliefs for higher earners is the obvious move imo.
Except that will result in a lot of people doing less work - little point doing a full 5 day week if tax makes it more sensible to work a 4 or even 3 day week...
The people who are impacted by those sort of changes aren't earning day to day living expenses they have savings and options...
Doubt it would be a major factor honestly. Anyone earning over £50k is a higher rate taxpayer.
Most of those are not so wealthy that they could easily afford a 20 or 40% drop in income.
Doing so because they only get 20% pension relief rather than 40% would be a very strange financial decision to make.
And yet that is what @MisterBedfordshire said earlier and is the experience of many others.
I carefully kept my income below £50,000 to ensure I kept child benefit for many years and last year played similar games to keep my income below £100,000...
Remove full tax relief on my large pension contribution and a 4 day week sounds very nice...
Income tax cliffs are real and definitely change behaviour, particularly when you factor in benefits.
But I don't agree it's the same for pension relief, there isn't the same cliff edge element.
No just a marginal rate of over 70% due to child benefit withdrawl if you have several kids.
So putting it into pension AVCs makes little dufference to your take home pay and builds abig tax free pot
Labour have an opportunity here at the start of Parliament and with a massive landslide majority.
Merge National Insurance and Income Tax and create a single Income Tax rate that is paid by all adults of all ages on the same income equitably.
No increase at all in Income Tax for those who are working and on PAYE.
Doubt they will do this. Will burn lots of political capital, will inevitably increase taxes for some groups, and althoygh logical, isn't a top priority.
I think they need to find a way of raising more money that isn't too unpopular. Reducing the very generous pension tax reliefs for higher earners is the obvious move imo.
Except that will result in a lot of people doing less work - little point doing a full 5 day week if tax makes it more sensible to work a 4 or even 3 day week...
The people who are impacted by those sort of changes aren't earning day to day living expenses they have savings and options...
Doubt it would be a major factor honestly. Anyone earning over £50k is a higher rate taxpayer.
Most of those are not so wealthy that they could easily afford a 20 or 40% drop in income.
Doing so because they only get 20% pension relief rather than 40% would be a very strange financial decision to make.
And yet that is what @MisterBedfordshire said earlier and is the experience of many others.
I carefully kept my income below £50,000 to ensure I kept child benefit for many years and last year played similar games to keep my income below £100,000...
Remove full tax relief on my large pension contribution and a 4 day week sounds very nice...
Income tax cliffs are real and definitely change behaviour, particularly when you factor in benefits.
But I don't agree it's the same for pension relief, there isn't the same cliff edge element.
There isn't now but there may be come October / next April..
BREAKING: A third child is confirmed to have died in yesterday’s knife attack in Southport. She was just 9 years old.
Heartbreaking. So so sad.
It makes me think if my 5 year old niece who could easily have been at this kind of daycare/club in the school holidays. I don't pay as much attention to the news as I used to but this one has really bummed me out. If anyone did anything to hurt my daughter I'd be demanding blood, if the judge doesn't waive anonymity in this case it will show once and for all that the UK justice system is not fit for purpose and geared towards criminals rather than victims.
If that chart is slightly valid it seems the Conservatives need Jenrick.
In what way is Jenrick the change candidate?
Jenrick was caught up in questionable dealings with Richard Desmond (and others), was hopeless in his role as secretary of state for housing (described as "no help at all" by 90% of leaseholders), was caught out breaking lockdown rules during Covid, and is mostly remembered by the general public for painting over murals at a children's asylum seeker centre.
It seems to me, that in terms of giving the appearance of being venal, ineffectual, rule-flouting and cruel, Jenrick is very much the continuity candidate with respect to his party's perception by the general public.
Jenrick and Stride were the only 2 of the 6 who backed Sunak in the 2022 summer leadership election, so no change there albeit both were also the only 2 who backed Remain in 2016 unlike Sunak who backed Leave, so some change there. Though Jenrick is pushing immigration control harder
Stride at least had the balls to do the media rounds when the government was sinking fast. Jenrick has too many negatives. ETA but it's not my vote and I'm staying away from the betting markets.
On the polling Jenrick has the second best net approval rating of the contenders after Tugendhat with voters (albeit that did not include Stride and forgot Tugendhat also backed Remain in 2016) https://x.com/keiranpedley/status/1816040577453973865
Lowest positives and second-lowest negatives suggest most don't know who Jenrick is. As a thought experiment, suppose he is elected and every news outlet needs to describe him. There are no positives. He'd be on the back foot before the first ball is bowled. (Other sports are available for this metaphor.)
BREAKING: A third child is confirmed to have died in yesterday’s knife attack in Southport. She was just 9 years old.
Heartbreaking. So so sad.
It makes me think if my 5 year old niece who could easily have been at this kind of daycare/club in the school holidays. I don't pay as much attention to the news as I used to but this one has really bummed me out. If anyone did anything to hurt my daughter I'd be demanding blood, if the judge doesn't waive anonymity in this case it will show once and for all that the UK justice system is not fit for purpose and geared towards criminals rather than victims.
If people knew who he was he wouldn't be safe outside prison. And nor should he ever feel safe for one moment of his wretched, miserable life ever again.
Are Labour really going to bring in the school fees VAT in January mid way through a school year?
That feels bizarre to me.
They’re attempting to make it retrospective to this September, but can’t get the legislation through in time.
Which I suspect will lead to a well-funded legal challenge.
Any evidence to back the September claim up?
Because if they were doing that they would have had to do it yesterday and instead all they said January.. (Remember this sort of trick is something I'm very aware of - so the wording yesterday was interesting and carefully created a distinct line)...
Reality is that by implementing it in January and announcing yesterday after the school year and finished it's designed to minimise the number of people able to move schools before September which is probably a relief to both State and Private schools...
Although it does rather mess up people who are already struggling to pay school fees...
It was in Reeves’s statement yesterday IIRC. Let me try and find it.
Edit: it’s actually slightly more complex. The VAT comes in in January, but any invoices sent from now *for education delivered after January 1*, will be expected to include the VAT, even though the legislation is not yet passed. So the schools are expected to include VAT in next year’s invoices if sent out over the summer. Which is retrospective taxation.
It has also been announced that fees invoiced or paid on or after 29 July 2024 that relate to the school terms after 1 January 2025 will be subject to the standard rate of VAT at the beginning of that term.
School fees paid before 29 July 2024 will follow the VAT treatment in force at the time of the normal tax point for these supplies, where the fee rate for the relevant term has been set and was known at the time of payment.
Draft legislation (VAT on Private School Fees & Removing the Charitable Rates Relief for Private Schools), an explanatory note and an accompanying technical note on these changes is available.
Where can I fund the legal challenge?
You may want to read this analysis first, if you haven't done so already
Are Labour really going to bring in the school fees VAT in January mid way through a school year?
That feels bizarre to me.
They’re attempting to make it retrospective to this September, but can’t get the legislation through in time.
Which I suspect will lead to a well-funded legal challenge.
Any evidence to back the September claim up?
Because if they were doing that they would have had to do it yesterday and instead all they said January.. (Remember this sort of trick is something I'm very aware of - so the wording yesterday was interesting and carefully created a distinct line)...
Reality is that by implementing it in January and announcing yesterday after the school year and finished it's designed to minimise the number of people able to move schools before September which is probably a relief to both State and Private schools...
Although it does rather mess up people who are already struggling to pay school fees...
So we’ll get a winter of freezing pensioner headlines followed by a January of taking the little darlings out of school/could state schools be overwhelmed headlines. Plus whatever comes down the line in the budget in October.
I don’t think we’ll be seeing much by way of a Labour honeymoon. That doesn’t mean that the Tories are going to suddenly look amazing (they’re not). But it will be interesting to see what the polls are coming out with early next year.
Not optimal… but then I guess they’re getting these hits out of the way early.
I LOL at Labour for the private school fees move.
I think Starmer reckons it'll be another foxhunting ban moment. But foxhunting was directly supported by very few people, and this move will affect many, many more people directly. It'll cheer those who hate people who are richer than them; but dismay many more.
Personally I’m a VAT supremacist, so this is grist to the mill. VAT on everything!
VAT on everything is a fair argument. But this is VAT on something very specific and targeted, mostly for ideological reasons rather than attempting to raise revenue.
It’s red meat to an activist base who think every private school is just like “Boris Johnson’s Eton”.
And it may well work out that Boris Johnson Eton comes out ahead on the changes, and it small / special needs schools that are the ones most effected.
If you want an extra £1bn from rich people there are much easier ways to get it.
Starmer doesn’t give a fuck how much money it raises. It was a high protein plant based meat substitute policy for his base that doesn’t repel centrist dickheads and can't be proved to cost a shitload of cash. He needed his base as hard as a fucking brick to work the GE for him.
It was and is smart politics. All of this wanking off about how much it will raise or cost totally misses the point of it. The lachrymose grief of the bottom half of the bourgeoisie is a splendid by-product, not the prime intent.
BREAKING: A third child is confirmed to have died in yesterday’s knife attack in Southport. She was just 9 years old.
Heartbreaking. So so sad.
It makes me think if my 5 year old niece who could easily have been at this kind of daycare/club in the school holidays. I don't pay as much attention to the news as I used to but this one has really bummed me out. If anyone did anything to hurt my daughter I'd be demanding blood, if the judge doesn't waive anonymity in this case it will show once and for all that the UK justice system is not fit for purpose and geared towards criminals rather than victims.
My wife has been particularly upset by it. Our youngest is nine and went off to a drama and dance holiday club this morning. It took some persuasion on my part to get her to allow her to go.
BREAKING: A third child is confirmed to have died in yesterday’s knife attack in Southport. She was just 9 years old.
Heartbreaking. So so sad.
It makes me think if my 5 year old niece who could easily have been at this kind of daycare/club in the school holidays. I don't pay as much attention to the news as I used to but this one has really bummed me out. If anyone did anything to hurt my daughter I'd be demanding blood, if the judge doesn't waive anonymity in this case it will show once and for all that the UK justice system is not fit for purpose and geared towards criminals rather than victims.
If people knew who he was he wouldn't be safe outside prison. And nor should he ever feel safe for one moment of his wretched, miserable life ever again.
Indeed, I just think about what those parents must be going through today. It's absolutely awful and I hope we find a way to just end this guy for good.
#BreakingNews Islamist preacher Anjem Choudary has been jailed at Woolwich Crown Court for life with a minimum term of 28 years for directing the terrorist organisation Al-Muhajiroun and encouraging support for it through online meetings
"I suspect Reeves and Starmer are following the Thatcher/Cameron playbook which is to complete the unpopular policies at the start of the parliament and reap the rewards at the end of the parliament."
The problem will be if the 22% pay rise for doctors is just the start of above inflation wage increases for public sector workers, because we know how that ends up, don't we?
If I understaand correctly the pay rise is for England only. I cant see the celtic fringe accepting less nor Starmer refusing them.
Are Labour really going to bring in the school fees VAT in January mid way through a school year?
That feels bizarre to me.
They’re attempting to make it retrospective to this September, but can’t get the legislation through in time.
Which I suspect will lead to a well-funded legal challenge.
Any evidence to back the September claim up?
Because if they were doing that they would have had to do it yesterday and instead all they said January.. (Remember this sort of trick is something I'm very aware of - so the wording yesterday was interesting and carefully created a distinct line)...
Reality is that by implementing it in January and announcing yesterday after the school year and finished it's designed to minimise the number of people able to move schools before September which is probably a relief to both State and Private schools...
Although it does rather mess up people who are already struggling to pay school fees...
So we’ll get a winter of freezing pensioner headlines followed by a January of taking the little darlings out of school/could state schools be overwhelmed headlines. Plus whatever comes down the line in the budget in October.
I don’t think we’ll be seeing much by way of a Labour honeymoon. That doesn’t mean that the Tories are going to suddenly look amazing (they’re not). But it will be interesting to see what the polls are coming out with early next year.
Not optimal… but then I guess they’re getting these hits out of the way early.
I LOL at Labour for the private school fees move.
I think Starmer reckons it'll be another foxhunting ban moment. But foxhunting was directly supported by very few people, and this move will affect many, many more people directly. It'll cheer those who hate people who are richer than them; but dismay many more.
Personally I’m a VAT supremacist, so this is grist to the mill. VAT on everything!
VAT on everything is a fair argument. But this is VAT on something very specific and targeted, mostly for ideological reasons rather than attempting to raise revenue.
It’s red meat to an activist base who think every private school is just like “Boris Johnson’s Eton”.
And it may well work out that Boris Johnson Eton comes out ahead on the changes, and it small / special needs schools that are the ones most effected.
If you want an extra £1bn from rich people there are much easier ways to get it.
Starmer doesn’t give a fuck how much money it raises. It was a high protein plant based meat substitute policy for his base that doesn’t repel centrist dickheads and can't be proved to cost a shitload of cash. He needed his base as hard as a fucking brick to work the GE for him.
It was and is smart politics. All of this wanking off about how much it will raise or cost totally misses the point of it. The lachrymose grief of the bottom half of the bourgeoisie is a splendid by-product, not the prime intent.
And the children with disrupted education, the good teachers now unemployed and the closed businesses?
All for a spiteful and envious policy that will damage the country overall.
And we've got five years of the crap that 20% of the electorate foisted on us.
BREAKING: A third child is confirmed to have died in yesterday’s knife attack in Southport. She was just 9 years old.
Heartbreaking. So so sad.
It makes me think if my 5 year old niece who could easily have been at this kind of daycare/club in the school holidays. I don't pay as much attention to the news as I used to but this one has really bummed me out. If anyone did anything to hurt my daughter I'd be demanding blood, if the judge doesn't waive anonymity in this case it will show once and for all that the UK justice system is not fit for purpose and geared towards criminals rather than victims.
I've seen rumours of the culprit circulate rapidly on social media/WhatsApp today. No media outlet daring to fill in the blanks.
Biggest giveaway is the Mayor of Liverpool "warning people not to speculate on the identity of the culprit", which in and of itself gives a bit of the game away.
"I suspect Reeves and Starmer are following the Thatcher/Cameron playbook which is to complete the unpopular policies at the start of the parliament and reap the rewards at the end of the parliament."
The problem will be if the 22% pay rise for doctors is just the start of above inflation wage increases for public sector workers, because we know how that ends up, don't we?
If I understaand correctly the pay rise is for England only. I cant see the celtic fringe accepting less nor Starmer refusing them.
Thanks to Barnett they’ll be able to afford a spot more…
#BreakingNews Islamist preacher Anjem Choudary has been jailed at Woolwich Crown Court for life with a minimum term of 28 years for directing the terrorist organisation Al-Muhajiroun and encouraging support for it through online meetings
The other grenade with replacing pensions tax relief with a credit for 20% or 30% tax on contributions is that those contributions, which up to now are tax exempt and don't even appear in Gross income in an employees P60 will now be included as taxable income.
So the amount on the P60 goes up significantly, so this money is now included in means tests for Universal Credit, Student Loan Repayments, Student Loan parental income, council tax relief, child benefit withdrawal etc.
Plus the employer contributions become taxable benefits in kind so appear as income in all the above too.
There is a reason the previous government didn't do it.
~£10bn of the "blackhole" is due to Labour's bumper increase in public sector pay. It's completely optional and they could hold back more than half of that figure. If the public sector doesn't like it they can move to the private sector.
The problem is that they /have/ moved to the private sector - the NHS has something like 100k unfilled jobs, current teacher recruitment in secondary schools is running ~50% below the target.
At some point either you pay the going rate or you stop being able to recruit staff.
1 problem with teacher recruitment is that they've f***ed up teacher training so badly that remarkable few graduates are taking teacher training courses. My daughter would have happily done so via the local training school (they usually have 10 or so ex pupils returning for it). This year 2 are going to do teacher training...
Though it depends upon subject does it not?
The stats I've seen show that more people are doing PE Teacher Training than desired, but very few people are doing Physics or Maths etc
Which hardly seems surprising to me given that teachers are paid the same regardless of subject specialism and a qualified physicist can typically do better privately (or academically elsewhere) than teaching teenagers.
Adjusting teacher remuneration so in-demand specialists are paid more than less-demanded specialists seems logical to me. Why not pay a physics teacher more than a PE teacher?
There are messy points that need thinking through though. Party because teachers don't come in tidy categories (you get PE qualified teachers teaching science because they know enough biology... and doing a decent job) and partly because of the perverse knock on incentives. If a school's budget is squeezed, should they replace someone physics-qualified with someone cheaper?
And PE teachers might add more value. It wasn't his physics teacher who discovered Wayne Rooney, or any other highly-paid (since that's what counts!) sports star.
"I suspect Reeves and Starmer are following the Thatcher/Cameron playbook which is to complete the unpopular policies at the start of the parliament and reap the rewards at the end of the parliament."
The problem will be if the 22% pay rise for doctors is just the start of above inflation wage increases for public sector workers, because we know how that ends up, don't we?
If I understaand correctly the pay rise is for England only. I cant see the celtic fringe accepting less nor Starmer refusing them.
Scotland offered and had accepted 17.5 percent over two years about a year ago;
BREAKING: A third child is confirmed to have died in yesterday’s knife attack in Southport. She was just 9 years old.
Heartbreaking. So so sad.
It makes me think if my 5 year old niece who could easily have been at this kind of daycare/club in the school holidays. I don't pay as much attention to the news as I used to but this one has really bummed me out. If anyone did anything to hurt my daughter I'd be demanding blood, if the judge doesn't waive anonymity in this case it will show once and for all that the UK justice system is not fit for purpose and geared towards criminals rather than victims.
I've seen rumours of the culprit circulate rapidly on social media/WhatsApp today. No media outlet daring to fill in the blanks.
Biggest giveaway is the Mayor of Liverpool "warning people not to speculate on the identity of the culprit", which in and of itself gives a bit of the game away.
No game, isn't it illegal to report the identity of an under-18 suspect unless or until the Judge waives anonymity?
Given the suspect is 17, and the crime was a heinous murder, anonymity absolutely should be waived - but only after conviction.
Are Labour really going to bring in the school fees VAT in January mid way through a school year?
That feels bizarre to me.
They’re attempting to make it retrospective to this September, but can’t get the legislation through in time.
Which I suspect will lead to a well-funded legal challenge.
Any evidence to back the September claim up?
Because if they were doing that they would have had to do it yesterday and instead all they said January.. (Remember this sort of trick is something I'm very aware of - so the wording yesterday was interesting and carefully created a distinct line)...
Reality is that by implementing it in January and announcing yesterday after the school year and finished it's designed to minimise the number of people able to move schools before September which is probably a relief to both State and Private schools...
Although it does rather mess up people who are already struggling to pay school fees...
So we’ll get a winter of freezing pensioner headlines followed by a January of taking the little darlings out of school/could state schools be overwhelmed headlines. Plus whatever comes down the line in the budget in October.
I don’t think we’ll be seeing much by way of a Labour honeymoon. That doesn’t mean that the Tories are going to suddenly look amazing (they’re not). But it will be interesting to see what the polls are coming out with early next year.
Not optimal… but then I guess they’re getting these hits out of the way early.
I LOL at Labour for the private school fees move.
I think Starmer reckons it'll be another foxhunting ban moment. But foxhunting was directly supported by very few people, and this move will affect many, many more people directly. It'll cheer those who hate people who are richer than them; but dismay many more.
Personally I’m a VAT supremacist, so this is grist to the mill. VAT on everything!
VAT on everything is a fair argument. But this is VAT on something very specific and targeted, mostly for ideological reasons rather than attempting to raise revenue.
It’s red meat to an activist base who think every private school is just like “Boris Johnson’s Eton”.
And it may well work out that Boris Johnson Eton comes out ahead on the changes, and it small / special needs schools that are the ones most effected.
If you want an extra £1bn from rich people there are much easier ways to get it.
Starmer doesn’t give a fuck how much money it raises. It was a high protein plant based meat substitute policy for his base that doesn’t repel centrist dickheads and can't be proved to cost a shitload of cash. He needed his base as hard as a fucking brick to work the GE for him.
It was and is smart politics. All of this wanking off about how much it will raise or cost totally misses the point of it. The lachrymose grief of the bottom half of the bourgeoisie is a splendid by-product, not the prime intent.
And the children with disrupted education, the good teachers now unemployed and the closed businesses?
All for a spiteful and envious policy that will damage the country overall.
And we've got five years of the crap that 20% of the electorate foisted on us.
if the teachers are any good there are a lot of vacancies in state schools...
"I suspect Reeves and Starmer are following the Thatcher/Cameron playbook which is to complete the unpopular policies at the start of the parliament and reap the rewards at the end of the parliament."
The problem will be if the 22% pay rise for doctors is just the start of above inflation wage increases for public sector workers, because we know how that ends up, don't we?
If I understaand correctly the pay rise is for England only. I cant see the celtic fringe accepting less nor Starmer refusing them.
Thanks to Barnett they’ll be able to afford a spot more…
LOL where do you think the actual cash comes from ?
Still maybe they deserve the cash boost as Milibnd is shutting down big chunks of their economy.
#BreakingNews Islamist preacher Anjem Choudary has been jailed at Woolwich Crown Court for life with a minimum term of 28 years for directing the terrorist organisation Al-Muhajiroun and encouraging support for it through online meetings
"I suspect Reeves and Starmer are following the Thatcher/Cameron playbook which is to complete the unpopular policies at the start of the parliament and reap the rewards at the end of the parliament."
The problem will be if the 22% pay rise for doctors is just the start of above inflation wage increases for public sector workers, because we know how that ends up, don't we?
Time to buy shares in breweries and sandwich shops?
"I suspect Reeves and Starmer are following the Thatcher/Cameron playbook which is to complete the unpopular policies at the start of the parliament and reap the rewards at the end of the parliament."
The problem will be if the 22% pay rise for doctors is just the start of above inflation wage increases for public sector workers, because we know how that ends up, don't we?
If I understaand correctly the pay rise is for England only. I cant see the celtic fringe accepting less nor Starmer refusing them.
Scotland offered and had accepted 17.5 percent over two years about a year ago;
BREAKING: A third child is confirmed to have died in yesterday’s knife attack in Southport. She was just 9 years old.
Heartbreaking. So so sad.
It makes me think if my 5 year old niece who could easily have been at this kind of daycare/club in the school holidays. I don't pay as much attention to the news as I used to but this one has really bummed me out. If anyone did anything to hurt my daughter I'd be demanding blood, if the judge doesn't waive anonymity in this case it will show once and for all that the UK justice system is not fit for purpose and geared towards criminals rather than victims.
I've seen rumours of the culprit circulate rapidly on social media/WhatsApp today. No media outlet daring to fill in the blanks.
Biggest giveaway is the Mayor of Liverpool "warning people not to speculate on the identity of the culprit", which in and of itself gives a bit of the game away.
Any idea as to motive? They've ruled out terrorism. He's 17 so not the parent of any of the children. And he had to get a cab to what is by all accounts an out of the way location, which rules out a random attack by a mentally ill stranger. Could it have been he was groomed by someone who did have a motive?
Are Labour really going to bring in the school fees VAT in January mid way through a school year?
That feels bizarre to me.
They’re attempting to make it retrospective to this September, but can’t get the legislation through in time.
Which I suspect will lead to a well-funded legal challenge.
Any evidence to back the September claim up?
Because if they were doing that they would have had to do it yesterday and instead all they said January.. (Remember this sort of trick is something I'm very aware of - so the wording yesterday was interesting and carefully created a distinct line)...
Reality is that by implementing it in January and announcing yesterday after the school year and finished it's designed to minimise the number of people able to move schools before September which is probably a relief to both State and Private schools...
Although it does rather mess up people who are already struggling to pay school fees...
So we’ll get a winter of freezing pensioner headlines followed by a January of taking the little darlings out of school/could state schools be overwhelmed headlines. Plus whatever comes down the line in the budget in October.
I don’t think we’ll be seeing much by way of a Labour honeymoon. That doesn’t mean that the Tories are going to suddenly look amazing (they’re not). But it will be interesting to see what the polls are coming out with early next year.
Not optimal… but then I guess they’re getting these hits out of the way early.
I LOL at Labour for the private school fees move.
I think Starmer reckons it'll be another foxhunting ban moment. But foxhunting was directly supported by very few people, and this move will affect many, many more people directly. It'll cheer those who hate people who are richer than them; but dismay many more.
Personally I’m a VAT supremacist, so this is grist to the mill. VAT on everything!
VAT on everything is a fair argument. But this is VAT on something very specific and targeted, mostly for ideological reasons rather than attempting to raise revenue.
It’s red meat to an activist base who think every private school is just like “Boris Johnson’s Eton”.
And it may well work out that Boris Johnson Eton comes out ahead on the changes, and it small / special needs schools that are the ones most effected.
If you want an extra £1bn from rich people there are much easier ways to get it.
Starmer doesn’t give a fuck how much money it raises. It was a high protein plant based meat substitute policy for his base that doesn’t repel centrist dickheads and can't be proved to cost a shitload of cash. He needed his base as hard as a fucking brick to work the GE for him.
It was and is smart politics. All of this wanking off about how much it will raise or cost totally misses the point of it. The lachrymose grief of the bottom half of the bourgeoisie is a splendid by-product, not the prime intent.
We all know that, we all know its red meat to the idealogues...but Starmer tells us he is different, he only makes chooses that are good for the country, country before party etc etc etc.
BREAKING: A third child is confirmed to have died in yesterday’s knife attack in Southport. She was just 9 years old.
Heartbreaking. So so sad.
It makes me think if my 5 year old niece who could easily have been at this kind of daycare/club in the school holidays. I don't pay as much attention to the news as I used to but this one has really bummed me out. If anyone did anything to hurt my daughter I'd be demanding blood, if the judge doesn't waive anonymity in this case it will show once and for all that the UK justice system is not fit for purpose and geared towards criminals rather than victims.
I've seen rumours of the culprit circulate rapidly on social media/WhatsApp today. No media outlet daring to fill in the blanks.
Biggest giveaway is the Mayor of Liverpool "warning people not to speculate on the identity of the culprit", which in and of itself gives a bit of the game away.
Any idea as to motive? They've ruled out terrorism. He's 17 so not the parent of any of the children. And he had to get a cab to what is by all accounts an out of the way location, which rules out a random attack by a mentally ill stranger. Could it have been he was groomed by someone who did have a motive?
Locals also said that the dance studio is located such that you really have to know where it is. It isn't front and centre on the street such that it is the first place you find if you were randomly wandering down there.
Labour have an opportunity here at the start of Parliament and with a massive landslide majority.
Merge National Insurance and Income Tax and create a single Income Tax rate that is paid by all adults of all ages on the same income equitably.
No increase at all in Income Tax for those who are working and on PAYE.
Doubt they will do this. Will burn lots of political capital, will inevitably increase taxes for some groups, and althoygh logical, isn't a top priority.
I think they need to find a way of raising more money that isn't too unpopular. Reducing the very generous pension tax reliefs for higher earners is the obvious move imo.
Except that will result in a lot of people doing less work - little point doing a full 5 day week if tax makes it more sensible to work a 4 or even 3 day week...
The people who are impacted by those sort of changes aren't earning day to day living expenses they have savings and options...
Doubt it would be a major factor honestly. Anyone earning over £50k is a higher rate taxpayer.
Most of those are not so wealthy that they could easily afford a 20 or 40% drop in income.
Doing so because they only get 20% pension relief rather than 40% would be a very strange financial decision to make.
And yet that is what @MisterBedfordshire said earlier and is the experience of many others.
I carefully kept my income below £50,000 to ensure I kept child benefit for many years and last year played similar games to keep my income below £100,000...
Remove full tax relief on my large pension contribution and a 4 day week sounds very nice...
I may need to look at these games, and pulling my kids out of private school, when we get to the Autumn and we know the lie of the land in the budget. Already tough as it is. It will get harder.
Of course, that will mean much less tax for the exchequer, and a bigger burden on the State, but hey ho, that's what you get when you try and squeeze people dry.
There was an opportunity to reset the tax narrative for Labour and remove the cliff edges but they've failed to do so. Another 5 years at least with people going part time or using tax avoidance at £100k.
I've shifted down to 3.5 days per week in my new job to stay below the cliff edge from an earlier agreed 4 day week. I now get Wednesday afternoon and Fridays with my kids which I think is a better use of my time than working so I can give the government 62% of the increment.
This wasn't the budget though - so there is little surprise that the tax narrative has been reset.
However it's clear from the discussions this afternoon that any changes impact people who are well paid is going to have interesting (and unexpected by the Government) consequences..
But £100k isn't even a huge salary today, not the same as what it was in 2009 when Brown introduced the 62% marginal rate, it's £152k in equivalent money today just by inflation. I'd happily do a 4.5 day week with Friday afternoons off if there was no marginal rate. It's immoral for the state to ask me for more than half of my income, I go to work to provide for my family not to fund a huge payrise for public sector fatcats.
£100k is still nearly 3 times the median wage (£34,963) and over twice the average wage (£42,210)..
Although the rest of your argument is absolutely valid - the lack of indexing has forced way more people into it...
And it used to be 4x the median salary in 2009. £100k is relatively a much smaller salary than it was when the cliff edge was introduced. It has a third less purchasing power and the number of people who earn at least £100k has more than doubled in that time. It's no longer a huge salary, a senior developer or data engineer can earn more than that before part time or AVCs are taken into account. In 2009 it was C suite or directors of big companies who would be in that salary range.
it's a silly anomaly if it can be sorted at neutral cost. What would your preferred method for getting rid of the cliff edge - without costing the Exchequer (otherwise it won't happen) ?
Bring the 45% rate down to £100k remove the cliff edge. Enough people will add an extra day or half day to their working week to more than make up for the 15% difference between the 60% effective rate and 45%. At my last company we did the sums and it was something mad like net gain of £2.4bn by removing the cliff edges at £100k.
Are Labour really going to bring in the school fees VAT in January mid way through a school year?
That feels bizarre to me.
They’re attempting to make it retrospective to this September, but can’t get the legislation through in time.
Which I suspect will lead to a well-funded legal challenge.
Any evidence to back the September claim up?
Because if they were doing that they would have had to do it yesterday and instead all they said January.. (Remember this sort of trick is something I'm very aware of - so the wording yesterday was interesting and carefully created a distinct line)...
Reality is that by implementing it in January and announcing yesterday after the school year and finished it's designed to minimise the number of people able to move schools before September which is probably a relief to both State and Private schools...
Although it does rather mess up people who are already struggling to pay school fees...
So we’ll get a winter of freezing pensioner headlines followed by a January of taking the little darlings out of school/could state schools be overwhelmed headlines. Plus whatever comes down the line in the budget in October.
I don’t think we’ll be seeing much by way of a Labour honeymoon. That doesn’t mean that the Tories are going to suddenly look amazing (they’re not). But it will be interesting to see what the polls are coming out with early next year.
Not optimal… but then I guess they’re getting these hits out of the way early.
I LOL at Labour for the private school fees move.
I think Starmer reckons it'll be another foxhunting ban moment. But foxhunting was directly supported by very few people, and this move will affect many, many more people directly. It'll cheer those who hate people who are richer than them; but dismay many more.
Personally I’m a VAT supremacist, so this is grist to the mill. VAT on everything!
VAT on everything is a fair argument. But this is VAT on something very specific and targeted, mostly for ideological reasons rather than attempting to raise revenue.
It’s red meat to an activist base who think every private school is just like “Boris Johnson’s Eton”.
And it may well work out that Boris Johnson Eton comes out ahead on the changes, and it small / special needs schools that are the ones most effected.
If you want an extra £1bn from rich people there are much easier ways to get it.
Starmer doesn’t give a fuck how much money it raises. It was a high protein plant based meat substitute policy for his base that doesn’t repel centrist dickheads and can't be proved to cost a shitload of cash. He needed his base as hard as a fucking brick to work the GE for him.
It was and is smart politics. All of this wanking off about how much it will raise or cost totally misses the point of it. The lachrymose grief of the bottom half of the bourgeoisie is a splendid by-product, not the prime intent.
And the children with disrupted education, the good teachers now unemployed and the closed businesses?
All for a spiteful and envious policy that will damage the country overall.
And we've got five years of the crap that 20% of the electorate foisted on us.
This could be a re-run of the Wilson administration 1974-1979, just with a bigger majority.
BREAKING: A third child is confirmed to have died in yesterday’s knife attack in Southport. She was just 9 years old.
Unimaginably sad.
One thing I notice is that one obvious point about what happened has not been made much of. The suspect is a male. He attacked a Taylor Swift dance and yoga class which, as he very likely knew, was likely to be full of young girls and women. Those killed and wounded were all girls and women. One businessman who was passing by tried to help and was stabbed in the leg.
Earlier this month the Met Commissioner said that violence against women and girls was "endemic, systemic and a threat to society on the same scale as terrorism".
It seems so inadequate to pass on condolences to the families and friends. I only hope they are being supported and find - in time - some comfort.
Are Labour really going to bring in the school fees VAT in January mid way through a school year?
That feels bizarre to me.
They’re attempting to make it retrospective to this September, but can’t get the legislation through in time.
Which I suspect will lead to a well-funded legal challenge.
Any evidence to back the September claim up?
Because if they were doing that they would have had to do it yesterday and instead all they said January.. (Remember this sort of trick is something I'm very aware of - so the wording yesterday was interesting and carefully created a distinct line)...
Reality is that by implementing it in January and announcing yesterday after the school year and finished it's designed to minimise the number of people able to move schools before September which is probably a relief to both State and Private schools...
Although it does rather mess up people who are already struggling to pay school fees...
So we’ll get a winter of freezing pensioner headlines followed by a January of taking the little darlings out of school/could state schools be overwhelmed headlines. Plus whatever comes down the line in the budget in October.
I don’t think we’ll be seeing much by way of a Labour honeymoon. That doesn’t mean that the Tories are going to suddenly look amazing (they’re not). But it will be interesting to see what the polls are coming out with early next year.
Not optimal… but then I guess they’re getting these hits out of the way early.
I LOL at Labour for the private school fees move.
I think Starmer reckons it'll be another foxhunting ban moment. But foxhunting was directly supported by very few people, and this move will affect many, many more people directly. It'll cheer those who hate people who are richer than them; but dismay many more.
Personally I’m a VAT supremacist, so this is grist to the mill. VAT on everything!
VAT on everything is a fair argument. But this is VAT on something very specific and targeted, mostly for ideological reasons rather than attempting to raise revenue.
It’s red meat to an activist base who think every private school is just like “Boris Johnson’s Eton”.
And it may well work out that Boris Johnson Eton comes out ahead on the changes, and it small / special needs schools that are the ones most effected.
If you want an extra £1bn from rich people there are much easier ways to get it.
Starmer doesn’t give a fuck how much money it raises. It was a high protein plant based meat substitute policy for his base that doesn’t repel centrist dickheads and can't be proved to cost a shitload of cash. He needed his base as hard as a fucking brick to work the GE for him.
It was and is smart politics. All of this wanking off about how much it will raise or cost totally misses the point of it. The lachrymose grief of the bottom half of the bourgeoisie is a splendid by-product, not the prime intent.
And the children with disrupted education, the good teachers now unemployed and the closed businesses?
All for a spiteful and envious policy that will damage the country overall.
And we've got five years of the crap that 20% of the electorate foisted on us.
This could be a re-run of the Wilson administration 1974-1979, just with a bigger majority.
Not really, to have a re-run like that you need a slender majority forcing decisions in a particular direction...
BREAKING: A third child is confirmed to have died in yesterday’s knife attack in Southport. She was just 9 years old.
Heartbreaking. So so sad.
It makes me think if my 5 year old niece who could easily have been at this kind of daycare/club in the school holidays. I don't pay as much attention to the news as I used to but this one has really bummed me out. If anyone did anything to hurt my daughter I'd be demanding blood, if the judge doesn't waive anonymity in this case it will show once and for all that the UK justice system is not fit for purpose and geared towards criminals rather than victims.
I've seen rumours of the culprit circulate rapidly on social media/WhatsApp today. No media outlet daring to fill in the blanks.
Biggest giveaway is the Mayor of Liverpool "warning people not to speculate on the identity of the culprit", which in and of itself gives a bit of the game away.
I thought we had the basic facts about where he lived, where he was born, where his parents were born? So much so that he can be fairly easily identified. Though now I see there's some doubt I'm not going to risk repeating them! As Bart points out, the law for the anonymity of U18 suspects is there for a reason.
BREAKING: A third child is confirmed to have died in yesterday’s knife attack in Southport. She was just 9 years old.
Heartbreaking. So so sad.
It makes me think if my 5 year old niece who could easily have been at this kind of daycare/club in the school holidays. I don't pay as much attention to the news as I used to but this one has really bummed me out. If anyone did anything to hurt my daughter I'd be demanding blood, if the judge doesn't waive anonymity in this case it will show once and for all that the UK justice system is not fit for purpose and geared towards criminals rather than victims.
I've seen rumours of the culprit circulate rapidly on social media/WhatsApp today. No media outlet daring to fill in the blanks.
Biggest giveaway is the Mayor of Liverpool "warning people not to speculate on the identity of the culprit", which in and of itself gives a bit of the game away.
Any idea as to motive? They've ruled out terrorism. He's 17 so not the parent of any of the children. And he had to get a cab to what is by all accounts an out of the way location, which rules out a random attack by a mentally ill stranger. Could it have been he was groomed by someone who did have a motive?
Locals also said that the dance studio is located such that you really have to know where it is. It isn't front and centre on the street such that it is the first place you find if you were randomly wandering down there.
Well it seems clear that he spent some time trying to find it and more time travelling to get there.
We are clearly missing a fundamental part of the story and I suspect the police are as well - because things just don't add up...
Are Labour really going to bring in the school fees VAT in January mid way through a school year?
That feels bizarre to me.
They’re attempting to make it retrospective to this September, but can’t get the legislation through in time.
Which I suspect will lead to a well-funded legal challenge.
Any evidence to back the September claim up?
Because if they were doing that they would have had to do it yesterday and instead all they said January.. (Remember this sort of trick is something I'm very aware of - so the wording yesterday was interesting and carefully created a distinct line)...
Reality is that by implementing it in January and announcing yesterday after the school year and finished it's designed to minimise the number of people able to move schools before September which is probably a relief to both State and Private schools...
Although it does rather mess up people who are already struggling to pay school fees...
So we’ll get a winter of freezing pensioner headlines followed by a January of taking the little darlings out of school/could state schools be overwhelmed headlines. Plus whatever comes down the line in the budget in October.
I don’t think we’ll be seeing much by way of a Labour honeymoon. That doesn’t mean that the Tories are going to suddenly look amazing (they’re not). But it will be interesting to see what the polls are coming out with early next year.
Not optimal… but then I guess they’re getting these hits out of the way early.
I LOL at Labour for the private school fees move.
I think Starmer reckons it'll be another foxhunting ban moment. But foxhunting was directly supported by very few people, and this move will affect many, many more people directly. It'll cheer those who hate people who are richer than them; but dismay many more.
Personally I’m a VAT supremacist, so this is grist to the mill. VAT on everything!
VAT on everything is a fair argument. But this is VAT on something very specific and targeted, mostly for ideological reasons rather than attempting to raise revenue.
It’s red meat to an activist base who think every private school is just like “Boris Johnson’s Eton”.
And it may well work out that Boris Johnson Eton comes out ahead on the changes, and it small / special needs schools that are the ones most effected.
If you want an extra £1bn from rich people there are much easier ways to get it.
Starmer doesn’t give a fuck how much money it raises. It was a high protein plant based meat substitute policy for his base that doesn’t repel centrist dickheads and can't be proved to cost a shitload of cash. He needed his base as hard as a fucking brick to work the GE for him.
It was and is smart politics. All of this wanking off about how much it will raise or cost totally misses the point of it. The lachrymose grief of the bottom half of the bourgeoisie is a splendid by-product, not the prime intent.
We all know that, we all know its red meat to the idealogues...but Starmer tells us he is different, he only makes chooses that are good for the country, country before party etc etc etc.
That was only ever going to be taken so far. Once they were in power Labour were always going to rediscover all the joys of doing those nice Laboury things that make them feel good. The big question is to what degree they will push it. And whether they ensured they had enough of a mandate for it to avoid a backlash.
It won't - the ECHR says children can have a none state education, it doesn't say how much it should cost...
The issue may be that a policy which disproportionately affects a particular group eg an ethnic minority or religious group or other might fall foul of anti-indirect discrimination provisions. Not saying this would succeed. Seems quite a stretch to me. But that may be the argument.
Not her of couse, no no no. I mean she attacked the sector for cash raising not for idelogical reasons.
It's only a misfortune that the policy will end up costing money she doesnt have.
She's trying her best to make Sunak look competent.
Bloke who's spent the last 24 hours obsessively posting about Rachel Reeves pontificating about obsessions.
Thrre's so much to post about. I truly didnt think she could be this inept.
Looking forward to October
What is so inept
She cancelled a set of projects none of which seem to have actual money against them apart from Stonehenge (which is contentious). She cut tax allowances And she implemented pay increases that I suspect were the reason behind the sudden July election...
Labour have an opportunity here at the start of Parliament and with a massive landslide majority.
Merge National Insurance and Income Tax and create a single Income Tax rate that is paid by all adults of all ages on the same income equitably.
No increase at all in Income Tax for those who are working and on PAYE.
Doubt they will do this. Will burn lots of political capital, will inevitably increase taxes for some groups, and althoygh logical, isn't a top priority.
I think they need to find a way of raising more money that isn't too unpopular. Reducing the very generous pension tax reliefs for higher earners is the obvious move imo.
Except that will result in a lot of people doing less work - little point doing a full 5 day week if tax makes it more sensible to work a 4 or even 3 day week...
The people who are impacted by those sort of changes aren't earning day to day living expenses they have savings and options...
Doubt it would be a major factor honestly. Anyone earning over £50k is a higher rate taxpayer.
Most of those are not so wealthy that they could easily afford a 20 or 40% drop in income.
Doing so because they only get 20% pension relief rather than 40% would be a very strange financial decision to make.
And yet that is what @MisterBedfordshire said earlier and is the experience of many others.
I carefully kept my income below £50,000 to ensure I kept child benefit for many years and last year played similar games to keep my income below £100,000...
Remove full tax relief on my large pension contribution and a 4 day week sounds very nice...
I may need to look at these games, and pulling my kids out of private school, when we get to the Autumn and we know the lie of the land in the budget. Already tough as it is. It will get harder.
Of course, that will mean much less tax for the exchequer, and a bigger burden on the State, but hey ho, that's what you get when you try and squeeze people dry.
There was an opportunity to reset the tax narrative for Labour and remove the cliff edges but they've failed to do so. Another 5 years at least with people going part time or using tax avoidance at £100k.
I've shifted down to 3.5 days per week in my new job to stay below the cliff edge from an earlier agreed 4 day week. I now get Wednesday afternoon and Fridays with my kids which I think is a better use of my time than working so I can give the government 62% of the increment.
This wasn't the budget though - so there is little surprise that the tax narrative has been reset.
However it's clear from the discussions this afternoon that any changes impact people who are well paid is going to have interesting (and unexpected by the Government) consequences..
But £100k isn't even a huge salary today, not the same as what it was in 2009 when Brown introduced the 62% marginal rate, it's £152k in equivalent money today just by inflation. I'd happily do a 4.5 day week with Friday afternoons off if there was no marginal rate. It's immoral for the state to ask me for more than half of my income, I go to work to provide for my family not to fund a huge payrise for public sector fatcats.
£100k is still nearly 3 times the median wage (£34,963) and over twice the average wage (£42,210)..
Although the rest of your argument is absolutely valid - the lack of indexing has forced way more people into it...
And it used to be 4x the median salary in 2009. £100k is relatively a much smaller salary than it was when the cliff edge was introduced. It has a third less purchasing power and the number of people who earn at least £100k has more than doubled in that time. It's no longer a huge salary, a senior developer or data engineer can earn more than that before part time or AVCs are taken into account. In 2009 it was C suite or directors of big companies who would be in that salary range.
it's a silly anomaly if it can be sorted at neutral cost. What would your preferred method for getting rid of the cliff edge - without costing the Exchequer (otherwise it won't happen) ?
Bring the 45% rate down to £100k remove the cliff edge. Enough people will add an extra day or half day to their working week to more than make up for the 15% difference between the 60% effective rate and 45%. At my last company we did the sums and it was something mad like net gain of £2.4bn by removing the cliff edges at £100k.
Indeed. One of the thing which frustrates me about Labour government - the last lot were just as bad - is an apparent blindness to the fact that people (and indeed businesses) respond to things which are incentives/disincentives to do things by doing more or less of those things.
Are Labour really going to bring in the school fees VAT in January mid way through a school year?
That feels bizarre to me.
They’re attempting to make it retrospective to this September, but can’t get the legislation through in time.
Which I suspect will lead to a well-funded legal challenge.
Any evidence to back the September claim up?
Because if they were doing that they would have had to do it yesterday and instead all they said January.. (Remember this sort of trick is something I'm very aware of - so the wording yesterday was interesting and carefully created a distinct line)...
Reality is that by implementing it in January and announcing yesterday after the school year and finished it's designed to minimise the number of people able to move schools before September which is probably a relief to both State and Private schools...
Although it does rather mess up people who are already struggling to pay school fees...
It was in Reeves’s statement yesterday IIRC. Let me try and find it.
Edit: it’s actually slightly more complex. The VAT comes in in January, but any invoices sent from now *for education delivered after January 1*, will be expected to include the VAT, even though the legislation is not yet passed. So the schools are expected to include VAT in next year’s invoices if sent out over the summer. Which is retrospective taxation.
It has also been announced that fees invoiced or paid on or after 29 July 2024 that relate to the school terms after 1 January 2025 will be subject to the standard rate of VAT at the beginning of that term.
School fees paid before 29 July 2024 will follow the VAT treatment in force at the time of the normal tax point for these supplies, where the fee rate for the relevant term has been set and was known at the time of payment.
Draft legislation (VAT on Private School Fees & Removing the Charitable Rates Relief for Private Schools), an explanatory note and an accompanying technical note on these changes is available.
Where can I fund the legal challenge?
What with? I thought the your kids' school fees left you stoney broke?
Are Labour really going to bring in the school fees VAT in January mid way through a school year?
That feels bizarre to me.
They’re attempting to make it retrospective to this September, but can’t get the legislation through in time.
Which I suspect will lead to a well-funded legal challenge.
Any evidence to back the September claim up?
Because if they were doing that they would have had to do it yesterday and instead all they said January.. (Remember this sort of trick is something I'm very aware of - so the wording yesterday was interesting and carefully created a distinct line)...
Reality is that by implementing it in January and announcing yesterday after the school year and finished it's designed to minimise the number of people able to move schools before September which is probably a relief to both State and Private schools...
Although it does rather mess up people who are already struggling to pay school fees...
So we’ll get a winter of freezing pensioner headlines followed by a January of taking the little darlings out of school/could state schools be overwhelmed headlines. Plus whatever comes down the line in the budget in October.
I don’t think we’ll be seeing much by way of a Labour honeymoon. That doesn’t mean that the Tories are going to suddenly look amazing (they’re not). But it will be interesting to see what the polls are coming out with early next year.
Not optimal… but then I guess they’re getting these hits out of the way early.
I LOL at Labour for the private school fees move.
I think Starmer reckons it'll be another foxhunting ban moment. But foxhunting was directly supported by very few people, and this move will affect many, many more people directly. It'll cheer those who hate people who are richer than them; but dismay many more.
Personally I’m a VAT supremacist, so this is grist to the mill. VAT on everything!
VAT on everything is a fair argument. But this is VAT on something very specific and targeted, mostly for ideological reasons rather than attempting to raise revenue.
It’s red meat to an activist base who think every private school is just like “Boris Johnson’s Eton”.
And it may well work out that Boris Johnson Eton comes out ahead on the changes, and it small / special needs schools that are the ones most effected.
If you want an extra £1bn from rich people there are much easier ways to get it.
Starmer doesn’t give a fuck how much money it raises. It was a high protein plant based meat substitute policy for his base that doesn’t repel centrist dickheads and can't be proved to cost a shitload of cash. He needed his base as hard as a fucking brick to work the GE for him.
It was and is smart politics. All of this wanking off about how much it will raise or cost totally misses the point of it. The lachrymose grief of the bottom half of the bourgeoisie is a splendid by-product, not the prime intent.
And the children with disrupted education, the good teachers now unemployed and the closed businesses?
All for a spiteful and envious policy that will damage the country overall.
And we've got five years of the crap that 20% of the electorate foisted on us.
This could be a re-run of the Wilson administration 1974-1979, just with a bigger majority.
Not really, to have a re-run like that you need a slender majority forcing decisions in a particular direction...
Well with talk like this, they had better deliver. If they don't, it's not entirely impossible to see them losing their majority in five years.
Rayner accuses Badenoch of not understanding why Tories lost election, with housing key factor Rayner starts by wishing Badenoch luck with her leadership bid. She says it was Badenoch’s ambition to be leader of the opposition, not hers.
She says she thinks there are a few things Badenoch “has not understood”.
One is that the Tories lost the election. Another is that they left services in a mess, including failing to meet their housing targets.
She says the Conservatives '“are talking to themselves, not the country”...
OTOH, if they do, then it's going to be a very long stint in opposition for Kemi.
That's just incredible. OK, it's early afternoon on a sunny day in mid-July. But if you'd shown that stat to someone 30 years ago it would have seemed the stuff of fantasy. Even 10 years ago it would have been wildly improbable.
The even better thing is that we are nowhere close to the peak of what we could easily be generating with solar. The number of houses with solar panels is, what, about 10%? (Wildly unscientific survey based on a look out of the window). I salivate to think what this figure will be in a decade's time.
Not her of couse, no no no. I mean she attacked the sector for cash raising not for idelogical reasons.
It's only a misfortune that the policy will end up costing money she doesnt have.
She's trying her best to make Sunak look competent.
Bloke who's spent the last 24 hours obsessively posting about Rachel Reeves pontificating about obsessions.
Thrre's so much to post about. I truly didnt think she could be this inept.
Looking forward to October
What is so inept
She cancelled a set of projects none of which seem to have actual money against them apart from Stonehenge (which is contentious). She cut tax allowances And she implemented pay increases that I suspect were the reason behind the sudden July election...
She said mean things about the outgoing government out loud.
Worse than that, she said out loud things things that we all kind of know are true; Hunt and Sunak did do the fiscal equivalent of sewing prawns into the curtain hems before leaving office. (I'm disappointed in Hunt, he blew up his grown-up reputation... for what?)
Worse still, she didn't fall into the trap of saying those things in the election campaign.
Still. Five/Nine/Thirteen years doesn't take long if you say it quickly.
Are Labour really going to bring in the school fees VAT in January mid way through a school year?
That feels bizarre to me.
They’re attempting to make it retrospective to this September, but can’t get the legislation through in time.
Which I suspect will lead to a well-funded legal challenge.
Any evidence to back the September claim up?
Because if they were doing that they would have had to do it yesterday and instead all they said January.. (Remember this sort of trick is something I'm very aware of - so the wording yesterday was interesting and carefully created a distinct line)...
Reality is that by implementing it in January and announcing yesterday after the school year and finished it's designed to minimise the number of people able to move schools before September which is probably a relief to both State and Private schools...
Although it does rather mess up people who are already struggling to pay school fees...
So we’ll get a winter of freezing pensioner headlines followed by a January of taking the little darlings out of school/could state schools be overwhelmed headlines. Plus whatever comes down the line in the budget in October.
I don’t think we’ll be seeing much by way of a Labour honeymoon. That doesn’t mean that the Tories are going to suddenly look amazing (they’re not). But it will be interesting to see what the polls are coming out with early next year.
Not optimal… but then I guess they’re getting these hits out of the way early.
I LOL at Labour for the private school fees move.
I think Starmer reckons it'll be another foxhunting ban moment. But foxhunting was directly supported by very few people, and this move will affect many, many more people directly. It'll cheer those who hate people who are richer than them; but dismay many more.
Personally I’m a VAT supremacist, so this is grist to the mill. VAT on everything!
VAT on everything is a fair argument. But this is VAT on something very specific and targeted, mostly for ideological reasons rather than attempting to raise revenue.
It’s red meat to an activist base who think every private school is just like “Boris Johnson’s Eton”.
And it may well work out that Boris Johnson Eton comes out ahead on the changes, and it small / special needs schools that are the ones most effected.
If you want an extra £1bn from rich people there are much easier ways to get it.
Starmer doesn’t give a fuck how much money it raises. It was a high protein plant based meat substitute policy for his base that doesn’t repel centrist dickheads and can't be proved to cost a shitload of cash. He needed his base as hard as a fucking brick to work the GE for him.
It was and is smart politics. All of this wanking off about how much it will raise or cost totally misses the point of it. The lachrymose grief of the bottom half of the bourgeoisie is a splendid by-product, not the prime intent.
And the children with disrupted education, the good teachers now unemployed and the closed businesses?
All for a spiteful and envious policy that will damage the country overall.
And we've got five years of the crap that 20% of the electorate foisted on us.
This could be a re-run of the Wilson administration 1974-1979, just with a bigger majority.
Not really, to have a re-run like that you need a slender majority forcing decisions in a particular direction...
Well with talk like this, they had better deliver. If they don't, it's not entirely impossible to see them losing their majority in five years.
Rayner accuses Badenoch of not understanding why Tories lost election, with housing key factor Rayner starts by wishing Badenoch luck with her leadership bid. She says it was Badenoch’s ambition to be leader of the opposition, not hers.
She says she thinks there are a few things Badenoch “has not understood”.
One is that the Tories lost the election. Another is that they left services in a mess, including failing to meet their housing targets.
She says the Conservatives '“are talking to themselves, not the country”...
OTOH, if they do, then it's going to be a very long stint in opposition for Kemi.
If Labour manage to deliver a Britain in which housing is as affordable as it was for our parents' generation they will deserve a long spell in power. Can't disagree - housing is possibly the biggest issue there is right now.
Labour have an opportunity here at the start of Parliament and with a massive landslide majority.
Merge National Insurance and Income Tax and create a single Income Tax rate that is paid by all adults of all ages on the same income equitably.
No increase at all in Income Tax for those who are working and on PAYE.
Doubt they will do this. Will burn lots of political capital, will inevitably increase taxes for some groups, and althoygh logical, isn't a top priority.
I think they need to find a way of raising more money that isn't too unpopular. Reducing the very generous pension tax reliefs for higher earners is the obvious move imo.
Except that will result in a lot of people doing less work - little point doing a full 5 day week if tax makes it more sensible to work a 4 or even 3 day week...
The people who are impacted by those sort of changes aren't earning day to day living expenses they have savings and options...
Doubt it would be a major factor honestly. Anyone earning over £50k is a higher rate taxpayer.
Most of those are not so wealthy that they could easily afford a 20 or 40% drop in income.
Doing so because they only get 20% pension relief rather than 40% would be a very strange financial decision to make.
And yet that is what @MisterBedfordshire said earlier and is the experience of many others.
I carefully kept my income below £50,000 to ensure I kept child benefit for many years and last year played similar games to keep my income below £100,000...
Remove full tax relief on my large pension contribution and a 4 day week sounds very nice...
I may need to look at these games, and pulling my kids out of private school, when we get to the Autumn and we know the lie of the land in the budget. Already tough as it is. It will get harder.
Of course, that will mean much less tax for the exchequer, and a bigger burden on the State, but hey ho, that's what you get when you try and squeeze people dry.
There was an opportunity to reset the tax narrative for Labour and remove the cliff edges but they've failed to do so. Another 5 years at least with people going part time or using tax avoidance at £100k.
I've shifted down to 3.5 days per week in my new job to stay below the cliff edge from an earlier agreed 4 day week. I now get Wednesday afternoon and Fridays with my kids which I think is a better use of my time than working so I can give the government 62% of the increment.
This wasn't the budget though - so there is little surprise that the tax narrative has been reset.
However it's clear from the discussions this afternoon that any changes impact people who are well paid is going to have interesting (and unexpected by the Government) consequences..
But £100k isn't even a huge salary today, not the same as what it was in 2009 when Brown introduced the 62% marginal rate, it's £152k in equivalent money today just by inflation. I'd happily do a 4.5 day week with Friday afternoons off if there was no marginal rate. It's immoral for the state to ask me for more than half of my income, I go to work to provide for my family not to fund a huge payrise for public sector fatcats.
£100k is still nearly 3 times the median wage (£34,963) and over twice the average wage (£42,210)..
Although the rest of your argument is absolutely valid - the lack of indexing has forced way more people into it...
And it used to be 4x the median salary in 2009. £100k is relatively a much smaller salary than it was when the cliff edge was introduced. It has a third less purchasing power and the number of people who earn at least £100k has more than doubled in that time. It's no longer a huge salary, a senior developer or data engineer can earn more than that before part time or AVCs are taken into account. In 2009 it was C suite or directors of big companies who would be in that salary range.
it's a silly anomaly if it can be sorted at neutral cost. What would your preferred method for getting rid of the cliff edge - without costing the Exchequer (otherwise it won't happen) ?
Bring the 45% rate down to £100k remove the cliff edge. Enough people will add an extra day or half day to their working week to more than make up for the 15% difference between the 60% effective rate and 45%. At my last company we did the sums and it was something mad like net gain of £2.4bn by removing the cliff edges at £100k.
Indeed. One of the thing which frustrates me about Labour government - the last lot were just as bad - is an apparent blindness to the fact that people (and indeed businesses) respond to things which are incentives/disincentives to do things by doing more or less of those things.
Oh dear, another day with the PB-rightists foaming at the mouth that a Labour government has the audacity to, er... actually govern.
Did you think they would just follow the Tory playbook?
You lot had it easy. The Conservatives never actually did anything right wing. You had to content yourselves with complaining about the ineffectual right wing noises they were making.
Comments
Governments have tended to avoid making explicit tax rises by letting inflation push more people into higher bands. It's a sleight of hand that voters shouldn't fall for, but seemingly do. I don't think that's ideal, but I don't know how to solve that problem.
That said, £100k is still a lot of money. It's the top 4% of the population. I am unmoved by their tears.
I know this as there has been a flag on our account for 18+ years that when we move the house shifts up 2 bands...
https://x.com/keiranpedley/status/1816040577453973865
It’s red meat to an activist base who think every private school is just like “Boris Johnson’s Eton”.
If you want an extra £1bn from rich people there are much easier ways to get it.
The demographic split is interesting and worth much more time and analysis.
Among those aged 60-69, the Conservatives got 33% (-24 on 2019), Labour 28% (+6), Reform 18% (+18)
Among those aged 70+, the Conservatives got 46% (-21), Labour 20% (+6), Reform 15% (+15)
Labour admits private school VAT raid will price parents out
Treasury insists there would be a minimal impact on state classrooms with enough space for extra pupils
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/07/29/labour-vat-raid-private-schools-state-classes-enough-room/
There is a process to do this.
Of course, the council wouldn't tell us which neighbour.
The stats I've seen show that more people are doing PE Teacher Training than desired, but very few people are doing Physics or Maths etc
Which hardly seems surprising to me given that teachers are paid the same regardless of subject specialism and a qualified physicist can typically do better privately (or academically elsewhere) than teaching teenagers.
Adjusting teacher remuneration so in-demand specialists are paid more than less-demanded specialists seems logical to me. Why not pay a physics teacher more than a PE teacher?
What would your preferred method for getting rid of the cliff edge - without costing the Exchequer (otherwise it won't happen) ?
I'm just calling it for what it is - stupid.
“You’ve been abandoned by the Tories and you’ve been shafted by Labour.” It’s Farage’s dream.
Many homes in England and Wales are renovated and extended. In this blog, we explain what happens to your Council Tax band when you make changes to your home. We also explain what an improvement indicator means and what you need to consider when purchasing a new home.
The VOA follows strict laws around valuation. This means, legally, we cannot change the Council Tax band of a property that has been improved until it is sold, or there is a general revaluation of all domestic properties. This helps to make sure homeowners are not penalised for improving or maintaining their home.
Instead, we give the property an improvement indicator.
So I love to know what your council was thinking because I think you are due a large refund and an apology....
#BreakingNews Islamist preacher Anjem Choudary has been jailed at Woolwich Crown Court for life with a minimum term of 28 years for directing the terrorist organisation Al-Muhajiroun and encouraging support for it through online meetings
https://x.com/PA/status/1818253172558717068
If you need to raise revenues better to make the 45p into 46p and keep it consistent across the board, than pretend its 45p but actually make it 62p (or whatever) for those at the cliff edge and then dropping it back down to 45p for those past the cliff edge.
In my case one reason we kept very quiet is that my house is a lower band to the house we are attached to. It's on a different road and they did very broad brush valuations...
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/jul/30/rachel-reeves-jeremy-hunt-public-finances-covered-up
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/school-teachers-review-body-34th-report-2024
There are messy points that need thinking through though. Party because teachers don't come in tidy categories (you get PE qualified teachers teaching science because they know enough biology... and doing a decent job) and partly because of the perverse knock on incentives. If a school's budget is squeezed, should they replace someone physics-qualified with someone cheaper?
She's carried that chip for life, I think.
Laffer curve effect will kick in as people stop engaging in avoidance/work extra hours and that will increase revenues which will then enable either extra spending or tax cuts depending upon your political preference.
He also does not have the huge net negatives Braverman had and Patel has, so if the Labour government becomes unpopular as LOTO he would inevitably benefit. I would prefer Tugendhat though
The problem will be if the 22% pay rise for doctors is just the start of above inflation wage increases for public sector workers, because we know how that ends up, don't we?
So putting it into pension AVCs makes little dufference to your take home pay and builds abig tax free pot
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/07/30/rachel-reeves-criticises-obsession-private-schools/
Not her of couse, no no no. I mean she attacked the sector for cash raising not for idelogical reasons.
It's only a misfortune that the policy will end up costing money she doesnt have.
She's trying her best to make Sunak look competent.
https://x.com/montie/status/1818199618439561470
https://taxpolicy.org.uk/2024/05/09/private_school_vat_risk/
It was and is smart politics. All of this wanking off about how much it will raise or cost totally misses the point of it. The lachrymose grief of the bottom half of the bourgeoisie is a splendid by-product, not the prime intent.
There's an amazing idea for a sitcom in there somewhere.
She’s making plenty of Brexiteers/Tories appreciate the ECHR.
I will probably die laughing if the ECHR is responsible to stopping this policy (I don’t expect it will.)
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/tax/labour-private-school-tax-raid-likely-illegal/
All for a spiteful and envious policy that will damage the country overall.
And we've got five years of the crap that 20% of the electorate foisted on us.
Biggest giveaway is the Mayor of Liverpool "warning people not to speculate on the identity of the culprit", which in and of itself gives a bit of the game away.
Arrest warrant issued for Katie Price as she fails to attend court hearing
Warrant issued after ex-model failed to attend bankruptcy hearing at insolvency and companies court
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/jul/30/arrest-warrant-issued-for-katie-price-as-she-fails-to-attend-court-hearing
Starmer seeing his entire legislative programme blocked by his lawyer mates would be extremely funny.
Can I see a lawter repealing laws ? Not at all likely.
So the amount on the P60 goes up significantly, so this money is now included in means tests for Universal Credit, Student Loan Repayments, Student Loan parental income, council tax relief, child benefit withdrawal etc.
Plus the employer contributions become taxable benefits in kind so appear as income in all the above too.
There is a reason the previous government didn't do it.
https://www.bma.org.uk/news-and-opinion/junior-doctors-in-scotland-accept-pay-offer
Given the suspect is 17, and the crime was a heinous murder, anonymity absolutely should be waived - but only after conviction.
As it was with the murder in Warrington of Brianna Ghey. The murderers had anonymity until they were convicted, at that point the Judge waived it: https://news.sky.com/story/scarlett-jenkinson-and-eddie-ratcliffe-named-as-brianna-gheys-teenage-killers-but-victims-father-disagrees-with-judges-decision-13061367
Still maybe they deserve the cash boost as Milibnd is shutting down big chunks of their economy.
Im sure the welsh and they Irish will insist on a pay cut.
Looking forward to October
One thing I notice is that one obvious point about what happened has not been made much of. The suspect is a male. He attacked a Taylor Swift dance and yoga class which, as he very likely knew, was likely to be full of young girls and women. Those killed and wounded were all girls and women. One businessman who was passing by tried to help and was stabbed in the leg.
Earlier this month the Met Commissioner said that violence against women and girls was "endemic, systemic and a threat to society on the same scale as terrorism".
It seems so inadequate to pass on condolences to the families and friends. I only hope they are being supported and find - in time - some comfort.
We are clearly missing a fundamental part of the story and I suspect the police are as well - because things just don't add up...
Or it could be a load of bluff and bluster.
https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk
She cancelled a set of projects none of which seem to have actual money against them apart from Stonehenge (which is contentious).
She cut tax allowances
And she implemented pay increases that I suspect were the reason behind the sudden July election...
https://azure.status.microsoft/en-gb/status
One of the thing which frustrates me about Labour government - the last lot were just as bad - is an apparent blindness to the fact that people (and indeed businesses) respond to things which are incentives/disincentives to do things by doing more or less of those things.
If they don't, it's not entirely impossible to see them losing their majority in five years.
Rayner accuses Badenoch of not understanding why Tories lost election, with housing key factor
Rayner starts by wishing Badenoch luck with her leadership bid. She says it was Badenoch’s ambition to be leader of the opposition, not hers.
She says she thinks there are a few things Badenoch “has not understood”.
One is that the Tories lost the election. Another is that they left services in a mess, including failing to meet their housing targets.
She says the Conservatives '“are talking to themselves, not the country”...
OTOH, if they do, then it's going to be a very long stint in opposition for Kemi.
OK, it's early afternoon on a sunny day in mid-July.
But if you'd shown that stat to someone 30 years ago it would have seemed the stuff of fantasy. Even 10 years ago it would have been wildly improbable.
The even better thing is that we are nowhere close to the peak of what we could easily be generating with solar. The number of houses with solar panels is, what, about 10%? (Wildly unscientific survey based on a look out of the window). I salivate to think what this figure will be in a decade's time.
Worse than that, she said out loud things things that we all kind of know are true; Hunt and Sunak did do the fiscal equivalent of sewing prawns into the curtain hems before leaving office. (I'm disappointed in Hunt, he blew up his grown-up reputation... for what?)
Worse still, she didn't fall into the trap of saying those things in the election campaign.
Still. Five/Nine/Thirteen years doesn't take long if you say it quickly.
Rayner says new housing target system will raise number of homes planned from 300,000 per year to 370,000..
Did you think they would just follow the Tory playbook?
Get lobbying.
If you want 200k achieved, aim for 300k
If you want 300k achieved, aim for 450k
Etc