Focus groups: "We aren't sure about Starmer. What does he stand for? Where's his vision? We've not heard many ideas. Bit of an empty suit to be honest."
Social care opportunity.
Labour: There needs to be a plan and we will tell you what it is at the next election in our manifesto.
Have they said if they would repeal these changes ?
I was having real trouble working out how the figures added up yesterday. The yield seemed to be far more than 1.25p would generate. The answer is that there is a further 1.25p increase in the Employers NI as well. As someone who is self employed I only pay this levy once so my tax bill just went up by about £1200. I will also have to pay a small amount of Employer NI for my wife.
But I think that this is worth it (assuming Scotland gives equivalent cover). I do not see how else the awful sequelae of Covid can be dealt with in the short term and the costs of anything like civilised social care can be provided in the longer term. These are both going to be expensive and it will take some time for tax revenues generally to get back to anything like "normal" post pandemic.
I also think that asking people to pay the first £86k of their care costs over their lifetime is enough. If they were in hospital receiving expensive treatments for a difficult medical condition they would of course pay nothing. Dementia is a lottery and there should be a limit to the extent to which the unlucky fork out. This level is high enough that most will never reach it. The elderly with resources will be paying their "hotel" bills in addition.
I think that the government has been brave to finally seize this nettle. Several other governments both before and since Dilnot looked at this and backed off. I commend Boris for his courage.
In Scotland social care has been "free" but it has also been incredibly underfunded and scarce. Many needs have simply not been met, not just for the elderly but for the disabled as well. Yesterday, on the back of this, Sturgeon promised another £800m for Social Care. I was not immediately clear if this was over a Parliament or annual, I think the latter, but it should ensure that Social Care is more of a practical reality and less of a theoretical right. We shall see. The Scottish government is rather an old hand at announcing expenditure that never actually gets spent.
But he hasn't fixed social care. The money is going overwhelmingly to the NHS. We have 100k care vacancies and the council coffers are still overdrawn before we recruit those. The total number of staff needed rises with our demographics. They all need to be paid a lot more, not just out of fairness but practically to compete for staff with labour shortages across many sectors. Social care will get a lot worse, not better, over the next decade if this is the solution.
The money will go to fund extra NHS spending over the next 18 months and then go to Social Care. I agree that wages in the SC sector need to improve but they are a consequence of the penny pinching we have had in that sector to date. This will not go away but it will be eased by these additional resources.
You don't really believe that do you? The much more likely scenario is that the NHS comes begging for more money and social care sits unresolved so this 1.25% quickly rises to 5%.
The squeeze for rentier & non working income SURELY has to come next.
If by "rentier" you mean "private rental owners", then the "squeeze" started when George Osborne went beserk in 2014 (and I think regrets not thinking it through properly, as he has lost 10s of billions of investment into housing and created a Grande Complication).
It is now as big a mess as IR35. For example, there are now nearly a quarter of a million Buy to Let investment companies. 42000 were set up in 2020. How will these be targeted?
There are only really 4 ways that rental works tax-wise on a personal basis now:
1 - One property as a supplement, as Ydoethur (?) was explaining. 2 - More properties with little or no borrowing. 3 - Incorporate. 4 - Up to 2 lodgers, where it can be tax free income.
Hamptons calculated some potentially huge savings for landlords who choose the company route to purchase their rental investments.
It said that someone buying a:
£250,000 property with a mortgage that covers 75 per cent of the value of the investment generating £1,000 a month in rent via a company could pay around £1,033 a year in tax This contrasts with a lower rate taxpayer owning the same property in their own name, potentially paying 42 per cent more – or £1,463 a year.
Indeed its a mess the taxes applied to individuals should apply to the corporations too.
And what about eg Grainger plc (approx 18k homes owned or building) or Legal and General (5k) and commercial arms (or main arms) of Housing Associations?
My wife and I are rather well paid but we calculated the impact of this last night and our household will be over £2,000 worse off a year under these new proposals.
As you can imagine neither of us are happy about it.
Yes, I get you but but fixing social care was always going to cost money and if people like you don't cough up then who else is?
Those with asset wealth.
We've got to stop squeezing workers.
Agree with your concerns.
How does one define asset wealth? Those who own houses have assets. So tax them. But that includes people like you and the tax would have to be paid out of income or savings.
Pension pots? Again this will hit workers.
Etc.
Not saying that this shouldn't be done. From what I understand, these proposals seem to be incoherent and unfair. I just think that taxing wealth will also hit workers as well. There is no option that won't hit some group or other.
The problem seems to be three-fold in my mind:-
1. First, work out what social care system we want. 2. Then work out how to pay for it in a way that is fair and effective. 3. Additionally, work out a way to pay for other public services and the cost of Covid.
This seems to be a mish-mash of social care and NHS, with little regard for fairness or effectiveness and doesn't deal with point 1 at all, as fas I can see.
God knows what happens on 3. Presumably we'll learn that in October.
Tax unearned income the same as earned income, tax pension income the same as earned income. Those two changes will bring in tens of billions per year. It can be achieved by merging NI and income tax. Keep the £12.5k threshold so lower paid workers and low income pensioners actually see a net reduction/no change in tax, most workers see no change while well off pensioners and rentier types see a huge increase in their tax bills.
The way we treat unearned income is ridiculous, investment is already incentivised with CGT being 20%. We don't need to also give income from investments a tax break.
Why would you lock up money in a pension for 30+ years if there are no tax breaks?
Saving is a good thing. It should be incentivised.
Absolutely, people will always do what they can to avoid tax, if a pension is seen to be tax inefficient, people will not put as much money in them.
We do seem to be demonising pensioners who have worked all their lives and put money away from their already taxed income to provide for themselves in retirement.
Demonise = Make them the richest generation ever, and on average richer than their kids and grandkids will be in retirement.
So the current 65+ generation is richer than any generation before and will be richer than any after?
It's certainly looking that way.
Ultimately we just need to abolish the state pension, or vastly increase the eligible age. Pensioners have their entire lives to prepare for retirement, and if they're feckless enough to not have done so, then I see no reason why the state should pay for them instead.
No as that would lead to severe poverty for some pensioners.
Better to target increases in funds going forward for the poorest pensioners so the richest pensioners with the biggest private pension pots do not automatically get the same rise overall
It would lead to a lot of pensioners having to make choices - the state pension is £130/week, which is just 15-18 hours working retail, which given that they've failed to privately store away enough isn't too bad. In addition most pensioners have significant equity in their home, so a Govt led pensioner equity release programme would also probably have to be implemented. Neither demand is unfair or excessive given the advantages they've had throughout their life.
They got free University, I've got £60k of tuition debt.
They had low tax rates, I'm at over 50% once you include pension money being locked away for 45 years.
They had house prices that were 2-3x average salary, I'm looking at 10.5x average salary and growing.
For their benefit the entire country was put into lockdown, while the young sacrificed far more despite essentially 0 risk of death.
It is only fair for pensioners to start paying their way in life, and to stop being leaches on society.
90% of them did not go to university but paid taxes for students costs and courses, taxpayers don't now. 40% are graduates now.
Top rates of tax were higher then and they did not get the inheritances the middle aged will get now.
More of them died from Covid than the young.
They paid in NI all their lives, they should get the state pension still. Future generations will get more private pensions due to more occupational enrollment but we should still keep the basic state pension
If there ever was a year for teenagers to earn some money and learn a little about the world of work before getting themselves tens of thousands in debt this was it. Yet:
Record numbers of 18-year-olds in the UK have accepted university places this year, according to updated figures from the Ucas admissions service.
There will be 272,500 of this age cohort starting at UK universities - up by 7% on last year.
That’s totally nuts, and will lead in future to a whole generation of massively indebted people with not enough graduate jobs to go round.
Advice to any 18 year old looking for a white-collar career, get a very junior job for a local accountant, lawyer or IT support firm. If you’re a more practical type, learn a trade - most tradesmen are higher-rate taxpayers now after an apprenticeship, especially in the south.
If you’re firmly set on being a doctor, engineer or academic, then go to university. If not, don’t, and learn on the job instead.
And the advantage of that route is that if you don't like your initial choice you can change it without being stuck with tens of thousands of debt,
If they still want to go to university they can do so a year or two later - possibly even with their employer contributing financially.
Absolutely. There’s lots of useful professional certifications, and there’s the Open University among others. Prove yourself to an employer, and get them to buy in to your education in a way that’s useful to them as well. Hell, even McDonalds sponsors part-time degrees for burger-flippers who want to become regional managers.
Getting yourself £50k or £60k in debt, to have a three year party before facing an uncertain job market, just seems like a silly decision. Maybe I’m just getting old.
McDonalds are a remarkable company.
Was hearing the story the other day of a local lady who started on the shop floor there and worked up to area manager. Then was leaving the business and let her have a local franchise in her 50s.
Now late 60s and owns 5 local franchises, with a 6th now building. Including the one directly across from the entrance to our local MacArthur Glen, which has somewhere above 3 million visitors a year.
Yes, they’re a fantastic example of a good employer, despite people’s perceptions of the nature of a lot of the work.
They really do invest a lot in both their own people and franchises, have made probably tens of thousands of millionaires over the years from the franchising operation. They’ll underwrite loans and send their own teams in to sort out problems, it’s really quite an amazing business model.
Robert Rea @robertrea · 20h Journalists: if National Insurance is rising from 12% to 13.25% it is NOT rising by 1.25%. It is rising by 1.25 percentage points. if you want to describe its rise in percentage terms, it is rising by just over 10%. It is a 10% tax hike.
I don't think this is correct. Both interpretations are valid linguistically imo.
Only because of the sloppiness of current practice; Mr REa is quite right, in fact. The ambiguity of current practice however is such that any competent writer or speaker has to confront it and deal with it by making the intended meaning crystal clear.
No, even as someone who enjoys a bit of pedantry I think this is pointless pedantry. Also verging on to language ludditery.
Given the author has also voted for Tony Blair and Nigel Farage, we should remember he has frequently failed to support the Conservative Party in the past so what is new? It is true that under Cameron the Tory Party won most voters over 35 in 2015, indeed in 2010 the Tories won most voters over 25 so Cameron would probably have had more reservations about raising NI by 1.25% than Boris did.
However the money the NHS needs from Covid and the cost of social care at home in particular needs to come from somewhere. As a result of the Brexit the author also voted for most under 45s voted Labour in both 2017 and 2019. Even Boris in 2019 lost the vote of workers to Labour, it was only the Tories huge lead amongst pensioners in 2019 which won them a majority. So now Boris will put the interest of pensioners and those 45 to 65 year olds waiting for an inheritance first, that it just the nature of the Tory coalition now post Brexit
I am not sure you have understood why @Philip_Thompson wrote the piece. Politics should be about politicians making life work for the voters, and if it doesn't work for them they look elsewhere. Although in my mind's eye I have Philip as The Terminator, "I'll be back!"
You are more than welcome to believe the NI increase is the best method of raising the required revenue for social care, but that is not how you frame your argument. Your point is whether it works or not is irrelevant so long as it doesn't lose too many votes.
If all that matters in politics is retaining power one might as well cut to the chase and go the full Bolsanaro and prepare to call in the troops to offset waning popularity.
NI was set up to fund healthcare, state pensions and unemployment insurance, if more of it is used to fund healthcare and social care in line with what it was set up for all to the good as far as I am concerned
I hate to be agreeing with @Philip_Thompson and @MaxPB but NI should be added into the income tax pot. Easier and cheaper to administrate and we all know what percentages we are paying without a calculator.
No it should not.
Indeed state pensions, JSA and healthcare now NHS should be removed from income tax funding altogether and funded entirely by NI as originally intended
The major issue with that approach was highlighted in the header, which is that it treats income from employment more severely than income from investment.
Government should have taken the opportunity to abolish employee NI completely, and merge it into income tax.
Whilst I agree with that this would be an absolutely massive task where all of the accrued rights and entitlements accumulated on NI would have needed to have been dealt with which would have been one of the most complicated pieces of legislation that Westminster has seen.
Given the author has also voted for Tony Blair and Nigel Farage, we should remember he has frequently failed to support the Conservative Party in the past so what is new? It is true that under Cameron the Tory Party won most voters over 35 in 2015, indeed in 2010 the Tories won most voters over 25 so Cameron would probably have had more reservations about raising NI by 1.25% than Boris did.
However the money the NHS needs from Covid and the cost of social care at home in particular needs to come from somewhere. As a result of the Brexit the author also voted for most under 45s voted Labour in both 2017 and 2019. Even Boris in 2019 lost the vote of workers to Labour, it was only the Tories huge lead amongst pensioners in 2019 which won them a majority. So now Boris will put the interest of pensioners and those 45 to 65 year olds waiting for an inheritance first, that it just the nature of the Tory coalition now post Brexit
I am not sure you have understood why @Philip_Thompson wrote the piece. Politics should be about politicians making life work for the voters, and if it doesn't work for them they look elsewhere. Although in my mind's eye I have Philip as The Terminator, "I'll be back!"
You are more than welcome to believe the NI increase is the best method of raising the required revenue for social care, but that is not how you frame your argument. Your point is whether it works or not is irrelevant so long as it doesn't lose too many votes.
If all that matters in politics is retaining power one might as well cut to the chase and go the full Bolsanaro and prepare to call in the troops to offset waning popularity.
NI was set up to fund healthcare, state pensions and unemployment insurance, if more of it is used to fund healthcare and social care in line with what it was set up for all to the good as far as I am concerned
I hate to be agreeing with @Philip_Thompson and @MaxPB but NI should be added into the income tax pot. Easier and cheaper to administrate and we all know what percentages we are paying without a calculator.
No it should not.
Indeed state pensions, JSA and healthcare now NHS should be removed from income tax funding altogether and funded entirely by NI as originally intended
The major issue with that approach was highlighted in the header, which is that it treats income from employment more severely than income from investment.
Government should have taken the opportunity to abolish employee NI completely, and merge it into income tax.
Whilst I agree with that this would be an absolutely massive task where all of the accrued rights and entitlements accumulated on NI would have needed to have been dealt with which would have been one of the most complicated pieces of legislation that Westminster has seen.
Yep, and the combination of pandemic and a large majority, would have been the perfect excuse to do something that’s decades overdue.
Jeremy Cliffe @JeremyCliffe · 22h - CDU/CSU falls to 19%, its lowest poll result of all time - Laschet relaunch showing no signs of success - SPD and Greens creeping towards two-party majority territory
The latest poll has the SPD and Greens on 41.5% combined, well short of a majority.
They would still likely need the FDP who are on 12.5% too
Apart from Saxony where the AfD lead, the latest INSA also has the SPD ahead in every state in Germany north of Bavaria which the CSU will still win, with Baden Wurttemberg the only state the CDU still lead in https://twitter.com/JeremyCliffe/status/1435230013314506752?s=20
SPD definitely hoping for a two party coalition and not three.
Because 9% of votes will be for parties under the threshold, they are a little bit closer than 41.5% - they are effectively on a combined 46%. So definitely still short.
I was having real trouble working out how the figures added up yesterday. The yield seemed to be far more than 1.25p would generate. The answer is that there is a further 1.25p increase in the Employers NI as well. As someone who is self employed I only pay this levy once so my tax bill just went up by about £1200. I will also have to pay a small amount of Employer NI for my wife.
But I think that this is worth it (assuming Scotland gives equivalent cover). I do not see how else the awful sequelae of Covid can be dealt with in the short term and the costs of anything like civilised social care can be provided in the longer term. These are both going to be expensive and it will take some time for tax revenues generally to get back to anything like "normal" post pandemic.
I also think that asking people to pay the first £86k of their care costs over their lifetime is enough. If they were in hospital receiving expensive treatments for a difficult medical condition they would of course pay nothing. Dementia is a lottery and there should be a limit to the extent to which the unlucky fork out. This level is high enough that most will never reach it. The elderly with resources will be paying their "hotel" bills in addition.
I think that the government has been brave to finally seize this nettle. Several other governments both before and since Dilnot looked at this and backed off. I commend Boris for his courage.
In Scotland social care has been "free" but it has also been incredibly underfunded and scarce. Many needs have simply not been met, not just for the elderly but for the disabled as well. Yesterday, on the back of this, Sturgeon promised another £800m for Social Care. I was not immediately clear if this was over a Parliament or annual, I think the latter, but it should ensure that Social Care is more of a practical reality and less of a theoretical right. We shall see. The Scottish government is rather an old hand at announcing expenditure that never actually gets spent.
But he hasn't fixed social care. The money is going overwhelmingly to the NHS. We have 100k care vacancies and the council coffers are still overdrawn before we recruit those. The total number of staff needed rises with our demographics. They all need to be paid a lot more, not just out of fairness but practically to compete for staff with labour shortages across many sectors. Social care will get a lot worse, not better, over the next decade if this is the solution.
The money will go to fund extra NHS spending over the next 18 months and then go to Social Care. I agree that wages in the SC sector need to improve but they are a consequence of the penny pinching we have had in that sector to date. This will not go away but it will be eased by these additional resources.
You don't really believe that do you? The much more likely scenario is that the NHS comes begging for more money and social care sits unresolved so this 1.25% quickly rises to 5%.
The squeeze for rentier & non working income SURELY has to come next.
If by "rentier" you mean "private rental owners", then the "squeeze" started when George Osborne went beserk in 2014 (and I think regrets not thinking it through properly, as he has lost 10s of billions of investment into housing and created a Grande Complication).
It is now as big a mess as IR35. For example, there are now nearly a quarter of a million Buy to Let investment companies. 42000 were set up in 2020. How will these be targeted?
There are only really 4 ways that rental works tax-wise on a personal basis now:
1 - One property as a supplement, as Ydoethur (?) was explaining. 2 - More properties with little or no borrowing. 3 - Incorporate. 4 - Up to 2 lodgers, where it can be tax free income.
Hamptons calculated some potentially huge savings for landlords who choose the company route to purchase their rental investments.
It said that someone buying a:
£250,000 property with a mortgage that covers 75 per cent of the value of the investment generating £1,000 a month in rent via a company could pay around £1,033 a year in tax This contrasts with a lower rate taxpayer owning the same property in their own name, potentially paying 42 per cent more – or £1,463 a year.
Indeed its a mess the taxes applied to individuals should apply to the corporations too.
And what about eg Grainger plc (approx 18k homes owned or building) or Legal and General (5k) and commercial arms (or main arms) of Housing Associations?
Good news. Energy storage is going to be big business in the coming decade. It’s also a brilliantly efficient way of recycling old electric car batteries, which is why Tesla are getting involved in it.
Given the author has also voted for Tony Blair and Nigel Farage, we should remember he has frequently failed to support the Conservative Party in the past so what is new? It is true that under Cameron the Tory Party won most voters over 35 in 2015, indeed in 2010 the Tories won most voters over 25 so Cameron would probably have had more reservations about raising NI by 1.25% than Boris did.
However the money the NHS needs from Covid and the cost of social care at home in particular needs to come from somewhere. As a result of the Brexit the author also voted for most under 45s voted Labour in both 2017 and 2019. Even Boris in 2019 lost the vote of workers to Labour, it was only the Tories huge lead amongst pensioners in 2019 which won them a majority. So now Boris will put the interest of pensioners and those 45 to 65 year olds waiting for an inheritance first, that it just the nature of the Tory coalition now post Brexit
I am not sure you have understood why @Philip_Thompson wrote the piece. Politics should be about politicians making life work for the voters, and if it doesn't work for them they look elsewhere. Although in my mind's eye I have Philip as The Terminator, "I'll be back!"
You are more than welcome to believe the NI increase is the best method of raising the required revenue for social care, but that is not how you frame your argument. Your point is whether it works or not is irrelevant so long as it doesn't lose too many votes.
If all that matters in politics is retaining power one might as well cut to the chase and go the full Bolsanaro and prepare to call in the troops to offset waning popularity.
NI was set up to fund healthcare, state pensions and unemployment insurance, if more of it is used to fund healthcare and social care in line with what it was set up for all to the good as far as I am concerned
I hate to be agreeing with @Philip_Thompson and @MaxPB but NI should be added into the income tax pot. Easier and cheaper to administrate and we all know what percentages we are paying without a calculator.
No it should not.
Indeed state pensions, JSA and healthcare now NHS should be removed from income tax funding altogether and funded entirely by NI as originally intended
The major issue with that approach was highlighted in the header, which is that it treats income from employment more severely than income from investment.
Government should have taken the opportunity to abolish employee NI completely, and merge it into income tax.
Whilst I agree with that this would be an absolutely massive task where all of the accrued rights and entitlements accumulated on NI would have needed to have been dealt with which would have been one of the most complicated pieces of legislation that Westminster has seen.
Yep, and the combination of pandemic and a large majority, would have been the perfect excuse to do something that’s decades overdue.
Some of those civil servants working from home might have been usefully deployed on it (although in fairness the Treasury Civil Servants have had a pretty outstanding pandemic, delivering furlough, grants, bounce back loans, etc with quite remarkable efficiency).
Jeremy Cliffe @JeremyCliffe · 22h - CDU/CSU falls to 19%, its lowest poll result of all time - Laschet relaunch showing no signs of success - SPD and Greens creeping towards two-party majority territory
I'd be (happily) surprised if SPD and Greens got a 2-party majority. But I don't think there has been a single poll this parliament that would give them a majority, even though they are currently not far off.
The best recent polls they have had were a couple of polls that had:
SPD 25 Greens 19
last week of August. Since then Greens may have dropped slightly and SPD increased slightly.
This best also only matches their best total end of April:
Greens 29 SPD 15
I guess if they are really perceived as creeping towards a majority it might help a few potential CDU-SPD switchers as it would blunt the CDU's attack that a vote for the SPD would allow die Linke into government.
Remarkable to see the conversion of some on here to wealth taxes. Fantastic to see. Wish I could bottle whatever led to this change of heart.
Please don't bottle it, it is 15 years of the young getting shafted by the state!
Right, but why now?
As you say, this has been going on for ages, the left have been making this point for ages, so what is causing the conversion? Is it going to be more widespread?
My pessimistic hunch is that for most people these tax changes are sufficiently small/complicated that they won't notice too much. But I hope I'm wrong, and this is the start of the way back for a Labour govt (with the Lib Dems if they are interested) that will shift the balance of taxation from workers towards the wealthy.
Watching the Lib Dems campaign in Surrey, on increasing taxation on property wealth would be, err, interesting. Maybe even ‘brave’, as Sir Humphrey might have said.
Mansion tax was their proposal in 2010 and they did okay then.
I was having real trouble working out how the figures added up yesterday. The yield seemed to be far more than 1.25p would generate. The answer is that there is a further 1.25p increase in the Employers NI as well. As someone who is self employed I only pay this levy once so my tax bill just went up by about £1200. I will also have to pay a small amount of Employer NI for my wife.
But I think that this is worth it (assuming Scotland gives equivalent cover). I do not see how else the awful sequelae of Covid can be dealt with in the short term and the costs of anything like civilised social care can be provided in the longer term. These are both going to be expensive and it will take some time for tax revenues generally to get back to anything like "normal" post pandemic.
I also think that asking people to pay the first £86k of their care costs over their lifetime is enough. If they were in hospital receiving expensive treatments for a difficult medical condition they would of course pay nothing. Dementia is a lottery and there should be a limit to the extent to which the unlucky fork out. This level is high enough that most will never reach it. The elderly with resources will be paying their "hotel" bills in addition.
I think that the government has been brave to finally seize this nettle. Several other governments both before and since Dilnot looked at this and backed off. I commend Boris for his courage.
In Scotland social care has been "free" but it has also been incredibly underfunded and scarce. Many needs have simply not been met, not just for the elderly but for the disabled as well. Yesterday, on the back of this, Sturgeon promised another £800m for Social Care. I was not immediately clear if this was over a Parliament or annual, I think the latter, but it should ensure that Social Care is more of a practical reality and less of a theoretical right. We shall see. The Scottish government is rather an old hand at announcing expenditure that never actually gets spent.
But he hasn't fixed social care. The money is going overwhelmingly to the NHS. We have 100k care vacancies and the council coffers are still overdrawn before we recruit those. The total number of staff needed rises with our demographics. They all need to be paid a lot more, not just out of fairness but practically to compete for staff with labour shortages across many sectors. Social care will get a lot worse, not better, over the next decade if this is the solution.
The money will go to fund extra NHS spending over the next 18 months and then go to Social Care. I agree that wages in the SC sector need to improve but they are a consequence of the penny pinching we have had in that sector to date. This will not go away but it will be eased by these additional resources.
You don't really believe that do you? The much more likely scenario is that the NHS comes begging for more money and social care sits unresolved so this 1.25% quickly rises to 5%.
There will be continuing upward pressure on NHS spending, that it absolutely so. But there is a particular crisis right now that needs to be addressed and this does that.
I thought your point, with which I have some sympathy, is that this additional income should be coming from capital taxes as well as income taxes. I completely agree that the burden of taxes on income is excessive and taxes on capital are far too light. The massive gains people make on their homes tax free is distorting inter generational wealth and opportunity too. But this is a different argument from whether this money is needed. It clearly is.
A point made by quite a few people is that if this really was a one-off Covid related cost, the normal thing is to incur the debt and pay it off over years.
I think there is a perceived need for a big political gesture, which I suspect is driven by the prospect of an utterly grim NHS winter coming up. The government wants to get ahead of that curve.
In fiscal terms this has almost nothing to do with social care and not much to do with the general NHS. It is a general tax increase that is nominally hypothecated to spending that is seen as desirable, but which essentially is happening (or in the case of social care, not happening) anyway.
The best take, I think. This isn't in essence a Social Care or an NHS story. It's deficit reduction packaged in the way judged best politically. The Treasury needs more funds because Covid has messed up the public finances. NI works best politically as the source of the funds. And Health & Social Care works best politically as their earmarked destination.
Agreed. This is what I have been saying. You cannot spend £400bn with more to come AND have reduced tax revenues and do nothing about it. It would be just irresponsible.
I was having real trouble working out how the figures added up yesterday. The yield seemed to be far more than 1.25p would generate. The answer is that there is a further 1.25p increase in the Employers NI as well. As someone who is self employed I only pay this levy once so my tax bill just went up by about £1200. I will also have to pay a small amount of Employer NI for my wife.
But I think that this is worth it (assuming Scotland gives equivalent cover). I do not see how else the awful sequelae of Covid can be dealt with in the short term and the costs of anything like civilised social care can be provided in the longer term. These are both going to be expensive and it will take some time for tax revenues generally to get back to anything like "normal" post pandemic.
I also think that asking people to pay the first £86k of their care costs over their lifetime is enough. If they were in hospital receiving expensive treatments for a difficult medical condition they would of course pay nothing. Dementia is a lottery and there should be a limit to the extent to which the unlucky fork out. This level is high enough that most will never reach it. The elderly with resources will be paying their "hotel" bills in addition.
I think that the government has been brave to finally seize this nettle. Several other governments both before and since Dilnot looked at this and backed off. I commend Boris for his courage.
In Scotland social care has been "free" but it has also been incredibly underfunded and scarce. Many needs have simply not been met, not just for the elderly but for the disabled as well. Yesterday, on the back of this, Sturgeon promised another £800m for Social Care. I was not immediately clear if this was over a Parliament or annual, I think the latter, but it should ensure that Social Care is more of a practical reality and less of a theoretical right. We shall see. The Scottish government is rather an old hand at announcing expenditure that never actually gets spent.
But he hasn't fixed social care. The money is going overwhelmingly to the NHS. We have 100k care vacancies and the council coffers are still overdrawn before we recruit those. The total number of staff needed rises with our demographics. They all need to be paid a lot more, not just out of fairness but practically to compete for staff with labour shortages across many sectors. Social care will get a lot worse, not better, over the next decade if this is the solution.
The money will go to fund extra NHS spending over the next 18 months and then go to Social Care. I agree that wages in the SC sector need to improve but they are a consequence of the penny pinching we have had in that sector to date. This will not go away but it will be eased by these additional resources.
You don't really believe that do you? The much more likely scenario is that the NHS comes begging for more money and social care sits unresolved so this 1.25% quickly rises to 5%.
The squeeze for rentier & non working income SURELY has to come next.
If by "rentier" you mean "private rental owners", then the "squeeze" started when George Osborne went beserk in 2014 (and I think regrets not thinking it through properly, as he has lost 10s of billions of investment into housing and created a Grande Complication).
It is now as big a mess as IR35. For example, there are now nearly a quarter of a million Buy to Let investment companies. 42000 were set up in 2020. How will these be targeted?
There are only really 4 ways that rental works tax-wise on a personal basis now:
1 - One property as a supplement, as Ydoethur (?) was explaining. 2 - More properties with little or no borrowing. 3 - Incorporate. 4 - Up to 2 lodgers, where it can be tax free income.
Hamptons calculated some potentially huge savings for landlords who choose the company route to purchase their rental investments.
It said that someone buying a:
£250,000 property with a mortgage that covers 75 per cent of the value of the investment generating £1,000 a month in rent via a company could pay around £1,033 a year in tax This contrasts with a lower rate taxpayer owning the same property in their own name, potentially paying 42 per cent more – or £1,463 a year.
Indeed its a mess the taxes applied to individuals should apply to the corporations too.
And what about eg Grainger plc (approx 18k homes owned or building) or Legal and General (5k) and commercial arms (or main arms) of Housing Associations?
What of them?
They should pay the same taxes.
It should be a level playing field.
Yes they should. It should be a level playing field.
Remarkable to see the conversion of some on here to wealth taxes. Fantastic to see. Wish I could bottle whatever led to this change of heart.
Please don't bottle it, it is 15 years of the young getting shafted by the state!
Right, but why now?
As you say, this has been going on for ages, the left have been making this point for ages, so what is causing the conversion? Is it going to be more widespread?
My pessimistic hunch is that for most people these tax changes are sufficiently small/complicated that they won't notice too much. But I hope I'm wrong, and this is the start of the way back for a Labour govt (with the Lib Dems if they are interested) that will shift the balance of taxation from workers towards the wealthy.
Watching the Lib Dems campaign in Surrey, on increasing taxation on property wealth would be, err, interesting. Maybe even ‘brave’, as Sir Humphrey might have said.
Mansion tax was their proposal in 2010 and they did okay then.
Except that, following a decade of excessive property inflation, a ‘mansion’ is now a 3-bed semi.
Jeremy Cliffe @JeremyCliffe · 22h - CDU/CSU falls to 19%, its lowest poll result of all time - Laschet relaunch showing no signs of success - SPD and Greens creeping towards two-party majority territory
The latest poll has the SPD and Greens on 41.5% combined, well short of a majority.
They would still likely need the FDP who are on 12.5% too
Apart from Saxony where the AfD lead, the latest INSA also has the SPD ahead in every state in Germany north of Bavaria which the CSU will still win, with Baden Wurttemberg the only state the CDU still lead in https://twitter.com/JeremyCliffe/status/1435230013314506752?s=20
The CDU could still lose to the Greens in BaWü but we'll see.
The probability now is that there will be a SPD-Green-FDP coalition depending on how the FDP behave but the SPD is likely to use the threat of a SPD-Green-Linke alliance to get the FDP to play ball in negotiations.
An SPD led grand coalition can't be completely ruled out if there's a majority for it although the CDU/CSU is likely to lose so badly that they go into opposition.
With regard to Philip's decision to leave the conservative party, it is understandable but very sad. I used to be in the labour party, which was always frustrating and compromising. But then it was basically infiltrated by people that no sensible person would want to associate with, which was why I left.
I don't think the situation is the same in the Conservative party, because it is basically full of good people. You can change the Conservative party, in the way that you cannot change the labour party. I doubt anyone in the Conservative party really wants it to go in the direction of being a self interested pensioners party, the decision taken was done in the name of political expediency with little regard to the long term costs - the Boris trademark style.
Remarkable to see the conversion of some on here to wealth taxes. Fantastic to see. Wish I could bottle whatever led to this change of heart.
Please don't bottle it, it is 15 years of the young getting shafted by the state!
Right, but why now?
As you say, this has been going on for ages, the left have been making this point for ages, so what is causing the conversion? Is it going to be more widespread?
My pessimistic hunch is that for most people these tax changes are sufficiently small/complicated that they won't notice too much. But I hope I'm wrong, and this is the start of the way back for a Labour govt (with the Lib Dems if they are interested) that will shift the balance of taxation from workers towards the wealthy.
Watching the Lib Dems campaign in Surrey, on increasing taxation on property wealth would be, err, interesting. Maybe even ‘brave’, as Sir Humphrey might have said.
Mansion tax was their proposal in 2010 and they did okay then.
Except that, following a decade of excessive property inflation, a ‘mansion’ is now a 3-bed semi.
Only in parts of the country. Where I live a 3 bed semi is less than 200K. Around £160K
Also, if labour are dead to the pensioners, why don't they just turn the tables entirely; propose a massive tax cut for working people on the basic rate pension, ie a flat tax of 20%. And then just add this to a levy for pensioners earning above a certain level however their income is sourced.
My daughter did her LFT on Monday and got her result on Tuesday lunch time, roughly 24 hours later. We all got tested yesterday afternoon and will presumably get our results today. I think that is pretty good but because my daughter was symptomless she had been a lot of places in the 4 days before her test. She got a T&T form to complete about that this morning. It is going to take a bit of time.
With regard to Philip's decision to leave the conservative party, it is understandable but very sad. I used to be in the labour party, which was always frustrating and compromising. But then it was basically infiltrated by people that no sensible person would want to associate with, which was why I left.
I don't think the situation is the same in the Conservative party, because it is basically full of good people. You can change the Conservative party, in the way that you cannot change the labour party. I doubt anyone in the Conservative party really wants it to go in the direction of being a self interested pensioners party, the decision taken was done in the name of political expediency with little regard to the long term costs - the Boris trademark style.
I think that is letting them off lightly. There are lots of Tory members who want to win more than they want to support a really good government. They might not be the direct equivalent of Corbynista nutters but they cause just as many problems for the rest of the country.
Jeremy Cliffe @JeremyCliffe · 22h - CDU/CSU falls to 19%, its lowest poll result of all time - Laschet relaunch showing no signs of success - SPD and Greens creeping towards two-party majority territory
The latest poll has the SPD and Greens on 41.5% combined, well short of a majority.
They would still likely need the FDP who are on 12.5% too
Apart from Saxony where the AfD lead, the latest INSA also has the SPD ahead in every state in Germany north of Bavaria which the CSU will still win, with Baden Wurttemberg the only state the CDU still lead in https://twitter.com/JeremyCliffe/status/1435230013314506752?s=20
The CDU could still lose to the Greens in BaWü but we'll see.
The probability now is that there will be a SPD-Green-FDP coalition depending on how the FDP behave but the SPD is likely to use the threat of a SPD-Green-Linke alliance to get the FDP to play ball in negotiations.
An SPD led grand coalition can't be completely ruled out if there's a majority for it although the CDU/CSU is likely to lose so badly that they go into opposition.
We haven't had a national poll in BaWü in two years according to Wahlrecht. Are we basing this off crossbreaks?
What's going to be an extra cherry on top of the bullshit is that in the run up to 2024 the Tory party will be looking to win back it's low tax credentials and the state finances will likely be close to a current budget surplus. The Tories are going to run on a manifesto commitment to lower income tax rates to 19% and 39%. It's very clear to me now what they're doing, a net transfer of tax burden from working people (not Tories) to non-working people (Tories). It's absolutely disgusting.
Good news. Energy storage is going to be big business in the coming decade. It’s also a brilliantly efficient way of recycling old electric car batteries, which is why Tesla are getting involved in it.
Tesla uses newly manufacture batteries in their Megapacks.
Remarkable to see the conversion of some on here to wealth taxes. Fantastic to see. Wish I could bottle whatever led to this change of heart.
Please don't bottle it, it is 15 years of the young getting shafted by the state!
Right, but why now?
As you say, this has been going on for ages, the left have been making this point for ages, so what is causing the conversion? Is it going to be more widespread?
My pessimistic hunch is that for most people these tax changes are sufficiently small/complicated that they won't notice too much. But I hope I'm wrong, and this is the start of the way back for a Labour govt (with the Lib Dems if they are interested) that will shift the balance of taxation from workers towards the wealthy.
Watching the Lib Dems campaign in Surrey, on increasing taxation on property wealth would be, err, interesting. Maybe even ‘brave’, as Sir Humphrey might have said.
Mansion tax was their proposal in 2010 and they did okay then.
Except that, following a decade of excessive property inflation, a ‘mansion’ is now a 3-bed semi.
Another issue, which has been largely ignored, is that in areas which have seen enormous house price inflation, there are many people who have lived there since before the absurdity.
For example, there is a square not far from me, in West London. Historically it was considered a bit blighted. Now it is 50/50 the ultra rich who have bought in, and older people who lived there when you needed a steel gate in front of the front door.
A mansion tax would add a bit of expense to the people on the square who own Overfinches - but would drive out the less well off.
Emblematic of the FDA regulatory failure on rapid testing - these tests are manufactured in California... https://twitter.com/PedsDocDex/status/1435191439516966916 Home, self-administered, ~15 minute wait COVID tests available in an Amsterdam supermarket for about $3.50 each. I don’t understand why we *still* don’t have these in the US!
Also, if labour are dead to the pensioners, why don't they just turn the tables entirely; propose a massive tax cut for working people on the basic rate pension, ie a flat tax of 20%. And then just add this to a levy for pensioners earning above a certain level however their income is sourced.
They don't need to do anything complicated, just merge NI into Income Tax as a simplification measure. Let those trying to defend over 65s not paying NI actually have to make some arguments about why that would be unfair.
Given the author has also voted for Tony Blair and Nigel Farage, we should remember he has frequently failed to support the Conservative Party in the past so what is new? It is true that under Cameron the Tory Party won most voters over 35 in 2015, indeed in 2010 the Tories won most voters over 25 so Cameron would probably have had more reservations about raising NI by 1.25% than Boris did.
However the money the NHS needs from Covid and the cost of social care at home in particular needs to come from somewhere. As a result of the Brexit the author also voted for most under 45s voted Labour in both 2017 and 2019. Even Boris in 2019 lost the vote of workers to Labour, it was only the Tories huge lead amongst pensioners in 2019 which won them a majority. So now Boris will put the interest of pensioners and those 45 to 65 year olds waiting for an inheritance first, that it just the nature of the Tory coalition now post Brexit
I am not sure you have understood why @Philip_Thompson wrote the piece. Politics should be about politicians making life work for the voters, and if it doesn't work for them they look elsewhere. Although in my mind's eye I have Philip as The Terminator, "I'll be back!"
You are more than welcome to believe the NI increase is the best method of raising the required revenue for social care, but that is not how you frame your argument. Your point is whether it works or not is irrelevant so long as it doesn't lose too many votes.
If all that matters in politics is retaining power one might as well cut to the chase and go the full Bolsanaro and prepare to call in the troops to offset waning popularity.
NI was set up to fund healthcare, state pensions and unemployment insurance, if more of it is used to fund healthcare and social care in line with what it was set up for all to the good as far as I am concerned
I hate to be agreeing with @Philip_Thompson and @MaxPB but NI should be added into the income tax pot. Easier and cheaper to administrate and we all know what percentages we are paying without a calculator.
No it should not.
Indeed state pensions, JSA and healthcare now NHS should be removed from income tax funding altogether and funded entirely by NI as originally intended
The major issue with that approach was highlighted in the header, which is that it treats income from employment more severely than income from investment.
Government should have taken the opportunity to abolish employee NI completely, and merge it into income tax.
Whilst I agree with that this would be an absolutely massive task where all of the accrued rights and entitlements accumulated on NI would have needed to have been dealt with which would have been one of the most complicated pieces of legislation that Westminster has seen.
Yep, and the combination of pandemic and a large majority, would have been the perfect excuse to do something that’s decades overdue.
Some of those civil servants working from home might have been usefully deployed on it (although in fairness the Treasury Civil Servants have had a pretty outstanding pandemic, delivering furlough, grants, bounce back loans, etc with quite remarkable efficiency).
Yes, the Treasury have done incredibly well at administering the various Covid schemes, as have the Home Office in administering the EU citizens’ residency scheme.
Unfortunately, the cynic in me says that these successes do a great job, of highlighting how uselessly unproductive most of the standing bureaucracy can be the rest of the time.
I was having real trouble working out how the figures added up yesterday. The yield seemed to be far more than 1.25p would generate. The answer is that there is a further 1.25p increase in the Employers NI as well. As someone who is self employed I only pay this levy once so my tax bill just went up by about £1200. I will also have to pay a small amount of Employer NI for my wife.
But I think that this is worth it (assuming Scotland gives equivalent cover). I do not see how else the awful sequelae of Covid can be dealt with in the short term and the costs of anything like civilised social care can be provided in the longer term. These are both going to be expensive and it will take some time for tax revenues generally to get back to anything like "normal" post pandemic.
I also think that asking people to pay the first £86k of their care costs over their lifetime is enough. If they were in hospital receiving expensive treatments for a difficult medical condition they would of course pay nothing. Dementia is a lottery and there should be a limit to the extent to which the unlucky fork out. This level is high enough that most will never reach it. The elderly with resources will be paying their "hotel" bills in addition.
I think that the government has been brave to finally seize this nettle. Several other governments both before and since Dilnot looked at this and backed off. I commend Boris for his courage.
In Scotland social care has been "free" but it has also been incredibly underfunded and scarce. Many needs have simply not been met, not just for the elderly but for the disabled as well. Yesterday, on the back of this, Sturgeon promised another £800m for Social Care. I was not immediately clear if this was over a Parliament or annual, I think the latter, but it should ensure that Social Care is more of a practical reality and less of a theoretical right. We shall see. The Scottish government is rather an old hand at announcing expenditure that never actually gets spent.
But he hasn't fixed social care. The money is going overwhelmingly to the NHS. We have 100k care vacancies and the council coffers are still overdrawn before we recruit those. The total number of staff needed rises with our demographics. They all need to be paid a lot more, not just out of fairness but practically to compete for staff with labour shortages across many sectors. Social care will get a lot worse, not better, over the next decade if this is the solution.
The money will go to fund extra NHS spending over the next 18 months and then go to Social Care. I agree that wages in the SC sector need to improve but they are a consequence of the penny pinching we have had in that sector to date. This will not go away but it will be eased by these additional resources.
You don't really believe that do you? The much more likely scenario is that the NHS comes begging for more money and social care sits unresolved so this 1.25% quickly rises to 5%.
There will be continuing upward pressure on NHS spending, that it absolutely so. But there is a particular crisis right now that needs to be addressed and this does that.
I thought your point, with which I have some sympathy, is that this additional income should be coming from capital taxes as well as income taxes. I completely agree that the burden of taxes on income is excessive and taxes on capital are far too light. The massive gains people make on their homes tax free is distorting inter generational wealth and opportunity too. But this is a different argument from whether this money is needed. It clearly is.
A point made by quite a few people is that if this really was a one-off Covid related cost, the normal thing is to incur the debt and pay it off over years.
I think there is a perceived need for a big political gesture, which I suspect is driven by the prospect of an utterly grim NHS winter coming up. The government wants to get ahead of that curve.
In fiscal terms this has almost nothing to do with social care and not much to do with the general NHS. It is a general tax increase that is nominally hypothecated to spending that is seen as desirable, but which essentially is happening (or in the case of social care, not happening) anyway.
The best take, I think. This isn't in essence a Social Care or an NHS story. It's deficit reduction packaged in the way judged best politically. The Treasury needs more funds because Covid has messed up the public finances. NI works best politically as the source of the funds. And Health & Social Care works best politically as their earmarked destination.
Agreed. This is what I have been saying. You cannot spend £400bn with more to come AND have reduced tax revenues and do nothing about it. It would be just irresponsible.
You were saying well done the government for solving social care or at least trying to ("commend Boris for his courage". Kinabalu is saying the government are not even trying to solve social care, merely make it look as if they are trying.
I'd imagine you might have more success changing his mind about Boris' muscly physique than agreeing this is courageous.
Good news. Energy storage is going to be big business in the coming decade. It’s also a brilliantly efficient way of recycling old electric car batteries, which is why Tesla are getting involved in it.
Tesla uses newly manufacture batteries in their Megapacks.
At the moment - there isn't a big enough number of old Tesla batteries to use for such purposes, yet.
As I foresaw a while back, the ability to scale from a single container up, and the reduced planning issues is making containerised battery storage very attractive.
What's going to be an extra cherry on top of the bullshit is that in the run up to 2024 the Tory party will be looking to win back it's low tax credentials and the state finances will likely be close to a current budget surplus. The Tories are going to run on a manifesto commitment to lower income tax rates to 19% and 39%. It's very clear to me now what they're doing, a net transfer of tax burden from working people (not Tories) to non-working people (Tories). It's absolutely disgusting.
What they will be able to say in 2024 is that Labour would tax you even more heavily. And that will almost certainly be true. SKS may be opportunistically opposing these tax increases but his central critique (so far as it can be ascertained) is that the government is not doing enough, not too much.
Robert Rea @robertrea · 20h Journalists: if National Insurance is rising from 12% to 13.25% it is NOT rising by 1.25%. It is rising by 1.25 percentage points. if you want to describe its rise in percentage terms, it is rising by just over 10%. It is a 10% tax hike.
I don't think this is correct. Both interpretations are valid linguistically imo.
Only because of the sloppiness of current practice; Mr REa is quite right, in fact. The ambiguity of current practice however is such that any competent writer or speaker has to confront it and deal with it by making the intended meaning crystal clear.
No, even as someone who enjoys a bit of pedantry I think this is pointless pedantry. Also verging on to language ludditery.
That's pretty much what I mean - the battle is lost (as with 'haver') and one just has to use a different wording for whichever option one wants to employ.
Jeremy Cliffe @JeremyCliffe · 22h - CDU/CSU falls to 19%, its lowest poll result of all time - Laschet relaunch showing no signs of success - SPD and Greens creeping towards two-party majority territory
The latest poll has the SPD and Greens on 41.5% combined, well short of a majority.
They would still likely need the FDP who are on 12.5% too
Apart from Saxony where the AfD lead, the latest INSA also has the SPD ahead in every state in Germany north of Bavaria which the CSU will still win, with Baden Wurttemberg the only state the CDU still lead in https://twitter.com/JeremyCliffe/status/1435230013314506752?s=20
The CDU could still lose to the Greens in BaWü but we'll see.
The probability now is that there will be a SPD-Green-FDP coalition depending on how the FDP behave but the SPD is likely to use the threat of a SPD-Green-Linke alliance to get the FDP to play ball in negotiations.
An SPD led grand coalition can't be completely ruled out if there's a majority for it although the CDU/CSU is likely to lose so badly that they go into opposition.
We haven't had a national poll in BaWü in two years according to Wahlrecht. Are we basing this off crossbreaks?
Just my knowledge of German politics TBH. BaWü was the strongest state for the CDU in 2013 and 2nd strongest state for them in 2017 but there is a lot of split voting between state elections and federal elections so a lot of CDU voters are already receptive to the Greens. We also know that the Greens are very strong in Freiburg and Stuttgart and it's suburbs so if the CDU is less than 4/5% ahead of the Greens nationally the Greens could very narrowly carry BaWü.
Remarkable to see the conversion of some on here to wealth taxes. Fantastic to see. Wish I could bottle whatever led to this change of heart.
Please don't bottle it, it is 15 years of the young getting shafted by the state!
Right, but why now?
As you say, this has been going on for ages, the left have been making this point for ages, so what is causing the conversion? Is it going to be more widespread?
My pessimistic hunch is that for most people these tax changes are sufficiently small/complicated that they won't notice too much. But I hope I'm wrong, and this is the start of the way back for a Labour govt (with the Lib Dems if they are interested) that will shift the balance of taxation from workers towards the wealthy.
Watching the Lib Dems campaign in Surrey, on increasing taxation on property wealth would be, err, interesting. Maybe even ‘brave’, as Sir Humphrey might have said.
Mansion tax was their proposal in 2010 and they did okay then.
Except that, following a decade of excessive property inflation, a ‘mansion’ is now a 3-bed semi.
Only in parts of the country. Where I live a 3 bed semi is less than 200K. Around £160K
My original comment was about Surrey. Yes, there are huge regional imbalances.
Those tax rises are not even 10% of the added debt. Will need to be in place for a decade to pay for the pandemic. Longer if interest and gilt rates go up.
Passed by two Teslas and an Ioniq on my way to work today. One of the Teslas was absolubtely enormous in a way similiar cars in the UK and europe aren't, it might not have a V8 but it's still a distinctly American car - didn't look that easy for getting down country lanes never mind the autopilot.
It's almost as if we have had a pandemic, isn't it?
A pandemic that had an almost 100% survival rate for the young seeing tax rises, which we locked the nation down to save the vulnerable elderly who are not seeing their taxes on pensions go up in line with the tax on wages.
Its rather sick but it seems economically @contrarian might have had a point if this is the way we're going to go. If we hadn't locked down the nation, if we had just let the virus take its course naturally, then the number of people requiring pensions and care homes would have come down, the number of workers wouldn't as much, and the people obsessing over their inheritance may have had it by now.
Personally I still think that would have been the wrong thing to do, but if all of the paying for the pandemic is going to fall on those who sacrificed rather than were saved from it then maybe it wouldn't have been?
It's almost as if we have had a pandemic, isn't it?
The problem is that the state is turning the pandemic healthcare spending into a permanent feature. There's not going to be any cycle down in spending once it's over. We need to have a very serious discussion in this country about life lengthening treatment for older people. The NHS is resource limited and taxpayers don't have an unlimited pool of money to throw at it. Should the NHS be offering people over 80 life lengthening treatment?
I was having real trouble working out how the figures added up yesterday. The yield seemed to be far more than 1.25p would generate. The answer is that there is a further 1.25p increase in the Employers NI as well. As someone who is self employed I only pay this levy once so my tax bill just went up by about £1200. I will also have to pay a small amount of Employer NI for my wife.
But I think that this is worth it (assuming Scotland gives equivalent cover). I do not see how else the awful sequelae of Covid can be dealt with in the short term and the costs of anything like civilised social care can be provided in the longer term. These are both going to be expensive and it will take some time for tax revenues generally to get back to anything like "normal" post pandemic.
I also think that asking people to pay the first £86k of their care costs over their lifetime is enough. If they were in hospital receiving expensive treatments for a difficult medical condition they would of course pay nothing. Dementia is a lottery and there should be a limit to the extent to which the unlucky fork out. This level is high enough that most will never reach it. The elderly with resources will be paying their "hotel" bills in addition.
I think that the government has been brave to finally seize this nettle. Several other governments both before and since Dilnot looked at this and backed off. I commend Boris for his courage.
In Scotland social care has been "free" but it has also been incredibly underfunded and scarce. Many needs have simply not been met, not just for the elderly but for the disabled as well. Yesterday, on the back of this, Sturgeon promised another £800m for Social Care. I was not immediately clear if this was over a Parliament or annual, I think the latter, but it should ensure that Social Care is more of a practical reality and less of a theoretical right. We shall see. The Scottish government is rather an old hand at announcing expenditure that never actually gets spent.
But he hasn't fixed social care. The money is going overwhelmingly to the NHS. We have 100k care vacancies and the council coffers are still overdrawn before we recruit those. The total number of staff needed rises with our demographics. They all need to be paid a lot more, not just out of fairness but practically to compete for staff with labour shortages across many sectors. Social care will get a lot worse, not better, over the next decade if this is the solution.
The money will go to fund extra NHS spending over the next 18 months and then go to Social Care. I agree that wages in the SC sector need to improve but they are a consequence of the penny pinching we have had in that sector to date. This will not go away but it will be eased by these additional resources.
You don't really believe that do you? The much more likely scenario is that the NHS comes begging for more money and social care sits unresolved so this 1.25% quickly rises to 5%.
There will be continuing upward pressure on NHS spending, that it absolutely so. But there is a particular crisis right now that needs to be addressed and this does that.
I thought your point, with which I have some sympathy, is that this additional income should be coming from capital taxes as well as income taxes. I completely agree that the burden of taxes on income is excessive and taxes on capital are far too light. The massive gains people make on their homes tax free is distorting inter generational wealth and opportunity too. But this is a different argument from whether this money is needed. It clearly is.
A point made by quite a few people is that if this really was a one-off Covid related cost, the normal thing is to incur the debt and pay it off over years.
I think there is a perceived need for a big political gesture, which I suspect is driven by the prospect of an utterly grim NHS winter coming up. The government wants to get ahead of that curve.
In fiscal terms this has almost nothing to do with social care and not much to do with the general NHS. It is a general tax increase that is nominally hypothecated to spending that is seen as desirable, but which essentially is happening (or in the case of social care, not happening) anyway.
The best take, I think. This isn't in essence a Social Care or an NHS story. It's deficit reduction packaged in the way judged best politically. The Treasury needs more funds because Covid has messed up the public finances. NI works best politically as the source of the funds. And Health & Social Care works best politically as their earmarked destination.
Agreed. This is what I have been saying. You cannot spend £400bn with more to come AND have reduced tax revenues and do nothing about it. It would be just irresponsible.
You were saying well done the government for solving social care or at least trying to ("commend Boris for his courage". Kinabalu is saying the government are not even trying to solve social care, merely make it look as if they are trying.
I'd imagine you might have more success changing his mind about Boris' muscly physique than agreeing this is courageous.
I do think that this additional tax will be an important and essential income flow for the government whose finances are under appalling pressure. I also think that he was right to acknowledge the important part that Social care plays on those pressures, not just because it gives dignity to the disabled and the elderly but because indirectly it will reduce pressure currently being applied to the NHS.
I commend him for his honesty in acknowledging the problem and being brave enough to accept that higher taxes are an essential component of the solution. Whether this is enough to resolve SC remains to be seen but it is far more than any other government of any stripe has done.
My daughter did her LFT on Monday and got her result on Tuesday lunch time, roughly 24 hours later. We all got tested yesterday afternoon and will presumably get our results today. I think that is pretty good but because my daughter was symptomless she had been a lot of places in the 4 days before her test. She got a T&T form to complete about that this morning. It is going to take a bit of time.
With a self administered LFT you get the result immediately.
Totally sympathise with Philip Thompson's view, but with qualifications;
1) PT implies that IT would be the right place to tax instead of NI. I agree. But he is also against breaking the manifesto pledge, which IT increase would do. He is silent on the point.
2) You can't, in a conversation for grown ups, discuss issues one at a time. That's what back benchers do when grubbing for votes. If you oppose a tax rise, you have to say what you would do instead, when we are already borrowing 300 billion a year and you insist on manifesto pledges being kept. Single issue politics is for students, MPs, XR and loony lefties.
3) Boris has a country to run and a tricky election to win. Old people vote; younger ones less so. That is not Boris's fault. Younger people should try the boring democratic process for a change and see what happens.
4) I think there is a decent chance that this plan will entirely unravel once the devil in the detail comes to light. If it does we are in T May territory again.
I was having real trouble working out how the figures added up yesterday. The yield seemed to be far more than 1.25p would generate. The answer is that there is a further 1.25p increase in the Employers NI as well. As someone who is self employed I only pay this levy once so my tax bill just went up by about £1200. I will also have to pay a small amount of Employer NI for my wife.
But I think that this is worth it (assuming Scotland gives equivalent cover). I do not see how else the awful sequelae of Covid can be dealt with in the short term and the costs of anything like civilised social care can be provided in the longer term. These are both going to be expensive and it will take some time for tax revenues generally to get back to anything like "normal" post pandemic.
I also think that asking people to pay the first £86k of their care costs over their lifetime is enough. If they were in hospital receiving expensive treatments for a difficult medical condition they would of course pay nothing. Dementia is a lottery and there should be a limit to the extent to which the unlucky fork out. This level is high enough that most will never reach it. The elderly with resources will be paying their "hotel" bills in addition.
I think that the government has been brave to finally seize this nettle. Several other governments both before and since Dilnot looked at this and backed off. I commend Boris for his courage.
In Scotland social care has been "free" but it has also been incredibly underfunded and scarce. Many needs have simply not been met, not just for the elderly but for the disabled as well. Yesterday, on the back of this, Sturgeon promised another £800m for Social Care. I was not immediately clear if this was over a Parliament or annual, I think the latter, but it should ensure that Social Care is more of a practical reality and less of a theoretical right. We shall see. The Scottish government is rather an old hand at announcing expenditure that never actually gets spent.
But he hasn't fixed social care. The money is going overwhelmingly to the NHS. We have 100k care vacancies and the council coffers are still overdrawn before we recruit those. The total number of staff needed rises with our demographics. They all need to be paid a lot more, not just out of fairness but practically to compete for staff with labour shortages across many sectors. Social care will get a lot worse, not better, over the next decade if this is the solution.
The money will go to fund extra NHS spending over the next 18 months and then go to Social Care. I agree that wages in the SC sector need to improve but they are a consequence of the penny pinching we have had in that sector to date. This will not go away but it will be eased by these additional resources.
You don't really believe that do you? The much more likely scenario is that the NHS comes begging for more money and social care sits unresolved so this 1.25% quickly rises to 5%.
There will be continuing upward pressure on NHS spending, that it absolutely so. But there is a particular crisis right now that needs to be addressed and this does that.
I thought your point, with which I have some sympathy, is that this additional income should be coming from capital taxes as well as income taxes. I completely agree that the burden of taxes on income is excessive and taxes on capital are far too light. The massive gains people make on their homes tax free is distorting inter generational wealth and opportunity too. But this is a different argument from whether this money is needed. It clearly is.
A point made by quite a few people is that if this really was a one-off Covid related cost, the normal thing is to incur the debt and pay it off over years.
I think there is a perceived need for a big political gesture, which I suspect is driven by the prospect of an utterly grim NHS winter coming up. The government wants to get ahead of that curve.
In fiscal terms this has almost nothing to do with social care and not much to do with the general NHS. It is a general tax increase that is nominally hypothecated to spending that is seen as desirable, but which essentially is happening (or in the case of social care, not happening) anyway.
The best take, I think. This isn't in essence a Social Care or an NHS story. It's deficit reduction packaged in the way judged best politically. The Treasury needs more funds because Covid has messed up the public finances. NI works best politically as the source of the funds. And Health & Social Care works best politically as their earmarked destination.
Agreed. This is what I have been saying. You cannot spend £400bn with more to come AND have reduced tax revenues and do nothing about it. It would be just irresponsible.
You were saying well done the government for solving social care or at least trying to ("commend Boris for his courage". Kinabalu is saying the government are not even trying to solve social care, merely make it look as if they are trying.
I'd imagine you might have more success changing his mind about Boris' muscly physique than agreeing this is courageous.
I do think that this additional tax will be an important and essential income flow for the government whose finances are under appalling pressure. I also think that he was right to acknowledge the important part that Social care plays on those pressures, not just because it gives dignity to the disabled and the elderly but because indirectly it will reduce pressure currently being applied to the NHS.
I commend him for his honesty in acknowledging the problem and being brave enough to accept that higher taxes are an essential component of the solution. Whether this is enough to resolve SC remains to be seen but it is far more than any other government of any stripe has done.
Its pure Brownian economics. How is it any different to Brown's mendacious "1p for the NHS" two decades ago?
There's nothing original, no reform, no credibility there just further ramping up the taxes on people who work while ignoring and potentially in the future further reducing Income Tax so that NI can continue to replace it.
I did not vote Conservatives to have a Gordon Brown as Chancellor.
It's almost as if we have had a pandemic, isn't it?
A pandemic that had an almost 100% survival rate for the young seeing tax rises, which we locked the nation down to save the vulnerable elderly who are not seeing their taxes on pensions go up in line with the tax on wages.
Its rather sick but it seems economically @contrarian might have had a point if this is the way we're going to go. If we hadn't locked down the nation, if we had just let the virus take its course naturally, then the number of people requiring pensions and care homes would have come down, the number of workers wouldn't as much, and the people obsessing over their inheritance may have had it by now.
Personally I still think that would have been the wrong thing to do, but if all of the paying for the pandemic is going to fall on those who sacrificed rather than were saved from it then maybe it wouldn't have been?
It's not Philip. They will pay the first £86k if they have the resources to do so. They will pay their accommodation in addition. What we have here is more money going into SC, not just for the elderly but also for the disabled and rather modest safety nets for those who are particularly unlucky.
At the moment you get SC if you can afford it or if you are peculiarly lucky on a post code lottery. That needs to change and that needs money.
What's going to be an extra cherry on top of the bullshit is that in the run up to 2024 the Tory party will be looking to win back it's low tax credentials and the state finances will likely be close to a current budget surplus. The Tories are going to run on a manifesto commitment to lower income tax rates to 19% and 39%. It's very clear to me now what they're doing, a net transfer of tax burden from working people (not Tories) to non-working people (Tories). It's absolutely disgusting.
What they will be able to say in 2024 is that Labour would tax you even more heavily. And that will almost certainly be true. SKS may be opportunistically opposing these tax increases but his central critique (so far as it can be ascertained) is that the government is not doing enough, not too much.
And Liz Kendall affirmed that labour policy is to protect pensioners from using their homes for care
Remarkable to see the conversion of some on here to wealth taxes. Fantastic to see. Wish I could bottle whatever led to this change of heart.
Please don't bottle it, it is 15 years of the young getting shafted by the state!
Right, but why now?
As you say, this has been going on for ages, the left have been making this point for ages, so what is causing the conversion? Is it going to be more widespread?
My pessimistic hunch is that for most people these tax changes are sufficiently small/complicated that they won't notice too much. But I hope I'm wrong, and this is the start of the way back for a Labour govt (with the Lib Dems if they are interested) that will shift the balance of taxation from workers towards the wealthy.
Watching the Lib Dems campaign in Surrey, on increasing taxation on property wealth would be, err, interesting. Maybe even ‘brave’, as Sir Humphrey might have said.
Mansion tax was their proposal in 2010 and they did okay then.
Except that, following a decade of excessive property inflation, a ‘mansion’ is now a 3-bed semi.
Only in parts of the country. Where I live a 3 bed semi is less than 200K. Around £160K
My original comment was about Surrey. Yes, there are huge regional imbalances.
Yes, Surrey that’s true, there is plenty of affordable property just not where people want to live.
Someone posted yesterday the average price In Guildford is £550K.
We have had over two decades of concentrating the wealth and jobs in London and the south east. Levelling up is a great idea but this govt cannot deliver it.
It's almost as if we have had a pandemic, isn't it?
A pandemic that had an almost 100% survival rate for the young seeing tax rises, which we locked the nation down to save the vulnerable elderly who are not seeing their taxes on pensions go up in line with the tax on wages.
Its rather sick but it seems economically @contrarian might have had a point if this is the way we're going to go. If we hadn't locked down the nation, if we had just let the virus take its course naturally, then the number of people requiring pensions and care homes would have come down, the number of workers wouldn't as much, and the people obsessing over their inheritance may have had it by now.
Personally I still think that would have been the wrong thing to do, but if all of the paying for the pandemic is going to fall on those who sacrificed rather than were saved from it then maybe it wouldn't have been?
It's not Philip. They will pay the first £86k if they have the resources to do so. They will pay their accommodation in addition. What we have here is more money going into SC, not just for the elderly but also for the disabled and rather modest safety nets for those who are particularly unlucky.
At the moment you get SC if you can afford it or if you are peculiarly lucky on a post code lottery. That needs to change and that needs money.
No, we don't. We have a pledge that SC will get some of this money "one day". You're being taken for a ride.
Good news. Energy storage is going to be big business in the coming decade. It’s also a brilliantly efficient way of recycling old electric car batteries, which is why Tesla are getting involved in it.
Tesla uses newly manufacture batteries in their Megapacks.
At the moment - there isn't a big enough number of old Tesla batteries to use for such purposes, yet.
As I foresaw a while back, the ability to scale from a single container up, and the reduced planning issues is making containerised battery storage very attractive.
It is - but there's no reason to assume that future battery storage won't be newly manufactured, too. The cars being built now are expected to have lifetimes of a decade or more. By the time they get scrapped, battery tech will have moved on significantly, with in terms of cost and capacity, and it might just be more economic fully to recycle the old stuff.
It's almost as if we have had a pandemic, isn't it?
A pandemic that had an almost 100% survival rate for the young seeing tax rises, which we locked the nation down to save the vulnerable elderly who are not seeing their taxes on pensions go up in line with the tax on wages.
Its rather sick but it seems economically @contrarian might have had a point if this is the way we're going to go. If we hadn't locked down the nation, if we had just let the virus take its course naturally, then the number of people requiring pensions and care homes would have come down, the number of workers wouldn't as much, and the people obsessing over their inheritance may have had it by now.
Personally I still think that would have been the wrong thing to do, but if all of the paying for the pandemic is going to fall on those who sacrificed rather than were saved from it then maybe it wouldn't have been?
It's not Philip. They will pay the first £86k if they have the resources to do so. They will pay their accommodation in addition. What we have here is more money going into SC, not just for the elderly but also for the disabled and rather modest safety nets for those who are particularly unlucky.
At the moment you get SC if you can afford it or if you are peculiarly lucky on a post code lottery. That needs to change and that needs money.
No, we don't. We have a pledge that SC will get some of this money "one day". You're being taken for a ride.
@Philip_Thompson what do you think about my Labour lead bet by year end?
I'd say it should still be odds against, but its got a much better chance of winning now than it did a week ago.
The problem is that too many people either don't understand the iniquity of yesterday - and that too many of those that do are in favour of such iniquity. 'Taxes on others' tends to be popular and those who work for a living now are 'others' for many voters.
I was having real trouble working out how the figures added up yesterday. The yield seemed to be far more than 1.25p would generate. The answer is that there is a further 1.25p increase in the Employers NI as well. As someone who is self employed I only pay this levy once so my tax bill just went up by about £1200. I will also have to pay a small amount of Employer NI for my wife.
But I think that this is worth it (assuming Scotland gives equivalent cover). I do not see how else the awful sequelae of Covid can be dealt with in the short term and the costs of anything like civilised social care can be provided in the longer term. These are both going to be expensive and it will take some time for tax revenues generally to get back to anything like "normal" post pandemic.
I also think that asking people to pay the first £86k of their care costs over their lifetime is enough. If they were in hospital receiving expensive treatments for a difficult medical condition they would of course pay nothing. Dementia is a lottery and there should be a limit to the extent to which the unlucky fork out. This level is high enough that most will never reach it. The elderly with resources will be paying their "hotel" bills in addition.
I think that the government has been brave to finally seize this nettle. Several other governments both before and since Dilnot looked at this and backed off. I commend Boris for his courage.
In Scotland social care has been "free" but it has also been incredibly underfunded and scarce. Many needs have simply not been met, not just for the elderly but for the disabled as well. Yesterday, on the back of this, Sturgeon promised another £800m for Social Care. I was not immediately clear if this was over a Parliament or annual, I think the latter, but it should ensure that Social Care is more of a practical reality and less of a theoretical right. We shall see. The Scottish government is rather an old hand at announcing expenditure that never actually gets spent.
But he hasn't fixed social care. The money is going overwhelmingly to the NHS. We have 100k care vacancies and the council coffers are still overdrawn before we recruit those. The total number of staff needed rises with our demographics. They all need to be paid a lot more, not just out of fairness but practically to compete for staff with labour shortages across many sectors. Social care will get a lot worse, not better, over the next decade if this is the solution.
The money will go to fund extra NHS spending over the next 18 months and then go to Social Care. I agree that wages in the SC sector need to improve but they are a consequence of the penny pinching we have had in that sector to date. This will not go away but it will be eased by these additional resources.
You don't really believe that do you? The much more likely scenario is that the NHS comes begging for more money and social care sits unresolved so this 1.25% quickly rises to 5%.
There will be continuing upward pressure on NHS spending, that it absolutely so. But there is a particular crisis right now that needs to be addressed and this does that.
I thought your point, with which I have some sympathy, is that this additional income should be coming from capital taxes as well as income taxes. I completely agree that the burden of taxes on income is excessive and taxes on capital are far too light. The massive gains people make on their homes tax free is distorting inter generational wealth and opportunity too. But this is a different argument from whether this money is needed. It clearly is.
A point made by quite a few people is that if this really was a one-off Covid related cost, the normal thing is to incur the debt and pay it off over years.
I think there is a perceived need for a big political gesture, which I suspect is driven by the prospect of an utterly grim NHS winter coming up. The government wants to get ahead of that curve.
In fiscal terms this has almost nothing to do with social care and not much to do with the general NHS. It is a general tax increase that is nominally hypothecated to spending that is seen as desirable, but which essentially is happening (or in the case of social care, not happening) anyway.
The best take, I think. This isn't in essence a Social Care or an NHS story. It's deficit reduction packaged in the way judged best politically. The Treasury needs more funds because Covid has messed up the public finances. NI works best politically as the source of the funds. And Health & Social Care works best politically as their earmarked destination.
Agreed. This is what I have been saying. You cannot spend £400bn with more to come AND have reduced tax revenues and do nothing about it. It would be just irresponsible.
You were saying well done the government for solving social care or at least trying to ("commend Boris for his courage". Kinabalu is saying the government are not even trying to solve social care, merely make it look as if they are trying.
I'd imagine you might have more success changing his mind about Boris' muscly physique than agreeing this is courageous.
Johnson can say he has addressed social care, where all previous governments have failed. It might not deal with anyone's real problems, but he works with symbolism. Johnson only cares about being seen to be courageous (and successful). It seems to work for him as long as he doesn't have to tackle any real problems. He doesn't have any real courage
My daughter did her LFT on Monday and got her result on Tuesday lunch time, roughly 24 hours later. We all got tested yesterday afternoon and will presumably get our results today. I think that is pretty good but because my daughter was symptomless she had been a lot of places in the 4 days before her test. She got a T&T form to complete about that this morning. It is going to take a bit of time.
With a self administered LFT you get the result immediately.
You still have to wait 10 or 15 minutes. It would be quicker for me to walk the 10 metres from my door to get an antigen test through the back window of the nearest shop, and get the result on my phone ten minutes later, than to actually go into the shop and buy the test and self-administer - which also wouldn't allow entry into bars and swimming pools etc. Assuming no queue to be tested (which there generally isn't these days as most people are now vaccinated so we don't need them any more so supply is much bigger than demand).
BUT I'm not sure if we haven't "flattened the curve" too much at this point, and end up with a worse winter than we could have had by having a few more cases now. Who knows? Nobody.
Good news. Energy storage is going to be big business in the coming decade. It’s also a brilliantly efficient way of recycling old electric car batteries, which is why Tesla are getting involved in it.
Tesla uses newly manufacture batteries in their Megapacks.
At the moment - there isn't a big enough number of old Tesla batteries to use for such purposes, yet.
As I foresaw a while back, the ability to scale from a single container up, and the reduced planning issues is making containerised battery storage very attractive.
It is - but there's no reason to assume that future battery storage won't be newly manufactured, too. The cars being built now are expected to have lifetimes of a decade or more. By the time they get scrapped, battery tech will have moved on significantly, with in terms of cost and capacity, and it might just be more economic fully to recycle the old stuff.
A battery with 70-80% capacity left may well be retired from automotive use - but would be useful for storage vs the probable cost of new one in a few years.
Passed by two Teslas and an Ioniq on my way to work today. One of the Teslas was absolubtely enormous in a way similiar cars in the UK and europe aren't, it might not have a V8 but it's still a distinctly American car - didn't look that easy for getting down country lanes never mind the autopilot.
Model S is a big wide car. Having had a big wide car (Volvo S90) I know from experience they are unsuitable for anything that isn't the primary road network.
Now that they are building European cars in China (and thus not having the awful build / quality issues from the American factory) they are appealing. My Outlander PHEV has too much useful space and higher ground clearance to make me actively think about driving one though.
It's almost as if we have had a pandemic, isn't it?
The problem is that the state is turning the pandemic healthcare spending into a permanent feature. There's not going to be any cycle down in spending once it's over. We need to have a very serious discussion in this country about life lengthening treatment for older people. The NHS is resource limited and taxpayers don't have an unlimited pool of money to throw at it. Should the NHS be offering people over 80 life lengthening treatment?
What do you mean by life lengthening? If they are in pain from cancer or whatever they need palliative care. I want people to die with dignity and in comfort, not neglected because they have reached a particular age and had their lot.
There will be an argument around the edges but there are horrific unmet medical needs in this country right now from those who wait years to get very patchy support for their psychiatric conditions, to those who wait in pain for hip and knee replacements to those who can no longer find an NHS dentist. We do need to have your discussion but I am not completely sure you will like the answer.
Remarkable to see the conversion of some on here to wealth taxes. Fantastic to see. Wish I could bottle whatever led to this change of heart.
Please don't bottle it, it is 15 years of the young getting shafted by the state!
Right, but why now?
As you say, this has been going on for ages, the left have been making this point for ages, so what is causing the conversion? Is it going to be more widespread?
My pessimistic hunch is that for most people these tax changes are sufficiently small/complicated that they won't notice too much. But I hope I'm wrong, and this is the start of the way back for a Labour govt (with the Lib Dems if they are interested) that will shift the balance of taxation from workers towards the wealthy.
Watching the Lib Dems campaign in Surrey, on increasing taxation on property wealth would be, err, interesting. Maybe even ‘brave’, as Sir Humphrey might have said.
Mansion tax was their proposal in 2010 and they did okay then.
Except that, following a decade of excessive property inflation, a ‘mansion’ is now a 3-bed semi.
Another issue, which has been largely ignored, is that in areas which have seen enormous house price inflation, there are many people who have lived there since before the absurdity.
For example, there is a square not far from me, in West London. Historically it was considered a bit blighted. Now it is 50/50 the ultra rich who have bought in, and older people who lived there when you needed a steel gate in front of the front door.
A mansion tax would add a bit of expense to the people on the square who own Overfinches - but would drive out the less well off.
Hmm. Is this part of the problem?
At a practical level, surely we want property to be used efficiently?
One of the herd of elephants in the room is that under-occupied property is overwhelmingly in the Owner Occupied sector. Owner Occupied properties are 65% of the stock, and half of them are under-occupied, which I think means 2 or more unused bedrooms.
Compare the wasted space there with the 0.9% of the stock which are long term empty homes.
A less regressive version of Council Tax would begin to change that.
I was having real trouble working out how the figures added up yesterday. The yield seemed to be far more than 1.25p would generate. The answer is that there is a further 1.25p increase in the Employers NI as well. As someone who is self employed I only pay this levy once so my tax bill just went up by about £1200. I will also have to pay a small amount of Employer NI for my wife.
But I think that this is worth it (assuming Scotland gives equivalent cover). I do not see how else the awful sequelae of Covid can be dealt with in the short term and the costs of anything like civilised social care can be provided in the longer term. These are both going to be expensive and it will take some time for tax revenues generally to get back to anything like "normal" post pandemic.
I also think that asking people to pay the first £86k of their care costs over their lifetime is enough. If they were in hospital receiving expensive treatments for a difficult medical condition they would of course pay nothing. Dementia is a lottery and there should be a limit to the extent to which the unlucky fork out. This level is high enough that most will never reach it. The elderly with resources will be paying their "hotel" bills in addition.
I think that the government has been brave to finally seize this nettle. Several other governments both before and since Dilnot looked at this and backed off. I commend Boris for his courage.
In Scotland social care has been "free" but it has also been incredibly underfunded and scarce. Many needs have simply not been met, not just for the elderly but for the disabled as well. Yesterday, on the back of this, Sturgeon promised another £800m for Social Care. I was not immediately clear if this was over a Parliament or annual, I think the latter, but it should ensure that Social Care is more of a practical reality and less of a theoretical right. We shall see. The Scottish government is rather an old hand at announcing expenditure that never actually gets spent.
But he hasn't fixed social care. The money is going overwhelmingly to the NHS. We have 100k care vacancies and the council coffers are still overdrawn before we recruit those. The total number of staff needed rises with our demographics. They all need to be paid a lot more, not just out of fairness but practically to compete for staff with labour shortages across many sectors. Social care will get a lot worse, not better, over the next decade if this is the solution.
The money will go to fund extra NHS spending over the next 18 months and then go to Social Care. I agree that wages in the SC sector need to improve but they are a consequence of the penny pinching we have had in that sector to date. This will not go away but it will be eased by these additional resources.
You don't really believe that do you? The much more likely scenario is that the NHS comes begging for more money and social care sits unresolved so this 1.25% quickly rises to 5%.
There will be continuing upward pressure on NHS spending, that it absolutely so. But there is a particular crisis right now that needs to be addressed and this does that.
I thought your point, with which I have some sympathy, is that this additional income should be coming from capital taxes as well as income taxes. I completely agree that the burden of taxes on income is excessive and taxes on capital are far too light. The massive gains people make on their homes tax free is distorting inter generational wealth and opportunity too. But this is a different argument from whether this money is needed. It clearly is.
A point made by quite a few people is that if this really was a one-off Covid related cost, the normal thing is to incur the debt and pay it off over years.
I think there is a perceived need for a big political gesture, which I suspect is driven by the prospect of an utterly grim NHS winter coming up. The government wants to get ahead of that curve.
In fiscal terms this has almost nothing to do with social care and not much to do with the general NHS. It is a general tax increase that is nominally hypothecated to spending that is seen as desirable, but which essentially is happening (or in the case of social care, not happening) anyway.
The best take, I think. This isn't in essence a Social Care or an NHS story. It's deficit reduction packaged in the way judged best politically. The Treasury needs more funds because Covid has messed up the public finances. NI works best politically as the source of the funds. And Health & Social Care works best politically as their earmarked destination.
Agreed. This is what I have been saying. You cannot spend £400bn with more to come AND have reduced tax revenues and do nothing about it. It would be just irresponsible.
You were saying well done the government for solving social care or at least trying to ("commend Boris for his courage". Kinabalu is saying the government are not even trying to solve social care, merely make it look as if they are trying.
I'd imagine you might have more success changing his mind about Boris' muscly physique than agreeing this is courageous.
I do think that this additional tax will be an important and essential income flow for the government whose finances are under appalling pressure. I also think that he was right to acknowledge the important part that Social care plays on those pressures, not just because it gives dignity to the disabled and the elderly but because indirectly it will reduce pressure currently being applied to the NHS.
I commend him for his honesty in acknowledging the problem and being brave enough to accept that higher taxes are an essential component of the solution. Whether this is enough to resolve SC remains to be seen but it is far more than any other government of any stripe has done.
Cobblers. Where has the Brexit money gone for the NHS? What has been announced is only enough to make services "get worse before they get better" (Javid's direct quote) and literally nothing for social care.
I was having real trouble working out how the figures added up yesterday. The yield seemed to be far more than 1.25p would generate. The answer is that there is a further 1.25p increase in the Employers NI as well. As someone who is self employed I only pay this levy once so my tax bill just went up by about £1200. I will also have to pay a small amount of Employer NI for my wife.
But I think that this is worth it (assuming Scotland gives equivalent cover). I do not see how else the awful sequelae of Covid can be dealt with in the short term and the costs of anything like civilised social care can be provided in the longer term. These are both going to be expensive and it will take some time for tax revenues generally to get back to anything like "normal" post pandemic.
I also think that asking people to pay the first £86k of their care costs over their lifetime is enough. If they were in hospital receiving expensive treatments for a difficult medical condition they would of course pay nothing. Dementia is a lottery and there should be a limit to the extent to which the unlucky fork out. This level is high enough that most will never reach it. The elderly with resources will be paying their "hotel" bills in addition.
I think that the government has been brave to finally seize this nettle. Several other governments both before and since Dilnot looked at this and backed off. I commend Boris for his courage.
In Scotland social care has been "free" but it has also been incredibly underfunded and scarce. Many needs have simply not been met, not just for the elderly but for the disabled as well. Yesterday, on the back of this, Sturgeon promised another £800m for Social Care. I was not immediately clear if this was over a Parliament or annual, I think the latter, but it should ensure that Social Care is more of a practical reality and less of a theoretical right. We shall see. The Scottish government is rather an old hand at announcing expenditure that never actually gets spent.
But he hasn't fixed social care. The money is going overwhelmingly to the NHS. We have 100k care vacancies and the council coffers are still overdrawn before we recruit those. The total number of staff needed rises with our demographics. They all need to be paid a lot more, not just out of fairness but practically to compete for staff with labour shortages across many sectors. Social care will get a lot worse, not better, over the next decade if this is the solution.
The money will go to fund extra NHS spending over the next 18 months and then go to Social Care. I agree that wages in the SC sector need to improve but they are a consequence of the penny pinching we have had in that sector to date. This will not go away but it will be eased by these additional resources.
You don't really believe that do you? The much more likely scenario is that the NHS comes begging for more money and social care sits unresolved so this 1.25% quickly rises to 5%.
There will be continuing upward pressure on NHS spending, that it absolutely so. But there is a particular crisis right now that needs to be addressed and this does that.
I thought your point, with which I have some sympathy, is that this additional income should be coming from capital taxes as well as income taxes. I completely agree that the burden of taxes on income is excessive and taxes on capital are far too light. The massive gains people make on their homes tax free is distorting inter generational wealth and opportunity too. But this is a different argument from whether this money is needed. It clearly is.
A point made by quite a few people is that if this really was a one-off Covid related cost, the normal thing is to incur the debt and pay it off over years.
I think there is a perceived need for a big political gesture, which I suspect is driven by the prospect of an utterly grim NHS winter coming up. The government wants to get ahead of that curve.
In fiscal terms this has almost nothing to do with social care and not much to do with the general NHS. It is a general tax increase that is nominally hypothecated to spending that is seen as desirable, but which essentially is happening (or in the case of social care, not happening) anyway.
The best take, I think. This isn't in essence a Social Care or an NHS story. It's deficit reduction packaged in the way judged best politically. The Treasury needs more funds because Covid has messed up the public finances. NI works best politically as the source of the funds. And Health & Social Care works best politically as their earmarked destination.
Agreed. This is what I have been saying. You cannot spend £400bn with more to come AND have reduced tax revenues and do nothing about it. It would be just irresponsible.
It would. I'm unusual in being on the left but big on sound money. Covid has to be paid for. My issue is who they have decided should bear the brunt. It's the opposite of the broadest shoulders. This should be Labour's attack line imo.
Remarkable to see the conversion of some on here to wealth taxes. Fantastic to see. Wish I could bottle whatever led to this change of heart.
Please don't bottle it, it is 15 years of the young getting shafted by the state!
Right, but why now?
As you say, this has been going on for ages, the left have been making this point for ages, so what is causing the conversion? Is it going to be more widespread?
My pessimistic hunch is that for most people these tax changes are sufficiently small/complicated that they won't notice too much. But I hope I'm wrong, and this is the start of the way back for a Labour govt (with the Lib Dems if they are interested) that will shift the balance of taxation from workers towards the wealthy.
Watching the Lib Dems campaign in Surrey, on increasing taxation on property wealth would be, err, interesting. Maybe even ‘brave’, as Sir Humphrey might have said.
Mansion tax was their proposal in 2010 and they did okay then.
Except that, following a decade of excessive property inflation, a ‘mansion’ is now a 3-bed semi.
Another issue, which has been largely ignored, is that in areas which have seen enormous house price inflation, there are many people who have lived there since before the absurdity.
For example, there is a square not far from me, in West London. Historically it was considered a bit blighted. Now it is 50/50 the ultra rich who have bought in, and older people who lived there when you needed a steel gate in front of the front door.
A mansion tax would add a bit of expense to the people on the square who own Overfinches - but would drive out the less well off.
Hmm. Is this part of the problem?
At a practical level, surely we want property to be used efficiently?
One of the herd of elephants in the room is that under-occupied property is overwhelmingly in the Owner Occupied sector.
A less regressive version of Council Tax would begin to change that.
So turn large areas of London into a version of Paris? Ultra rich plus ultra poor. With no one in between.
What's going to be an extra cherry on top of the bullshit is that in the run up to 2024 the Tory party will be looking to win back it's low tax credentials and the state finances will likely be close to a current budget surplus. The Tories are going to run on a manifesto commitment to lower income tax rates to 19% and 39%. It's very clear to me now what they're doing, a net transfer of tax burden from working people (not Tories) to non-working people (Tories). It's absolutely disgusting.
What they will be able to say in 2024 is that Labour would tax you even more heavily. And that will almost certainly be true. SKS may be opportunistically opposing these tax increases but his central critique (so far as it can be ascertained) is that the government is not doing enough, not too much.
And Liz Kendall affirmed that labour policy is to protect pensioners from using their homes for care
I am impressed that anyone managed to make anything out of what Liz Kendall said. To me it was, we'll tell you at the next election and no, I am not giving out any clues.
Passed by two Teslas and an Ioniq on my way to work today. One of the Teslas was absolubtely enormous in a way similiar cars in the UK and europe aren't, it might not have a V8 but it's still a distinctly American car - didn't look that easy for getting down country lanes never mind the autopilot.
Model S is a big wide car. Having had a big wide car (Volvo S90) I know from experience they are unsuitable for anything that isn't the primary road network.
Now that they are building European cars in China (and thus not having the awful build / quality issues from the American factory) they are appealing. My Outlander PHEV has too much useful space and higher ground clearance to make me actively think about driving one though.
The model X is 2 metres wide (Or 1,999 mm), not sure it'd fit through my drive gates !
Jeremy Cliffe @JeremyCliffe · 22h - CDU/CSU falls to 19%, its lowest poll result of all time - Laschet relaunch showing no signs of success - SPD and Greens creeping towards two-party majority territory
The latest poll has the SPD and Greens on 41.5% combined, well short of a majority.
They would still likely need the FDP who are on 12.5% too
Apart from Saxony where the AfD lead, the latest INSA also has the SPD ahead in every state in Germany north of Bavaria which the CSU will still win, with Baden Wurttemberg the only state the CDU still lead in https://twitter.com/JeremyCliffe/status/1435230013314506752?s=20
The CDU could still lose to the Greens in BaWü but we'll see.
The probability now is that there will be a SPD-Green-FDP coalition depending on how the FDP behave but the SPD is likely to use the threat of a SPD-Green-Linke alliance to get the FDP to play ball in negotiations.
An SPD led grand coalition can't be completely ruled out if there's a majority for it although the CDU/CSU is likely to lose so badly that they go into opposition.
We haven't had a national poll in BaWü in two years according to Wahlrecht. Are we basing this off crossbreaks?
Just my knowledge of German politics TBH. BaWü was the strongest state for the CDU in 2013 and 2nd strongest state for them in 2017 but there is a lot of split voting between state elections and federal elections so a lot of CDU voters are already receptive to the Greens. We also know that the Greens are very strong in Freiburg and Stuttgart and it's suburbs so if the CDU is less than 4/5% ahead of the Greens nationally the Greens could very narrowly carry BaWü.
Basically the old Kingdom of Protestant Prussia will vote overwhelmingly SPD.
However the more conservative and rural and Catholic historically old Kingdom of Bavaria and Grand Duchy of Baden and Kingdom of Wurttemberg and principality of Hohenzollern will still vote CSU or likely CDU in BaWu
Remarkable to see the conversion of some on here to wealth taxes. Fantastic to see. Wish I could bottle whatever led to this change of heart.
Please don't bottle it, it is 15 years of the young getting shafted by the state!
Right, but why now?
As you say, this has been going on for ages, the left have been making this point for ages, so what is causing the conversion? Is it going to be more widespread?
My pessimistic hunch is that for most people these tax changes are sufficiently small/complicated that they won't notice too much. But I hope I'm wrong, and this is the start of the way back for a Labour govt (with the Lib Dems if they are interested) that will shift the balance of taxation from workers towards the wealthy.
Watching the Lib Dems campaign in Surrey, on increasing taxation on property wealth would be, err, interesting. Maybe even ‘brave’, as Sir Humphrey might have said.
Mansion tax was their proposal in 2010 and they did okay then.
Except that, following a decade of excessive property inflation, a ‘mansion’ is now a 3-bed semi.
Another issue, which has been largely ignored, is that in areas which have seen enormous house price inflation, there are many people who have lived there since before the absurdity.
For example, there is a square not far from me, in West London. Historically it was considered a bit blighted. Now it is 50/50 the ultra rich who have bought in, and older people who lived there when you needed a steel gate in front of the front door.
A mansion tax would add a bit of expense to the people on the square who own Overfinches - but would drive out the less well off.
Hmm. Is this part of the problem?
At a practical level, surely we want property to be used efficiently?
One of the herd of elephants in the room is that under-occupied property is overwhelmingly in the Owner Occupied sector.
A less regressive version of Council Tax would begin to change that.
So turn large areas of London into a version of Paris? Ultra rich plus ultra poor. With no one in between.
Isn't that increasingly the status quo?
And increasing tax on tenants working poor, while holding taxes flat on people who own their property mortgage-free who aren't working, will exaggerate that regression won't it?
I was having real trouble working out how the figures added up yesterday. The yield seemed to be far more than 1.25p would generate. The answer is that there is a further 1.25p increase in the Employers NI as well. As someone who is self employed I only pay this levy once so my tax bill just went up by about £1200. I will also have to pay a small amount of Employer NI for my wife.
But I think that this is worth it (assuming Scotland gives equivalent cover). I do not see how else the awful sequelae of Covid can be dealt with in the short term and the costs of anything like civilised social care can be provided in the longer term. These are both going to be expensive and it will take some time for tax revenues generally to get back to anything like "normal" post pandemic.
I also think that asking people to pay the first £86k of their care costs over their lifetime is enough. If they were in hospital receiving expensive treatments for a difficult medical condition they would of course pay nothing. Dementia is a lottery and there should be a limit to the extent to which the unlucky fork out. This level is high enough that most will never reach it. The elderly with resources will be paying their "hotel" bills in addition.
I think that the government has been brave to finally seize this nettle. Several other governments both before and since Dilnot looked at this and backed off. I commend Boris for his courage.
In Scotland social care has been "free" but it has also been incredibly underfunded and scarce. Many needs have simply not been met, not just for the elderly but for the disabled as well. Yesterday, on the back of this, Sturgeon promised another £800m for Social Care. I was not immediately clear if this was over a Parliament or annual, I think the latter, but it should ensure that Social Care is more of a practical reality and less of a theoretical right. We shall see. The Scottish government is rather an old hand at announcing expenditure that never actually gets spent.
But he hasn't fixed social care. The money is going overwhelmingly to the NHS. We have 100k care vacancies and the council coffers are still overdrawn before we recruit those. The total number of staff needed rises with our demographics. They all need to be paid a lot more, not just out of fairness but practically to compete for staff with labour shortages across many sectors. Social care will get a lot worse, not better, over the next decade if this is the solution.
The money will go to fund extra NHS spending over the next 18 months and then go to Social Care. I agree that wages in the SC sector need to improve but they are a consequence of the penny pinching we have had in that sector to date. This will not go away but it will be eased by these additional resources.
You don't really believe that do you? The much more likely scenario is that the NHS comes begging for more money and social care sits unresolved so this 1.25% quickly rises to 5%.
There will be continuing upward pressure on NHS spending, that it absolutely so. But there is a particular crisis right now that needs to be addressed and this does that.
I thought your point, with which I have some sympathy, is that this additional income should be coming from capital taxes as well as income taxes. I completely agree that the burden of taxes on income is excessive and taxes on capital are far too light. The massive gains people make on their homes tax free is distorting inter generational wealth and opportunity too. But this is a different argument from whether this money is needed. It clearly is.
A point made by quite a few people is that if this really was a one-off Covid related cost, the normal thing is to incur the debt and pay it off over years.
I think there is a perceived need for a big political gesture, which I suspect is driven by the prospect of an utterly grim NHS winter coming up. The government wants to get ahead of that curve.
In fiscal terms this has almost nothing to do with social care and not much to do with the general NHS. It is a general tax increase that is nominally hypothecated to spending that is seen as desirable, but which essentially is happening (or in the case of social care, not happening) anyway.
The best take, I think. This isn't in essence a Social Care or an NHS story. It's deficit reduction packaged in the way judged best politically. The Treasury needs more funds because Covid has messed up the public finances. NI works best politically as the source of the funds. And Health & Social Care works best politically as their earmarked destination.
Agreed. This is what I have been saying. You cannot spend £400bn with more to come AND have reduced tax revenues and do nothing about it. It would be just irresponsible.
You were saying well done the government for solving social care or at least trying to ("commend Boris for his courage". Kinabalu is saying the government are not even trying to solve social care, merely make it look as if they are trying.
I'd imagine you might have more success changing his mind about Boris' muscly physique than agreeing this is courageous.
I do think that this additional tax will be an important and essential income flow for the government whose finances are under appalling pressure. I also think that he was right to acknowledge the important part that Social care plays on those pressures, not just because it gives dignity to the disabled and the elderly but because indirectly it will reduce pressure currently being applied to the NHS.
I commend him for his honesty in acknowledging the problem and being brave enough to accept that higher taxes are an essential component of the solution. Whether this is enough to resolve SC remains to be seen but it is far more than any other government of any stripe has done.
Not at all, it merely brings real terms spending per person in care back to 2010 levels by 2025, yet care staff wages will need to be higher with less migration, so real terms care per person will be lower than under the last Labour government.
Jeremy Cliffe @JeremyCliffe · 22h - CDU/CSU falls to 19%, its lowest poll result of all time - Laschet relaunch showing no signs of success - SPD and Greens creeping towards two-party majority territory
The latest poll has the SPD and Greens on 41.5% combined, well short of a majority.
They would still likely need the FDP who are on 12.5% too
Apart from Saxony where the AfD lead, the latest INSA also has the SPD ahead in every state in Germany north of Bavaria which the CSU will still win, with Baden Wurttemberg the only state the CDU still lead in https://twitter.com/JeremyCliffe/status/1435230013314506752?s=20
The CDU could still lose to the Greens in BaWü but we'll see.
The probability now is that there will be a SPD-Green-FDP coalition depending on how the FDP behave but the SPD is likely to use the threat of a SPD-Green-Linke alliance to get the FDP to play ball in negotiations.
An SPD led grand coalition can't be completely ruled out if there's a majority for it although the CDU/CSU is likely to lose so badly that they go into opposition.
We haven't had a national poll in BaWü in two years according to Wahlrecht. Are we basing this off crossbreaks?
Just my knowledge of German politics TBH. BaWü was the strongest state for the CDU in 2013 and 2nd strongest state for them in 2017 but there is a lot of split voting between state elections and federal elections so a lot of CDU voters are already receptive to the Greens. We also know that the Greens are very strong in Freiburg and Stuttgart and it's suburbs so if the CDU is less than 4/5% ahead of the Greens nationally the Greens could very narrowly carry BaWü.
Basically the old Kingdom of Protestant Prussia will vote overwhelmingly SPD.
However the more conservative and rural and Catholic historically old Kingdom of Bavaria and Grand Duchy of Baden and Kingdom of Wurttemberg and principality of Hohenzollern will still vote CSU or likely CDU in BaWu
I actually meant the other way around. I think it's optimistic (from their perspective) to say that the Union are favourites in BaWu.
We know they are only holding on to Bayern on a much reduced vote share and that is the CSU half of the draw.
My daughter did her LFT on Monday and got her result on Tuesday lunch time, roughly 24 hours later. We all got tested yesterday afternoon and will presumably get our results today. I think that is pretty good but because my daughter was symptomless she had been a lot of places in the 4 days before her test. She got a T&T form to complete about that this morning. It is going to take a bit of time.
With a self administered LFT you get the result immediately.
Yes, my son did those when he was at school and I have used them a few times when asked to before going to certain events. But for a State administered system which is integrated with T&T I thought that was pretty good. Still hoping for the all clear naturally.
I take it that the NHS money off the bus is gone and forgotten?
£18.2m a year promised. £10.4bn actually available (net EU contribution). £7bn being paid to the EU this year so c. £3bn of actual cash. New tax hike raises £12bn, so we're still £3bn short.
A lot of people cited money for the NHS as the reason they supported Brexit. That money simply doesn't exist. Which is how we have the Brexit bus cash AND a big tax increase and still not enough cash so that NHS services get worse.
As the Covid bill is cited as the excuse for the tax rise then I assume a lot more than the promised £18bn is needed - add the £12bn tax take on top perhaps? So we need £30bn and its maybe getting half that.
Good news. Energy storage is going to be big business in the coming decade. It’s also a brilliantly efficient way of recycling old electric car batteries, which is why Tesla are getting involved in it.
Tesla uses newly manufacture batteries in their Megapacks.
At the moment - there isn't a big enough number of old Tesla batteries to use for such purposes, yet.
the s and the x use different cells from the storage devices so they cant be reused for that purpose
Remarkable to see the conversion of some on here to wealth taxes. Fantastic to see. Wish I could bottle whatever led to this change of heart.
Please don't bottle it, it is 15 years of the young getting shafted by the state!
Right, but why now?
As you say, this has been going on for ages, the left have been making this point for ages, so what is causing the conversion? Is it going to be more widespread?
My pessimistic hunch is that for most people these tax changes are sufficiently small/complicated that they won't notice too much. But I hope I'm wrong, and this is the start of the way back for a Labour govt (with the Lib Dems if they are interested) that will shift the balance of taxation from workers towards the wealthy.
Watching the Lib Dems campaign in Surrey, on increasing taxation on property wealth would be, err, interesting. Maybe even ‘brave’, as Sir Humphrey might have said.
Mansion tax was their proposal in 2010 and they did okay then.
Except that, following a decade of excessive property inflation, a ‘mansion’ is now a 3-bed semi.
Another issue, which has been largely ignored, is that in areas which have seen enormous house price inflation, there are many people who have lived there since before the absurdity.
For example, there is a square not far from me, in West London. Historically it was considered a bit blighted. Now it is 50/50 the ultra rich who have bought in, and older people who lived there when you needed a steel gate in front of the front door.
A mansion tax would add a bit of expense to the people on the square who own Overfinches - but would drive out the less well off.
Hmm. Is this part of the problem?
At a practical level, surely we want property to be used efficiently?
One of the herd of elephants in the room is that under-occupied property is overwhelmingly in the Owner Occupied sector.
A less regressive version of Council Tax would begin to change that.
So turn large areas of London into a version of Paris? Ultra rich plus ultra poor. With no one in between.
Apply a fair Council Tax, and see what happens.
If 50/50 ultra rich have bought in, then all you are doing is slowing down the process.
I take it that the NHS money off the bus is gone and forgotten?
£18.2m a year promised. £10.4bn actually available (net EU contribution). £7bn being paid to the EU this year so c. £3bn of actual cash. New tax hike raises £12bn, so we're still £3bn short.
A lot of people cited money for the NHS as the reason they supported Brexit. That money simply doesn't exist. Which is how we have the Brexit bus cash AND a big tax increase and still not enough cash so that NHS services get worse.
As the Covid bill is cited as the excuse for the tax rise then I assume a lot more than the promised £18bn is needed - add the £12bn tax take on top perhaps? So we need £30bn and its maybe getting half that.
NHS Funding has increased way more than £350m a week even without COVID.
I take it that the NHS money off the bus is gone and forgotten?
£18.2m a year promised. £10.4bn actually available (net EU contribution). £7bn being paid to the EU this year so c. £3bn of actual cash. New tax hike raises £12bn, so we're still £3bn short.
A lot of people cited money for the NHS as the reason they supported Brexit. That money simply doesn't exist. Which is how we have the Brexit bus cash AND a big tax increase and still not enough cash so that NHS services get worse.
As the Covid bill is cited as the excuse for the tax rise then I assume a lot more than the promised £18bn is needed - add the £12bn tax take on top perhaps? So we need £30bn and its maybe getting half that.
So you are saying the government should have increased taxes by another £15bn? Wow.
I was having real trouble working out how the figures added up yesterday. The yield seemed to be far more than 1.25p would generate. The answer is that there is a further 1.25p increase in the Employers NI as well. As someone who is self employed I only pay this levy once so my tax bill just went up by about £1200. I will also have to pay a small amount of Employer NI for my wife.
But I think that this is worth it (assuming Scotland gives equivalent cover). I do not see how else the awful sequelae of Covid can be dealt with in the short term and the costs of anything like civilised social care can be provided in the longer term. These are both going to be expensive and it will take some time for tax revenues generally to get back to anything like "normal" post pandemic.
I also think that asking people to pay the first £86k of their care costs over their lifetime is enough. If they were in hospital receiving expensive treatments for a difficult medical condition they would of course pay nothing. Dementia is a lottery and there should be a limit to the extent to which the unlucky fork out. This level is high enough that most will never reach it. The elderly with resources will be paying their "hotel" bills in addition.
I think that the government has been brave to finally seize this nettle. Several other governments both before and since Dilnot looked at this and backed off. I commend Boris for his courage.
In Scotland social care has been "free" but it has also been incredibly underfunded and scarce. Many needs have simply not been met, not just for the elderly but for the disabled as well. Yesterday, on the back of this, Sturgeon promised another £800m for Social Care. I was not immediately clear if this was over a Parliament or annual, I think the latter, but it should ensure that Social Care is more of a practical reality and less of a theoretical right. We shall see. The Scottish government is rather an old hand at announcing expenditure that never actually gets spent.
But he hasn't fixed social care. The money is going overwhelmingly to the NHS. We have 100k care vacancies and the council coffers are still overdrawn before we recruit those. The total number of staff needed rises with our demographics. They all need to be paid a lot more, not just out of fairness but practically to compete for staff with labour shortages across many sectors. Social care will get a lot worse, not better, over the next decade if this is the solution.
The money will go to fund extra NHS spending over the next 18 months and then go to Social Care. I agree that wages in the SC sector need to improve but they are a consequence of the penny pinching we have had in that sector to date. This will not go away but it will be eased by these additional resources.
You don't really believe that do you? The much more likely scenario is that the NHS comes begging for more money and social care sits unresolved so this 1.25% quickly rises to 5%.
There will be continuing upward pressure on NHS spending, that it absolutely so. But there is a particular crisis right now that needs to be addressed and this does that.
I thought your point, with which I have some sympathy, is that this additional income should be coming from capital taxes as well as income taxes. I completely agree that the burden of taxes on income is excessive and taxes on capital are far too light. The massive gains people make on their homes tax free is distorting inter generational wealth and opportunity too. But this is a different argument from whether this money is needed. It clearly is.
A point made by quite a few people is that if this really was a one-off Covid related cost, the normal thing is to incur the debt and pay it off over years.
I think there is a perceived need for a big political gesture, which I suspect is driven by the prospect of an utterly grim NHS winter coming up. The government wants to get ahead of that curve.
In fiscal terms this has almost nothing to do with social care and not much to do with the general NHS. It is a general tax increase that is nominally hypothecated to spending that is seen as desirable, but which essentially is happening (or in the case of social care, not happening) anyway.
The best take, I think. This isn't in essence a Social Care or an NHS story. It's deficit reduction packaged in the way judged best politically. The Treasury needs more funds because Covid has messed up the public finances. NI works best politically as the source of the funds. And Health & Social Care works best politically as their earmarked destination.
Agreed. This is what I have been saying. You cannot spend £400bn with more to come AND have reduced tax revenues and do nothing about it. It would be just irresponsible.
You were saying well done the government for solving social care or at least trying to ("commend Boris for his courage". Kinabalu is saying the government are not even trying to solve social care, merely make it look as if they are trying.
I'd imagine you might have more success changing his mind about Boris' muscly physique than agreeing this is courageous.
Although in the face of Philip's forceful and eloquent arguments on this matter - the Johnson physique - I ended up caving and agreeing that the man is indeed something of a Vin Diesel.
Remarkable to see the conversion of some on here to wealth taxes. Fantastic to see. Wish I could bottle whatever led to this change of heart.
Please don't bottle it, it is 15 years of the young getting shafted by the state!
Right, but why now?
As you say, this has been going on for ages, the left have been making this point for ages, so what is causing the conversion? Is it going to be more widespread?
My pessimistic hunch is that for most people these tax changes are sufficiently small/complicated that they won't notice too much. But I hope I'm wrong, and this is the start of the way back for a Labour govt (with the Lib Dems if they are interested) that will shift the balance of taxation from workers towards the wealthy.
Watching the Lib Dems campaign in Surrey, on increasing taxation on property wealth would be, err, interesting. Maybe even ‘brave’, as Sir Humphrey might have said.
Mansion tax was their proposal in 2010 and they did okay then.
Except that, following a decade of excessive property inflation, a ‘mansion’ is now a 3-bed semi.
Another issue, which has been largely ignored, is that in areas which have seen enormous house price inflation, there are many people who have lived there since before the absurdity.
For example, there is a square not far from me, in West London. Historically it was considered a bit blighted. Now it is 50/50 the ultra rich who have bought in, and older people who lived there when you needed a steel gate in front of the front door.
A mansion tax would add a bit of expense to the people on the square who own Overfinches - but would drive out the less well off.
Hmm. Is this part of the problem?
At a practical level, surely we want property to be used efficiently?
One of the herd of elephants in the room is that under-occupied property is overwhelmingly in the Owner Occupied sector.
A less regressive version of Council Tax would begin to change that.
So turn large areas of London into a version of Paris? Ultra rich plus ultra poor. With no one in between.
Apply a fair Council Tax, and see what happens.
If 50/50 ultra rich have bought in, then all you are doing is slowing down the process.
The problem is that extra taxation can be a flea bite to the ultra rich, but eliminate access to various things for others.
The ultra rich are in favour of hikes in the Congestion Charge, for example. If you own a Bugatti Veyron, a few pounds a day to keep the proles off the road is barely noticeable.
I was having real trouble working out how the figures added up yesterday. The yield seemed to be far more than 1.25p would generate. The answer is that there is a further 1.25p increase in the Employers NI as well. As someone who is self employed I only pay this levy once so my tax bill just went up by about £1200. I will also have to pay a small amount of Employer NI for my wife.
But I think that this is worth it (assuming Scotland gives equivalent cover). I do not see how else the awful sequelae of Covid can be dealt with in the short term and the costs of anything like civilised social care can be provided in the longer term. These are both going to be expensive and it will take some time for tax revenues generally to get back to anything like "normal" post pandemic.
I also think that asking people to pay the first £86k of their care costs over their lifetime is enough. If they were in hospital receiving expensive treatments for a difficult medical condition they would of course pay nothing. Dementia is a lottery and there should be a limit to the extent to which the unlucky fork out. This level is high enough that most will never reach it. The elderly with resources will be paying their "hotel" bills in addition.
I think that the government has been brave to finally seize this nettle. Several other governments both before and since Dilnot looked at this and backed off. I commend Boris for his courage.
In Scotland social care has been "free" but it has also been incredibly underfunded and scarce. Many needs have simply not been met, not just for the elderly but for the disabled as well. Yesterday, on the back of this, Sturgeon promised another £800m for Social Care. I was not immediately clear if this was over a Parliament or annual, I think the latter, but it should ensure that Social Care is more of a practical reality and less of a theoretical right. We shall see. The Scottish government is rather an old hand at announcing expenditure that never actually gets spent.
But he hasn't fixed social care. The money is going overwhelmingly to the NHS. We have 100k care vacancies and the council coffers are still overdrawn before we recruit those. The total number of staff needed rises with our demographics. They all need to be paid a lot more, not just out of fairness but practically to compete for staff with labour shortages across many sectors. Social care will get a lot worse, not better, over the next decade if this is the solution.
The money will go to fund extra NHS spending over the next 18 months and then go to Social Care. I agree that wages in the SC sector need to improve but they are a consequence of the penny pinching we have had in that sector to date. This will not go away but it will be eased by these additional resources.
You don't really believe that do you? The much more likely scenario is that the NHS comes begging for more money and social care sits unresolved so this 1.25% quickly rises to 5%.
There will be continuing upward pressure on NHS spending, that it absolutely so. But there is a particular crisis right now that needs to be addressed and this does that.
I thought your point, with which I have some sympathy, is that this additional income should be coming from capital taxes as well as income taxes. I completely agree that the burden of taxes on income is excessive and taxes on capital are far too light. The massive gains people make on their homes tax free is distorting inter generational wealth and opportunity too. But this is a different argument from whether this money is needed. It clearly is.
A point made by quite a few people is that if this really was a one-off Covid related cost, the normal thing is to incur the debt and pay it off over years.
I think there is a perceived need for a big political gesture, which I suspect is driven by the prospect of an utterly grim NHS winter coming up. The government wants to get ahead of that curve.
In fiscal terms this has almost nothing to do with social care and not much to do with the general NHS. It is a general tax increase that is nominally hypothecated to spending that is seen as desirable, but which essentially is happening (or in the case of social care, not happening) anyway.
The best take, I think. This isn't in essence a Social Care or an NHS story. It's deficit reduction packaged in the way judged best politically. The Treasury needs more funds because Covid has messed up the public finances. NI works best politically as the source of the funds. And Health & Social Care works best politically as their earmarked destination.
Agreed. This is what I have been saying. You cannot spend £400bn with more to come AND have reduced tax revenues and do nothing about it. It would be just irresponsible.
You were saying well done the government for solving social care or at least trying to ("commend Boris for his courage". Kinabalu is saying the government are not even trying to solve social care, merely make it look as if they are trying.
I'd imagine you might have more success changing his mind about Boris' muscly physique than agreeing this is courageous.
Although in the face of Philip's forceful and eloquent arguments on this matter - the Johnson physique - I ended up caving and agreeing that the man is indeed something of a Vin Diesel.
Good news. Energy storage is going to be big business in the coming decade. It’s also a brilliantly efficient way of recycling old electric car batteries, which is why Tesla are getting involved in it.
Tesla uses newly manufacture batteries in their Megapacks.
At the moment - there isn't a big enough number of old Tesla batteries to use for such purposes, yet.
As I foresaw a while back, the ability to scale from a single container up, and the reduced planning issues is making containerised battery storage very attractive.
It is - but there's no reason to assume that future battery storage won't be newly manufactured, too. The cars being built now are expected to have lifetimes of a decade or more. By the time they get scrapped, battery tech will have moved on significantly, with in terms of cost and capacity, and it might just be more economic fully to recycle the old stuff.
A battery with 70-80% capacity left may well be retired from automotive use - but would be useful for storage vs the probable cost of new one in a few years.
Except it won't be a few years, but a decade or more. And it's not just a matter of putting them in a box - would require fairly extensive testing, plus the same costs of system integration for new batteries.
I'm sure some will be used in this way, but I doubt it will be more than a fraction of the total market.
Good news. Energy storage is going to be big business in the coming decade. It’s also a brilliantly efficient way of recycling old electric car batteries, which is why Tesla are getting involved in it.
Tesla uses newly manufacture batteries in their Megapacks.
At the moment - there isn't a big enough number of old Tesla batteries to use for such purposes, yet.
As I foresaw a while back, the ability to scale from a single container up, and the reduced planning issues is making containerised battery storage very attractive.
It is - but there's no reason to assume that future battery storage won't be newly manufactured, too. The cars being built now are expected to have lifetimes of a decade or more. By the time they get scrapped, battery tech will have moved on significantly, with in terms of cost and capacity, and it might just be more economic fully to recycle the old stuff.
It will start with Renault, surely - since they have been leasing out batteries for quite a long time.
I was having real trouble working out how the figures added up yesterday. The yield seemed to be far more than 1.25p would generate. The answer is that there is a further 1.25p increase in the Employers NI as well. As someone who is self employed I only pay this levy once so my tax bill just went up by about £1200. I will also have to pay a small amount of Employer NI for my wife.
But I think that this is worth it (assuming Scotland gives equivalent cover). I do not see how else the awful sequelae of Covid can be dealt with in the short term and the costs of anything like civilised social care can be provided in the longer term. These are both going to be expensive and it will take some time for tax revenues generally to get back to anything like "normal" post pandemic.
I also think that asking people to pay the first £86k of their care costs over their lifetime is enough. If they were in hospital receiving expensive treatments for a difficult medical condition they would of course pay nothing. Dementia is a lottery and there should be a limit to the extent to which the unlucky fork out. This level is high enough that most will never reach it. The elderly with resources will be paying their "hotel" bills in addition.
I think that the government has been brave to finally seize this nettle. Several other governments both before and since Dilnot looked at this and backed off. I commend Boris for his courage.
In Scotland social care has been "free" but it has also been incredibly underfunded and scarce. Many needs have simply not been met, not just for the elderly but for the disabled as well. Yesterday, on the back of this, Sturgeon promised another £800m for Social Care. I was not immediately clear if this was over a Parliament or annual, I think the latter, but it should ensure that Social Care is more of a practical reality and less of a theoretical right. We shall see. The Scottish government is rather an old hand at announcing expenditure that never actually gets spent.
But he hasn't fixed social care. The money is going overwhelmingly to the NHS. We have 100k care vacancies and the council coffers are still overdrawn before we recruit those. The total number of staff needed rises with our demographics. They all need to be paid a lot more, not just out of fairness but practically to compete for staff with labour shortages across many sectors. Social care will get a lot worse, not better, over the next decade if this is the solution.
The money will go to fund extra NHS spending over the next 18 months and then go to Social Care. I agree that wages in the SC sector need to improve but they are a consequence of the penny pinching we have had in that sector to date. This will not go away but it will be eased by these additional resources.
You don't really believe that do you? The much more likely scenario is that the NHS comes begging for more money and social care sits unresolved so this 1.25% quickly rises to 5%.
There will be continuing upward pressure on NHS spending, that it absolutely so. But there is a particular crisis right now that needs to be addressed and this does that.
I thought your point, with which I have some sympathy, is that this additional income should be coming from capital taxes as well as income taxes. I completely agree that the burden of taxes on income is excessive and taxes on capital are far too light. The massive gains people make on their homes tax free is distorting inter generational wealth and opportunity too. But this is a different argument from whether this money is needed. It clearly is.
A point made by quite a few people is that if this really was a one-off Covid related cost, the normal thing is to incur the debt and pay it off over years.
I think there is a perceived need for a big political gesture, which I suspect is driven by the prospect of an utterly grim NHS winter coming up. The government wants to get ahead of that curve.
In fiscal terms this has almost nothing to do with social care and not much to do with the general NHS. It is a general tax increase that is nominally hypothecated to spending that is seen as desirable, but which essentially is happening (or in the case of social care, not happening) anyway.
The best take, I think. This isn't in essence a Social Care or an NHS story. It's deficit reduction packaged in the way judged best politically. The Treasury needs more funds because Covid has messed up the public finances. NI works best politically as the source of the funds. And Health & Social Care works best politically as their earmarked destination.
Agreed. This is what I have been saying. You cannot spend £400bn with more to come AND have reduced tax revenues and do nothing about it. It would be just irresponsible.
You were saying well done the government for solving social care or at least trying to ("commend Boris for his courage". Kinabalu is saying the government are not even trying to solve social care, merely make it look as if they are trying.
I'd imagine you might have more success changing his mind about Boris' muscly physique than agreeing this is courageous.
I do think that this additional tax will be an important and essential income flow for the government whose finances are under appalling pressure. I also think that he was right to acknowledge the important part that Social care plays on those pressures, not just because it gives dignity to the disabled and the elderly but because indirectly it will reduce pressure currently being applied to the NHS.
I commend him for his honesty in acknowledging the problem and being brave enough to accept that higher taxes are an essential component of the solution. Whether this is enough to resolve SC remains to be seen but it is far more than any other government of any stripe has done.
Cobblers. Where has the Brexit money gone for the NHS? What has been announced is only enough to make services "get worse before they get better" (Javid's direct quote) and literally nothing for social care.
We are already massively up on the £350m a week that was on the bus. And, because of the pandemic, we are going even further. Given your politics I am surprised that you have a problem with this.
Tony Blair wouldn't be presenting a plan for social care and he won three elections.
He would just be doing a much better job than Starmer of destroying the Government. "Tax wealth not workers" would be a good start
Hasn't a persons wealth been created through working, or are we just going to tax the equity in someone's house
We've lived in this house 20 years; worth now, according t'internet, substantially more than we paid for it. Some small improvements, but nothing to justify that.
What's going to be an extra cherry on top of the bullshit is that in the run up to 2024 the Tory party will be looking to win back it's low tax credentials and the state finances will likely be close to a current budget surplus. The Tories are going to run on a manifesto commitment to lower income tax rates to 19% and 39%. It's very clear to me now what they're doing, a net transfer of tax burden from working people (not Tories) to non-working people (Tories). It's absolutely disgusting.
What they will be able to say in 2024 is that Labour would tax you even more heavily. And that will almost certainly be true. SKS may be opportunistically opposing these tax increases but his central critique (so far as it can be ascertained) is that the government is not doing enough, not too much.
And Liz Kendall affirmed that labour policy is to protect pensioners from using their homes for care
I am impressed that anyone managed to make anything out of what Liz Kendall said. To me it was, we'll tell you at the next election and no, I am not giving out any clues.
As I said yesterday, it seems that the entire shadow cabinet is hostage to Starmer's indecisiveness/overcaution.
Tony Blair wouldn't be presenting a plan for social care and he won three elections.
He would just be doing a much better job than Starmer of destroying the Government. "Tax wealth not workers" would be a good start
Hasn't a persons wealth been created through working, or are we just going to tax the equity in someone's house
We've lived in this house 20 years; worth now, according t'internet, substantially more than we paid for it. Some small improvements, but nothing to justify that.
Comments
Top rates of tax were higher then and they did not get the inheritances the middle aged will get now.
More of them died from Covid than the young.
They paid in NI all their lives, they should get the state pension still. Future generations will get more private pensions due to more occupational enrollment but we should still keep the basic state pension
https://electrek.co/2021/09/07/tesla-megapack-giant-project-under-construction-uk/
They really do invest a lot in both their own people and franchises, have made probably tens of thousands of millionaires over the years from the franchising operation. They’ll underwrite loans and send their own teams in to sort out problems, it’s really quite an amazing business model.
Because 9% of votes will be for parties under the threshold, they are a little bit closer than 41.5% - they are effectively on a combined 46%. So definitely still short.
They should pay the same taxes.
It should be a level playing field.
So true. Just came back from Germany, where testing* IS a public good. Let me tell you a bit about how that works, and how it keeps the country running. ...
https://twitter.com/stef_friedhoff/status/1435452751052525568
*LFTs
Got to start somewhere I suppose. Plus a degree of local resilience is no bad thing.
The best recent polls they have had were a couple of polls that had:
SPD 25
Greens 19
last week of August. Since then Greens may have dropped slightly and SPD increased slightly.
This best also only matches their best total end of April:
Greens 29
SPD 15
I guess if they are really perceived as creeping towards a majority it might help a few potential CDU-SPD switchers as it would blunt the CDU's attack that a vote for the SPD would allow die Linke into government.
The probability now is that there will be a SPD-Green-FDP coalition depending on how the FDP behave but the SPD is likely to use the threat of a SPD-Green-Linke alliance to get the FDP to play ball in negotiations.
An SPD led grand coalition can't be completely ruled out if there's a majority for it although the CDU/CSU is likely to lose so badly that they go into opposition.
I don't think the situation is the same in the Conservative party, because it is basically full of good people. You can change the Conservative party, in the way that you cannot change the labour party. I doubt anyone in the Conservative party really wants it to go in the direction of being a self interested pensioners party, the decision taken was done in the name of political expediency with little regard to the long term costs - the Boris trademark style.
1. NHS will account for 40% of public spending by 2025, up from 28% in 2004
2. In 6 months the Govt has imposed £36bn of tax rises (NI, Corporation, Income Tax thresholds)
3. https://twitter.com/jrmaidment/status/1435536062076661763
For example, there is a square not far from me, in West London. Historically it was considered a bit blighted. Now it is 50/50 the ultra rich who have bought in, and older people who lived there when you needed a steel gate in front of the front door.
A mansion tax would add a bit of expense to the people on the square who own Overfinches - but would drive out the less well off.
https://twitter.com/PedsDocDex/status/1435191439516966916
Home, self-administered, ~15 minute wait COVID tests available in an Amsterdam supermarket for about $3.50 each. I don’t understand why we *still* don’t have these in the US!
Unfortunately, the cynic in me says that these successes do a great job, of highlighting how uselessly unproductive most of the standing bureaucracy can be the rest of the time.
Kinabalu is saying the government are not even trying to solve social care, merely make it look as if they are trying.
I'd imagine you might have more success changing his mind about Boris' muscly physique than agreeing this is courageous.
As I foresaw a while back, the ability to scale from a single container up, and the reduced planning issues is making containerised battery storage very attractive.
We are going to have to suck it up.
Its rather sick but it seems economically @contrarian might have had a point if this is the way we're going to go. If we hadn't locked down the nation, if we had just let the virus take its course naturally, then the number of people requiring pensions and care homes would have come down, the number of workers wouldn't as much, and the people obsessing over their inheritance may have had it by now.
Personally I still think that would have been the wrong thing to do, but if all of the paying for the pandemic is going to fall on those who sacrificed rather than were saved from it then maybe it wouldn't have been?
I commend him for his honesty in acknowledging the problem and being brave enough to accept that higher taxes are an essential component of the solution. Whether this is enough to resolve SC remains to be seen but it is far more than any other government of any stripe has done.
1) PT implies that IT would be the right place to tax instead of NI. I agree. But he is also against breaking the manifesto pledge, which IT increase would do. He is silent on the point.
2) You can't, in a conversation for grown ups, discuss issues one at a time. That's what back benchers do when grubbing for votes. If you oppose a tax rise, you have to say what you would do instead, when we are already borrowing 300 billion a year and you insist on manifesto pledges being kept. Single issue politics is for students, MPs, XR and loony lefties.
3) Boris has a country to run and a tricky election to win. Old people vote; younger ones less so. That is not Boris's fault. Younger people should try the boring democratic process for a change and see what happens.
4) I think there is a decent chance that this plan will entirely unravel once the devil in the detail comes to light. If it does we are in T May territory again.
There's nothing original, no reform, no credibility there just further ramping up the taxes on people who work while ignoring and potentially in the future further reducing Income Tax so that NI can continue to replace it.
I did not vote Conservatives to have a Gordon Brown as Chancellor.
At the moment you get SC if you can afford it or if you are peculiarly lucky on a post code lottery. That needs to change and that needs money.
Someone posted yesterday the average price In Guildford is £550K.
We have had over two decades of concentrating the wealth and jobs in London and the south east. Levelling up is a great idea but this govt cannot deliver it.
Take Back ControlExclusive - leaked government email seen by Sky News reveals ministers bow to pressure from Australia over their climate asks in trade deal
Tune into @skynews at 11am with @adamboultonSKY for full details
https://twitter.com/SamCoatesSky/status/1435541318516854788
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21783912/#:~:text=The results revealed that administration,histological structure of reproductive organs.
The results revealed that administration of ivermectin once weekly for 8 weeks induced slight fertility disturbances.
Suspect @Keir_Starmer may use that in #PMQs.
Especially as @BorisJohnson yesterday selectively quoted IFS saying his plan was 'progressive' (tho not as progressive as income tax).
https://twitter.com/paulwaugh/status/1435541694930378755
The cars being built now are expected to have lifetimes of a decade or more. By the time they get scrapped, battery tech will have moved on significantly, with in terms of cost and capacity, and it might just be more economic fully to recycle the old stuff.
The problem is that too many people either don't understand the iniquity of yesterday - and that too many of those that do are in favour of such iniquity. 'Taxes on others' tends to be popular and those who work for a living now are 'others' for many voters.
BUT I'm not sure if we haven't "flattened the curve" too much at this point, and end up with a worse winter than we could have had by having a few more cases now. Who knows? Nobody.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02423-8
Note, quite a lot of this we are only learning thanks to Covid...
Now that they are building European cars in China (and thus not having the awful build / quality issues from the American factory) they are appealing. My Outlander PHEV has too much useful space and higher ground clearance to make me actively think about driving one though.
There will be an argument around the edges but there are horrific unmet medical needs in this country right now from those who wait years to get very patchy support for their psychiatric conditions, to those who wait in pain for hip and knee replacements to those who can no longer find an NHS dentist. We do need to have your discussion but I am not completely sure you will like the answer.
At a practical level, surely we want property to be used efficiently?
One of the herd of elephants in the room is that under-occupied property is overwhelmingly in the Owner Occupied sector. Owner Occupied properties are 65% of the stock, and half of them are under-occupied, which I think means 2 or more unused bedrooms.
Compare the wasted space there with the 0.9% of the stock which are long term empty homes.
A less regressive version of Council Tax would begin to change that.
He would just be doing a much better job than Starmer of destroying the Government. "Tax wealth not workers" would be a good start
However the more conservative and rural and Catholic historically old Kingdom of Bavaria and Grand Duchy of Baden and Kingdom of Wurttemberg and principality of Hohenzollern will still vote CSU or likely CDU in BaWu
And increasing tax on tenants working poor, while holding taxes flat on people who own their property mortgage-free who aren't working, will exaggerate that regression won't it?
We know they are only holding on to Bayern on a much reduced vote share and that is the CSU half of the draw.
£18.2m a year promised. £10.4bn actually available (net EU contribution). £7bn being paid to the EU this year so c. £3bn of actual cash. New tax hike raises £12bn, so we're still £3bn short.
A lot of people cited money for the NHS as the reason they supported Brexit. That money simply doesn't exist. Which is how we have the Brexit bus cash AND a big tax increase and still not enough cash so that NHS services get worse.
As the Covid bill is cited as the excuse for the tax rise then I assume a lot more than the promised £18bn is needed - add the £12bn tax take on top perhaps? So we need £30bn and its maybe getting half that.
18650 vs 2170
If 50/50 ultra rich have bought in, then all you are doing is slowing down the process.
"If we put a 10% tax on the wealth of those with over £100m, we would raise £69 billion."
That would *only* raise £69bn? really? barely a mark on the public finances?
The ultra rich are in favour of hikes in the Congestion Charge, for example. If you own a Bugatti Veyron, a few pounds a day to keep the proles off the road is barely noticeable.
And it's not just a matter of putting them in a box - would require fairly extensive testing, plus the same costs of system integration for new batteries.
I'm sure some will be used in this way, but I doubt it will be more than a fraction of the total market.