@ONS Public service productivity in Quarter 2 2024 is estimated to be 8.5% below its pre-#COVID19 pandemic peak in Quarter 4 (Oct to Dec) 2019.
And this is our problem in a nutshell. Our public services are falling apart, not because of cuts in spending which have been modest to non existent) but because we are getting less and less for our money. That is the problem the last government largely ducked and which this government has to come to terms with. If they don't no amount of additional taxation will be enough.
Improving productivity in the public sector requires much the same as in the private sector. Invest in modern buildings, modern technology and staff development. It's not Brain surgery.
NHS productivity improved noticeably in the first half of the year and will improve even more second half as the strikes are over:
It does require these things but it also requires a relentless grinding on costs and the elimination of unnecessary work and procedures. When I was a partner in a firm watching the pennies and the proportion of staff time on fee earning work was very much a part of the job description and it is hard and tedious work, especially when everyone is busy. One of my partners had a saying is that all committees need to have an odd number of participants but 3 is too many. In other words, get someone on the job and let them get on with it.
I am not anti-farmer and it is fake news to say otherwise.
I wasn't going to miss an opportunity to use this line
The most dangerous place to stand in Westminster is the space between Kemi Badenoch and a passing bandwagon.
Are we really about to get five years of daily hating on Kemi?
You're sounding like the Corbynites who regularly had a go at OGH and myself for pointing out Corbyn was a bit of a duffer.
Anyhoo, did you not read the previous thread.
Corbyn even in 2019 polled higher than Starmer is now and in 2017 Corbyn got a higher voteshare than Starmer did in July
And lost.
It was Corbyn's misfortune that in 2017 May led a largely united right as did Boris in 2019. It was Starmer's luck that in 2024 he faced a right divided between Tory and Reform giving him huge gains in seats under FPTP for tiny rise in Labour voteshare.
Had UKIP polled much higher in 2017 at Tory expense then Corbyn would likely have beaten May and become PM. Indeed until Boris replaced May in 2019 Farage's then Brexit party were eating into the Tory vote to such an extent the polls suggested Corbyn would become PM in a Spring 2019 GE
Ed Davey was at the farmers' rally as well so does that mean he was on the same bandwagon?
Oppositions oppose - that's what they do - but there's a difference between contradiction and argument as Mr Python once demonstrated. For every tax rise they wish to reverse, both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats have to show how they would "compensate" the public finances. I suspect both may find it difficult as we approach the next election to square the circle of cutting taxes, improving services and balancing the public finances.
As we've also seen this morning, public sector productivity remains a big problem - the kneejerk response of sacking 50% of civil servants won't help that at all.
The problem is we can't have a proper conversation about tax in this country - there's a claim from some we are "over taxed" (not quite sure what that means) and there's a valid question as to whether we get any "value" from the taxes we pay but the truth is we have a deficit which needs to be closed and borrowing which needs to be reduced and there's little or no honesty from anyone about any of this.
Yes, cut spending if there is an obvious argument (and nothing, including the armed forces, should be exempt) but the Party is over and we all now need to pay the bill and if that means raising basic rate tax to 25p and higher rate to 50p and looking at property and land asset value taxation, so be it.
On the basis that I want my Government to be competant even if I disagree with them on a lot of things, the Starmer reign so far really does worry me.
Three big tax policies have resulted from the Budget - Removing the Winter Fuel allowance (which I know was announced prior to the budget), Inheritence tax on family run businesses and farms, and increasing Employer's NI.
The first two of these are being done for explainable reasons (The state should not be giving money to those who don't need it just because they are old, and rich investors are using the IHT arrangments to avoid paying tax) but both have been completely ballsed up with their implementation - not the PR but the actual planned implementation.
It would have been easily possible to have devised a system to properly means test the WFA removal rather than using the blunt tool of Pension Credit and it was certainly possible to devise an IHT system that did not threaten the future of family farms and businesses whilst still closing the investment loophole. I just get the impression that, because they don't actually understand (or care?) about the collateral damage, they plough on with the most basic sledgehammer applications of their plans safe in the knowledge that they can always point to the intended target as an excuse. They are the Bomber Harris of politics.
(On the third policy of employers NI we have yet to see the effects of that but I suspect a lot of smaller businesses will be laying off staff or shutting down entirely and again there seems to be no effort to differentiate between larger companies and the small businesses which run on very low profit margins)
Meanwhile we still don't have an effective or fair tax regime for multinationals.
@ONS Public service productivity in Quarter 2 2024 is estimated to be 8.5% below its pre-#COVID19 pandemic peak in Quarter 4 (Oct to Dec) 2019.
And this is our problem in a nutshell. Our public services are falling apart, not because of cuts in spending which have been modest to non existent) but because we are getting less and less for our money. That is the problem the last government largely ducked and which this government has to come to terms with. If they don't no amount of additional taxation will be enough.
And the multi billion pound question is... why?
Is it about a lack of the smack of firm management, is it the money spent on diversity consultants, or is it that we have solved bottlenecks with the short term fix of extra bodies rather than equipping staff with better tools to achieve more?
My guess (based on the way that capital budgets always get raided to fix crises, and have been for decades, and we're going to be under Hunt) is that the last diagnosis is the main problem.
I think from my limited experience that there is a lack of quality management, that WFH has in fact reduced people's output despite all the claims to the contrary, that it has encouraged a mind set that this job is for my benefit rather than the benefit of the people to whom the service that is being provided, that it is my mental health and work life balance that is important, not the quality of life of the service users I am supposedly working for and, perhaps above all, the never ending multiplication of emails to masses of people who don't need to receive them but get interrupted anyway.
None of this will stop me from WFH today, of course.
I’ve found it made me more efficient at delivering existing work, and less efficient at winning new work. I’m back in most of the time now.
It’s definitely a challenge for our new joiners and graduate entry too.
My daughter, who qualified as a solicitor last week, had a job whilst at University with the SSSC which is a regulator of the care sector in Scotland. All the time she was working for them (admittedly during Covid) she was WFH and only rarely met her colleagues.
They offered her a traineeship but she, rightly in my view, came to the conclusion that she would not learn from that in the same way as she would in the office and she went for a private firm instead. Her current job has her in court pretty much every day and has given her a vast range of experience she simply would not have got with the SSSC who were offering her more money. The management there were genuinely surprised when she turned them down.
For young people yes being in the office 4/5 days a week or indeed 5 out of 5 may be a benefit as they get to know their team and do work in person.
For parents, especially mothers, wfh however is a godsend as it gives them time to do the school run, do the washing, cooking, cleaning etc in breaks from work at home in the day which they couldn't so easily with the daily commute and also saves on travel costs
Tories and the right wing need to be careful. They seem to be in a bubble of rage. They remind me of the Harris campaign.
They are in danger of shoring up their base elites
That you think hill farmers an "elite" is quite telling.
Somebody is in a bubble, but....
To someone who has nothing trying to get by, prioritising talking about people with over a million quid in assets or access to private education might seem a teensy wheensy bit elitist.
And yes we are all in bubbles these days, Every single one of us.
"Not a priority" is politico-speak for "never". It's designed to let people down gently, with some vague hope that one day things might be different, whereas actually there never will be; the idea is it shuts them up, and they eventually accept it.
The non-taxable status of agricultural land and education had been in place for decades, across multiple administrations, and for very good reason; you raise tax on the things that make sense and not on those that don't.
To simply accept it is to accept a permanent shift to the Left, and Labour's dividing lines.
I see no reason why the Tories should do that.
My hunch is that Badenoch is walking into the same trap that. Cameron set for Milliband. Come the next election, the electorate will be reminded daily that the Tories opposed every measure required to the fix the mess they created. The fact that she currently backs spending but objects to every measure required to pay for it feels like a mistake
The mess is being created by your lot.
By the time of the next election the electorate aren't going to thank you for anemic growth and fewer jobs.
Ed Davey was at the farmers' rally as well so does that mean he was on the same bandwagon?
Oppositions oppose - that's what they do - but there's a difference between contradiction and argument as Mr Python once demonstrated. For every tax rise they wish to reverse, both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats have to show how they would "compensate" the public finances. I suspect both may find it difficult as we approach the next election to square the circle of cutting taxes, improving services and balancing the public finances.
As we've also seen this morning, public sector productivity remains a big problem - the kneejerk response of sacking 50% of civil servants won't help that at all.
The problem is we can't have a proper conversation about tax in this country - there's a claim from some we are "over taxed" (not quite sure what that means) and there's a valid question as to whether we get any "value" from the taxes we pay but the truth is we have a deficit which needs to be closed and borrowing which needs to be reduced and there's little or no honesty from anyone about any of this.
Yes, cut spending if there is an obvious argument (and nothing, including the armed forces, should be exempt) but the Party is over and we all now need to pay the bill and if that means raising basic rate tax to 25p and higher rate to 50p and looking at property and land asset value taxation, so be it.
This highlights the fundamental flaw in Reeves budget. Taxes were increased as was necessary but spending increased even more with consequential increases in borrowing. She might get lucky and be bailed out by an unexpected surge in world growth but if she is unlucky and the winds of change from the US are adverse she has put the ship of state in a highly precarious position dangerously close to the rocks.
Without doubt one of the worst thread headers TSE has ever done.
No party wins general elections without shoring up their core vote first and for Tories they include private school parents and farmers. Voters also want a choice not an echo, if you want to hammer farmers with inheritance tax and hit private school parents with VAT you vote Labour anyway and if the Tories don't stand up for farmers and private school parents they will leak voters to Reform and the LDs who will.
Plus 57% of voters oppose the hated tractor tax anyway
Not to mention VAT on school fees will just reduce the scholarships they provide and hit smaller schools most making them even more exclusive. While we need family farms to produce our food, you can't make food from houses. Most farms may be asset rich but they are income poor
If you are asset rich but income poor, you can get a mortgage or similar sort of loan. It’s not difficult.
We need houses to live in. You can’t make houses from food (pace Hansel & Gretel).
When reading headers like this it is worth bearing in mind that only a few weeks ago TSE was writing headers assuring us that Badenoch was utterly toast and had no chance of being LOTO. Not sure his political radar is necessarily that accurate these days.
I agree. Not that sure it ever was.
Clearly both Conservative policies are right and the right thing to do. "Oh but the cost, the cost". So a policy which will "only" wreck 500 farming businesses per year and only raise £1B per annum at most should not be reversed ?
The real question is will the Lib Dems guarantee to vote to abolish IHT ? If they don't their councillors need not imagine they will be re-elected any more than Labour ones.
The figure 100k farmers is bizarre, there must be towards 500k who are directly affected by the farming aspect of this ludicrous policy and probably 2 or 3 million who are closely linked to such people. You can double those figures for small businesses.
It might be that on-one in the top tier of this vile government have ever knowingly fucked a Tory. Presumably us Tories have more taste.
On the basis that I want my Government to be competant even if I disagree with them on a lot of things, the Starmer reign so far really does worry me.
Three big tax policies have resulted from the Budget - Removing the Winter Fuel allowance (which I know was announced prior to the budget), Inheritence tax on family run businesses and farms, and increasing Employer's NI.
The first two of these are being done for explainable reasons (The state should not be giving money to those who don't need it just because they are old, and rich investors are using the IHT arrangments to avoid paying tax) but both have been completely ballsed up with their implementation - not the PR but the actual planned implementation.
It would have been easily possible to have devised a system to properly means test the WFA removal rather than using the blunt tool of Pension Credit and it was certainly possible to devise an IHT system that did not threaten the future of family farms and businesses whilst still closing the investment loophole. I just get the impression that, because they don't actually understand (or care?) about the collateral damage, they plough on with the most basic sledgehammer applications of their plans safe in the knowledge that they can always point to the intended target as an excuse. They are the Bomber Harris of politics.
(On the third policy of employers NI we have yet to see the effects of that but I suspect a lot of smaller businesses will be laying off staff or shutting down entirely and again there seems to be no effort to differentiate between larger companies and the small businesses which run on very low profit margins)
Meanwhile we still don't have an effective or fair tax regime for multinationals.
Isn't the problem not just the employer NI increase but also the substantial rise in the NMW making jobs much more expensive, especially in the hospitality industry
Putin will negotiate if Zelensky hands half his country over to Russia, if Ukranians are asked about those terms they might decide to still fight on. Ukranians at a push might accept a shared sovereignty with Russia over Crimea but no more
When reading headers like this it is worth bearing in mind that only a few weeks ago TSE was writing headers assuring us that Badenoch was utterly toast and had no chance of being LOTO. Not sure his political radar is necessarily that accurate these days.
We all get to make our own political bets. If you think Badenoch is great, bet accordingly.
Ed Davey was at the farmers' rally as well so does that mean he was on the same bandwagon?
Oppositions oppose - that's what they do - but there's a difference between contradiction and argument as Mr Python once demonstrated. For every tax rise they wish to reverse, both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats have to show how they would "compensate" the public finances. I suspect both may find it difficult as we approach the next election to square the circle of cutting taxes, improving services and balancing the public finances.
As we've also seen this morning, public sector productivity remains a big problem - the kneejerk response of sacking 50% of civil servants won't help that at all.
The problem is we can't have a proper conversation about tax in this country - there's a claim from some we are "over taxed" (not quite sure what that means) and there's a valid question as to whether we get any "value" from the taxes we pay but the truth is we have a deficit which needs to be closed and borrowing which needs to be reduced and there's little or no honesty from anyone about any of this.
Yes, cut spending if there is an obvious argument (and nothing, including the armed forces, should be exempt) but the Party is over and we all now need to pay the bill and if that means raising basic rate tax to 25p and higher rate to 50p and looking at property and land asset value taxation, so be it.
If the opposition was still Labour then yes, they would be unable to get a word out edgeways for the howling of Kuensberg etc al "How will you pay for it? You're going to tax toddlers!" But I don't expect lib Ems or Conservatives will experience the same barracking.
Tories and the right wing need to be careful. They seem to be in a bubble of rage. They remind me of the Harris campaign.
They are in danger of shoring up their base elites
That you think hill farmers an "elite" is quite telling.
Somebody is in a bubble, but....
To someone who has nothing trying to get by, prioritising talking about people with over a million quid in assets or access to private education might seem a teensy wheensy bit elitist.
And yes we are all in bubbles these days, Every single one of us.
"Not a priority" is politico-speak for "never". It's designed to let people down gently, with some vague hope that one day things might be different, whereas actually there never will be; the idea is it shuts them up, and they eventually accept it.
The non-taxable status of agricultural land and education had been in place for decades, across multiple administrations, and for very good reason; you raise tax on the things that make sense and not on those that don't.
To simply accept it is to accept a permanent shift to the Left, and Labour's dividing lines.
I see no reason why the Tories should do that.
My hunch is that Badenoch is walking into the same trap that. Cameron set for Milliband. Come the next election, the electorate will be reminded daily that the Tories opposed every measure required to the fix the mess they created. The fact that she currently backs spending but objects to every measure required to pay for it feels like a mistake
The mess is being created by your lot.
By the time of the next election the electorate aren't going to thank you for anemic growth and fewer jobs.
That’s exactly what Ed Milliband said
I've got news for you: the LOTO isn't Ed Miliband, and it isn't the 2010-2015 parliament anymore.
And Cameron delivered more jobs and some growth, as well as income tax cuts, which is why he was re-elected.
Without doubt one of the worst thread headers TSE has ever done.
No party wins general elections without shoring up their core vote first and for Tories they include private school parents and farmers. Voters also want a choice not an echo, if you want to hammer farmers with inheritance tax and hit private school parents with VAT you vote Labour anyway and if the Tories don't stand up for farmers and private school parents they will leak voters to Reform and the LDs who will.
Plus 57% of voters oppose the hated tractor tax anyway
Not to mention VAT on school fees will just reduce the scholarships they provide and hit smaller schools most making them even more exclusive. While we need family farms to produce our food, you can't make food from houses. Most farms may be asset rich but they are income poor
If you are asset rich but income poor, you can get a mortgage or similar sort of loan. It’s not difficult.
We need houses to live in. You can’t make houses from food (pace Hansel & Gretel).
No you can't as you don't have the income to repay a mortgage for starters.
We need houses to live in mainly in cities, suburbs and towns, we need the countryside to still provide our food mainly
An excellent thread header @TheScreamingEagles . Whether I agree or not is another matter. I've not commented on either tax because I don't know whether I agree with them or not. In principle they are obvious tax raising measures. My only concern is the details. Do they do more harm than good? Are the impacts worse than the benefits? The LDs who I support are against both. However I don't slavishly follow them. Do they object because the taxes are wrong or do they object for political advantages.
However regardless the header is succinct, entertaining and thought provoking.
Without doubt one of the worst thread headers TSE has ever done.
No party wins general elections without shoring up their core vote first and for Tories they include private school parents and farmers. Voters also want a choice not an echo, if you want to hammer farmers with inheritance tax and hit private school parents with VAT you vote Labour anyway and if the Tories don't stand up for farmers and private school parents they will leak voters to Reform and the LDs who will.
Plus 57% of voters oppose the hated tractor tax anyway
Not to mention VAT on school fees will just reduce the scholarships they provide and hit smaller schools most making them even more exclusive. While we need family farms to produce our food, you can't make food from houses. Most farms may be asset rich but they are income poor
If you are asset rich but income poor, you can get a mortgage or similar sort of loan. It’s not difficult.
We need houses to live in. You can’t make houses from food (pace Hansel & Gretel).
Actually it is often very difficult for farmers. One of the long term issues in farming has been securing loans and mortgages, at least at the same rates that the rest of us enjoy.
There is an obvious difference between a £3m farm and a £3m private house. The former produces food/drink that the country needs, the latter is private property.
Plenty of houses can be worth £3m in the sarfeast without being a mansion - its a crazy market. Tax is due, it's probably being sold, sentimental value perhaps but its just a house and the person inheriting almost certainly already owns at least one other.
The farm? Selling up removes the business (unless there are large liquid assets which can go to pay the bill. Selling up realistically means small farms being bought by bigger farms, which changes the farming industry into something that isn't optimal for producing food/drink products which the country needs.
Comparing one to the other is a bit daft...
If you are only in farming because of a tax loophole which farmers benefit from, and the rest of us don't, then maybe you shouldn't be in farming?
If the opposition was still Labour then yes, they would be unable to get a word out edgeways for the howling of Kuensberg etc al "How will you pay for it? You're going to tax toddlers!" But I don't expect lib Ems or Conservatives will experience the same barracking.
Interesting piece on just how spectacularly bad at the job she was
@ONS Public service productivity in Quarter 2 2024 is estimated to be 8.5% below its pre-#COVID19 pandemic peak in Quarter 4 (Oct to Dec) 2019.
That ought to be low hanging fruit for a competent administration.
Unless the productivity drop is due to civil servants WFH. Back in the days of Good King Boris, websites would even warn of slower than normal service owing to WFH. Roll on a couple of years and the right to WFH is stoutly defended by PBers with highly-paid sitting-down jobs, and in any case the government took the opportunity to office buildings.
While Bademoch has promised to reverse the IHT changes for farmers and the VAT on school fees, she does not seem to have done the same for the end of the universal winter fuel allowance.
It is Tory policy to reverse the winter fuel cut too
It's all adding up, isn't it?
It is also Tory policy to scrap the big payrises given to NHS GPs and train drivers Labour pushed through to appease their core vote
I think a wise man once said, “No party wins general elections without shoring up their core vote first”.
@ONS Public service productivity in Quarter 2 2024 is estimated to be 8.5% below its pre-#COVID19 pandemic peak in Quarter 4 (Oct to Dec) 2019.
And this is our problem in a nutshell. Our public services are falling apart, not because of cuts in spending which have been modest to non existent) but because we are getting less and less for our money. That is the problem the last government largely ducked and which this government has to come to terms with. If they don't no amount of additional taxation will be enough.
And the multi billion pound question is... why?
Is it about a lack of the smack of firm management, is it the money spent on diversity consultants, or is it that we have solved bottlenecks with the short term fix of extra bodies rather than equipping staff with better tools to achieve more?
My guess (based on the way that capital budgets always get raided to fix crises, and have been for decades, and we're going to be under Hunt) is that the last diagnosis is the main problem.
I think from my limited experience that there is a lack of quality management, that WFH has in fact reduced people's output despite all the claims to the contrary, that it has encouraged a mind set that this job is for my benefit rather than the benefit of the people to whom the service that is being provided, that it is my mental health and work life balance that is important, not the quality of life of the service users I am supposedly working for and, perhaps above all, the never ending multiplication of emails to masses of people who don't need to receive them but get interrupted anyway.
None of this will stop me from WFH today, of course.
I’ve found it made me more efficient at delivering existing work, and less efficient at winning new work. I’m back in most of the time now.
It’s definitely a challenge for our new joiners and graduate entry too.
My daughter, who qualified as a solicitor last week, had a job whilst at University with the SSSC which is a regulator of the care sector in Scotland. All the time she was working for them (admittedly during Covid) she was WFH and only rarely met her colleagues.
They offered her a traineeship but she, rightly in my view, came to the conclusion that she would not learn from that in the same way as she would in the office and she went for a private firm instead. Her current job has her in court pretty much every day and has given her a vast range of experience she simply would not have got with the SSSC who were offering her more money. The management there were genuinely surprised when she turned them down.
For young people yes being in the office 4/5 days a week or indeed 5 out of 5 may be a benefit as they get to know their team and do work in person.
For parents, especially mothers, wfh however is a godsend as it gives them time to do the school run, do the washing, cooking, cleaning etc in breaks from work at home in the day which they couldn't so easily with the daily commute and also saves on travel costs
The attractions for those mothers are obvious and it no doubt improves their work life balance enormously. The ONS seem to be indicating, however, that it is not doing a lot for their output.
Ed Davey was at the farmers' rally as well so does that mean he was on the same bandwagon?
Oppositions oppose - that's what they do - but there's a difference between contradiction and argument as Mr Python once demonstrated. For every tax rise they wish to reverse, both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats have to show how they would "compensate" the public finances. I suspect both may find it difficult as we approach the next election to square the circle of cutting taxes, improving services and balancing the public finances.
As we've also seen this morning, public sector productivity remains a big problem - the kneejerk response of sacking 50% of civil servants won't help that at all.
The problem is we can't have a proper conversation about tax in this country - there's a claim from some we are "over taxed" (not quite sure what that means) and there's a valid question as to whether we get any "value" from the taxes we pay but the truth is we have a deficit which needs to be closed and borrowing which needs to be reduced and there's little or no honesty from anyone about any of this.
Yes, cut spending if there is an obvious argument (and nothing, including the armed forces, should be exempt) but the Party is over and we all now need to pay the bill and if that means raising basic rate tax to 25p and higher rate to 50p and looking at property and land asset value taxation, so be it.
Your final paragraph might be fine proposals for a left of centre Labour party and the Greens albeit at the risk of losing swing voters who hate higher taxes. They certainly aren't for a right of centre Conservative party
Ed Davey was at the farmers' rally as well so does that mean he was on the same bandwagon?
Oppositions oppose - that's what they do - but there's a difference between contradiction and argument as Mr Python once demonstrated. For every tax rise they wish to reverse, both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats have to show how they would "compensate" the public finances. I suspect both may find it difficult as we approach the next election to square the circle of cutting taxes, improving services and balancing the public finances.
As we've also seen this morning, public sector productivity remains a big problem - the kneejerk response of sacking 50% of civil servants won't help that at all.
The problem is we can't have a proper conversation about tax in this country - there's a claim from some we are "over taxed" (not quite sure what that means) and there's a valid question as to whether we get any "value" from the taxes we pay but the truth is we have a deficit which needs to be closed and borrowing which needs to be reduced and there's little or no honesty from anyone about any of this.
Yes, cut spending if there is an obvious argument (and nothing, including the armed forces, should be exempt) but the Party is over and we all now need to pay the bill and if that means raising basic rate tax to 25p and higher rate to 50p and looking at property and land asset value taxation, so be it.
This highlights the fundamental flaw in Reeves budget. Taxes were increased as was necessary but spending increased even more with consequential increases in borrowing. She might get lucky and be bailed out by an unexpected surge in world growth but if she is unlucky and the winds of change from the US are adverse she has put the ship of state in a highly precarious position dangerously close to the rocks.
Indeed and this is why I don't support either Labour or the Conservatives (and I'm struggling with the others as well).
I'd have much preferred a more radical Budget from Reeves with big tax rises and spending cuts to reduce the deficit and borrowing (to be clear, I'm not opposed to all borrowing by any stretch - borrowing for capital investment isn't a bad idea and an obvious way to fund infrastructure projects).
Her problem is she probably couldn't sell spending cuts to her Party any more than Hunt could have sold tax rises to his - his NI cuts were irresponsible and the equivalent of salting the earth for the new Government.
The debate on tax has been so poisoned you can't even say the words "income tax rises" without getting a heap of vitriol from all sides. Let me be very clear - IF you can bring the public finances back under control and get some growth in the economy, tax cuts can be back on the table (though I'd much rather we paid off the debt to reduce interest payments and leave a better economic legacy for the future).
Don't agree with the premise of the header. The principal purpose of the Opposition is to oppose. If you can highlight an issue by jumping on a bandwagon climb right aboard. There is plenty of time to produce a coherent notion of an alternative but there is no need to start making difficult choices right now.
That's true, but opposing everything for the sake of opposing is very much a page from the Corbyn handbook.
He was a fairly effective LOTO against May. He found Boris much harder to handle. And it is not really a question of opposing "everything", only the unpopular parts. Of course, with Reeves in charge, that can feel like everything.
That was partly because Boris was also an effective LOTO against May.
On the subject of farmers and IHT: my father was a (tenant) farmer. He used to say that tenant farmers lived rich and died poor, while owner-occupiers lived poor and died rich.
On the basis that I want my Government to be competant even if I disagree with them on a lot of things, the Starmer reign so far really does worry me.
Three big tax policies have resulted from the Budget - Removing the Winter Fuel allowance (which I know was announced prior to the budget), Inheritence tax on family run businesses and farms, and increasing Employer's NI.
The first two of these are being done for explainable reasons (The state should not be giving money to those who don't need it just because they are old, and rich investors are using the IHT arrangments to avoid paying tax) but both have been completely ballsed up with their implementation - not the PR but the actual planned implementation.
It would have been easily possible to have devised a system to properly means test the WFA removal rather than using the blunt tool of Pension Credit and it was certainly possible to devise an IHT system that did not threaten the future of family farms and businesses whilst still closing the investment loophole. I just get the impression that, because they don't actually understand (or care?) about the collateral damage, they plough on with the most basic sledgehammer applications of their plans safe in the knowledge that they can always point to the intended target as an excuse. They are the Bomber Harris of politics.
(On the third policy of employers NI we have yet to see the effects of that but I suspect a lot of smaller businesses will be laying off staff or shutting down entirely and again there seems to be no effort to differentiate between larger companies and the small businesses which run on very low profit margins)
Meanwhile we still don't have an effective or fair tax regime for multinationals.
Isn't the problem not just the employer NI increase but also the substantial rise in the NMW making jobs much more expensive, especially in the hospitality industry
Yes I hadn't mentioned that one. That is partly me being a bit naughty because in principle I support increases in the Minimum Wage. But again it is something that should be a lot more nuanced and I get the impression Labour just don't do (or again care) about nuance.
With the Tories it is (or has been in recent years) naked self interest and feck the country, with Labour it is blind ideology and feck the country. Neither are attractive
Torsten Bell showing how in touch with the proles he is.
I'm not sure there are many £3m houses in Swansea.
What do you expect from a Greenwich born and Oxford educated former Director of Policy for Ed Miliband and left wing think tank director who was parachuted into a safe Labour seat in Wales with absolutely no connection to Swansea prior at all
Without doubt one of the worst thread headers TSE has ever done.
No party wins general elections without shoring up their core vote first and for Tories they include private school parents and farmers. Voters also want a choice not an echo, if you want to hammer farmers with inheritance tax and hit private school parents with VAT you vote Labour anyway and if the Tories don't stand up for farmers and private school parents they will leak voters to Reform and the LDs who will.
Plus 57% of voters oppose the hated tractor tax anyway
Not to mention VAT on school fees will just reduce the scholarships they provide and hit smaller schools most making them even more exclusive. While we need family farms to produce our food, you can't make food from houses. Most farms may be asset rich but they are income poor
If you are asset rich but income poor, you can get a mortgage or similar sort of loan. It’s not difficult.
We need houses to live in. You can’t make houses from food (pace Hansel & Gretel).
No you can't as you don't have the income to repay a mortgage for starters.
We need houses to live in mainly in cities, suburbs and towns, we need the countryside to still provide our food mainly
If the land cannot generate any income, why is its value so high?
Every time I write a long post a new thread pops up….
There’s lots to unpick in the farming IHT issue but one is the nature and role of farming.
Part of the issue is the PR ‘brand’ of farming, which is positive - they produce our food. But beneath that is an industry in need of reform, as in many ways it has not served the country’s needs efficiently over a very long period of time. And by efficiency I mean maximising food production whilst minimising environmental disbenefits. And one of the issues there is the lack of new ideas as barriers to entry are high and peer pressure to conform also high. iHT might help a smidge with that.
In many ways the popular view of farming is very outdated. Farmers are really land managers responding to markets. And they have fended off regulation by agreeing to voluntary schemes, which are light touch if costly and process heavy, and which they moan about. The Red tape. But by agreeing to red tape it has basically exempted them from proper application of polluter pays. Farming is about growing food. Land management is about maximising the value of assets, be it through producing food, green power, recreation or development. And that is what they are now.
Many farmers are not wealthy, at least cash wealthy. Their income varies. There is uncertainty. But this can be offset by joining environmental schemes. Some are very wealthy and as with all walks of life the tendency has been for the wealthier to get bigger. Land is an asset, and the asset accumulators have moved in, big style. The Dysons. A farmer I know on the edge of a county town made many millions from selling land for development. He immediately started buying land in Wales to offset capital gains.
I tend to agree with the Govt that most smaller farmers who prepare properly will be able to avoid IHT. But to some extent so will the larger ones in time because they will develop accountancy dodges. What does rankle in all this is the way the NFU is treated so much more sympathetically than any other representative Union. A more recidivist and backward looking organisation it would Be hard to find.
Along with the support for renewing Trump's tax cut, further evidence that a very large part of the electorate can be persuaded to vote for policies directly against their own economic interest.
Perhaps if the useless Democrat campaign would have made more about the damage it could do as well as tackling the inflation attack ads they may have done a little better.
Perhaps - but that's really just whataboutery.
What happens next is more relevant. Are we about to see a repeat of Hoover ?
Of course the difference is that Trump is inheriting a remarkable strong economy, with currently low inflation, from the Democrats.
Inflation is edging up in the US and stagflation is a very real risk as is the national debt and Trump is worse for that than Mommala would have been
High and low inflation is largely down to,the fed not the democrats and telling people inflation is low when they are paying far more for staples than four years before and their salaries have not kept up doesn’t help as it didn’t help Rishi.
On the basis that I want my Government to be competant even if I disagree with them on a lot of things, the Starmer reign so far really does worry me.
Three big tax policies have resulted from the Budget - Removing the Winter Fuel allowance (which I know was announced prior to the budget), Inheritence tax on family run businesses and farms, and increasing Employer's NI.
The first two of these are being done for explainable reasons (The state should not be giving money to those who don't need it just because they are old, and rich investors are using the IHT arrangments to avoid paying tax) but both have been completely ballsed up with their implementation - not the PR but the actual planned implementation.
It would have been easily possible to have devised a system to properly means test the WFA removal rather than using the blunt tool of Pension Credit and it was certainly possible to devise an IHT system that did not threaten the future of family farms and businesses whilst still closing the investment loophole. I just get the impression that, because they don't actually understand (or care?) about the collateral damage, they plough on with the most basic sledgehammer applications of their plans safe in the knowledge that they can always point to the intended target as an excuse. They are the Bomber Harris of politics.
(On the third policy of employers NI we have yet to see the effects of that but I suspect a lot of smaller businesses will be laying off staff or shutting down entirely and again there seems to be no effort to differentiate between larger companies and the small businesses which run on very low profit margins)
Meanwhile we still don't have an effective or fair tax regime for multinationals.
It's rare I agree with you but you've nailed this with some serious nails.
That's the thing with public policy - you need to think the thing through from start to finish and discover the loopholes and potential problems before announcing the policy. Yes, there will always be "losers" and they will shout loud and long while the winners keep quiet but that's the nature of politics and sometimes, in politics, you have to face down those who shout and argue your case firmly and with conviction.
There will also be those who argue with the principle of the policy itself rather than its impacts - there are those who are opposed to IHT in any form - and they will never be satisfied.
@ONS Public service productivity in Quarter 2 2024 is estimated to be 8.5% below its pre-#COVID19 pandemic peak in Quarter 4 (Oct to Dec) 2019.
And this is our problem in a nutshell. Our public services are falling apart, not because of cuts in spending which have been modest to non existent) but because we are getting less and less for our money. That is the problem the last government largely ducked and which this government has to come to terms with. If they don't no amount of additional taxation will be enough.
Improving productivity in the public sector requires much the same as in the private sector. Invest in modern buildings, modern technology and staff development. It's not Brain surgery.
NHS productivity improved noticeably in the first half of the year and will improve even more second half as the strikes are over:
It does require these things but it also requires a relentless grinding on costs and the elimination of unnecessary work and procedures. When I was a partner in a firm watching the pennies and the proportion of staff time on fee earning work was very much a part of the job description and it is hard and tedious work, especially when everyone is busy. One of my partners had a saying is that all committees need to have an odd number of participants but 3 is too many. In other words, get someone on the job and let them get on with it.
+1
We have actually expanded spending in some areas - to get less return. Why?
One to consider. There is an affection, in the public sector, for running at 98%* capacity. No waste!
Operational research**, for more than a century, has told us that an organisation running at 98% of capacity, is in the edge of failure. Quality suffers, staff moral collapses etc.
Strangely, what is observed in the places in public service where 98% is the target?
*Or ludicrous numbers like this. **Worth considering the name sometimes used for this - "Scientific Management"
@ONS Public service productivity in Quarter 2 2024 is estimated to be 8.5% below its pre-#COVID19 pandemic peak in Quarter 4 (Oct to Dec) 2019.
And this is our problem in a nutshell. Our public services are falling apart, not because of cuts in spending which have been modest to non existent) but because we are getting less and less for our money. That is the problem the last government largely ducked and which this government has to come to terms with. If they don't no amount of additional taxation will be enough.
And the multi billion pound question is... why?
Is it about a lack of the smack of firm management, is it the money spent on diversity consultants, or is it that we have solved bottlenecks with the short term fix of extra bodies rather than equipping staff with better tools to achieve more?
My guess (based on the way that capital budgets always get raided to fix crises, and have been for decades, and we're going to be under Hunt) is that the last diagnosis is the main problem.
I think from my limited experience that there is a lack of quality management, that WFH has in fact reduced people's output despite all the claims to the contrary, that it has encouraged a mind set that this job is for my benefit rather than the benefit of the people to whom the service that is being provided, that it is my mental health and work life balance that is important, not the quality of life of the service users I am supposedly working for and, perhaps above all, the never ending multiplication of emails to masses of people who don't need to receive them but get interrupted anyway.
None of this will stop me from WFH today, of course.
I’ve found it made me more efficient at delivering existing work, and less efficient at winning new work. I’m back in most of the time now.
It’s definitely a challenge for our new joiners and graduate entry too.
My daughter, who qualified as a solicitor last week, had a job whilst at University with the SSSC which is a regulator of the care sector in Scotland. All the time she was working for them (admittedly during Covid) she was WFH and only rarely met her colleagues.
They offered her a traineeship but she, rightly in my view, came to the conclusion that she would not learn from that in the same way as she would in the office and she went for a private firm instead. Her current job has her in court pretty much every day and has given her a vast range of experience she simply would not have got with the SSSC who were offering her more money. The management there were genuinely surprised when she turned them down.
For young people yes being in the office 4/5 days a week or indeed 5 out of 5 may be a benefit as they get to know their team and do work in person.
For parents, especially mothers, wfh however is a godsend as it gives them time to do the school run, do the washing, cooking, cleaning etc in breaks from work at home in the day which they couldn't so easily with the daily commute and also saves on travel costs
The attractions for those mothers are obvious and it no doubt improves their work life balance enormously. The ONS seem to be indicating, however, that it is not doing a lot for their output.
Some will be doing the 'life' part in breaks from their 'work'.
Others will be doing the 'work' part in breaks from their 'life'.
Its the second group whose productivity will be falling.
Without doubt one of the worst thread headers TSE has ever done.
No party wins general elections without shoring up their core vote first and for Tories they include private school parents and farmers. Voters also want a choice not an echo, if you want to hammer farmers with inheritance tax and hit private school parents with VAT you vote Labour anyway and if the Tories don't stand up for farmers and private school parents they will leak voters to Reform and the LDs who will.
Plus 57% of voters oppose the hated tractor tax anyway
Not to mention VAT on school fees will just reduce the scholarships they provide and hit smaller schools most making them even more exclusive. While we need family farms to produce our food, you can't make food from houses. Most farms may be asset rich but they are income poor
If you are asset rich but income poor, you can get a mortgage or similar sort of loan. It’s not difficult.
We need houses to live in. You can’t make houses from food (pace Hansel & Gretel).
No you can't as you don't have the income to repay a mortgage for starters.
We need houses to live in mainly in cities, suburbs and towns, we need the countryside to still provide our food mainly
If the land cannot generate any income, why is its value so high?
It is there to develop food, not to be sold off to the nearest property developer
When reading headers like this it is worth bearing in mind that only a few weeks ago TSE was writing headers assuring us that Badenoch was utterly toast and had no chance of being LOTO. Not sure his political radar is necessarily that accurate these days.
We all get to make our own political bets. If you think Badenoch is great, bet accordingly.
I don't. I am not a Tory. My main concern in the Tory election was that Jenrick not get it. But it is stiill amusing to look at and highlight the absolute certainty with which TSE wrote that Badenoch would never make the final two and would never be leader.
Without doubt one of the worst thread headers TSE has ever done.
No party wins general elections without shoring up their core vote first and for Tories they include private school parents and farmers. Voters also want a choice not an echo, if you want to hammer farmers with inheritance tax and hit private school parents with VAT you vote Labour anyway and if the Tories don't stand up for farmers and private school parents they will leak voters to Reform and the LDs who will.
Plus 57% of voters oppose the hated tractor tax anyway
Not to mention VAT on school fees will just reduce the scholarships they provide and hit smaller schools most making them even more exclusive. While we need family farms to produce our food, you can't make food from houses. Most farms may be asset rich but they are income poor
If you are asset rich but income poor, you can get a mortgage or similar sort of loan. It’s not difficult.
We need houses to live in. You can’t make houses from food (pace Hansel & Gretel).
No you can't as you don't have the income to repay a mortgage for starters.
We need houses to live in mainly in cities, suburbs and towns, we need the countryside to still provide our food mainly
If the land cannot generate any income, why is its value so high?
It is there to develop food, not to be sold off to the nearest property developer
While Bademoch has promised to reverse the IHT changes for farmers and the VAT on school fees, she does not seem to have done the same for the end of the universal winter fuel allowance.
It is Tory policy to reverse the winter fuel cut too
It's labour's policy in Scotland - let Starmer explain that one
I'll be interested to see how Mr Sarwar promises to do that without budget cuts elsewhere, as the Barnett consequential of the DWP WFA has vanished (hence the SNP having to follow suit).
NB that this isn't grandstanding for the GE but the rather sooner Holyrood election which however isn't till May 2026, so time for him to quietly forget about it.
Also: despite the headlines, he's not promising to restore WFP but just to means test it - which isn't so far off the current Westminster proposal anyway.
@ONS Public service productivity in Quarter 2 2024 is estimated to be 8.5% below its pre-#COVID19 pandemic peak in Quarter 4 (Oct to Dec) 2019.
And this is our problem in a nutshell. Our public services are falling apart, not because of cuts in spending which have been modest to non existent) but because we are getting less and less for our money. That is the problem the last government largely ducked and which this government has to come to terms with. If they don't no amount of additional taxation will be enough.
And the multi billion pound question is... why?
Is it about a lack of the smack of firm management, is it the money spent on diversity consultants, or is it that we have solved bottlenecks with the short term fix of extra bodies rather than equipping staff with better tools to achieve more?
My guess (based on the way that capital budgets always get raided to fix crises, and have been for decades, and we're going to be under Hunt) is that the last diagnosis is the main problem.
I think from my limited experience that there is a lack of quality management, that WFH has in fact reduced people's output despite all the claims to the contrary, that it has encouraged a mind set that this job is for my benefit rather than the benefit of the people to whom the service that is being provided, that it is my mental health and work life balance that is important, not the quality of life of the service users I am supposedly working for and, perhaps above all, the never ending multiplication of emails to masses of people who don't need to receive them but get interrupted anyway.
None of this will stop me from WFH today, of course.
I’ve found it made me more efficient at delivering existing work, and less efficient at winning new work. I’m back in most of the time now.
It’s definitely a challenge for our new joiners and graduate entry too.
My daughter, who qualified as a solicitor last week, had a job whilst at University with the SSSC which is a regulator of the care sector in Scotland. All the time she was working for them (admittedly during Covid) she was WFH and only rarely met her colleagues.
They offered her a traineeship but she, rightly in my view, came to the conclusion that she would not learn from that in the same way as she would in the office and she went for a private firm instead. Her current job has her in court pretty much every day and has given her a vast range of experience she simply would not have got with the SSSC who were offering her more money. The management there were genuinely surprised when she turned them down.
For young people yes being in the office 4/5 days a week or indeed 5 out of 5 may be a benefit as they get to know their team and do work in person.
For parents, especially mothers, wfh however is a godsend as it gives them time to do the school run, do the washing, cooking, cleaning etc in breaks from work at home in the day which they couldn't so easily with the daily commute and also saves on travel costs
The attractions for those mothers are obvious and it no doubt improves their work life balance enormously. The ONS seem to be indicating, however, that it is not doing a lot for their output.
Yes well given our below replacement fertility rate we could do with a few more women having an output of children as mothers with more work life balance making that easier than just being measured on their output of workplace productivity
On the basis that I want my Government to be competant even if I disagree with them on a lot of things, the Starmer reign so far really does worry me.
Three big tax policies have resulted from the Budget - Removing the Winter Fuel allowance (which I know was announced prior to the budget), Inheritence tax on family run businesses and farms, and increasing Employer's NI.
The first two of these are being done for explainable reasons (The state should not be giving money to those who don't need it just because they are old, and rich investors are using the IHT arrangments to avoid paying tax) but both have been completely ballsed up with their implementation - not the PR but the actual planned implementation.
It would have been easily possible to have devised a system to properly means test the WFA removal rather than using the blunt tool of Pension Credit and it was certainly possible to devise an IHT system that did not threaten the future of family farms and businesses whilst still closing the investment loophole. I just get the impression that, because they don't actually understand (or care?) about the collateral damage, they plough on with the most basic sledgehammer applications of their plans safe in the knowledge that they can always point to the intended target as an excuse. They are the Bomber Harris of politics.
(On the third policy of employers NI we have yet to see the effects of that but I suspect a lot of smaller businesses will be laying off staff or shutting down entirely and again there seems to be no effort to differentiate between larger companies and the small businesses which run on very low profit margins)
Meanwhile we still don't have an effective or fair tax regime for multinationals.
It's rare I agree with you but you've nailed this with some serious nails.
That's the thing with public policy - you need to think the thing through from start to finish and discover the loopholes and potential problems before announcing the policy. Yes, there will always be "losers" and they will shout loud and long while the winners keep quiet but that's the nature of politics and sometimes, in politics, you have to face down those who shout and argue your case firmly and with conviction.
There will also be those who argue with the principle of the policy itself rather than its impacts - there are those who are opposed to IHT in any form - and they will never be satisfied.
Which is why competent governments think things through and plan properly whilst in opposition.
Its increasingly clear that Labour kept quiet about their plans not just for political reasons but also because the necessary work hadn't been done.
That is the amount of electricity my solar panels have generated since installed.
Found out in unfortunate circumstances - I have something repeatedly tripping about half of my downstairs power, and I need to find out what it is - which will endless climbing over things to unplug stuff. Fortunately, it's not the kitchen - where the freezer is located - or where the the internet comes in (so I can tell you all about it ).
Linda McMahon may not be the best choice of education Secretary. Meltzer hinting at a qualifications issue and what did she know about her husbands vile antics when head of the WWE.
Ed Davey was at the farmers' rally as well so does that mean he was on the same bandwagon?
Oppositions oppose - that's what they do - but there's a difference between contradiction and argument as Mr Python once demonstrated. For every tax rise they wish to reverse, both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats have to show how they would "compensate" the public finances. I suspect both may find it difficult as we approach the next election to square the circle of cutting taxes, improving services and balancing the public finances.
As we've also seen this morning, public sector productivity remains a big problem - the kneejerk response of sacking 50% of civil servants won't help that at all.
The problem is we can't have a proper conversation about tax in this country - there's a claim from some we are "over taxed" (not quite sure what that means) and there's a valid question as to whether we get any "value" from the taxes we pay but the truth is we have a deficit which needs to be closed and borrowing which needs to be reduced and there's little or no honesty from anyone about any of this.
Yes, cut spending if there is an obvious argument (and nothing, including the armed forces, should be exempt) but the Party is over and we all now need to pay the bill and if that means raising basic rate tax to 25p and higher rate to 50p and looking at property and land asset value taxation, so be it.
Your final paragraph might be fine proposals for a left of centre Labour party and the Greens albeit at the risk of losing swing voters who hate higher taxes. They certainly aren't for a right of centre Conservative party
Fair enough so back to you - what would a "right of centre" (not even sure what that means) Party propose to reduce the deficit and borrowing?
Spending cuts? If so, what and where and why weren't these enacted during the 14 years your party led the Government? A previous Conservative Prime Minister transformed the State in eleven and a half years - the five leaders you chose over a 14 year period did the sum equivalent of bugger all.
Indeed one might argue for a "right of centre" party you governed more like a "left of centre" party but you didn't even do that properly.
While Bademoch has promised to reverse the IHT changes for farmers and the VAT on school fees, she does not seem to have done the same for the end of the universal winter fuel allowance.
It is Tory policy to reverse the winter fuel cut too
It's labour's policy in Scotland - let Starmer explain that one
I'll be interested to see how Mr Sarwar promises to do that without budget cuts elsewhere, as the Barnett consequential of the DWP WFA has vanished (hence the SNP having to follow suit).
NB that this isn't grandstanding for the GE but the rather sooner Holyrood election which however isn't till May 2026, so time for him to quietly forget about it.
Tbf, the Barnett consequentials for Scotland are substantial this time round. There's enough cash to do it and the policy is now devolved (PAWHP).
Without doubt one of the worst thread headers TSE has ever done.
No party wins general elections without shoring up their core vote first and for Tories they include private school parents and farmers. Voters also want a choice not an echo, if you want to hammer farmers with inheritance tax and hit private school parents with VAT you vote Labour anyway and if the Tories don't stand up for farmers and private school parents they will leak voters to Reform and the LDs who will.
Plus 57% of voters oppose the hated tractor tax anyway
Not to mention VAT on school fees will just reduce the scholarships they provide and hit smaller schools most making them even more exclusive. While we need family farms to produce our food, you can't make food from houses. Most farms may be asset rich but they are income poor
If you are asset rich but income poor, you can get a mortgage or similar sort of loan. It’s not difficult.
We need houses to live in. You can’t make houses from food (pace Hansel & Gretel).
No you can't as you don't have the income to repay a mortgage for starters.
We need houses to live in mainly in cities, suburbs and towns, we need the countryside to still provide our food mainly
If the land cannot generate any income, why is its value so high?
It is there to develop food, not to be sold off to the nearest property developer
If land is sold to pay IHT then it will be either farmed by someone else, or used for some other sort of development. It won't simply stay fallow, though a bit of rewinding would be welcome.
It seems that the PB Tory position is that subsidies to inflate house prices are bad, but relefs that inflate land value are good.
If agricultural land prices fall as a result it will be bad for IHT dodging speculators but good for smaller farmers as it improves their return on capital. Additionally the more land prices fall the more small farmers escape IHT entirely by slipping under the threshold.
Ed Davey was at the farmers' rally as well so does that mean he was on the same bandwagon?
Oppositions oppose - that's what they do - but there's a difference between contradiction and argument as Mr Python once demonstrated. For every tax rise they wish to reverse, both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats have to show how they would "compensate" the public finances. I suspect both may find it difficult as we approach the next election to square the circle of cutting taxes, improving services and balancing the public finances.
As we've also seen this morning, public sector productivity remains a big problem - the kneejerk response of sacking 50% of civil servants won't help that at all.
The problem is we can't have a proper conversation about tax in this country - there's a claim from some we are "over taxed" (not quite sure what that means) and there's a valid question as to whether we get any "value" from the taxes we pay but the truth is we have a deficit which needs to be closed and borrowing which needs to be reduced and there's little or no honesty from anyone about any of this.
Yes, cut spending if there is an obvious argument (and nothing, including the armed forces, should be exempt) but the Party is over and we all now need to pay the bill and if that means raising basic rate tax to 25p and higher rate to 50p and looking at property and land asset value taxation, so be it.
Your final paragraph might be fine proposals for a left of centre Labour party and the Greens albeit at the risk of losing swing voters who hate higher taxes. They certainly aren't for a right of centre Conservative party
Land value taxation, most certainly. It is long overdue. And at the same time you could abolish IHT completely.
Of course this would not suit the Right-wing Conservative Party. It used to be the party of enormous landowners. Now it is the party of tax-dodgers.
Without doubt one of the worst thread headers TSE has ever done.
No party wins general elections without shoring up their core vote first and for Tories they include private school parents and farmers. Voters also want a choice not an echo, if you want to hammer farmers with inheritance tax and hit private school parents with VAT you vote Labour anyway and if the Tories don't stand up for farmers and private school parents they will leak voters to Reform and the LDs who will.
Plus 57% of voters oppose the hated tractor tax anyway
Not to mention VAT on school fees will just reduce the scholarships they provide and hit smaller schools most making them even more exclusive. While we need family farms to produce our food, you can't make food from houses. Most farms may be asset rich but they are income poor
If you are asset rich but income poor, you can get a mortgage or similar sort of loan. It’s not difficult.
We need houses to live in. You can’t make houses from food (pace Hansel & Gretel).
Actually it is often very difficult for farmers. One of the long term issues in farming has been securing loans and mortgages, at least at the same rates that the rest of us enjoy.
It is one of the ironies and failings of post-Cold War capitalism that the innovations that were so important to the development of capitalism - insurance and finance - now operate so poorly in the modern economy, and are hard for businesses to access on reasonable terms.
@ONS Public service productivity in Quarter 2 2024 is estimated to be 8.5% below its pre-#COVID19 pandemic peak in Quarter 4 (Oct to Dec) 2019.
And this is our problem in a nutshell. Our public services are falling apart, not because of cuts in spending which have been modest to non existent) but because we are getting less and less for our money. That is the problem the last government largely ducked and which this government has to come to terms with. If they don't no amount of additional taxation will be enough.
Bear in mind demand for public services (mainly health and social care) is increasing faster than GDP or spending feasibly could, as the country ages. We have to run to stand still.
It’s a sort of inverse Malthusian crisis.
Health spending is increasing much, much faster than our demographic profile changes would suggest.
Without doubt one of the worst thread headers TSE has ever done.
No party wins general elections without shoring up their core vote first and for Tories they include private school parents and farmers. Voters also want a choice not an echo, if you want to hammer farmers with inheritance tax and hit private school parents with VAT you vote Labour anyway and if the Tories don't stand up for farmers and private school parents they will leak voters to Reform and the LDs who will.
Plus 57% of voters oppose the hated tractor tax anyway
Not to mention VAT on school fees will just reduce the scholarships they provide and hit smaller schools most making them even more exclusive. While we need family farms to produce our food, you can't make food from houses. Most farms may be asset rich but they are income poor
If you are asset rich but income poor, you can get a mortgage or similar sort of loan. It’s not difficult.
We need houses to live in. You can’t make houses from food (pace Hansel & Gretel).
No you can't as you don't have the income to repay a mortgage for starters.
We need houses to live in mainly in cities, suburbs and towns, we need the countryside to still provide our food mainly
If the land cannot generate any income, why is its value so high?
It is there to develop food, not to be sold off to the nearest property developer
If land is sold to pay IHT then it will be either farmed by someone else, or used for some other sort of development. It won't simply stay fallow, though a bit of rewinding would be welcome.
It seems that the PB Tory position is that subsidies to inflate house prices are bad, but relefs that inflate land value are good.
If agricultural land prices fall as a result it will be bad for IHT dodging speculators but good for smaller farmers as it improves their return on capital. Additionally the more land prices fall the more small farmers escape IHT entirely by slipping under the threshold.
I thought the very Tory RNRB *was* a subsidy to inflate house prices ... as were cheap credit schemes for buyers ...
@ONS Public service productivity in Quarter 2 2024 is estimated to be 8.5% below its pre-#COVID19 pandemic peak in Quarter 4 (Oct to Dec) 2019.
And this is our problem in a nutshell. Our public services are falling apart, not because of cuts in spending which have been modest to non existent) but because we are getting less and less for our money. That is the problem the last government largely ducked and which this government has to come to terms with. If they don't no amount of additional taxation will be enough.
And the multi billion pound question is... why?
Is it about a lack of the smack of firm management, is it the money spent on diversity consultants, or is it that we have solved bottlenecks with the short term fix of extra bodies rather than equipping staff with better tools to achieve more?
My guess (based on the way that capital budgets always get raided to fix crises, and have been for decades, and we're going to be under Hunt) is that the last diagnosis is the main problem.
I think from my limited experience that there is a lack of quality management, that WFH has in fact reduced people's output despite all the claims to the contrary, that it has encouraged a mind set that this job is for my benefit rather than the benefit of the people to whom the service that is being provided, that it is my mental health and work life balance that is important, not the quality of life of the service users I am supposedly working for and, perhaps above all, the never ending multiplication of emails to masses of people who don't need to receive them but get interrupted anyway.
None of this will stop me from WFH today, of course.
I’ve found it made me more efficient at delivering existing work, and less efficient at winning new work. I’m back in most of the time now.
It’s definitely a challenge for our new joiners and graduate entry too.
My daughter, who qualified as a solicitor last week, had a job whilst at University with the SSSC which is a regulator of the care sector in Scotland. All the time she was working for them (admittedly during Covid) she was WFH and only rarely met her colleagues.
They offered her a traineeship but she, rightly in my view, came to the conclusion that she would not learn from that in the same way as she would in the office and she went for a private firm instead. Her current job has her in court pretty much every day and has given her a vast range of experience she simply would not have got with the SSSC who were offering her more money. The management there were genuinely surprised when she turned them down.
For young people yes being in the office 4/5 days a week or indeed 5 out of 5 may be a benefit as they get to know their team and do work in person.
For parents, especially mothers, wfh however is a godsend as it gives them time to do the school run, do the washing, cooking, cleaning etc in breaks from work at home in the day which they couldn't so easily with the daily commute and also saves on travel costs
The attractions for those mothers are obvious and it no doubt improves their work life balance enormously. The ONS seem to be indicating, however, that it is not doing a lot for their output.
Yes well given our below replacement fertility rate we could do with a few more women having an output of children as mothers with more work life balance making that easier than just being measured on their output of workplace productivity
If you want to improve fertility rates then tax cuts for 30 somethings not Farmers would be a good idea. Yet Kemi thinks statutory maternity pay should go.
On the basis that I want my Government to be competant even if I disagree with them on a lot of things, the Starmer reign so far really does worry me.
Three big tax policies have resulted from the Budget - Removing the Winter Fuel allowance (which I know was announced prior to the budget), Inheritence tax on family run businesses and farms, and increasing Employer's NI.
The first two of these are being done for explainable reasons (The state should not be giving money to those who don't need it just because they are old, and rich investors are using the IHT arrangments to avoid paying tax) but both have been completely ballsed up with their implementation - not the PR but the actual planned implementation.
It would have been easily possible to have devised a system to properly means test the WFA removal rather than using the blunt tool of Pension Credit and it was certainly possible to devise an IHT system that did not threaten the future of family farms and businesses whilst still closing the investment loophole. I just get the impression that, because they don't actually understand (or care?) about the collateral damage, they plough on with the most basic sledgehammer applications of their plans safe in the knowledge that they can always point to the intended target as an excuse. They are the Bomber Harris of politics.
(On the third policy of employers NI we have yet to see the effects of that but I suspect a lot of smaller businesses will be laying off staff or shutting down entirely and again there seems to be no effort to differentiate between larger companies and the small businesses which run on very low profit margins)
Meanwhile we still don't have an effective or fair tax regime for multinationals.
It's rare I agree with you but you've nailed this with some serious nails.
That's the thing with public policy - you need to think the thing through from start to finish and discover the loopholes and potential problems before announcing the policy. Yes, there will always be "losers" and they will shout loud and long while the winners keep quiet but that's the nature of politics and sometimes, in politics, you have to face down those who shout and argue your case firmly and with conviction.
There will also be those who argue with the principle of the policy itself rather than its impacts - there are those who are opposed to IHT in any form - and they will never be satisfied.
Which is why competent governments think things through and plan properly whilst in opposition.
Its increasingly clear that Labour kept quiet about their plans not just for political reasons but also because the necessary work hadn't been done.
Yes and it might have been the case (at least in 2020-21) Labour thought they had no realistic chance of winning but the implosion of the Conservative Government from mid 2022 must have made them think they not only might but would be elected.
I also think back channels exist with the civil service who would normally look at the initial policy proposals and vet them (when I was in local Government we always looked at what the Opposition was planning just in case we had to implement it).
Did the civil service warn Reeves of the potential problems? If not, why not? The service isn't neutral or impartial as most believe - it is or should be a friendly critic to all.
Even so, the Reeves team seems strangely bereft of some serious thinkers but you could equally argue the Conservative side wasn't strong on straegic thinking either.
While Bademoch has promised to reverse the IHT changes for farmers and the VAT on school fees, she does not seem to have done the same for the end of the universal winter fuel allowance.
It is Tory policy to reverse the winter fuel cut too
It's labour's policy in Scotland - let Starmer explain that one
I'll be interested to see how Mr Sarwar promises to do that without budget cuts elsewhere, as the Barnett consequential of the DWP WFA has vanished (hence the SNP having to follow suit).
NB that this isn't grandstanding for the GE but the rather sooner Holyrood election which however isn't till May 2026, so time for him to quietly forget about it.
Tbf, the Barnett consequentials for Scotland are substantial this time round. There's enough cash to do it and the policy is now devolved (PAWHP).
Sure, but only the jmeans tested kind, and how can they do it except the same way as London? Which the SNP would have to do anyway. So no difference there. Troiuble is, any other way of doing it costs money to administer. Unless they do it as a tax allowance which is taxable? But then the SG don't get the tax back and the budget for that won't therefore balance.
Edit: also, the SG taxation powers are very limited. Might not allow the SG to organise anyuthing sensible to deal with the WFP replacement.
When reading headers like this it is worth bearing in mind that only a few weeks ago TSE was writing headers assuring us that Badenoch was utterly toast and had no chance of being LOTO. Not sure his political radar is necessarily that accurate these days.
We all get to make our own political bets. If you think Badenoch is great, bet accordingly.
I don't. I am not a Tory. My main concern in the Tory election was that Jenrick not get it. But it is stiill amusing to look at and highlight the absolute certainty with which TSE wrote that Badenoch would never make the final two and would never be leader.
@ONS Public service productivity in Quarter 2 2024 is estimated to be 8.5% below its pre-#COVID19 pandemic peak in Quarter 4 (Oct to Dec) 2019.
And this is our problem in a nutshell. Our public services are falling apart, not because of cuts in spending which have been modest to non existent) but because we are getting less and less for our money. That is the problem the last government largely ducked and which this government has to come to terms with. If they don't no amount of additional taxation will be enough.
And the multi billion pound question is... why?
Is it about a lack of the smack of firm management, is it the money spent on diversity consultants, or is it that we have solved bottlenecks with the short term fix of extra bodies rather than equipping staff with better tools to achieve more?
My guess (based on the way that capital budgets always get raided to fix crises, and have been for decades, and we're going to be under Hunt) is that the last diagnosis is the main problem.
I think from my limited experience that there is a lack of quality management, that WFH has in fact reduced people's output despite all the claims to the contrary, that it has encouraged a mind set that this job is for my benefit rather than the benefit of the people to whom the service that is being provided, that it is my mental health and work life balance that is important, not the quality of life of the service users I am supposedly working for and, perhaps above all, the never ending multiplication of emails to masses of people who don't need to receive them but get interrupted anyway.
None of this will stop me from WFH today, of course.
I’ve found it made me more efficient at delivering existing work, and less efficient at winning new work. I’m back in most of the time now.
It’s definitely a challenge for our new joiners and graduate entry too.
My daughter, who qualified as a solicitor last week, had a job whilst at University with the SSSC which is a regulator of the care sector in Scotland. All the time she was working for them (admittedly during Covid) she was WFH and only rarely met her colleagues.
They offered her a traineeship but she, rightly in my view, came to the conclusion that she would not learn from that in the same way as she would in the office and she went for a private firm instead. Her current job has her in court pretty much every day and has given her a vast range of experience she simply would not have got with the SSSC who were offering her more money. The management there were genuinely surprised when she turned them down.
For young people yes being in the office 4/5 days a week or indeed 5 out of 5 may be a benefit as they get to know their team and do work in person.
For parents, especially mothers, wfh however is a godsend as it gives them time to do the school run, do the washing, cooking, cleaning etc in breaks from work at home in the day which they couldn't so easily with the daily commute and also saves on travel costs
The attractions for those mothers are obvious and it no doubt improves their work life balance enormously. The ONS seem to be indicating, however, that it is not doing a lot for their output.
Yes well given our below replacement fertility rate we could do with a few more women having an output of children as mothers with more work life balance making that easier than just being measured on their output of workplace productivity
If you want to improve fertility rates then tax cuts for 30 somethings not Farmers would be a good idea. Yet Kemi thinks statutory maternity pay should go.
We need mothers and farmers producing food supply. That means more child benefit for stay at home mothers and lower taxes for mothers who choose to work part time and I made clear I opposed Kemi's view on maternity pay
@ONS Public service productivity in Quarter 2 2024 is estimated to be 8.5% below its pre-#COVID19 pandemic peak in Quarter 4 (Oct to Dec) 2019.
And this is our problem in a nutshell. Our public services are falling apart, not because of cuts in spending which have been modest to non existent) but because we are getting less and less for our money. That is the problem the last government largely ducked and which this government has to come to terms with. If they don't no amount of additional taxation will be enough.
And the multi billion pound question is... why?
Is it about a lack of the smack of firm management, is it the money spent on diversity consultants, or is it that we have solved bottlenecks with the short term fix of extra bodies rather than equipping staff with better tools to achieve more?
My guess (based on the way that capital budgets always get raided to fix crises, and have been for decades, and we're going to be under Hunt) is that the last diagnosis is the main problem.
I think from my limited experience that there is a lack of quality management, that WFH has in fact reduced people's output despite all the claims to the contrary, that it has encouraged a mind set that this job is for my benefit rather than the benefit of the people to whom the service that is being provided, that it is my mental health and work life balance that is important, not the quality of life of the service users I am supposedly working for and, perhaps above all, the never ending multiplication of emails to masses of people who don't need to receive them but get interrupted anyway.
None of this will stop me from WFH today, of course.
I’ve found it made me more efficient at delivering existing work, and less efficient at winning new work. I’m back in most of the time now.
It’s definitely a challenge for our new joiners and graduate entry too.
My daughter, who qualified as a solicitor last week, had a job whilst at University with the SSSC which is a regulator of the care sector in Scotland. All the time she was working for them (admittedly during Covid) she was WFH and only rarely met her colleagues.
They offered her a traineeship but she, rightly in my view, came to the conclusion that she would not learn from that in the same way as she would in the office and she went for a private firm instead. Her current job has her in court pretty much every day and has given her a vast range of experience she simply would not have got with the SSSC who were offering her more money. The management there were genuinely surprised when she turned them down.
For young people yes being in the office 4/5 days a week or indeed 5 out of 5 may be a benefit as they get to know their team and do work in person.
For parents, especially mothers, wfh however is a godsend as it gives them time to do the school run, do the washing, cooking, cleaning etc in breaks from work at home in the day which they couldn't so easily with the daily commute and also saves on travel costs
The attractions for those mothers are obvious and it no doubt improves their work life balance enormously. The ONS seem to be indicating, however, that it is not doing a lot for their output.
Yes well given our below replacement fertility rate we could do with a few more women having an output of children as mothers with more work life balance making that easier than just being measured on their output of workplace productivity
If you want to improve fertility rates then tax cuts for 30 somethings not Farmers would be a good idea. Yet Kemi thinks statutory maternity pay should go.
"Yet Kemi thinks statutory maternity pay should go".
@ONS Public service productivity in Quarter 2 2024 is estimated to be 8.5% below its pre-#COVID19 pandemic peak in Quarter 4 (Oct to Dec) 2019.
And this is our problem in a nutshell. Our public services are falling apart, not because of cuts in spending which have been modest to non existent) but because we are getting less and less for our money. That is the problem the last government largely ducked and which this government has to come to terms with. If they don't no amount of additional taxation will be enough.
And the multi billion pound question is... why?
Is it about a lack of the smack of firm management, is it the money spent on diversity consultants, or is it that we have solved bottlenecks with the short term fix of extra bodies rather than equipping staff with better tools to achieve more?
My guess (based on the way that capital budgets always get raided to fix crises, and have been for decades, and we're going to be under Hunt) is that the last diagnosis is the main problem.
Staff numbers went up massively for no improvement in output. And haven’t come down
@ONS Public service productivity in Quarter 2 2024 is estimated to be 8.5% below its pre-#COVID19 pandemic peak in Quarter 4 (Oct to Dec) 2019.
And this is our problem in a nutshell. Our public services are falling apart, not because of cuts in spending which have been modest to non existent) but because we are getting less and less for our money. That is the problem the last government largely ducked and which this government has to come to terms with. If they don't no amount of additional taxation will be enough.
And the multi billion pound question is... why?
Is it about a lack of the smack of firm management, is it the money spent on diversity consultants, or is it that we have solved bottlenecks with the short term fix of extra bodies rather than equipping staff with better tools to achieve more?
My guess (based on the way that capital budgets always get raided to fix crises, and have been for decades, and we're going to be under Hunt) is that the last diagnosis is the main problem.
I think from my limited experience that there is a lack of quality management, that WFH has in fact reduced people's output despite all the claims to the contrary, that it has encouraged a mind set that this job is for my benefit rather than the benefit of the people to whom the service that is being provided, that it is my mental health and work life balance that is important, not the quality of life of the service users I am supposedly working for and, perhaps above all, the never ending multiplication of emails to masses of people who don't need to receive them but get interrupted anyway.
None of this will stop me from WFH today, of course.
I’ve found it made me more efficient at delivering existing work, and less efficient at winning new work. I’m back in most of the time now.
It’s definitely a challenge for our new joiners and graduate entry too.
My daughter, who qualified as a solicitor last week, had a job whilst at University with the SSSC which is a regulator of the care sector in Scotland. All the time she was working for them (admittedly during Covid) she was WFH and only rarely met her colleagues.
They offered her a traineeship but she, rightly in my view, came to the conclusion that she would not learn from that in the same way as she would in the office and she went for a private firm instead. Her current job has her in court pretty much every day and has given her a vast range of experience she simply would not have got with the SSSC who were offering her more money. The management there were genuinely surprised when she turned them down.
For young people yes being in the office 4/5 days a week or indeed 5 out of 5 may be a benefit as they get to know their team and do work in person.
For parents, especially mothers, wfh however is a godsend as it gives them time to do the school run, do the washing, cooking, cleaning etc in breaks from work at home in the day which they couldn't so easily with the daily commute and also saves on travel costs
The attractions for those mothers are obvious and it no doubt improves their work life balance enormously. The ONS seem to be indicating, however, that it is not doing a lot for their output.
Yes well given our below replacement fertility rate we could do with a few more women having an output of children as mothers with more work life balance making that easier than just being measured on their output of workplace productivity
If you want to improve fertility rates then tax cuts for 30 somethings not Farmers would be a good idea. Yet Kemi thinks statutory maternity pay should go.
We need mothers and farmers producing food supply. That means more child benefit for stay at home mothers and lower taxes for mothers who choose to work part time and I made clear I opposed Kemi's view on maternity pay
We need mothers producing food supply?! My reference to Hansel and Gretel was a joke!
Without doubt one of the worst thread headers TSE has ever done.
No party wins general elections without shoring up their core vote first and for Tories they include private school parents and farmers. Voters also want a choice not an echo, if you want to hammer farmers with inheritance tax and hit private school parents with VAT you vote Labour anyway and if the Tories don't stand up for farmers and private school parents they will leak voters to Reform and the LDs who will.
Plus 57% of voters oppose the hated tractor tax anyway
Not to mention VAT on school fees will just reduce the scholarships they provide and hit smaller schools most making them even more exclusive. While we need family farms to produce our food, you can't make food from houses. Most farms may be asset rich but they are income poor
If you are asset rich but income poor, you can get a mortgage or similar sort of loan. It’s not difficult.
We need houses to live in. You can’t make houses from food (pace Hansel & Gretel).
No you can't as you don't have the income to repay a mortgage for starters.
We need houses to live in mainly in cities, suburbs and towns, we need the countryside to still provide our food mainly
If the land cannot generate any income, why is its value so high?
It is there to develop food, not to be sold off to the nearest property developer
If land is sold to pay IHT then it will be either farmed by someone else, or used for some other sort of development. It won't simply stay fallow, though a bit of rewinding would be welcome.
It seems that the PB Tory position is that subsidies to inflate house prices are bad, but relefs that inflate land value are good.
If agricultural land prices fall as a result it will be bad for IHT dodging speculators but good for smaller farmers as it improves their return on capital. Additionally the more land prices fall the more small farmers escape IHT entirely by slipping under the threshold.
No if land is sold to pay IHT family farms will be lost forever, either replaced by property development or some huge agri corp both of which would be much worse.
Labour could have kept the IHT exemption for 3 generations of family farms or more if they just wanted to hit speculators but didn't as it was just a policy of class war
Linda McMahon may not be the best choice of education Secretary. Meltzer hinting at a qualifications issue and what did she know about her husbands vile antics when head of the WWE.
Shane McMahon is the one I really feel for. He seems a decent person.
In America? If Trump is going to abolish the Education Department, why does he need someone to run it?
(Other than to repay campaign favours.)
Because it still requires people to manage the shutdown, and transfer the services and people that are still required into other departments. Better to bring in an outsider with business management experience to undertake a role such as this, in fact there’s quite a few outsiders up for nomination at the moment.
@ONS Public service productivity in Quarter 2 2024 is estimated to be 8.5% below its pre-#COVID19 pandemic peak in Quarter 4 (Oct to Dec) 2019.
And this is our problem in a nutshell. Our public services are falling apart, not because of cuts in spending which have been modest to non existent) but because we are getting less and less for our money. That is the problem the last government largely ducked and which this government has to come to terms with. If they don't no amount of additional taxation will be enough.
And the multi billion pound question is... why?
Is it about a lack of the smack of firm management, is it the money spent on diversity consultants, or is it that we have solved bottlenecks with the short term fix of extra bodies rather than equipping staff with better tools to achieve more?
My guess (based on the way that capital budgets always get raided to fix crises, and have been for decades, and we're going to be under Hunt) is that the last diagnosis is the main problem.
I think from my limited experience that there is a lack of quality management, that WFH has in fact reduced people's output despite all the claims to the contrary, that it has encouraged a mind set that this job is for my benefit rather than the benefit of the people to whom the service that is being provided, that it is my mental health and work life balance that is important, not the quality of life of the service users I am supposedly working for and, perhaps above all, the never ending multiplication of emails to masses of people who don't need to receive them but get interrupted anyway.
None of this will stop me from WFH today, of course.
I’ve found it made me more efficient at delivering existing work, and less efficient at winning new work. I’m back in most of the time now.
It’s definitely a challenge for our new joiners and graduate entry too.
My daughter, who qualified as a solicitor last week, had a job whilst at University with the SSSC which is a regulator of the care sector in Scotland. All the time she was working for them (admittedly during Covid) she was WFH and only rarely met her colleagues.
They offered her a traineeship but she, rightly in my view, came to the conclusion that she would not learn from that in the same way as she would in the office and she went for a private firm instead. Her current job has her in court pretty much every day and has given her a vast range of experience she simply would not have got with the SSSC who were offering her more money. The management there were genuinely surprised when she turned them down.
For young people yes being in the office 4/5 days a week or indeed 5 out of 5 may be a benefit as they get to know their team and do work in person.
For parents, especially mothers, wfh however is a godsend as it gives them time to do the school run, do the washing, cooking, cleaning etc in breaks from work at home in the day which they couldn't so easily with the daily commute and also saves on travel costs
The attractions for those mothers are obvious and it no doubt improves their work life balance enormously. The ONS seem to be indicating, however, that it is not doing a lot for their output.
Yes well given our below replacement fertility rate we could do with a few more women having an output of children as mothers with more work life balance making that easier than just being measured on their output of workplace productivity
If you want to improve fertility rates then tax cuts for 30 somethings not Farmers would be a good idea. Yet Kemi thinks statutory maternity pay should go.
"Yet Kemi thinks statutory maternity pay should go".
Not true.
She did, however, question whether there should be less maternity support than at present (without putting forward a specific policy).
@ONS Public service productivity in Quarter 2 2024 is estimated to be 8.5% below its pre-#COVID19 pandemic peak in Quarter 4 (Oct to Dec) 2019.
And this is our problem in a nutshell. Our public services are falling apart, not because of cuts in spending which have been modest to non existent) but because we are getting less and less for our money. That is the problem the last government largely ducked and which this government has to come to terms with. If they don't no amount of additional taxation will be enough.
And the multi billion pound question is... why?
Is it about a lack of the smack of firm management, is it the money spent on diversity consultants, or is it that we have solved bottlenecks with the short term fix of extra bodies rather than equipping staff with better tools to achieve more?
My guess (based on the way that capital budgets always get raided to fix crises, and have been for decades, and we're going to be under Hunt) is that the last diagnosis is the main problem.
I think from my limited experience that there is a lack of quality management, that WFH has in fact reduced people's output despite all the claims to the contrary, that it has encouraged a mind set that this job is for my benefit rather than the benefit of the people to whom the service that is being provided, that it is my mental health and work life balance that is important, not the quality of life of the service users I am supposedly working for and, perhaps above all, the never ending multiplication of emails to masses of people who don't need to receive them but get interrupted anyway.
None of this will stop me from WFH today, of course.
I’ve found it made me more efficient at delivering existing work, and less efficient at winning new work. I’m back in most of the time now.
It’s definitely a challenge for our new joiners and graduate entry too.
My daughter, who qualified as a solicitor last week, had a job whilst at University with the SSSC which is a regulator of the care sector in Scotland. All the time she was working for them (admittedly during Covid) she was WFH and only rarely met her colleagues.
They offered her a traineeship but she, rightly in my view, came to the conclusion that she would not learn from that in the same way as she would in the office and she went for a private firm instead. Her current job has her in court pretty much every day and has given her a vast range of experience she simply would not have got with the SSSC who were offering her more money. The management there were genuinely surprised when she turned them down.
For young people yes being in the office 4/5 days a week or indeed 5 out of 5 may be a benefit as they get to know their team and do work in person.
For parents, especially mothers, wfh however is a godsend as it gives them time to do the school run, do the washing, cooking, cleaning etc in breaks from work at home in the day which they couldn't so easily with the daily commute and also saves on travel costs
The attractions for those mothers are obvious and it no doubt improves their work life balance enormously. The ONS seem to be indicating, however, that it is not doing a lot for their output.
Yes well given our below replacement fertility rate we could do with a few more women having an output of children as mothers with more work life balance making that easier than just being measured on their output of workplace productivity
If you want to improve fertility rates then tax cuts for 30 somethings not Farmers would be a good idea. Yet Kemi thinks statutory maternity pay should go.
"Yet Kemi thinks statutory maternity pay should go".
Not true.
Some of it, certainly, surely? And perhaps all, even if she has reverse-ferreted a bit.
@ONS Public service productivity in Quarter 2 2024 is estimated to be 8.5% below its pre-#COVID19 pandemic peak in Quarter 4 (Oct to Dec) 2019.
And this is our problem in a nutshell. Our public services are falling apart, not because of cuts in spending which have been modest to non existent) but because we are getting less and less for our money. That is the problem the last government largely ducked and which this government has to come to terms with. If they don't no amount of additional taxation will be enough.
And the multi billion pound question is... why?
Is it about a lack of the smack of firm management, is it the money spent on diversity consultants, or is it that we have solved bottlenecks with the short term fix of extra bodies rather than equipping staff with better tools to achieve more?
My guess (based on the way that capital budgets always get raided to fix crises, and have been for decades, and we're going to be under Hunt) is that the last diagnosis is the main problem.
I think from my limited experience that there is a lack of quality management, that WFH has in fact reduced people's output despite all the claims to the contrary, that it has encouraged a mind set that this job is for my benefit rather than the benefit of the people to whom the service that is being provided, that it is my mental health and work life balance that is important, not the quality of life of the service users I am supposedly working for and, perhaps above all, the never ending multiplication of emails to masses of people who don't need to receive them but get interrupted anyway.
None of this will stop me from WFH today, of course.
I’ve found it made me more efficient at delivering existing work, and less efficient at winning new work. I’m back in most of the time now.
It’s definitely a challenge for our new joiners and graduate entry too.
My daughter, who qualified as a solicitor last week, had a job whilst at University with the SSSC which is a regulator of the care sector in Scotland. All the time she was working for them (admittedly during Covid) she was WFH and only rarely met her colleagues.
They offered her a traineeship but she, rightly in my view, came to the conclusion that she would not learn from that in the same way as she would in the office and she went for a private firm instead. Her current job has her in court pretty much every day and has given her a vast range of experience she simply would not have got with the SSSC who were offering her more money. The management there were genuinely surprised when she turned them down.
For young people yes being in the office 4/5 days a week or indeed 5 out of 5 may be a benefit as they get to know their team and do work in person.
For parents, especially mothers, wfh however is a godsend as it gives them time to do the school run, do the washing, cooking, cleaning etc in breaks from work at home in the day which they couldn't so easily with the daily commute and also saves on travel costs
The attractions for those mothers are obvious and it no doubt improves their work life balance enormously. The ONS seem to be indicating, however, that it is not doing a lot for their output.
Yes well given our below replacement fertility rate we could do with a few more women having an output of children as mothers with more work life balance making that easier than just being measured on their output of workplace productivity
If you want to improve fertility rates then tax cuts for 30 somethings not Farmers would be a good idea. Yet Kemi thinks statutory maternity pay should go.
"Yet Kemi thinks statutory maternity pay should go".
Not true.
She did for a while, but couldn't stick with her principles.
I disagree. First of all, she needs to shore up the base. And, by the way, it's worth noting that the Lib Dems are also opposing both tax raids.
Wait until you hear about the other government policies the Lib Dems oppose.
A big mistake by the Lib Dems. Falling between two stools if you'll excuse the medical expression. An excellent header by TSE. He's on the money. 'Things sweet prove in digestion sour'.
At Millfield that bastion of egalitarianism 25% of their boys and girls were sons and daughters of farmers and that was not counting the JCB offspring who at that time hadn't purchased their 8000 acres of prime Cotswold countryside.
The main reason public sector productivity is so poor is the inability to move unproductive people out. The ultimate tool for increasing output per worker is to shit can the least productive ones which is something that private sector businesses do all the time. Until that attitude is brought to the public sector no amount of "investment" will help. The lazy and the feckless are attracted to the public sector because they know once they're in it's impossible to be removed regardless of how shit they are at the job.
Change this and suddenly public sector productivity will shoot up as those lazy buggers start to fear for their next salary.
Then should all the hill farmers in the Lake District quit hill farming? Then you will need to pay a lot of money to someone to.... do much of what they are doing now, to preserve the look of the landscape. Because it is artificial.
It is worth remembering that the framers have been carefully and extensively constrained in what they can do with the land. As a matter of government policy, since before WW2.
Someone, yesterday, was commenting on the fact that from the food security point of view, we produce 60-75% (depends how you count it) of what the nation consumes. And that goes back to the Corn Laws - lots of imports, to keep prices down.
This is because government policy was to encourage food security, balanced with using imports to hold prices down. Hence farmers getting pennies for tons of potatoes etc.
We now have extensive environmental concerns. Again, someone bought up the farmer who was given a prison sentence for scarping the land next to a river, repeatedly. Again, we need someone to actually implement the various rules.
The value of land is largely beyond the control of farmers - in addition to IHT, what no one has mentioned, is speculative land purchase for housing.
As I previously mentioned here, I nearly bought 35 acres of land in Marden on that basis - the plan was to solar farm it (probably renting it out as pasture for sheep as well) and wait and see about planning permission.
It's a very attractive business plan - make a steady profit. With the non-trivial chance of a windfall that lands you in FU money.
Ed Davey was at the farmers' rally as well so does that mean he was on the same bandwagon?
Oppositions oppose - that's what they do - but there's a difference between contradiction and argument as Mr Python once demonstrated. For every tax rise they wish to reverse, both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats have to show how they would "compensate" the public finances. I suspect both may find it difficult as we approach the next election to square the circle of cutting taxes, improving services and balancing the public finances.
As we've also seen this morning, public sector productivity remains a big problem - the kneejerk response of sacking 50% of civil servants won't help that at all.
The problem is we can't have a proper conversation about tax in this country - there's a claim from some we are "over taxed" (not quite sure what that means) and there's a valid question as to whether we get any "value" from the taxes we pay but the truth is we have a deficit which needs to be closed and borrowing which needs to be reduced and there's little or no honesty from anyone about any of this.
Yes, cut spending if there is an obvious argument (and nothing, including the armed forces, should be exempt) but the Party is over and we all now need to pay the bill and if that means raising basic rate tax to 25p and higher rate to 50p and looking at property and land asset value taxation, so be it.
Your final paragraph might be fine proposals for a left of centre Labour party and the Greens albeit at the risk of losing swing voters who hate higher taxes. They certainly aren't for a right of centre Conservative party
Fair enough so back to you - what would a "right of centre" (not even sure what that means) Party propose to reduce the deficit and borrowing?
Spending cuts? If so, what and where and why weren't these enacted during the 14 years your party led the Government? A previous Conservative Prime Minister transformed the State in eleven and a half years - the five leaders you chose over a 14 year period did the sum equivalent of bugger all.
Indeed one might argue for a "right of centre" party you governed more like a "left of centre" party but you didn't even do that properly.
Well we would start by axing the payrise for GPs and train drivers.
We could also then move on to making the NHS more efficient and finding savings there rather than just shovelling money into a bottomless pit.
While Bademoch has promised to reverse the IHT changes for farmers and the VAT on school fees, she does not seem to have done the same for the end of the universal winter fuel allowance.
It is Tory policy to reverse the winter fuel cut too
Really? I’ve not seen that announced. That would be a mistake
Linda McMahon may not be the best choice of education Secretary. Meltzer hinting at a qualifications issue and what did she know about her husbands vile antics when head of the WWE.
Shane McMahon is the one I really feel for. He seems a decent person.
In America? If Trump is going to abolish the Education Department, why does he need someone to run it?
(Other than to repay campaign favours.)
Because it still requires people to manage the shutdown, and transfer the services and people that are still required into other departments. Better to bring in an outsider with business management experience to undertake a role such as this, in fact there’s quite a few outsiders up for nomination at the moment.
So far, you’ve defended the choices of Matt Gaetz and Linda McMahon. Are you going to defend Mehmet Oz next?
@ONS Public service productivity in Quarter 2 2024 is estimated to be 8.5% below its pre-#COVID19 pandemic peak in Quarter 4 (Oct to Dec) 2019.
And this is our problem in a nutshell. Our public services are falling apart, not because of cuts in spending which have been modest to non existent) but because we are getting less and less for our money. That is the problem the last government largely ducked and which this government has to come to terms with. If they don't no amount of additional taxation will be enough.
And the multi billion pound question is... why?
Is it about a lack of the smack of firm management, is it the money spent on diversity consultants, or is it that we have solved bottlenecks with the short term fix of extra bodies rather than equipping staff with better tools to achieve more?
My guess (based on the way that capital budgets always get raided to fix crises, and have been for decades, and we're going to be under Hunt) is that the last diagnosis is the main problem.
I think from my limited experience that there is a lack of quality management, that WFH has in fact reduced people's output despite all the claims to the contrary, that it has encouraged a mind set that this job is for my benefit rather than the benefit of the people to whom the service that is being provided, that it is my mental health and work life balance that is important, not the quality of life of the service users I am supposedly working for and, perhaps above all, the never ending multiplication of emails to masses of people who don't need to receive them but get interrupted anyway.
None of this will stop me from WFH today, of course.
I’ve found it made me more efficient at delivering existing work, and less efficient at winning new work. I’m back in most of the time now.
It’s definitely a challenge for our new joiners and graduate entry too.
My daughter, who qualified as a solicitor last week, had a job whilst at University with the SSSC which is a regulator of the care sector in Scotland. All the time she was working for them (admittedly during Covid) she was WFH and only rarely met her colleagues.
They offered her a traineeship but she, rightly in my view, came to the conclusion that she would not learn from that in the same way as she would in the office and she went for a private firm instead. Her current job has her in court pretty much every day and has given her a vast range of experience she simply would not have got with the SSSC who were offering her more money. The management there were genuinely surprised when she turned them down.
For young people yes being in the office 4/5 days a week or indeed 5 out of 5 may be a benefit as they get to know their team and do work in person.
For parents, especially mothers, wfh however is a godsend as it gives them time to do the school run, do the washing, cooking, cleaning etc in breaks from work at home in the day which they couldn't so easily with the daily commute and also saves on travel costs
The attractions for those mothers are obvious and it no doubt improves their work life balance enormously. The ONS seem to be indicating, however, that it is not doing a lot for their output.
Yes well given our below replacement fertility rate we could do with a few more women having an output of children as mothers with more work life balance making that easier than just being measured on their output of workplace productivity
If you want to improve fertility rates then tax cuts for 30 somethings not Farmers would be a good idea. Yet Kemi thinks statutory maternity pay should go.
Statutory maternity pay isn’t a fraction of the issue, compared to housing costs that now make it impossible to live on one salary in many parts of the country.
The left are coming over as extremely "nasty" in their anti-farm comments.
Well, I'm not of the left, but I'm generally sceptical of giving any industry special treatment. And I'm especially sceptical when the special treatment is abused by other groups of people to avoid taxes.
Am I coming over as nasty?
I have no objection to farmers. They are carrying out economic activity, just like shoemakers, bakers, shopkeepers and insurance entrepreneurs.
But I also struggle to see why they should get special treatment.
Which is why I'd suggest replacing inheritance tax with a small annual gross assets levy. You can pass whatever you like onto your children, free of tax, but for people with assets of more than £1m, you need to make an annual payment 0.1% or 0.2% on the excess.
And this would be payable by anyone owning assets in the UK, not just by UK taxpayers. (I.e. tax the asset, not just resident taxpayers.)
It would probably raise almost exactly the same as IHT. It would avoid massive one-off payments. It wouldn't treat different family run businesses differently depending on the industry they were in.
And it wouldn't distort the market by allowing investment managers to buy up farmland solely for the purpose of avoiding IHT.
I think the difference is that farmers put food on our tables and often it's a pretty thankless andow margin industry. Isn't there a case to be made that having a proper food security reserve is worth a few tax breaks?
Does it have the effect though?
Or does the tax break encourage family farmers to sell to Mr Investment Manager who wants to dodge tax?
The problem is that farms - and other family owned businesses - are in an unusual situation. For them to exist they have to have assets which have a very high paper value - land, machinery, factories etc - but the profit margins are often extremely small. This means that treating them in the same way as other inheritences will almost certainly lead to them being put out of business. Now that may not matter to some people. But I do think that as a nation we do far better having large numbers of family owned businesses rather than a few hundred multinationals owning and running everything. If you want all the family businesses to cease to exist - or at least don't care - then I can follow your thinking on this. But if you bellieve that a diverse range of small businesses and entrepreneurship is something to be valued then you ned to find another way to deal with the genuine issues of investment tax avoidance without hammering the real businessmen - whether they are farmers or boot makers.
In 2023 the average ROCE for farms was 0.5%
`
Don't forget though that the tax break will have had the effect of pushing the ROCE down, because it will have pushed the value of land up.
Surely the solution here is the @Malmesbury compromise: i.e. the IHT break exists so long as you don't sell the farm. If you do, then you need to pay it back.
Yep that is exactly the way to do it. Trouble is neither Labour nor the supporters of the tax on here are willing to consider it. They would rather pretend it isn't a problem and all the farmers are either vastly rich or too poor to qualify.
Does it roll over as a liability?
You can imagine in, say, 3 generations, someone who hates farming but can’t sell because they would owe a massive amount of IHT that would destroy all their capital base.
I've suggested something similar. What I'd do is either fix the liability at death in notional terms (so it's eroded by inflation and any land value increases above inflation, so over a generation it drops significantly) or index link it but take off a % each year or simply cancel the previous liability when a new one comes due.
The main reason public sector productivity is so poor is the inability to move unproductive people out. The ultimate tool for increasing output per worker is to shit can the least productive ones which is something that private sector businesses do all the time. Until that attitude is brought to the public sector no amount of "investment" will help. The lazy and the feckless are attracted to the public sector because they know once they're in it's impossible to be removed regardless of how shit they are at the job.
Change this and suddenly public sector productivity will shoot up as those lazy buggers start to fear for their next salary.
Not true. No such thing as a permanent job. Hasn't been for decades. Just reorganise and make everyone apply for the new jobs.
'A rise in energy prices pushed UK inflation to its highest rate for six months, official figures show.
The inflation rate, which measures price changes over time, hit 2.3% in the year to October, a bigger-than-expected increase from 1.7% in September.
Annual gas and electricity bills for a typical household went up by about £149 last month, but prices are rising much more slowly than in recent years.
However, the rate, which is closely monitored to determine interest rates, is now back above the Bank of England's 2% target.'
While Bademoch has promised to reverse the IHT changes for farmers and the VAT on school fees, she does not seem to have done the same for the end of the universal winter fuel allowance.
It is Tory policy to reverse the winter fuel cut too
It's labour's policy in Scotland - let Starmer explain that one
I'll be interested to see how Mr Sarwar promises to do that without budget cuts elsewhere, as the Barnett consequential of the DWP WFA has vanished (hence the SNP having to follow suit).
NB that this isn't grandstanding for the GE but the rather sooner Holyrood election which however isn't till May 2026, so time for him to quietly forget about it.
Tbf, the Barnett consequentials for Scotland are substantial this time round. There's enough cash to do it and the policy is now devolved (PAWHP).
Sure, but only the jmeans tested kind, and how can they do it except the same way as London? Which the SNP would have to do anyway. So no difference there. Troiuble is, any other way of doing it costs money to administer. Unless they do it as a tax allowance which is taxable? But then the SG don't get the tax back and the budget for that won't therefore balance.
Edit: also, the SG taxation powers are very limited. Might not allow the SG to organise anyuthing sensible to deal with the WFP replacement.
I think there is now enough slack to do it on a universal basis. But yes, in the medium term it would either be universal or PC-based. We kinda need a "Scottish Pensioner Payment" that is similar to the Scottish Child Payment rates of eligibility.
In theory the SG can change income tax however they want. They are going to get fewer/less receipts anyway due to depressing effect of employer NICs changes on salaries.
The main reason public sector productivity is so poor is the inability to move unproductive people out. The ultimate tool for increasing output per worker is to shit can the least productive ones which is something that private sector businesses do all the time. Until that attitude is brought to the public sector no amount of "investment" will help. The lazy and the feckless are attracted to the public sector because they know once they're in it's impossible to be removed regardless of how shit they are at the job.
Change this and suddenly public sector productivity will shoot up as those lazy buggers start to fear for their next salary.
NHS England cut 9,000 posts from a total of just more than 24,000. The idea that it is “impossible” to remove public sector workers is a strange fantasy to hold on to.
While Bademoch has promised to reverse the IHT changes for farmers and the VAT on school fees, she does not seem to have done the same for the end of the universal winter fuel allowance.
It is Tory policy to reverse the winter fuel cut too
Really? I’ve not seen that announced. That would be a mistake
While Bademoch has promised to reverse the IHT changes for farmers and the VAT on school fees, she does not seem to have done the same for the end of the universal winter fuel allowance.
It is Tory policy to reverse the winter fuel cut too
It's labour's policy in Scotland - let Starmer explain that one
I'll be interested to see how Mr Sarwar promises to do that without budget cuts elsewhere, as the Barnett consequential of the DWP WFA has vanished (hence the SNP having to follow suit).
NB that this isn't grandstanding for the GE but the rather sooner Holyrood election which however isn't till May 2026, so time for him to quietly forget about it.
Also: despite the headlines, he's not promising to restore WFP but just to means test it - which isn't so far off the current Westminster proposal anyway.
I really hoped that SLab ( the forgotten nothing, learnt nothing party) would have a whack at forming a government at Holyrood just to remind voters of their quality, but it looks like it may not happen. Still an outside chance of them cobbling together something with their Unionist fellow travellers, assuming Reform don't gut the SCons.
@ONS Public service productivity in Quarter 2 2024 is estimated to be 8.5% below its pre-#COVID19 pandemic peak in Quarter 4 (Oct to Dec) 2019.
And this is our problem in a nutshell. Our public services are falling apart, not because of cuts in spending which have been modest to non existent) but because we are getting less and less for our money. That is the problem the last government largely ducked and which this government has to come to terms with. If they don't no amount of additional taxation will be enough.
And the multi billion pound question is... why?
Is it about a lack of the smack of firm management, is it the money spent on diversity consultants, or is it that we have solved bottlenecks with the short term fix of extra bodies rather than equipping staff with better tools to achieve more?
My guess (based on the way that capital budgets always get raided to fix crises, and have been for decades, and we're going to be under Hunt) is that the last diagnosis is the main problem.
I think from my limited experience that there is a lack of quality management, that WFH has in fact reduced people's output despite all the claims to the contrary, that it has encouraged a mind set that this job is for my benefit rather than the benefit of the people to whom the service that is being provided, that it is my mental health and work life balance that is important, not the quality of life of the service users I am supposedly working for and, perhaps above all, the never ending multiplication of emails to masses of people who don't need to receive them but get interrupted anyway.
None of this will stop me from WFH today, of course.
I’ve found it made me more efficient at delivering existing work, and less efficient at winning new work. I’m back in most of the time now.
It’s definitely a challenge for our new joiners and graduate entry too.
My daughter, who qualified as a solicitor last week, had a job whilst at University with the SSSC which is a regulator of the care sector in Scotland. All the time she was working for them (admittedly during Covid) she was WFH and only rarely met her colleagues.
They offered her a traineeship but she, rightly in my view, came to the conclusion that she would not learn from that in the same way as she would in the office and she went for a private firm instead. Her current job has her in court pretty much every day and has given her a vast range of experience she simply would not have got with the SSSC who were offering her more money. The management there were genuinely surprised when she turned them down.
For young people yes being in the office 4/5 days a week or indeed 5 out of 5 may be a benefit as they get to know their team and do work in person.
For parents, especially mothers, wfh however is a godsend as it gives them time to do the school run, do the washing, cooking, cleaning etc in breaks from work at home in the day which they couldn't so easily with the daily commute and also saves on travel costs
The attractions for those mothers are obvious and it no doubt improves their work life balance enormously. The ONS seem to be indicating, however, that it is not doing a lot for their output.
Yes well given our below replacement fertility rate we could do with a few more women having an output of children as mothers with more work life balance making that easier than just being measured on their output of workplace productivity
If you want to improve fertility rates then tax cuts for 30 somethings not Farmers would be a good idea. Yet Kemi thinks statutory maternity pay should go.
We need mothers and farmers producing food supply. That means more child benefit for stay at home mothers and lower taxes for mothers who choose to work part time and I made clear I opposed Kemi's view on maternity pay
Ah, the Tradwife thing has made it over to Gilead Britain.
Without doubt one of the worst thread headers TSE has ever done.
No party wins general elections without shoring up their core vote first and for Tories they include private school parents and farmers. Voters also want a choice not an echo, if you want to hammer farmers with inheritance tax and hit private school parents with VAT you vote Labour anyway and if the Tories don't stand up for farmers and private school parents they will leak voters to Reform and the LDs who will.
Plus 57% of voters oppose the hated tractor tax anyway
Not to mention VAT on school fees will just reduce the scholarships they provide and hit smaller schools most making them even more exclusive. While we need family farms to produce our food, you can't make food from houses. Most farms may be asset rich but they are income poor
If you are asset rich but income poor, you can get a mortgage or similar sort of loan. It’s not difficult.
We need houses to live in. You can’t make houses from food (pace Hansel & Gretel).
No you can't as you don't have the income to repay a mortgage for starters.
We need houses to live in mainly in cities, suburbs and towns, we need the countryside to still provide our food mainly
If the land cannot generate any income, why is its value so high?
It is there to develop food, not to be sold off to the nearest property developer
If land is sold to pay IHT then it will be either farmed by someone else, or used for some other sort of development. It won't simply stay fallow, though a bit of rewinding would be welcome.
It seems that the PB Tory position is that subsidies to inflate house prices are bad, but relefs that inflate land value are good.
If agricultural land prices fall as a result it will be bad for IHT dodging speculators but good for smaller farmers as it improves their return on capital. Additionally the more land prices fall the more small farmers escape IHT entirely by slipping under the threshold.
No if land is sold to pay IHT family farms will be lost forever, either replaced by property development or some huge agri corp both of which would be much worse.
Labour could have kept the IHT exemption for 3 generations of family farms or more if they just wanted to hit speculators but didn't as it was just a policy of class war
As 100% AR only came in in 1992, was Mrs Thatchers government waging class war on family farmers?
Indeed wasn't it Death Duties on large estates in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that substantially transferred land from the landed gentry to their tenants? Thereby converting tenant farmers to owners?
There's something to be said for a similar programme of land reform, so that younger more entrepreneurial farmers can get started, rather than work the estates of the rich.
I disagree. First of all, she needs to shore up the base. And, by the way, it's worth noting that the Lib Dems are also opposing both tax raids.
Wait until you hear about the other government policies the Lib Dems oppose.
A big mistake by the Lib Dems. Falling between two stools if you'll excuse the medical expression. An excellent header by TSE. He's on the money. 'Things sweet prove in digestion sour'.
At Millfield that bastion of egalitarianism 25% of their boys and girls were sons and daughters of farmers and that was not counting the JCB offspring who at that time hadn't purchased their 8000 acres of prime Cotswold countryside.
Entirely sensible by the LDs, not least as over half their parliamentary seats are rural or semi rural
@ONS Public service productivity in Quarter 2 2024 is estimated to be 8.5% below its pre-#COVID19 pandemic peak in Quarter 4 (Oct to Dec) 2019.
And this is our problem in a nutshell. Our public services are falling apart, not because of cuts in spending which have been modest to non existent) but because we are getting less and less for our money. That is the problem the last government largely ducked and which this government has to come to terms with. If they don't no amount of additional taxation will be enough.
And the multi billion pound question is... why?
Is it about a lack of the smack of firm management, is it the money spent on diversity consultants, or is it that we have solved bottlenecks with the short term fix of extra bodies rather than equipping staff with better tools to achieve more?
My guess (based on the way that capital budgets always get raided to fix crises, and have been for decades, and we're going to be under Hunt) is that the last diagnosis is the main problem.
I think from my limited experience that there is a lack of quality management, that WFH has in fact reduced people's output despite all the claims to the contrary, that it has encouraged a mind set that this job is for my benefit rather than the benefit of the people to whom the service that is being provided, that it is my mental health and work life balance that is important, not the quality of life of the service users I am supposedly working for and, perhaps above all, the never ending multiplication of emails to masses of people who don't need to receive them but get interrupted anyway.
None of this will stop me from WFH today, of course.
I’ve found it made me more efficient at delivering existing work, and less efficient at winning new work. I’m back in most of the time now.
It’s definitely a challenge for our new joiners and graduate entry too.
My daughter, who qualified as a solicitor last week, had a job whilst at University with the SSSC which is a regulator of the care sector in Scotland. All the time she was working for them (admittedly during Covid) she was WFH and only rarely met her colleagues.
They offered her a traineeship but she, rightly in my view, came to the conclusion that she would not learn from that in the same way as she would in the office and she went for a private firm instead. Her current job has her in court pretty much every day and has given her a vast range of experience she simply would not have got with the SSSC who were offering her more money. The management there were genuinely surprised when she turned them down.
For young people yes being in the office 4/5 days a week or indeed 5 out of 5 may be a benefit as they get to know their team and do work in person.
For parents, especially mothers, wfh however is a godsend as it gives them time to do the school run, do the washing, cooking, cleaning etc in breaks from work at home in the day which they couldn't so easily with the daily commute and also saves on travel costs
The attractions for those mothers are obvious and it no doubt improves their work life balance enormously. The ONS seem to be indicating, however, that it is not doing a lot for their output.
Yes well given our below replacement fertility rate we could do with a few more women having an output of children as mothers with more work life balance making that easier than just being measured on their output of workplace productivity
If you want to improve fertility rates then tax cuts for 30 somethings not Farmers would be a good idea. Yet Kemi thinks statutory maternity pay should go.
We need mothers and farmers producing food supply. That means more child benefit for stay at home mothers and lower taxes for mothers who choose to work part time and I made clear I opposed Kemi's view on maternity pay
Ah, the Tradwife thing has made it over to Gilead Britain.
The Tradwife trend is purely status signalling for the rich. The lifestyle is only accessible to the time-rich with money behind them.
@ONS Public service productivity in Quarter 2 2024 is estimated to be 8.5% below its pre-#COVID19 pandemic peak in Quarter 4 (Oct to Dec) 2019.
And this is our problem in a nutshell. Our public services are falling apart, not because of cuts in spending which have been modest to non existent) but because we are getting less and less for our money. That is the problem the last government largely ducked and which this government has to come to terms with. If they don't no amount of additional taxation will be enough.
And the multi billion pound question is... why?
Is it about a lack of the smack of firm management, is it the money spent on diversity consultants, or is it that we have solved bottlenecks with the short term fix of extra bodies rather than equipping staff with better tools to achieve more?
My guess (based on the way that capital budgets always get raided to fix crises, and have been for decades, and we're going to be under Hunt) is that the last diagnosis is the main problem.
I think from my limited experience that there is a lack of quality management, that WFH has in fact reduced people's output despite all the claims to the contrary, that it has encouraged a mind set that this job is for my benefit rather than the benefit of the people to whom the service that is being provided, that it is my mental health and work life balance that is important, not the quality of life of the service users I am supposedly working for and, perhaps above all, the never ending multiplication of emails to masses of people who don't need to receive them but get interrupted anyway.
None of this will stop me from WFH today, of course.
I’ve found it made me more efficient at delivering existing work, and less efficient at winning new work. I’m back in most of the time now.
It’s definitely a challenge for our new joiners and graduate entry too.
My daughter, who qualified as a solicitor last week, had a job whilst at University with the SSSC which is a regulator of the care sector in Scotland. All the time she was working for them (admittedly during Covid) she was WFH and only rarely met her colleagues.
They offered her a traineeship but she, rightly in my view, came to the conclusion that she would not learn from that in the same way as she would in the office and she went for a private firm instead. Her current job has her in court pretty much every day and has given her a vast range of experience she simply would not have got with the SSSC who were offering her more money. The management there were genuinely surprised when she turned them down.
For young people yes being in the office 4/5 days a week or indeed 5 out of 5 may be a benefit as they get to know their team and do work in person.
For parents, especially mothers, wfh however is a godsend as it gives them time to do the school run, do the washing, cooking, cleaning etc in breaks from work at home in the day which they couldn't so easily with the daily commute and also saves on travel costs
The attractions for those mothers are obvious and it no doubt improves their work life balance enormously. The ONS seem to be indicating, however, that it is not doing a lot for their output.
Yes well given our below replacement fertility rate we could do with a few more women having an output of children as mothers with more work life balance making that easier than just being measured on their output of workplace productivity
If you want to improve fertility rates then tax cuts for 30 somethings not Farmers would be a good idea. Yet Kemi thinks statutory maternity pay should go.
Not true, the biggest issue with having more kids is housing costs and going from 2 kids to 3 is transportion. My wife and I were looking into it and we'd need to buy a new car if we had a third kid because of car seat rules that your generation never had to contend with. Not only are the seats expensive, cars that can fit 3 car seats are also expensive. Statutory maternity pay doesn't even rate as a top 10 issue.
The main reason public sector productivity is so poor is the inability to move unproductive people out. The ultimate tool for increasing output per worker is to shit can the least productive ones which is something that private sector businesses do all the time. Until that attitude is brought to the public sector no amount of "investment" will help. The lazy and the feckless are attracted to the public sector because they know once they're in it's impossible to be removed regardless of how shit they are at the job.
Change this and suddenly public sector productivity will shoot up as those lazy buggers start to fear for their next salary.
NHS England cut 9,000 posts from a total of just more than 24,000. The idea that it is “impossible” to remove public sector workers is a strange fantasy to hold on to.
Yes, but that cull brought a drop rather than increase in productivity!
Without doubt one of the worst thread headers TSE has ever done.
No party wins general elections without shoring up their core vote first and for Tories they include private school parents and farmers. Voters also want a choice not an echo, if you want to hammer farmers with inheritance tax and hit private school parents with VAT you vote Labour anyway and if the Tories don't stand up for farmers and private school parents they will leak voters to Reform and the LDs who will.
Plus 57% of voters oppose the hated tractor tax anyway
Not to mention VAT on school fees will just reduce the scholarships they provide and hit smaller schools most making them even more exclusive. While we need family farms to produce our food, you can't make food from houses. Most farms may be asset rich but they are income poor
If you are asset rich but income poor, you can get a mortgage or similar sort of loan. It’s not difficult.
We need houses to live in. You can’t make houses from food (pace Hansel & Gretel).
No you can't as you don't have the income to repay a mortgage for starters.
We need houses to live in mainly in cities, suburbs and towns, we need the countryside to still provide our food mainly
If the land cannot generate any income, why is its value so high?
It is there to develop food, not to be sold off to the nearest property developer
If land is sold to pay IHT then it will be either farmed by someone else, or used for some other sort of development. It won't simply stay fallow, though a bit of rewinding would be welcome.
It seems that the PB Tory position is that subsidies to inflate house prices are bad, but relefs that inflate land value are good.
If agricultural land prices fall as a result it will be bad for IHT dodging speculators but good for smaller farmers as it improves their return on capital. Additionally the more land prices fall the more small farmers escape IHT entirely by slipping under the threshold.
No if land is sold to pay IHT family farms will be lost forever, either replaced by property development or some huge agri corp both of which would be much worse.
Labour could have kept the IHT exemption for 3 generations of family farms or more if they just wanted to hit speculators but didn't as it was just a policy of class war
As 100% AR only came in in 1992, was Mrs Thatchers government waging class war on family farmers?
Indeed wasn't it Death Duties on large estates in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that substantially transferred land from the landed gentry to their tenants? Thereby converting tenant farmers to owners?
There's something to be said for a similar programme of land reform, so that younger more entrepreneurial farmers can get started, rather than work the estates of the rich.
It was Mrs Thatcher who introduced APR in the first place with the Inheritance Act 1984 not least as more farms were being hit by inheritance tax with no real rise in income to pay it.
Death duties on large estates were just another piece of class warfare this time brought in by Lloyd George's Liberals rather than Labour which made little difference to tenants though did open up stately homes and estates to the National Trust and English Heritage for paying visitors to help pay the bills.
No young entrepreneurial farmer out of agricultural college will be able to buy an over £1 million farm estate anyway, indeed 90% of them will have fathers who own the family farm anyway and due to this useless Labour measure may well give up and become accountants or lawyers instead
The main reason public sector productivity is so poor is the inability to move unproductive people out. The ultimate tool for increasing output per worker is to shit can the least productive ones which is something that private sector businesses do all the time. Until that attitude is brought to the public sector no amount of "investment" will help. The lazy and the feckless are attracted to the public sector because they know once they're in it's impossible to be removed regardless of how shit they are at the job.
Change this and suddenly public sector productivity will shoot up as those lazy buggers start to fear for their next salary.
You'd probably have to boost salaries a quite bit to make up for the additional uncertainty - there would be a lot of collateral damage along the way, and the pensions aren't worth as much if you could randomly lose your job in your 40s/50s.
'A rise in energy prices pushed UK inflation to its highest rate for six months, official figures show.
The inflation rate, which measures price changes over time, hit 2.3% in the year to October, a bigger-than-expected increase from 1.7% in September.
Annual gas and electricity bills for a typical household went up by about £149 last month, but prices are rising much more slowly than in recent years.
However, the rate, which is closely monitored to determine interest rates, is now back above the Bank of England's 2% target.'
And its going to go higher as the employer NI increases work their way through the cost base. Higher inflation, lower growth, more borrowing. This is not the economic miracle we were looking for.
@StillWaters on your point about building consensus, I would be interested to hear your thoughts on the trans issue and if we can find some common ground as I have with others
I think consensus is fine. I like to build consensus where it can be found, obviously that won’t be the case for everything but I think on this issue there is a middle ground somewhere.
My views on this have changed some after listening to the women on here. I don’t think that a bad thing.
The main reason public sector productivity is so poor is the inability to move unproductive people out. The ultimate tool for increasing output per worker is to shit can the least productive ones which is something that private sector businesses do all the time. Until that attitude is brought to the public sector no amount of "investment" will help. The lazy and the feckless are attracted to the public sector because they know once they're in it's impossible to be removed regardless of how shit they are at the job.
Change this and suddenly public sector productivity will shoot up as those lazy buggers start to fear for their next salary.
Let’s presume for one moment Angela Rayners wheeze of allowing public sector workers to do the same job for four days a week comes to pass. How would this impact productivity ?
Comments
Had UKIP polled much higher in 2017 at Tory expense then Corbyn would likely have beaten May and become PM.
Indeed until Boris replaced May in 2019 Farage's then Brexit party were eating into the Tory vote to such an extent the polls suggested Corbyn would become PM in a Spring 2019 GE
Ed Davey was at the farmers' rally as well so does that mean he was on the same bandwagon?
Oppositions oppose - that's what they do - but there's a difference between contradiction and argument as Mr Python once demonstrated. For every tax rise they wish to reverse, both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats have to show how they would "compensate" the public finances. I suspect both may find it difficult as we approach the next election to square the circle of cutting taxes, improving services and balancing the public finances.
As we've also seen this morning, public sector productivity remains a big problem - the kneejerk response of sacking 50% of civil servants won't help that at all.
The problem is we can't have a proper conversation about tax in this country - there's a claim from some we are "over taxed" (not quite sure what that means) and there's a valid question as to whether we get any "value" from the taxes we pay but the truth is we have a deficit which needs to be closed and borrowing which needs to be reduced and there's little or no honesty from anyone about any of this.
Yes, cut spending if there is an obvious argument (and nothing, including the armed forces, should be exempt) but the Party is over and we all now need to pay the bill and if that means raising basic rate tax to 25p and higher rate to 50p and looking at property and land asset value taxation, so be it.
I'm not sure there are many £3m houses in Swansea.
Three big tax policies have resulted from the Budget - Removing the Winter Fuel allowance (which I know was announced prior to the budget), Inheritence tax on family run businesses and farms, and increasing Employer's NI.
The first two of these are being done for explainable reasons (The state should not be giving money to those who don't need it just because they are old, and rich investors are using the IHT arrangments to avoid paying tax) but both have been completely ballsed up with their implementation - not the PR but the actual planned implementation.
It would have been easily possible to have devised a system to properly means test the WFA removal rather than using the blunt tool of Pension Credit and it was certainly possible to devise an IHT system that did not threaten the future of family farms and businesses whilst still closing the investment loophole. I just get the impression that, because they don't actually understand (or care?) about the collateral damage, they plough on with the most basic sledgehammer applications of their plans safe in the knowledge that they can always point to the intended target as an excuse. They are the Bomber Harris of politics.
(On the third policy of employers NI we have yet to see the effects of that but I suspect a lot of smaller businesses will be laying off staff or shutting down entirely and again there seems to be no effort to differentiate between larger companies and the small businesses which run on very low profit margins)
Meanwhile we still don't have an effective or fair tax regime for multinationals.
For parents, especially mothers, wfh however is a godsend as it gives them time to do the school run, do the washing, cooking, cleaning etc in breaks from work at home in the day which they couldn't so easily with the daily commute and also saves on travel costs
We need houses to live in. You can’t make houses from food (pace Hansel & Gretel).
Clearly both Conservative policies are right and the right thing to do. "Oh but the cost, the cost". So a policy which will "only" wreck 500 farming businesses per year and only raise £1B per annum at most should not be reversed ?
The real question is will the Lib Dems guarantee to vote to abolish IHT ? If they don't their councillors need not imagine they will be re-elected any more than Labour ones.
The figure 100k farmers is bizarre, there must be towards 500k who are directly affected by the farming aspect of this ludicrous policy and probably 2 or 3 million who are closely linked to such people. You can double those figures for small businesses.
It might be that on-one in the top tier of this vile government have ever knowingly fucked a Tory. Presumably us Tories have more taste.
But I don't expect lib Ems or Conservatives will experience the same barracking.
And Cameron delivered more jobs and some growth, as well as income tax cuts, which is why he was re-elected.
We need houses to live in mainly in cities, suburbs and towns, we need the countryside to still provide our food mainly
However regardless the header is succinct, entertaining and thought provoking.
https://bylinetimes.com/2022/03/30/laura-kuenssberg-bbc-political-editor-was-a-catastrophic-systemic-failure/
I'd have much preferred a more radical Budget from Reeves with big tax rises and spending cuts to reduce the deficit and borrowing (to be clear, I'm not opposed to all borrowing by any stretch - borrowing for capital investment isn't a bad idea and an obvious way to fund infrastructure projects).
Her problem is she probably couldn't sell spending cuts to her Party any more than Hunt could have sold tax rises to his - his NI cuts were irresponsible and the equivalent of salting the earth for the new Government.
The debate on tax has been so poisoned you can't even say the words "income tax rises" without getting a heap of vitriol from all sides. Let me be very clear - IF you can bring the public finances back under control and get some growth in the economy, tax cuts can be back on the table (though I'd much rather we paid off the debt to reduce interest payments and leave a better economic legacy for the future).
The solution is very simple. Self farmed land is a business and should get IHT relief. Rented out land is an investment and should not.
With the Tories it is (or has been in recent years) naked self interest and feck the country, with Labour it is blind ideology and feck the country. Neither are attractive
High and low inflation is largely down to,the fed not the democrats and telling people inflation is low when they are paying far more for staples than four years before and their salaries have not kept up doesn’t help as it didn’t help Rishi.
That's the thing with public policy - you need to think the thing through from start to finish and discover the loopholes and potential problems before announcing the policy. Yes, there will always be "losers" and they will shout loud and long while the winners keep quiet but that's the nature of politics and sometimes, in politics, you have to face down those who shout and argue your case firmly and with conviction.
There will also be those who argue with the principle of the policy itself rather than its impacts - there are those who are opposed to IHT in any form - and they will never be satisfied.
We have actually expanded spending in some areas - to get less return. Why?
One to consider. There is an affection, in the public sector, for running at 98%* capacity. No waste!
Operational research**, for more than a century, has told us that an organisation running at 98% of capacity, is in the edge of failure. Quality suffers, staff moral collapses etc.
Strangely, what is observed in the places in public service where 98% is the target?
*Or ludicrous numbers like this.
**Worth considering the name sometimes used for this - "Scientific Management"
Others will be doing the 'work' part in breaks from their 'life'.
Its the second group whose productivity will be falling.
NB that this isn't grandstanding for the GE but the rather sooner Holyrood election which however isn't till May 2026, so time for him to quietly forget about it.
Also: despite the headlines, he's not promising to restore WFP but just to means test it - which isn't so far off the current Westminster proposal anyway.
Its increasingly clear that Labour kept quiet about their plans not just for political reasons but also because the necessary work hadn't been done.
Today's Number : 35198.2 kWh = 35.2 MWh.
That is the amount of electricity my solar panels have generated since installed.
Found out in unfortunate circumstances - I have something repeatedly tripping about half of my downstairs power, and I need to find out what it is - which will endless climbing over things to unplug stuff. Fortunately, it's not the kitchen - where the freezer is located - or where the the internet comes in (so I can tell you all about it
The solar power meter is next to the fuse box.
(Other than to repay campaign favours.)
Spending cuts? If so, what and where and why weren't these enacted during the 14 years your party led the Government? A previous Conservative Prime Minister transformed the State in eleven and a half years - the five leaders you chose over a 14 year period did the sum equivalent of bugger all.
Indeed one might argue for a "right of centre" party you governed more like a "left of centre" party but you didn't even do that properly.
It seems that the PB Tory position is that subsidies to inflate house prices are bad, but relefs that inflate land value are good.
If agricultural land prices fall as a result it will be bad for IHT dodging speculators but good for smaller farmers as it improves their return on capital. Additionally the more land prices fall the more small farmers escape IHT entirely by slipping under the threshold.
Of course this would not suit the Right-wing Conservative Party. It used to be the party of enormous landowners. Now it is the party of tax-dodgers.
I also think back channels exist with the civil service who would normally look at the initial policy proposals and vet them (when I was in local Government we always looked at what the Opposition was planning just in case we had to implement it).
Did the civil service warn Reeves of the potential problems? If not, why not? The service isn't neutral or impartial as most believe - it is or should be a friendly critic to all.
Even so, the Reeves team seems strangely bereft of some serious thinkers but you could equally argue the Conservative side wasn't strong on straegic thinking either.
Edit: also, the SG taxation powers are very limited. Might not allow the SG to organise anyuthing sensible to deal with the WFP replacement.
People seem to forget I also voted for her.
Not true.
Labour could have kept the IHT exemption for 3 generations of family farms or more if they just wanted to hit speculators but didn't as it was just a policy of class war
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2024/sep/29/maternity-pay-is-excessive-says-tory-leadership-hopeful-kemi-badenoch
At Millfield that bastion of egalitarianism 25% of their boys and girls were sons and daughters of farmers and that was not counting the JCB offspring who at that time hadn't purchased their 8000 acres of prime Cotswold countryside.
Change this and suddenly public sector productivity will shoot up as those lazy buggers start to fear for their next salary.
It is worth remembering that the framers have been carefully and extensively constrained in what they can do with the land. As a matter of government policy, since before WW2.
Someone, yesterday, was commenting on the fact that from the food security point of view, we produce 60-75% (depends how you count it) of what the nation consumes. And that goes back to the Corn Laws - lots of imports, to keep prices down.
This is because government policy was to encourage food security, balanced with using imports to hold prices down. Hence farmers getting pennies for tons of potatoes etc.
We now have extensive environmental concerns. Again, someone bought up the farmer who was given a prison sentence for scarping the land next to a river, repeatedly. Again, we need someone to actually implement the various rules.
The value of land is largely beyond the control of farmers - in addition to IHT, what no one has mentioned, is speculative land purchase for housing.
As I previously mentioned here, I nearly bought 35 acres of land in Marden on that basis - the plan was to solar farm it (probably renting it out as pasture for sheep as well) and wait and see about planning permission.
It's a very attractive business plan - make a steady profit. With the non-trivial chance of a windfall that lands you in FU money.
We could also then move on to making the NHS more efficient and finding savings there rather than just shovelling money into a bottomless pit.
The inflation rate, which measures price changes over time, hit 2.3% in the year to October, a bigger-than-expected increase from 1.7% in September.
Annual gas and electricity bills for a typical household went up by about £149 last month, but prices are rising much more slowly than in recent years.
However, the rate, which is closely monitored to determine interest rates, is now back above the Bank of England's 2% target.'
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8rl4rgdj12o
In theory the SG can change income tax however they want. They are going to get fewer/less receipts anyway due to depressing effect of employer NICs changes on salaries.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWKiXstJRhc (12mins)
Angus Robertson
@AngusRobertson
Scottish Labour has fallen further behind @theSNP
according to a new poll. Details of @Survation
poll for @progressscot
in today’s @thetimes
https://x.com/AngusRobertson/status/1859160592734437845
GileadBritain.Indeed wasn't it Death Duties on large estates in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that substantially transferred land from the landed gentry to their tenants? Thereby converting tenant farmers to owners?
There's something to be said for a similar programme of land reform, so that younger more entrepreneurial farmers can get started, rather than work the estates of the rich.
Not sure I agree this is what will happen. Never fall out with a profession that appears in children's books is a political adage.
Death duties on large estates were just another piece of class warfare this time brought in by Lloyd George's Liberals rather than Labour which made little difference to tenants though did open up stately homes and estates to the National Trust and English Heritage for paying visitors to help pay the bills.
No young entrepreneurial farmer out of agricultural college will be able to buy an over £1 million farm estate anyway, indeed 90% of them will have fathers who own the family farm anyway and due to this useless Labour measure may well give up and become accountants or lawyers instead
I think consensus is fine. I like to build consensus where it can be found, obviously that won’t be the case for everything but I think on this issue there is a middle ground somewhere.
My views on this have changed some after listening to the women on here. I don’t think that a bad thing.