The Reform revolution looks somewhat anemic this morning. If you can’t turn out a big protest vote at times like this, the general election is going to be challenging.
I profoundly disagree. Leave aside Runcorn - a seat Labour won by 35% a year ago - they've taken one mayoralty and have come perilously close to winning three more, all from pretty much a standing start. They were ahead of all other parties in councillor-count last I saw (early days, granted). They're far ahead of their main rival on the right-of-centre in all the mayoral contests.
Labour is talking itself into denial and complacency by setting Reform's bar ludicrously high.
It’s like claiming the Conservatives underperformed in 1968, because they fell short in Newham and Tower Hamlets.
Very bad for Labour and cataclysmic for the Tories in results so far. More attention will be paid to Labour, rightly because the Tories were already discounted, while there were still some residual expectations for Labour. And all this means a great result for Reform. By default, I think, but it doesn't matter: a win's a win.
I don't agree. A seat which is meaningless being lost mid term is normal more so when the seat was vacated because the MP floored a constituent. The only interesting feature is that the winner was Reform not Tory. So a significant result for the Tories- possibly-and a pointer for what Labour could improve but beyond that and the shame on Liverpool nothing much
I don’t envy Labour but the clear message from his support at the last GE and before was that people are done with austerity. To double down on it whilst doing stuff that really upsets middle England, like the war on nature, has been politics at its poorest.
How can austerity end without raising taxes which are already at a high level?
Growth. Essentially, it can't. We can't afford the level of welfare we're currently paying for - we've basically got UBI for anyone who can pass a PIP and keeping anyone over 65 in clover.
Which party is going to be brave enough to end the triple lock ? My answer none .
It's not just the state pension, public sector pensions need a 30-40% haircut too. In too many areas we're living well beyond our means and our welfare state is far, far beyond a safety net. Cut a million people from state employment to take us back to 2017, taper the state pension for higher rate tax payers, merge NI and income tax so that non-working income is taxed at the same rate as working income, cut to £2k the cash ISA allowance, push through a 30-40% haircut for defined benefit pensions (even for people currently receiving them), introduce much, much tougher criteria to receive disability benefits and exclude all but 5% of the most serious mental health cases by default. The rest can go back to work or live on £450 per month or whatever UC is for unemployed people. Also get rid of UC, move back to the old system if JSA and ESA, UC is an experiment that hasn't worked, it's just encouraged people to game the system worse than ever.
I think if Labour started that programme today by the end of the parliament we could be in a position to actually pay front line service staff more and attract better quality candidates for teachers, police, nurses etc...
What we have now is an underfunded and hugely over funded state at the same time it's literally the worst of both worlds.
There's no way a haircut to built up public sector pension entitlements would survive a court challenge. Some final salary public sector pensions were too generous, but those days are gone now (although the less generous career average DB pensions are still a draw). Still live recipients of those generous pensions, of course, but I don't think there's much to be done about that.
Cutting future pensions to be earned could work but only with substantial pay increases in many areas. I've looked at civil service roles a few times, but the pay is laughable in tech/science roles, coupled with the insistence of starting new entrants on the bottom of the scale. There's a post I looked at recently that had a range of. £55-£70k. £70k or even £65k would have had me apply, but the guidance was very clear it would be bottom of scale for me coming from outside and the path to pay progression was highly opaque. It was written in some ways as a more senior role, with more line management duties than I have at present, but would have been a pay cut for me. A the same time, I saw a 'lead python developer's post at the same place with the same pay range, which really is ridiculous. If they won't compete, they're not going to get good people and will end up spending more than funding a post properly - either lots of turnover as people gain experience and the leave or someone really mediocre who sits there doing not a great deal.
Parliament is sovereign, it can pass primary legislation to mandate a haircut for db pensions. It will of course make them wildly unpopular with people who lose out but it is absolutely possible.
I've also said many times that pension contributions should be cut and salaries increased in the public sector. People want the money today, not at some nebulous point in the future. A friend of mine was contacted to apply for senior on prem cybersecurity admin but the salary is well below market rate and they make it up in the pension, the overall package isn't dissimilar to what he might get elsewhere but he can't afford the pay cut so politely declined.
But aside from that, we just have too many people doing too little in that £40-60k band in the public sector. Lots of salary collectors creating micro bureaucracies around them to justify their roles. We should sweep the lot of them away and bank the saving, reduce the deficit and bank the subsequent drop in the interest bill as gilt prices increase and yields fall.
Parliament is sovereign, but it should use that power carefully. It would damage the trustworthiness of the state if it were to casually use that power to cancel the liabilities it had accrued.
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
No what's wrong is we arent building houses.
You wouldn't post that if you lived in at some parts of Essex. Maldon is an example; hundreds of homes have been built to the South and West of the town. And a village nearby is protesting about 600 new homes being built. In our small town around 100 extra houses have recently been added, increasing the population by around 10%.
We had similar debates in Stockton-on-Tees when I lived there. The whole borough had been endless housebuilding for a decade. Multiple projects with hundreds of homes per site as well as smaller infill builds. And even bigger ones in the planning stage which are now going up.
The comedy factor? With the 2014 planning regs change the council was deemed to be "not building enough houses", allowing developers to do what they liked regardless of what councillors or even the MP thought.
The issue? The wrong type of houses being built. I lived on a development that ran to nearly 1,000 houses. Part of the site used to have a run down council estate on it, which was bulldozed. A small number of LHA houses added to the project did not adequately replace the hundreds of smaller affordable houses removed.
We're building houses that people can't afford.
That's what happens when you build houses in dumps where nobody with any choice wants to live instead of in the prosperous successful areas of the country which are in desperate need of new housing.
We need 8 million or so houses to match France, but very few of those should be built in the north.
It's so staggeringly obvious where the demand is when you look at the price/incomes ratio: from memory, 4x in the north, 10x in the SE and 14x in London.
But as we're governed by a bunch of economically illiterate, social media-obsessed cowards, focused on the next opinion poll not the next generation, I don't expect that to change anytime soon.
Why not move some of the demand up north, instead of snowballing the south? Regional energy pricing, a flat 0.5% rate of council tax based on house prices, capital investment based on the inverse of average wages, remove all IHT and CGT allowances for property.
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
No what's wrong is we arent building houses.
You wouldn't post that if you lived in at some parts of Essex. Maldon is an example; hundreds of homes have been built to the South and West of the town. And a village nearby is protesting about 600 new homes being built. In our small town around 100 extra houses have recently been added, increasing the population by around 10%.
We had similar debates in Stockton-on-Tees when I lived there. The whole borough had been endless housebuilding for a decade. Multiple projects with hundreds of homes per site as well as smaller infill builds. And even bigger ones in the planning stage which are now going up.
The comedy factor? With the 2014 planning regs change the council was deemed to be "not building enough houses", allowing developers to do what they liked regardless of what councillors or even the MP thought.
The issue? The wrong type of houses being built. I lived on a development that ran to nearly 1,000 houses. Part of the site used to have a run down council estate on it, which was bulldozed. A small number of LHA houses added to the project did not adequately replace the hundreds of smaller affordable houses removed.
We're building houses that people can't afford.
That's what happens when you build houses in dumps where nobody with any choice wants to live instead of in the prosperous successful areas of the country which are in desperate need of new housing.
We need 8 million or so houses to match France, but very few of those should be built in the north.
It's so staggeringly obvious where the demand is when you look at the price/incomes ratio: from memory, 4x in the north, 10x in the SE and 14x in London.
But as we're governed by a bunch of economically illiterate, social media-obsessed cowards, focused on the next opinion poll not the next generation, I don't expect that to change anytime soon.
It's a matter for society how purely and extensively we allow markets to operate.
We don't for example have a market in child labour, or allowing departure from compulsory education at 11 or 14.
We actually do have a limited market in child labour.
I'd forgotten that Gethins won by an even tinier margin (2) than the one in Runcorn, though that was a GE rather than a by-election. Is this the record?
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
No what's wrong is we arent building houses.
You wouldn't post that if you lived in at some parts of Essex. Maldon is an example; hundreds of homes have been built to the South and West of the town. And a village nearby is protesting about 600 new homes being built. In our small town around 100 extra houses have recently been added, increasing the population by around 10%.
We had similar debates in Stockton-on-Tees when I lived there. The whole borough had been endless housebuilding for a decade. Multiple projects with hundreds of homes per site as well as smaller infill builds. And even bigger ones in the planning stage which are now going up.
The comedy factor? With the 2014 planning regs change the council was deemed to be "not building enough houses", allowing developers to do what they liked regardless of what councillors or even the MP thought.
The issue? The wrong type of houses being built. I lived on a development that ran to nearly 1,000 houses. Part of the site used to have a run down council estate on it, which was bulldozed. A small number of LHA houses added to the project did not adequately replace the hundreds of smaller affordable houses removed.
We're building houses that people can't afford.
That's what happens when you build houses in dumps where nobody with any choice wants to live instead of in the prosperous successful areas of the country which are in desperate need of new housing.
We need 8 million or so houses to match France, but very few of those should be built in the north.
It's so staggeringly obvious where the demand is when you look at the price/incomes ratio: from memory, 4x in the north, 10x in the SE and 14x in London.
But as we're governed by a bunch of economically illiterate, social media-obsessed cowards, focused on the next opinion poll not the next generation, I don't expect that to change anytime soon.
It's a matter for society how purely and extensively we allow markets to operate.
We don't for example have a market in child labour, or allowing departure from compulsory education at 11 or 14.
We actually do have a limited market in child labour.
Holding teenagers as prisoners of the state and shouting at them is not education.
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
No what's wrong is we arent building houses.
You wouldn't post that if you lived in at some parts of Essex. Maldon is an example; hundreds of homes have been built to the South and West of the town. And a village nearby is protesting about 600 new homes being built. In our small town around 100 extra houses have recently been added, increasing the population by around 10%.
We had similar debates in Stockton-on-Tees when I lived there. The whole borough had been endless housebuilding for a decade. Multiple projects with hundreds of homes per site as well as smaller infill builds. And even bigger ones in the planning stage which are now going up.
The comedy factor? With the 2014 planning regs change the council was deemed to be "not building enough houses", allowing developers to do what they liked regardless of what councillors or even the MP thought.
The issue? The wrong type of houses being built. I lived on a development that ran to nearly 1,000 houses. Part of the site used to have a run down council estate on it, which was bulldozed. A small number of LHA houses added to the project did not adequately replace the hundreds of smaller affordable houses removed.
We're building houses that people can't afford.
That's what happens when you build houses in dumps where nobody with any choice wants to live instead of in the prosperous successful areas of the country which are in desperate need of new housing.
We need 8 million or so houses to match France, but very few of those should be built in the north.
It's so staggeringly obvious where the demand is when you look at the price/incomes ratio: from memory, 4x in the north, 10x in the SE and 14x in London.
But as we're governed by a bunch of economically illiterate, social media-obsessed cowards, focused on the next opinion poll not the next generation, I don't expect that to change anytime soon.
Why not move some of the demand up north, instead of snowballing the south? Regional energy pricing, a flat 0.5% rate of council tax based on house prices, capital investment based on the inverse of average wages, remove all IHT and CGT allowances for property.
Scrap London waiting for the majority of .gov rolls.
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
No what's wrong is we arent building houses.
You wouldn't post that if you lived in at some parts of Essex. Maldon is an example; hundreds of homes have been built to the South and West of the town. And a village nearby is protesting about 600 new homes being built. In our small town around 100 extra houses have recently been added, increasing the population by around 10%.
We had similar debates in Stockton-on-Tees when I lived there. The whole borough had been endless housebuilding for a decade. Multiple projects with hundreds of homes per site as well as smaller infill builds. And even bigger ones in the planning stage which are now going up.
The comedy factor? With the 2014 planning regs change the council was deemed to be "not building enough houses", allowing developers to do what they liked regardless of what councillors or even the MP thought.
The issue? The wrong type of houses being built. I lived on a development that ran to nearly 1,000 houses. Part of the site used to have a run down council estate on it, which was bulldozed. A small number of LHA houses added to the project did not adequately replace the hundreds of smaller affordable houses removed.
We're building houses that people can't afford.
That's what happens when you build houses in dumps where nobody with any choice wants to live instead of in the prosperous successful areas of the country which are in desperate need of new housing.
We need 8 million or so houses to match France, but very few of those should be built in the north.
It's so staggeringly obvious where the demand is when you look at the price/incomes ratio: from memory, 4x in the north, 10x in the SE and 14x in London.
But as we're governed by a bunch of economically illiterate, social media-obsessed cowards, focused on the next opinion poll not the next generation, I don't expect that to change anytime soon.
It's a matter for society how purely and extensively we allow markets to operate.
We don't for example have a market in child labour, or allowing departure from compulsory education at 11 or 14.
We actually do have a limited market in child labour.
Holding teenagers as prisoners of the state and shouting at them is not education.
It seems to me that claiming these results aren’t that good for Reform (whose average vote share, so far, is 39%), is whistling to keep one’s spirits up.
I think that they are good but not as good as most people were expecting.
At this point mid-term in a Tory Government the Lib Dems would be probably be winning a tory seat in a by-election like this by a 5 figure majority.
Reform are the only party whose voters support Trump, IMO that puts a very distinct ceiling on their vote come a GE. We are also finally now going to see Reform actually have to deliver on their promises in those areas that they have been successful.
Unless either Reform or the Tories deliver a knockout blow to the other I think the value is on another Labour win in 4 years, aided heavily by tactical voting if Reform are in the running.
Well my small bet on Lab in Runcorn and Helsby turned out to be a value loser. Oh well. But more generally, I'd say there was more value in the second favourites last night than in the favourites. And also, Reform still struggle to get their vote out. I just need about a dozen nights like last night in order to win at slightly favourable odds 5 times out of 12 and I'll be a slight net winner
It’s supposed to be Casino’s job to explain why losing bets is such good value for money?
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
No what's wrong is we arent building houses.
You wouldn't post that if you lived in at some parts of Essex. Maldon is an example; hundreds of homes have been built to the South and West of the town. And a village nearby is protesting about 600 new homes being built. In our small town around 100 extra houses have recently been added, increasing the population by around 10%.
We had similar debates in Stockton-on-Tees when I lived there. The whole borough had been endless housebuilding for a decade. Multiple projects with hundreds of homes per site as well as smaller infill builds. And even bigger ones in the planning stage which are now going up.
The comedy factor? With the 2014 planning regs change the council was deemed to be "not building enough houses", allowing developers to do what they liked regardless of what councillors or even the MP thought.
The issue? The wrong type of houses being built. I lived on a development that ran to nearly 1,000 houses. Part of the site used to have a run down council estate on it, which was bulldozed. A small number of LHA houses added to the project did not adequately replace the hundreds of smaller affordable houses removed.
We're building houses that people can't afford.
That's what happens when you build houses in dumps where nobody with any choice wants to live instead of in the prosperous successful areas of the country which are in desperate need of new housing.
We need 8 million or so houses to match France, but very few of those should be built in the north.
It's so staggeringly obvious where the demand is when you look at the price/incomes ratio: from memory, 4x in the north, 10x in the SE and 14x in London.
But as we're governed by a bunch of economically illiterate, social media-obsessed cowards, focused on the next opinion poll not the next generation, I don't expect that to change anytime soon.
Why not move some of the demand up north, instead of snowballing the south? Regional energy pricing, a flat 0.5% rate of council tax based on house prices, capital investment based on the inverse of average wages, remove all IHT and CGT allowances for property.
Northern Powerhouse Rail to connect the Northern cities into a stronger single economic zone too.
But Britain doesn't really have the luxury of picking and choosing where to grow its economy. It needs to reinforce the economic success of the wider London area as well as lay the foundations for improving the performance of the north.
I see Andrea 'give the finger' Jenkyns' latest genius idea is to house migrants in tents rather than hotels. I'm sure Kent residents will feel a lot better when they're surrounded by migrant camps, though easier to burn down I guess.
The woman is vile in the extreme.
Not sure where she's been, housing migrants/homeless in tents seems to have been unofficial policy for a while.
If the promised improvement in processing asylum applications is achieved then this problem should reduce and hence become less of a campaigning point for Reform. Hence Jenkyns' suggestion, migrant camps will be more unpopular than migrant hostels.
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
No what's wrong is we arent building houses.
You wouldn't post that if you lived in at some parts of Essex. Maldon is an example; hundreds of homes have been built to the South and West of the town. And a village nearby is protesting about 600 new homes being built. In our small town around 100 extra houses have recently been added, increasing the population by around 10%.
We had similar debates in Stockton-on-Tees when I lived there. The whole borough had been endless housebuilding for a decade. Multiple projects with hundreds of homes per site as well as smaller infill builds. And even bigger ones in the planning stage which are now going up.
The comedy factor? With the 2014 planning regs change the council was deemed to be "not building enough houses", allowing developers to do what they liked regardless of what councillors or even the MP thought.
The issue? The wrong type of houses being built. I lived on a development that ran to nearly 1,000 houses. Part of the site used to have a run down council estate on it, which was bulldozed. A small number of LHA houses added to the project did not adequately replace the hundreds of smaller affordable houses removed.
We're building houses that people can't afford.
That's what happens when you build houses in dumps where nobody with any choice wants to live instead of in the prosperous successful areas of the country which are in desperate need of new housing.
We need 8 million or so houses to match France, but very few of those should be built in the north.
It's so staggeringly obvious where the demand is when you look at the price/incomes ratio: from memory, 4x in the north, 10x in the SE and 14x in London.
But as we're governed by a bunch of economically illiterate, social media-obsessed cowards, focused on the next opinion poll not the next generation, I don't expect that to change anytime soon.
Why not move some of the demand up north, instead of snowballing the south? Regional energy pricing, a flat 0.5% rate of council tax based on house prices, capital investment based on the inverse of average wages, remove all IHT and CGT allowances for property.
Scrap London waiting for the majority of .gov rolls.
And housing benefit for private rentals.
(This might cause mass homelessness, but something moving towards that might work).
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
No what's wrong is we arent building houses.
You wouldn't post that if you lived in at some parts of Essex. Maldon is an example; hundreds of homes have been built to the South and West of the town. And a village nearby is protesting about 600 new homes being built. In our small town around 100 extra houses have recently been added, increasing the population by around 10%.
We had similar debates in Stockton-on-Tees when I lived there. The whole borough had been endless housebuilding for a decade. Multiple projects with hundreds of homes per site as well as smaller infill builds. And even bigger ones in the planning stage which are now going up.
The comedy factor? With the 2014 planning regs change the council was deemed to be "not building enough houses", allowing developers to do what they liked regardless of what councillors or even the MP thought.
The issue? The wrong type of houses being built. I lived on a development that ran to nearly 1,000 houses. Part of the site used to have a run down council estate on it, which was bulldozed. A small number of LHA houses added to the project did not adequately replace the hundreds of smaller affordable houses removed.
We're building houses that people can't afford.
That's what happens when you build houses in dumps where nobody with any choice wants to live instead of in the prosperous successful areas of the country which are in desperate need of new housing.
We need 8 million or so houses to match France, but very few of those should be built in the north.
It's so staggeringly obvious where the demand is when you look at the price/incomes ratio: from memory, 4x in the north, 10x in the SE and 14x in London.
But as we're governed by a bunch of economically illiterate, social media-obsessed cowards, focused on the next opinion poll not the next generation, I don't expect that to change anytime soon.
Why not move some of the demand up north, instead of snowballing the south? Regional energy pricing, a flat 0.5% rate of council tax based on house prices, capital investment based on the inverse of average wages, remove all IHT and CGT allowances for property.
And crucially, abolish Stamp Duty and remove VAT on house renovations. All those together would zap the economy into life while sorting about 75% of the housing "crisis" out, I reckon.
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
No what's wrong is we arent building houses.
You wouldn't post that if you lived in at some parts of Essex. Maldon is an example; hundreds of homes have been built to the South and West of the town. And a village nearby is protesting about 600 new homes being built. In our small town around 100 extra houses have recently been added, increasing the population by around 10%.
We had similar debates in Stockton-on-Tees when I lived there. The whole borough had been endless housebuilding for a decade. Multiple projects with hundreds of homes per site as well as smaller infill builds. And even bigger ones in the planning stage which are now going up.
The comedy factor? With the 2014 planning regs change the council was deemed to be "not building enough houses", allowing developers to do what they liked regardless of what councillors or even the MP thought.
The issue? The wrong type of houses being built. I lived on a development that ran to nearly 1,000 houses. Part of the site used to have a run down council estate on it, which was bulldozed. A small number of LHA houses added to the project did not adequately replace the hundreds of smaller affordable houses removed.
We're building houses that people can't afford.
That's what happens when you build houses in dumps where nobody with any choice wants to live instead of in the prosperous successful areas of the country which are in desperate need of new housing.
We need 8 million or so houses to match France, but very few of those should be built in the north.
It's so staggeringly obvious where the demand is when you look at the price/incomes ratio: from memory, 4x in the north, 10x in the SE and 14x in London.
But as we're governed by a bunch of economically illiterate, social media-obsessed cowards, focused on the next opinion poll not the next generation, I don't expect that to change anytime soon.
Why not move some of the demand up north, instead of snowballing the south? Regional energy pricing, a flat 0.5% rate of council tax based on house prices, capital investment based on the inverse of average wages, remove all IHT and CGT allowances for property.
Scrap London waiting for the majority of .gov rolls.
Tbh London has enough private sector bumph to paddle it's own canoe. Moving gov't out of there would be one way to rebalance the economy.
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
No what's wrong is we arent building houses.
You wouldn't post that if you lived in at some parts of Essex. Maldon is an example; hundreds of homes have been built to the South and West of the town. And a village nearby is protesting about 600 new homes being built. In our small town around 100 extra houses have recently been added, increasing the population by around 10%.
We had similar debates in Stockton-on-Tees when I lived there. The whole borough had been endless housebuilding for a decade. Multiple projects with hundreds of homes per site as well as smaller infill builds. And even bigger ones in the planning stage which are now going up.
The comedy factor? With the 2014 planning regs change the council was deemed to be "not building enough houses", allowing developers to do what they liked regardless of what councillors or even the MP thought.
The issue? The wrong type of houses being built. I lived on a development that ran to nearly 1,000 houses. Part of the site used to have a run down council estate on it, which was bulldozed. A small number of LHA houses added to the project did not adequately replace the hundreds of smaller affordable houses removed.
We're building houses that people can't afford.
That's what happens when you build houses in dumps where nobody with any choice wants to live instead of in the prosperous successful areas of the country which are in desperate need of new housing.
We need 8 million or so houses to match France, but very few of those should be built in the north.
It's so staggeringly obvious where the demand is when you look at the price/incomes ratio: from memory, 4x in the north, 10x in the SE and 14x in London.
But as we're governed by a bunch of economically illiterate, social media-obsessed cowards, focused on the next opinion poll not the next generation, I don't expect that to change anytime soon.
Why not move some of the demand up north, instead of snowballing the south? Regional energy pricing, a flat 0.5% rate of council tax based on house prices, capital investment based on the inverse of average wages, remove all IHT and CGT allowances for property.
Devolving income tax and CT would have an effect. Even a 3-4% CT difference would be enough to encourage a lot of businesses to relocate - it works in Germany and the US which both have ranges of that magnitude between states / cities.
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
No what's wrong is we arent building houses.
You wouldn't post that if you lived in at some parts of Essex. Maldon is an example; hundreds of homes have been built to the South and West of the town. And a village nearby is protesting about 600 new homes being built. In our small town around 100 extra houses have recently been added, increasing the population by around 10%.
We had similar debates in Stockton-on-Tees when I lived there. The whole borough had been endless housebuilding for a decade. Multiple projects with hundreds of homes per site as well as smaller infill builds. And even bigger ones in the planning stage which are now going up.
The comedy factor? With the 2014 planning regs change the council was deemed to be "not building enough houses", allowing developers to do what they liked regardless of what councillors or even the MP thought.
The issue? The wrong type of houses being built. I lived on a development that ran to nearly 1,000 houses. Part of the site used to have a run down council estate on it, which was bulldozed. A small number of LHA houses added to the project did not adequately replace the hundreds of smaller affordable houses removed.
We're building houses that people can't afford.
And yet still they sell, so people clearly can afford them.
If we build enough, they will become affordable to more people. That's the glory of the market. This is true whether we build a million 5-bedroom detacheds or a million flats (though the former would cause more reshuffling).
David, there is a major difference between being sold and people being able to afford them. Far too many people are trapped paying mortgages they can't afford, which extracts cash from the economy as they can't then spend it on stuff in shops and hospitality.
Other property is bought by landlords to let to the people who can't afford a mortgage at all. Or where the exorbitant rent is paid by the state.
Either way you look at it the market is broken. We need to build a significant number of smaller houses and apartment blocks. But we can't do that - councils and housing associations are communist and broke, developers only want to build executive style homes, and MPs have too many rentier types in their ranks who refuse reforms.
The market is primarily broken by planning restrictions and micromanagement. Bringing prices down - which means expanding supply - is the biggest single thing that could address all the above problems. The details of what's built is secondary (though far from irrelevant).
As an aside, very high mortgage repayments doesn't extract money from the economy (much) - but it does recycle it from younger adults (especially) paying those mortgages, to inheritance receivers.
The Reform revolution looks somewhat anemic this morning. If you can’t turn out a big protest vote at times like this, the general election is going to be challenging.
hmmm - this was a safe seat.
Election Year
Labour
Reform UK
Conservative
Green
Liberal Democrat
Liberal
Social Democratic Party
2019 (Notional)
48.8%
4.8%
36.8%
2.9%
6.7%
–
–
2024
52.9%
18.1%
16.0%
6.4%
5.1%
1.1%
0.3%
2025 (By-election)
38.7%
38.7%
–
–
–
–
–
Look at that Conservative fall, though.
Eh?
37 percent (notional) in 2019, 16 percent last year, 7 percent yesterday.
Yes, a lot of the commentary here is about how bad Labour did in Runcorn, but it wasn't really a safe seat based on the 2019 results. It was on a relatively thin 12% margin against the Tories. In a situation where a Labour government is doing politically unpopular things, it would have been easy for the Tories to overcome this margin in a by-election. The fact that the Labour MP resigned in scandal would have further supressed the Labour vote.
The seat only became a very safe seat in 2024 because the right-wing vote was split between Reform & Conservative.
Compared to 2019, the Labour vote has only reduced by 10 percentage points, but the Tory vote has reduced by 30 percentage points.
It seems to me that claiming these results aren’t that good for Reform (whose average vote share, so far, is 39%), is whistling to keep one’s spirits up.
You have to keep your pecker up somehow at times like these.
Can’t believe gullible people fell for Farage’s ‘Divisive hate filled rhetoric’ blaming immigrants for their shit lives and life failings’ !!
The Reform revolution looks somewhat anemic this morning. If you can’t turn out a big protest vote at times like this, the general election is going to be challenging.
I profoundly disagree. Leave aside Runcorn - a seat Labour won by 35% a year ago - they've taken one mayoralty and have come perilously close to winning three more, all from pretty much a standing start. They were ahead of all other parties in councillor-count last I saw (early days, granted). They're far ahead of their main rival on the right-of-centre in all the mayoral contests.
Labour is talking itself into denial and complacency by setting Reform's bar ludicrously high.
These people have been rehearsing those lines for so long that they are compelled to use them
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
No what's wrong is we arent building houses.
You wouldn't post that if you lived in at some parts of Essex. Maldon is an example; hundreds of homes have been built to the South and West of the town. And a village nearby is protesting about 600 new homes being built. In our small town around 100 extra houses have recently been added, increasing the population by around 10%.
We had similar debates in Stockton-on-Tees when I lived there. The whole borough had been endless housebuilding for a decade. Multiple projects with hundreds of homes per site as well as smaller infill builds. And even bigger ones in the planning stage which are now going up.
The comedy factor? With the 2014 planning regs change the council was deemed to be "not building enough houses", allowing developers to do what they liked regardless of what councillors or even the MP thought.
The issue? The wrong type of houses being built. I lived on a development that ran to nearly 1,000 houses. Part of the site used to have a run down council estate on it, which was bulldozed. A small number of LHA houses added to the project did not adequately replace the hundreds of smaller affordable houses removed.
We're building houses that people can't afford.
That's what happens when you build houses in dumps where nobody with any choice wants to live instead of in the prosperous successful areas of the country which are in desperate need of new housing.
We need 8 million or so houses to match France, but very few of those should be built in the north.
It's so staggeringly obvious where the demand is when you look at the price/incomes ratio: from memory, 4x in the north, 10x in the SE and 14x in London.
But as we're governed by a bunch of economically illiterate, social media-obsessed cowards, focused on the next opinion poll not the next generation, I don't expect that to change anytime soon.
It's a matter for society how purely and extensively we allow markets to operate.
We don't for example have a market in child labour, or allowing departure from compulsory education at 11 or 14.
We actually do have a limited market in child labour.
Holding teenagers as prisoners of the state and shouting at them is not education.
The Reform revolution looks somewhat anemic this morning. If you can’t turn out a big protest vote at times like this, the general election is going to be challenging.
I profoundly disagree. Leave aside Runcorn - a seat Labour won by 35% a year ago - they've taken one mayoralty and have come perilously close to winning three more, all from pretty much a standing start. They were ahead of all other parties in councillor-count last I saw (early days, granted). They're far ahead of their main rival on the right-of-centre in all the mayoral contests.
Labour is talking itself into denial and complacency by setting Reform's bar ludicrously high.
Yes. Agree. Looking ahead as to the future route, our system is bound to favour reality veering towards a sort of two party state of affairs, even if it doesn't look like one.
In the past this was (in England) Lab v Con with a subset of LD v Con =Lab or LD v Con, covering almost all seats.
The unacknowledged arrangement whereby almost all seats are in reality contested by either Lab or LD but not both remains intact, even though Reform takes votes off Labour.
It's the broad right which has smashed up. The pressure therefore for a formal pact, an informal or accidental pact (like Lab and LD) or a single party called 'We Are Everything Apart From Lab or LD'.
I should think most One Nation Tories (such as me) have already gone away with no immediate plans to return.
I don’t envy Labour but the clear message from his support at the last GE and before was that people are done with austerity. To double down on it whilst doing stuff that really upsets middle England, like the war on nature, has been politics at its poorest.
How can austerity end without raising taxes which are already at a high level?
Growth. Essentially, it can't. We can't afford the level of welfare we're currently paying for - we've basically got UBI for anyone who can pass a PIP and keeping anyone over 65 in clover.
Which party is going to be brave enough to end the triple lock ? My answer none .
It's not just the state pension, public sector pensions need a 30-40% haircut too. In too many areas we're living well beyond our means and our welfare state is far, far beyond a safety net. Cut a million people from state employment to take us back to 2017, taper the state pension for higher rate tax payers, merge NI and income tax so that non-working income is taxed at the same rate as working income, cut to £2k the cash ISA allowance, push through a 30-40% haircut for defined benefit pensions (even for people currently receiving them), introduce much, much tougher criteria to receive disability benefits and exclude all but 5% of the most serious mental health cases by default. The rest can go back to work or live on £450 per month or whatever UC is for unemployed people. Also get rid of UC, move back to the old system if JSA and ESA, UC is an experiment that hasn't worked, it's just encouraged people to game the system worse than ever.
I think if Labour started that programme today by the end of the parliament we could be in a position to actually pay front line service staff more and attract better quality candidates for teachers, police, nurses etc...
What we have now is an underfunded and hugely over funded state at the same time it's literally the worst of both worlds.
There's no way a haircut to built up public sector pension entitlements would survive a court challenge. Some final salary public sector pensions were too generous, but those days are gone now (although the less generous career average DB pensions are still a draw). Still live recipients of those generous pensions, of course, but I don't think there's much to be done about that.
Cutting future pensions to be earned could work but only with substantial pay increases in many areas. I've looked at civil service roles a few times, but the pay is laughable in tech/science roles, coupled with the insistence of starting new entrants on the bottom of the scale. There's a post I looked at recently that had a range of. £55-£70k. £70k or even £65k would have had me apply, but the guidance was very clear it would be bottom of scale for me coming from outside and the path to pay progression was highly opaque. It was written in some ways as a more senior role, with more line management duties than I have at present, but would have been a pay cut for me. A the same time, I saw a 'lead python developer's post at the same place with the same pay range, which really is ridiculous. If they won't compete, they're not going to get good people and will end up spending more than funding a post properly - either lots of turnover as people gain experience and the leave or someone really mediocre who sits there doing not a great deal.
More likely, the post remains unfilled and instead a Contractor is brought in on £800-£1000 per day.
I did once work out how much more it cost the government to employ me rather than just paying the market rate - it's something like 300%. That's where the savings can be made. But the Mail would throw a total hissy fit and it can't be done.
"employ" FFS, I'd advise that you only communicate with your accountant by phone.
Seems to be the tories and Labour haven’t quite grasped the mood out there - seemingly continuing in the same way they have for decades and changing nothing.
Starmer needs to stop the “smash the gangs” rubbish as quite clearly it’s making no difference. Reeves needs to go. And we need to start having an honest conversation about the NHS and whether there is a “better way”.
Badenoch - well, she’s quite useless. She won’t be around for much longer I think.
Apart from that, really fascinating time in politics
IMHO we should restrict what is available on the NHS. Emergency care, obviously, and basic services. But a lot of things we just can't afford, yes, like latest treatments for X, Y, Z. If we have to borrow money to support our standard if living we aren't a wealthy country.
But I’ve seen little evidence (actually, apart from Reform) wanting to be honest about what the NHS can and can’t do. Even Farage has said it can be done differently, and all Labour ran with was “reform will charge to use the NHS”. Like somehow we don’t already spaff billions from our taxes on it somehow
We don't "spaff billions" on the NHS. We spend broadly comparable figures to other OECD nations (US excepted) for broadly similar health outcomes.
Well my small bet on Lab in Runcorn and Helsby turned out to be a value loser. Oh well. But more generally, I'd say there was more value in the second favourites last night than in the favourites. And also, Reform still struggle to get their vote out. I just need about a dozen nights like last night in order to win at slightly favourable odds 5 times out of 12 and I'll be a slight net winner
It’s supposed to be Casino’s job to explain why losing bets is such good value for money?
Not only is backing he favourite a poor strategy to long-term success (the 'picking up pennies in front of the steam-roller' argument), there is very rarely much fun in that approach. And really, for most of us, why do we gamble? The £20 profit I would have made from my bet would have been nice, but would it have been life-changing? I would have got far more value from my stake from the feeling of 'I said that would happen even though the majority didn't'.
I don’t envy Labour but the clear message from his support at the last GE and before was that people are done with austerity. To double down on it whilst doing stuff that really upsets middle England, like the war on nature, has been politics at its poorest.
How can austerity end without raising taxes which are already at a high level?
Growth. Essentially, it can't. We can't afford the level of welfare we're currently paying for - we've basically got UBI for anyone who can pass a PIP and keeping anyone over 65 in clover.
Which party is going to be brave enough to end the triple lock ? My answer none .
It's not just the state pension, public sector pensions need a 30-40% haircut too. In too many areas we're living well beyond our means and our welfare state is far, far beyond a safety net. Cut a million people from state employment to take us back to 2017, taper the state pension for higher rate tax payers, merge NI and income tax so that non-working income is taxed at the same rate as working income, cut to £2k the cash ISA allowance, push through a 30-40% haircut for defined benefit pensions (even for people currently receiving them), introduce much, much tougher criteria to receive disability benefits and exclude all but 5% of the most serious mental health cases by default. The rest can go back to work or live on £450 per month or whatever UC is for unemployed people. Also get rid of UC, move back to the old system if JSA and ESA, UC is an experiment that hasn't worked, it's just encouraged people to game the system worse than ever.
I think if Labour started that programme today by the end of the parliament we could be in a position to actually pay front line service staff more and attract better quality candidates for teachers, police, nurses etc...
What we have now is an underfunded and hugely over funded state at the same time it's literally the worst of both worlds.
There's no way a haircut to built up public sector pension entitlements would survive a court challenge. Some final salary public sector pensions were too generous, but those days are gone now (although the less generous career average DB pensions are still a draw). Still live recipients of those generous pensions, of course, but I don't think there's much to be done about that.
Cutting future pensions to be earned could work but only with substantial pay increases in many areas. I've looked at civil service roles a few times, but the pay is laughable in tech/science roles, coupled with the insistence of starting new entrants on the bottom of the scale. There's a post I looked at recently that had a range of. £55-£70k. £70k or even £65k would have had me apply, but the guidance was very clear it would be bottom of scale for me coming from outside and the path to pay progression was highly opaque. It was written in some ways as a more senior role, with more line management duties than I have at present, but would have been a pay cut for me. A the same time, I saw a 'lead python developer's post at the same place with the same pay range, which really is ridiculous. If they won't compete, they're not going to get good people and will end up spending more than funding a post properly - either lots of turnover as people gain experience and the leave or someone really mediocre who sits there doing not a great deal.
More likely, the post remains unfilled and instead a Contractor is brought in on £800-£1000 per day.
I did once work out how much more it cost the government to employ me rather than just paying the market rate - it's something like 300%. That's where the savings can be made. But the Mail would throw a total hissy fit and it can't be done.
"employ" FFS, I'd advise that you only communicate with your accountant by phone.
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
No what's wrong is we arent building houses.
You wouldn't post that if you lived in at some parts of Essex. Maldon is an example; hundreds of homes have been built to the South and West of the town. And a village nearby is protesting about 600 new homes being built. In our small town around 100 extra houses have recently been added, increasing the population by around 10%.
We had similar debates in Stockton-on-Tees when I lived there. The whole borough had been endless housebuilding for a decade. Multiple projects with hundreds of homes per site as well as smaller infill builds. And even bigger ones in the planning stage which are now going up.
The comedy factor? With the 2014 planning regs change the council was deemed to be "not building enough houses", allowing developers to do what they liked regardless of what councillors or even the MP thought.
The issue? The wrong type of houses being built. I lived on a development that ran to nearly 1,000 houses. Part of the site used to have a run down council estate on it, which was bulldozed. A small number of LHA houses added to the project did not adequately replace the hundreds of smaller affordable houses removed.
We're building houses that people can't afford.
And yet still they sell, so people clearly can afford them.
If we build enough, they will become affordable to more people. That's the glory of the market. This is true whether we build a million 5-bedroom detacheds or a million flats (though the former would cause more reshuffling).
David, there is a major difference between being sold and people being able to afford them. Far too many people are trapped paying mortgages they can't afford, which extracts cash from the economy as they can't then spend it on stuff in shops and hospitality.
Other property is bought by landlords to let to the people who can't afford a mortgage at all. Or where the exorbitant rent is paid by the state.
Either way you look at it the market is broken. We need to build a significant number of smaller houses and apartment blocks. But we can't do that - councils and housing associations are communist and broke, developers only want to build executive style homes, and MPs have too many rentier types in their ranks who refuse reforms.
The market is primarily broken by planning restrictions and micromanagement. Bringing prices down - which means expanding supply - is the biggest single thing that could address all the above problems. The details of what's built is secondary (though far from irrelevant).
As an aside, very high mortgage repayments doesn't extract money from the economy (much) - but it does recycle it from younger adults (especially) paying those mortgages, to inheritance receivers.
Easy money, openness to dodgy foreign money, and too low taxation on property ownership generally, are critical factors.
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
No what's wrong is we arent building houses.
What's the point of building houses if they get bought up as second homes?
According to the Government, in 2021/2 there were 809,000 second homes in England. Reducing that number seems a very sensible way forward to me.
Good luck with that one. I am often in touch with but not part of a culture/social group which takes multiple house/flat ownership for personal use both in the UK and abroad as the cultural norm. It has a substantial overlap with the group which takes the use of private education for granted for them and their circle, and also a substantial overlap with inherited wealth and current though unreliable support for Labour and the LDs.
Not only do they all vote, between them they know everyone in the structures of power.
i don't know the size of the total group, but if it is 2% of the UK population, that's heading towards 1.5 million.
I think one measure of the quality of our society is how far privileged or wealthy people are prevented from manipulating the system.
Such "influencing" is really a mild version of values which we find in more extreme form in the corruption within Trump's setup with his oligarchs, exploiting a systemic setup which has proven to be ... er ... not very resilient.
For second homes, I think we can aspire at the very least to remove loopholes.
A (in my view) parallel example was around countryside access, and how an agreement was reached around a decade ago between stakeholders - NFU, CLA, Ramblers etc - on a way to proceed with respect to the right to claim historic Rights of Way as public footpaths. The Theresa Coffey became Minister, and threw it all into the bin on her own authority as Minister, at one week's notice.
Wow. Another Batley & Spen seemed like the impossible dream yet LAB came within a ridiculous 6 - SIX! - votes of doing it. 'Close but no cigar' does not apply here. SKS, if he smoked, would be lighting one up and rightly so. The strong LAB performance (against the most challenging backdrop for an incumbent imaginable) is the big story here.
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
No what's wrong is we arent building houses.
You wouldn't post that if you lived in at some parts of Essex. Maldon is an example; hundreds of homes have been built to the South and West of the town. And a village nearby is protesting about 600 new homes being built. In our small town around 100 extra houses have recently been added, increasing the population by around 10%.
So what? My “village” has increased in size by around 50% in the last 10 years. If I don’t like it I can move to a more rural place. It’s just the nature of the beast.
I'm not complaining, just saying. We might get another grocers, or a better post office. I don't understand why people can say that 'we aren't building house.' as posted by the colleague to whom I was replying.
Robert Saunders @robertsaunders.bsky.social · 35m Turnout in the West of England mayoral election was 30%. So as a proportion of the total electorate, the figures would be:
Well my small bet on Lab in Runcorn and Helsby turned out to be a value loser. Oh well. But more generally, I'd say there was more value in the second favourites last night than in the favourites. And also, Reform still struggle to get their vote out. I just need about a dozen nights like last night in order to win at slightly favourable odds 5 times out of 12 and I'll be a slight net winner
It’s supposed to be Casino’s job to explain why losing bets is such good value for money?
Not only is backing he favourite a poor strategy to long-term success (the 'picking up pennies in front of the steam-roller' argument), there is very rarely much fun in that approach. And really, for most of us, why do we gamble? The £20 profit I would have made from my bet would have been nice, but would it have been life-changing? I would have got far more value from my stake from the feeling of 'I said that would happen even though the majority didn't'.
Will that do?
It was just a joke. Despite being the site’s king of the value loser, Casino seems to do alright on it in the round.
Seems to be the tories and Labour haven’t quite grasped the mood out there - seemingly continuing in the same way they have for decades and changing nothing.
Starmer needs to stop the “smash the gangs” rubbish as quite clearly it’s making no difference. Reeves needs to go. And we need to start having an honest conversation about the NHS and whether there is a “better way”.
Badenoch - well, she’s quite useless. She won’t be around for much longer I think.
Apart from that, really fascinating time in politics
IMHO we should restrict what is available on the NHS. Emergency care, obviously, and basic services. But a lot of things we just can't afford, yes, like latest treatments for X, Y, Z. If we have to borrow money to support our standard if living we aren't a wealthy country.
But I’ve seen little evidence (actually, apart from Reform) wanting to be honest about what the NHS can and can’t do. Even Farage has said it can be done differently, and all Labour ran with was “reform will charge to use the NHS”. Like somehow we don’t already spaff billions from our taxes on it somehow
We don't "spaff billions" on the NHS. We spend broadly comparable figures to other OECD nations (US excepted) for broadly similar health outcomes.
hmmmm
OECD Health Expenditure as Percentage of GDP (2022–2023)
I don’t envy Labour but the clear message from his support at the last GE and before was that people are done with austerity. To double down on it whilst doing stuff that really upsets middle England, like the war on nature, has been politics at its poorest.
How can austerity end without raising taxes which are already at a high level?
Growth. Essentially, it can't. We can't afford the level of welfare we're currently paying for - we've basically got UBI for anyone who can pass a PIP and keeping anyone over 65 in clover.
Which party is going to be brave enough to end the triple lock ? My answer none .
It's not just the state pension, public sector pensions need a 30-40% haircut too. In too many areas we're living well beyond our means and our welfare state is far, far beyond a safety net. Cut a million people from state employment to take us back to 2017, taper the state pension for higher rate tax payers, merge NI and income tax so that non-working income is taxed at the same rate as working income, cut to £2k the cash ISA allowance, push through a 30-40% haircut for defined benefit pensions (even for people currently receiving them), introduce much, much tougher criteria to receive disability benefits and exclude all but 5% of the most serious mental health cases by default. The rest can go back to work or live on £450 per month or whatever UC is for unemployed people. Also get rid of UC, move back to the old system if JSA and ESA, UC is an experiment that hasn't worked, it's just encouraged people to game the system worse than ever.
I think if Labour started that programme today by the end of the parliament we could be in a position to actually pay front line service staff more and attract better quality candidates for teachers, police, nurses etc...
What we have now is an underfunded and hugely over funded state at the same time it's literally the worst of both worlds.
There's no way a haircut to built up public sector pension entitlements would survive a court challenge. Some final salary public sector pensions were too generous, but those days are gone now (although the less generous career average DB pensions are still a draw). Still live recipients of those generous pensions, of course, but I don't think there's much to be done about that.
Cutting future pensions to be earned could work but only with substantial pay increases in many areas. I've looked at civil service roles a few times, but the pay is laughable in tech/science roles, coupled with the insistence of starting new entrants on the bottom of the scale. There's a post I looked at recently that had a range of. £55-£70k. £70k or even £65k would have had me apply, but the guidance was very clear it would be bottom of scale for me coming from outside and the path to pay progression was highly opaque. It was written in some ways as a more senior role, with more line management duties than I have at present, but would have been a pay cut for me. A the same time, I saw a 'lead python developer's post at the same place with the same pay range, which really is ridiculous. If they won't compete, they're not going to get good people and will end up spending more than funding a post properly - either lots of turnover as people gain experience and the leave or someone really mediocre who sits there doing not a great deal.
Parliament is sovereign, it can pass primary legislation to mandate a haircut for db pensions. It will of course make them wildly unpopular with people who lose out but it is absolutely possible.
I've also said many times that pension contributions should be cut and salaries increased in the public sector. People want the money today, not at some nebulous point in the future. A friend of mine was contacted to apply for senior on prem cybersecurity admin but the salary is well below market rate and they make it up in the pension, the overall package isn't dissimilar to what he might get elsewhere but he can't afford the pay cut so politely declined.
But aside from that, we just have too many people doing too little in that £40-60k band in the public sector. Lots of salary collectors creating micro bureaucracies around them to justify their roles. We should sweep the lot of them away and bank the saving, reduce the deficit and bank the subsequent drop in the interest bill as gilt prices increase and yields fall.
Parliament is sovereign, but it should use that power carefully. It would damage the trustworthiness of the state if it were to casually use that power to cancel the liabilities it had accrued.
Max pb is a grade A idiot. The pensioner vote goes way beyond the 67 + people. Anyone over 55 would be furious at his plans as would many of those younger and aware of the realities of life for their parents and other family. Like several well off posters here he thinks the lifestyle of his wealthy family is the norm
Reality is the only way we can solve things is by fixing the fundamental issues in the economy - which is housing is too expensive and everything is too focused on London we need HS2 and decent metro systems for Leeds, Manchester, Birmingham ….
Activists who were planning to sail an aid ship to Gaza say it was struck by drones in international waters off the coast of Malta - and appeared to accuse Israel of being behind the attack.
You are forever posting pro Israel propaganda often from obscure Zionist websites. I get sent some of the same stuff. A large number of them are bullshit much of it created in this country
Activists who were planning to sail an aid ship to Gaza say it was struck by drones in international waters off the coast of Malta - and appeared to accuse Israel of being behind the attack.
You are forever posting pro Israel propaganda often from obscure Zionist websites. I get sent some of the same stuff. A large number of them are bullshit much of it created in this country
Huh...No i am not. Firstly, I have hardly been about the 6 months. I have posted I think 1 maybe 2 from one guy who has researched the background of certain individuals if that is what you mean by "forever posting pro-Israel propaganda". Other that can you provide examples of this?
As for the above, it the headline story on the BBC. I am not sure how you see it is pro-Israel either. That is massively overstepping the mark if it turns out it was Israel, impossible to justify.
Seems to be the tories and Labour haven’t quite grasped the mood out there - seemingly continuing in the same way they have for decades and changing nothing.
Starmer needs to stop the “smash the gangs” rubbish as quite clearly it’s making no difference. Reeves needs to go. And we need to start having an honest conversation about the NHS and whether there is a “better way”.
Badenoch - well, she’s quite useless. She won’t be around for much longer I think.
Apart from that, really fascinating time in politics
IMHO we should restrict what is available on the NHS. Emergency care, obviously, and basic services. But a lot of things we just can't afford, yes, like latest treatments for X, Y, Z. If we have to borrow money to support our standard if living we aren't a wealthy country.
But I’ve seen little evidence (actually, apart from Reform) wanting to be honest about what the NHS can and can’t do. Even Farage has said it can be done differently, and all Labour ran with was “reform will charge to use the NHS”. Like somehow we don’t already spaff billions from our taxes on it somehow
We don't "spaff billions" on the NHS. We spend broadly comparable figures to other OECD nations (US excepted) for broadly similar health outcomes.
Yes, whatever faults we may level at the NHS, poor value for money against health outcomes at the macro scale shouldn't really be one of them. Though to be fair to Razedabode, I don't think (?) this is the point he was trying to make.
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
No what's wrong is we arent building houses.
You wouldn't post that if you lived in at some parts of Essex. Maldon is an example; hundreds of homes have been built to the South and West of the town. And a village nearby is protesting about 600 new homes being built. In our small town around 100 extra houses have recently been added, increasing the population by around 10%.
We had similar debates in Stockton-on-Tees when I lived there. The whole borough had been endless housebuilding for a decade. Multiple projects with hundreds of homes per site as well as smaller infill builds. And even bigger ones in the planning stage which are now going up.
The comedy factor? With the 2014 planning regs change the council was deemed to be "not building enough houses", allowing developers to do what they liked regardless of what councillors or even the MP thought.
The issue? The wrong type of houses being built. I lived on a development that ran to nearly 1,000 houses. Part of the site used to have a run down council estate on it, which was bulldozed. A small number of LHA houses added to the project did not adequately replace the hundreds of smaller affordable houses removed.
We're building houses that people can't afford.
And yet still they sell, so people clearly can afford them.
If we build enough, they will become affordable to more people. That's the glory of the market. This is true whether we build a million 5-bedroom detacheds or a million flats (though the former would cause more reshuffling).
David, there is a major difference between being sold and people being able to afford them. Far too many people are trapped paying mortgages they can't afford, which extracts cash from the economy as they can't then spend it on stuff in shops and hospitality.
Other property is bought by landlords to let to the people who can't afford a mortgage at all. Or where the exorbitant rent is paid by the state.
Either way you look at it the market is broken. We need to build a significant number of smaller houses and apartment blocks. But we can't do that - councils and housing associations are communist and broke, developers only want to build executive style homes, and MPs have too many rentier types in their ranks who refuse reforms.
The market is primarily broken by planning restrictions and micromanagement. Bringing prices down - which means expanding supply - is the biggest single thing that could address all the above problems. The details of what's built is secondary (though far from irrelevant).
As an aside, very high mortgage repayments doesn't extract money from the economy (much) - but it does recycle it from younger adults (especially) paying those mortgages, to inheritance receivers.
Easy money, openness to dodgy foreign money, and too low taxation on property ownership generally, are critical factors.
We should also consider other factors in the economy. Uber, Deliveroo and Amazon not investing in employees, the likes of Apple and Starbucks taking money out of the economy with questionable schemes to avoid paying tax in the UK, etc. Communities need affordable housing. They also need businesses who are invested in their success.
The Reform revolution looks somewhat anemic this morning. If you can’t turn out a big protest vote at times like this, the general election is going to be challenging.
hmmm - this was a safe seat.
Election Year
Labour
Reform UK
Conservative
Green
Liberal Democrat
Liberal
Social Democratic Party
2019 (Notional)
48.8%
4.8%
36.8%
2.9%
6.7%
–
–
2024
52.9%
18.1%
16.0%
6.4%
5.1%
1.1%
0.3%
2025 (By-election)
38.7%
38.7%
–
–
–
–
–
Look at that Conservative fall, though.
Eh?
37 percent (notional) in 2019, 16 percent last year, 7 percent yesterday.
Yes, a lot of the commentary here is about how bad Labour did in Runcorn, but it wasn't really a safe seat based on the 2019 results. It was on a relatively thin 12% margin against the Tories. In a situation where a Labour government is doing politically unpopular things, it would have been easy for the Tories to overcome this margin in a by-election. The fact that the Labour MP resigned in scandal would have further supressed the Labour vote.
The seat only became a very safe seat in 2024 because the right-wing vote was split between Reform & Conservative.
Compared to 2019, the Labour vote has only reduced by 10 percentage points, but the Tory vote has reduced by 30 percentage points.
The thing that flattered the Labour (and Lib Dem) seat count last year was how inefficient the RefCon split was. Con on 24% and Ref on 14% without much geographic sorting allowed the centre-left parties to come through on the side in a lot of places. The current split (Ref 26% Con 20%, or thereabouts) probably isn't that much more efficient, maybe a bit worse.
There must come a point where the slider moves to "lots of Reform seats becuase the Conservatives are dead"; I wonder where that is?
I don’t envy Labour but the clear message from his support at the last GE and before was that people are done with austerity. To double down on it whilst doing stuff that really upsets middle England, like the war on nature, has been politics at its poorest.
How can austerity end without raising taxes which are already at a high level?
Growth. Essentially, it can't. We can't afford the level of welfare we're currently paying for - we've basically got UBI for anyone who can pass a PIP and keeping anyone over 65 in clover.
Which party is going to be brave enough to end the triple lock ? My answer none .
It's not just the state pension, public sector pensions need a 30-40% haircut too. In too many areas we're living well beyond our means and our welfare state is far, far beyond a safety net. Cut a million people from state employment to take us back to 2017, taper the state pension for higher rate tax payers, merge NI and income tax so that non-working income is taxed at the same rate as working income, cut to £2k the cash ISA allowance, push through a 30-40% haircut for defined benefit pensions (even for people currently receiving them), introduce much, much tougher criteria to receive disability benefits and exclude all but 5% of the most serious mental health cases by default. The rest can go back to work or live on £450 per month or whatever UC is for unemployed people. Also get rid of UC, move back to the old system if JSA and ESA, UC is an experiment that hasn't worked, it's just encouraged people to game the system worse than ever.
I think if Labour started that programme today by the end of the parliament we could be in a position to actually pay front line service staff more and attract better quality candidates for teachers, police, nurses etc...
What we have now is an underfunded and hugely over funded state at the same time it's literally the worst of both worlds.
There's no way a haircut to built up public sector pension entitlements would survive a court challenge. Some final salary public sector pensions were too generous, but those days are gone now (although the less generous career average DB pensions are still a draw). Still live recipients of those generous pensions, of course, but I don't think there's much to be done about that.
Cutting future pensions to be earned could work but only with substantial pay increases in many areas. I've looked at civil service roles a few times, but the pay is laughable in tech/science roles, coupled with the insistence of starting new entrants on the bottom of the scale. There's a post I looked at recently that had a range of. £55-£70k. £70k or even £65k would have had me apply, but the guidance was very clear it would be bottom of scale for me coming from outside and the path to pay progression was highly opaque. It was written in some ways as a more senior role, with more line management duties than I have at present, but would have been a pay cut for me. A the same time, I saw a 'lead python developer's post at the same place with the same pay range, which really is ridiculous. If they won't compete, they're not going to get good people and will end up spending more than funding a post properly - either lots of turnover as people gain experience and the leave or someone really mediocre who sits there doing not a great deal.
More likely, the post remains unfilled and instead a Contractor is brought in on £800-£1000 per day.
I did once work out how much more it cost the government to employ me rather than just paying the market rate - it's something like 300%. That's where the savings can be made. But the Mail would throw a total hissy fit and it can't be done.
"employ" FFS, I'd advise that you only communicate with your accountant by phone.
I'm an employee too, just not employed by the government.
Sadly my inflated daily charge rate goes mostly to pay for inflated management salaries, the Chief Exec's rather nice bonus, and shareholders, but it does mean I know what the actual market rate is because it's roughly what I'm paid.
And don't forget when working these things out that there are genuinely hidden costs of employment that are covered in a headline day rate and you have to factor them in. My comment above is a bit tongue-in-cheek - but also bear in mind that there is an overhead in managing contracts (on both sides) that also goes away if you employ people directly.
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
No what's wrong is we arent building houses.
You wouldn't post that if you lived in at some parts of Essex. Maldon is an example; hundreds of homes have been built to the South and West of the town. And a village nearby is protesting about 600 new homes being built. In our small town around 100 extra houses have recently been added, increasing the population by around 10%.
We had similar debates in Stockton-on-Tees when I lived there. The whole borough had been endless housebuilding for a decade. Multiple projects with hundreds of homes per site as well as smaller infill builds. And even bigger ones in the planning stage which are now going up.
The comedy factor? With the 2014 planning regs change the council was deemed to be "not building enough houses", allowing developers to do what they liked regardless of what councillors or even the MP thought.
The issue? The wrong type of houses being built. I lived on a development that ran to nearly 1,000 houses. Part of the site used to have a run down council estate on it, which was bulldozed. A small number of LHA houses added to the project did not adequately replace the hundreds of smaller affordable houses removed.
We're building houses that people can't afford.
That's what happens when you build houses in dumps where nobody with any choice wants to live instead of in the prosperous successful areas of the country which are in desperate need of new housing.
We need 8 million or so houses to match France, but very few of those should be built in the north.
It's so staggeringly obvious where the demand is when you look at the price/incomes ratio: from memory, 4x in the north, 10x in the SE and 14x in London.
But as we're governed by a bunch of economically illiterate, social media-obsessed cowards, focused on the next opinion poll not the next generation, I don't expect that to change anytime soon.
You seem strangely bitter that people in northern England have jobs, affordable homes, often a good standard of living and even higher quality of life.
Seems to be the tories and Labour haven’t quite grasped the mood out there - seemingly continuing in the same way they have for decades and changing nothing.
Starmer needs to stop the “smash the gangs” rubbish as quite clearly it’s making no difference. Reeves needs to go. And we need to start having an honest conversation about the NHS and whether there is a “better way”.
Badenoch - well, she’s quite useless. She won’t be around for much longer I think.
Apart from that, really fascinating time in politics
IMHO we should restrict what is available on the NHS. Emergency care, obviously, and basic services. But a lot of things we just can't afford, yes, like latest treatments for X, Y, Z. If we have to borrow money to support our standard if living we aren't a wealthy country.
But I’ve seen little evidence (actually, apart from Reform) wanting to be honest about what the NHS can and can’t do. Even Farage has said it can be done differently, and all Labour ran with was “reform will charge to use the NHS”. Like somehow we don’t already spaff billions from our taxes on it somehow
We don't "spaff billions" on the NHS. We spend broadly comparable figures to other OECD nations (US excepted) for broadly similar health outcomes.
hmmmm
OECD Health Expenditure as Percentage of GDP (2022–2023)
Country
Total Health Expenditure (% of GDP)
Private Health Expenditure (% of GDP)
United States
17.3%
8.5%
Germany
12.7%
2.4%
France
11.7%
2.3%
Japan
10.8%
1.5%
Canada
11.9%
3.0%
Austria
11.4%
2.4%
Belgium
10.9%
2.4%
Australia
10.4%
2.9%
Denmark
10.5%
1.7%
Netherlands
10.8%
1.6%
New Zealand
9.8%
1.9%
United Kingdom
10.9%
1.5%
Finland
9.4%
2.1%
Spain
9.9%
2.4%
Italy
9.3%
2.1%
Iceland
9.3%
1.6%
Slovenia
9.0%
2.2%
South Korea
9.7%
2.8%
Czech Republic
8.4%
1.0%
Chile
9.4%
2.6%
Estonia
7.8%
1.3%
Poland
6.5%
1.9%
Hungary
6.8%
2.2%
Mexico
6.2%
3.2%
Turkey
5.0%
1.5%
Luxembourg
5.5%
0.7%
Thanks for illustrating my point. Our health expenditure is around the median of those countries.
How does Luxembourg get so low? It is because lots of people work there, but don't live there? The biggest outlier, of course, is the US, which has the most cost-ineffective healthcare system going.
Wow. Another Batley & Spen seemed like the impossible dream yet LAB came within a ridiculous 6 - SIX! - votes of doing it. 'Close but no cigar' does not apply here. SKS, if he smoked, would be lighting one up and rightly so. The strong LAB performance (against the most challenging backdrop for an incumbent imaginable) is the big story here.
Agree. The really important binary divide at the moment is between those who might vote for Reform and those who certainly won't. Such evidence as Runcorn provides is that both groups are large, and that those who are anti Reform will vote tactically in substantial numbers.
If this is correct it will, if sustained over time, lead us back to a sort of quasi 2 party system in most of England - the Reform camp and the Anti Reform camp.
Also, if correct, it sharpens the Tory dilemma, possibly to the point of destruction or absorption.
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
No what's wrong is we arent building houses.
You wouldn't post that if you lived in at some parts of Essex. Maldon is an example; hundreds of homes have been built to the South and West of the town. And a village nearby is protesting about 600 new homes being built. In our small town around 100 extra houses have recently been added, increasing the population by around 10%.
We had similar debates in Stockton-on-Tees when I lived there. The whole borough had been endless housebuilding for a decade. Multiple projects with hundreds of homes per site as well as smaller infill builds. And even bigger ones in the planning stage which are now going up.
The comedy factor? With the 2014 planning regs change the council was deemed to be "not building enough houses", allowing developers to do what they liked regardless of what councillors or even the MP thought.
The issue? The wrong type of houses being built. I lived on a development that ran to nearly 1,000 houses. Part of the site used to have a run down council estate on it, which was bulldozed. A small number of LHA houses added to the project did not adequately replace the hundreds of smaller affordable houses removed.
We're building houses that people can't afford.
And yet still they sell, so people clearly can afford them.
If we build enough, they will become affordable to more people. That's the glory of the market. This is true whether we build a million 5-bedroom detacheds or a million flats (though the former would cause more reshuffling).
David, there is a major difference between being sold and people being able to afford them. Far too many people are trapped paying mortgages they can't afford, which extracts cash from the economy as they can't then spend it on stuff in shops and hospitality.
Other property is bought by landlords to let to the people who can't afford a mortgage at all. Or where the exorbitant rent is paid by the state.
Either way you look at it the market is broken. We need to build a significant number of smaller houses and apartment blocks. But we can't do that - councils and housing associations are communist and broke, developers only want to build executive style homes, and MPs have too many rentier types in their ranks who refuse reforms.
The market is primarily broken by planning restrictions and micromanagement. Bringing prices down - which means expanding supply - is the biggest single thing that could address all the above problems. The details of what's built is secondary (though far from irrelevant).
As an aside, very high mortgage repayments doesn't extract money from the economy (much) - but it does recycle it from younger adults (especially) paying those mortgages, to inheritance receivers.
Easy money, openness to dodgy foreign money, and too low taxation on property ownership generally, are critical factors.
We should also consider other factors in the economy. Uber, Deliveroo and Amazon not investing in employees, the likes of Apple and Starbucks taking money out of the economy with questionable schemes to avoid paying tax in the UK, etc. Communities need affordable housing. They also need businesses who are invested in their success.
Very Trumpian logic. Buying things from foreign companies means our money is being taken?
I see Andrea 'give the finger' Jenkyns' latest genius idea is to house migrants in tents rather than hotels. I'm sure Kent residents will feel a lot better when they're surrounded by migrant camps, though easier to burn down I guess.
The woman is vile in the extreme.
Not sure where she's been, housing migrants/homeless in tents seems to have been unofficial policy for a while.
If the promised improvement in processing asylum applications is achieved then this problem should reduce and hence become less of a campaigning point for Reform. Hence Jenkyns' suggestion, migrant camps will be more unpopular than migrant hostels.
“If…”
Record Number of Channel Crossings so far this year.
I don’t envy Labour but the clear message from his support at the last GE and before was that people are done with austerity. To double down on it whilst doing stuff that really upsets middle England, like the war on nature, has been politics at its poorest.
How can austerity end without raising taxes which are already at a high level?
Growth. Essentially, it can't. We can't afford the level of welfare we're currently paying for - we've basically got UBI for anyone who can pass a PIP and keeping anyone over 65 in clover.
Which party is going to be brave enough to end the triple lock ? My answer none .
It's not just the state pension, public sector pensions need a 30-40% haircut too. In too many areas we're living well beyond our means and our welfare state is far, far beyond a safety net. Cut a million people from state employment to take us back to 2017, taper the state pension for higher rate tax payers, merge NI and income tax so that non-working income is taxed at the same rate as working income, cut to £2k the cash ISA allowance, push through a 30-40% haircut for defined benefit pensions (even for people currently receiving them), introduce much, much tougher criteria to receive disability benefits and exclude all but 5% of the most serious mental health cases by default. The rest can go back to work or live on £450 per month or whatever UC is for unemployed people. Also get rid of UC, move back to the old system if JSA and ESA, UC is an experiment that hasn't worked, it's just encouraged people to game the system worse than ever.
I think if Labour started that programme today by the end of the parliament we could be in a position to actually pay front line service staff more and attract better quality candidates for teachers, police, nurses etc...
What we have now is an underfunded and hugely over funded state at the same time it's literally the worst of both worlds.
There's no way a haircut to built up public sector pension entitlements would survive a court challenge. Some final salary public sector pensions were too generous, but those days are gone now (although the less generous career average DB pensions are still a draw). Still live recipients of those generous pensions, of course, but I don't think there's much to be done about that.
Cutting future pensions to be earned could work but only with substantial pay increases in many areas. I've looked at civil service roles a few times, but the pay is laughable in tech/science roles, coupled with the insistence of starting new entrants on the bottom of the scale. There's a post I looked at recently that had a range of. £55-£70k. £70k or even £65k would have had me apply, but the guidance was very clear it would be bottom of scale for me coming from outside and the path to pay progression was highly opaque. It was written in some ways as a more senior role, with more line management duties than I have at present, but would have been a pay cut for me. A the same time, I saw a 'lead python developer's post at the same place with the same pay range, which really is ridiculous. If they won't compete, they're not going to get good people and will end up spending more than funding a post properly - either lots of turnover as people gain experience and the leave or someone really mediocre who sits there doing not a great deal.
Parliament is sovereign, it can pass primary legislation to mandate a haircut for db pensions. It will of course make them wildly unpopular with people who lose out but it is absolutely possible.
I've also said many times that pension contributions should be cut and salaries increased in the public sector. People want the money today, not at some nebulous point in the future. A friend of mine was contacted to apply for senior on prem cybersecurity admin but the salary is well below market rate and they make it up in the pension, the overall package isn't dissimilar to what he might get elsewhere but he can't afford the pay cut so politely declined.
But aside from that, we just have too many people doing too little in that £40-60k band in the public sector. Lots of salary collectors creating micro bureaucracies around them to justify their roles. We should sweep the lot of them away and bank the saving, reduce the deficit and bank the subsequent drop in the interest bill as gilt prices increase and yields fall.
Parliament is sovereign, but it should use that power carefully. It would damage the trustworthiness of the state if it were to casually use that power to cancel the liabilities it had accrued.
Max pb is a grade A idiot. The pensioner vote goes way beyond the 67 + people. Anyone over 55 would be furious at his plans as would many of those younger and aware of the realities of life for their parents and other family. Like several well off posters here he thinks the lifestyle of his wealthy family is the norm
The sane way to have handled that, early on in this government's term, would have been
1) Merge NI & Income tax 2) Get rid of all the odds an ends - 3 rates, fixed personal allowance. 3) In the turmoil of the above, put the effective rates up a bit. 4) Pension is "quadruple locked"* to the personal allowance. 5) All the old age extra benefits go in a blender. Come out as taxable/means tested. Sell this as "Mrs Miggins on the basic pension get YY% more money next year"
Can I be Labour Chancellor?
*A Quadruple Lock has to better than a Triple Lock, right?
Activists who were planning to sail an aid ship to Gaza say it was struck by drones in international waters off the coast of Malta - and appeared to accuse Israel of being behind the attack.
You are forever posting pro Israel propaganda often from obscure Zionist websites. I get sent some of the same stuff. A large number of them are bullshit much of it created in this country
Huh...No i am not. I have posted I think 1 maybe 2 from one guy who has researched the background of certain individuals if that is what you mean by "forever posting pro-Israel propaganda".
As for the above, it the headline story on the BBC.
I noticed the Manchester origin of one you posted recently and North Manchester is where my sister's vast family reside so I am aware of the networks. But in my opinion it's doing enormous damage to that country's reputation.
My advice, FWIW for Starmer: Sack Reeves and reverse the winter fuel axe.
The winter fuel allowance was part of any of the triple lock payments where pensions went up by average earnings.
But the issue was the crap presentation - as I multiple times I would have reversed the change in November while increasing income tax by 3p to reverse the 4p NI deduction.
That would have left poorer pensioners better off while fixing the mess Hunt made to public sector finances for zero actual benefit to the Tory party
Seems to be the tories and Labour haven’t quite grasped the mood out there - seemingly continuing in the same way they have for decades and changing nothing.
Starmer needs to stop the “smash the gangs” rubbish as quite clearly it’s making no difference. Reeves needs to go. And we need to start having an honest conversation about the NHS and whether there is a “better way”.
Badenoch - well, she’s quite useless. She won’t be around for much longer I think.
Apart from that, really fascinating time in politics
IMHO we should restrict what is available on the NHS. Emergency care, obviously, and basic services. But a lot of things we just can't afford, yes, like latest treatments for X, Y, Z. If we have to borrow money to support our standard if living we aren't a wealthy country.
But I’ve seen little evidence (actually, apart from Reform) wanting to be honest about what the NHS can and can’t do. Even Farage has said it can be done differently, and all Labour ran with was “reform will charge to use the NHS”. Like somehow we don’t already spaff billions from our taxes on it somehow
We don't "spaff billions" on the NHS. We spend broadly comparable figures to other OECD nations (US excepted) for broadly similar health outcomes.
hmmmm
OECD Health Expenditure as Percentage of GDP (2022–2023)
Country
Total Health Expenditure (% of GDP)
Private Health Expenditure (% of GDP)
United States
17.3%
8.5%
Germany
12.7%
2.4%
France
11.7%
2.3%
Japan
10.8%
1.5%
Canada
11.9%
3.0%
Austria
11.4%
2.4%
Belgium
10.9%
2.4%
Australia
10.4%
2.9%
Denmark
10.5%
1.7%
Netherlands
10.8%
1.6%
New Zealand
9.8%
1.9%
United Kingdom
10.9%
1.5%
Finland
9.4%
2.1%
Spain
9.9%
2.4%
Italy
9.3%
2.1%
Iceland
9.3%
1.6%
Slovenia
9.0%
2.2%
South Korea
9.7%
2.8%
Czech Republic
8.4%
1.0%
Chile
9.4%
2.6%
Estonia
7.8%
1.3%
Poland
6.5%
1.9%
Hungary
6.8%
2.2%
Mexico
6.2%
3.2%
Turkey
5.0%
1.5%
Luxembourg
5.5%
0.7%
Thanks for illustrating my point. Our health expenditure is around the median of those countries.
How does Luxembourg get so low? It is because lots of people work there, but don't live there? The biggest outlier, of course, is the US, which has the most cost-ineffective healthcare system going.
What I find interesting is that the public component is comparable to many others, but our private input is low.
Double spending on BUPA. And, increasingly, this is what is happening. The work scheme for private health are being used more and more.
Activists who were planning to sail an aid ship to Gaza say it was struck by drones in international waters off the coast of Malta - and appeared to accuse Israel of being behind the attack.
You are forever posting pro Israel propaganda often from obscure Zionist websites. I get sent some of the same stuff. A large number of them are bullshit much of it created in this country
Huh...No i am not. I have posted I think 1 maybe 2 from one guy who has researched the background of certain individuals if that is what you mean by "forever posting pro-Israel propaganda".
As for the above, it the headline story on the BBC.
I noticed the Manchester origin of one you posted recently and North Manchester is where my sister's vast family reside so I am aware of the networks. But in my opinion it's doing enormous damage to that country's reputation.
What are you talking about? I literally have no idea. I haven't even been posting much until a week ago as I have been busy in Asia.
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
No what's wrong is we arent building houses.
You wouldn't post that if you lived in at some parts of Essex. Maldon is an example; hundreds of homes have been built to the South and West of the town. And a village nearby is protesting about 600 new homes being built. In our small town around 100 extra houses have recently been added, increasing the population by around 10%.
We had similar debates in Stockton-on-Tees when I lived there. The whole borough had been endless housebuilding for a decade. Multiple projects with hundreds of homes per site as well as smaller infill builds. And even bigger ones in the planning stage which are now going up.
The comedy factor? With the 2014 planning regs change the council was deemed to be "not building enough houses", allowing developers to do what they liked regardless of what councillors or even the MP thought.
The issue? The wrong type of houses being built. I lived on a development that ran to nearly 1,000 houses. Part of the site used to have a run down council estate on it, which was bulldozed. A small number of LHA houses added to the project did not adequately replace the hundreds of smaller affordable houses removed.
We're building houses that people can't afford.
And yet still they sell, so people clearly can afford them.
If we build enough, they will become affordable to more people. That's the glory of the market. This is true whether we build a million 5-bedroom detacheds or a million flats (though the former would cause more reshuffling).
David, there is a major difference between being sold and people being able to afford them. Far too many people are trapped paying mortgages they can't afford, which extracts cash from the economy as they can't then spend it on stuff in shops and hospitality.
Other property is bought by landlords to let to the people who can't afford a mortgage at all. Or where the exorbitant rent is paid by the state.
Either way you look at it the market is broken. We need to build a significant number of smaller houses and apartment blocks. But we can't do that - councils and housing associations are communist and broke, developers only want to build executive style homes, and MPs have too many rentier types in their ranks who refuse reforms.
The market is primarily broken by planning restrictions and micromanagement. Bringing prices down - which means expanding supply - is the biggest single thing that could address all the above problems. The details of what's built is secondary (though far from irrelevant).
As an aside, very high mortgage repayments doesn't extract money from the economy (much) - but it does recycle it from younger adults (especially) paying those mortgages, to inheritance receivers.
Easy money, openness to dodgy foreign money, and too low taxation on property ownership generally, are critical factors.
We should also consider other factors in the economy. Uber, Deliveroo and Amazon not investing in employees, the likes of Apple and Starbucks taking money out of the economy with questionable schemes to avoid paying tax in the UK, etc. Communities need affordable housing. They also need businesses who are invested in their success.
Very Trumpian logic. Buying things from foreign companies means our money is being taken?
If I go to Starbucks and purchase a hot beverage, most of the work is being done in the UK, but Starbucks UK claims it makes very little profit because it has to pay Starbucks International lots of money for the Starbucks branding. I am effectively buying something from a local company, but they make the accounting look as though I am buying something from a foreign company.
Seems to be the tories and Labour haven’t quite grasped the mood out there - seemingly continuing in the same way they have for decades and changing nothing.
Starmer needs to stop the “smash the gangs” rubbish as quite clearly it’s making no difference. Reeves needs to go. And we need to start having an honest conversation about the NHS and whether there is a “better way”.
Badenoch - well, she’s quite useless. She won’t be around for much longer I think.
Apart from that, really fascinating time in politics
IMHO we should restrict what is available on the NHS. Emergency care, obviously, and basic services. But a lot of things we just can't afford, yes, like latest treatments for X, Y, Z. If we have to borrow money to support our standard if living we aren't a wealthy country.
But I’ve seen little evidence (actually, apart from Reform) wanting to be honest about what the NHS can and can’t do. Even Farage has said it can be done differently, and all Labour ran with was “reform will charge to use the NHS”. Like somehow we don’t already spaff billions from our taxes on it somehow
We don't "spaff billions" on the NHS. We spend broadly comparable figures to other OECD nations (US excepted) for broadly similar health outcomes.
hmmmm
OECD Health Expenditure as Percentage of GDP (2022–2023)
Country
Total Health Expenditure (% of GDP)
Private Health Expenditure (% of GDP)
United States
17.3%
8.5%
Germany
12.7%
2.4%
France
11.7%
2.3%
Japan
10.8%
1.5%
Canada
11.9%
3.0%
Austria
11.4%
2.4%
Belgium
10.9%
2.4%
Australia
10.4%
2.9%
Denmark
10.5%
1.7%
Netherlands
10.8%
1.6%
New Zealand
9.8%
1.9%
United Kingdom
10.9%
1.5%
Finland
9.4%
2.1%
Spain
9.9%
2.4%
Italy
9.3%
2.1%
Iceland
9.3%
1.6%
Slovenia
9.0%
2.2%
South Korea
9.7%
2.8%
Czech Republic
8.4%
1.0%
Chile
9.4%
2.6%
Estonia
7.8%
1.3%
Poland
6.5%
1.9%
Hungary
6.8%
2.2%
Mexico
6.2%
3.2%
Turkey
5.0%
1.5%
Luxembourg
5.5%
0.7%
Thanks for illustrating my point. Our health expenditure is around the median of those countries.
How does Luxembourg get so low? It is because lots of people work there, but don't live there? The biggest outlier, of course, is the US, which has the most cost-ineffective healthcare system going.
128,678.19 USD GDP per capita vs 49,463.86 USD (2023) UK will do that.
I remember the BBC presenting a programme from Boston on the then upcoming referendum. I remember being amazed at how it seemed that everyone was posh and in favour of staying in Europe. It was nothing like I found it, as I was born and brought up in the town and most of my family still live there. None of my relatives was going to vote to stay and the pubs I frequented were all full of Leavers.
I wondered if I had totally re-read it. Not so. More than three quarters voted to leave - the highest total in the country. I lost all faith in the BBC as being unbiased - they could not have got it so wrong without being totally biased.
The Lincolnshire Mayor vote shows that little has changed. The Lincolnshire independence vote came to 8% along with the 42% for Reform. No doubt the BBC were gobsmacked again.
Seems to be the tories and Labour haven’t quite grasped the mood out there - seemingly continuing in the same way they have for decades and changing nothing.
Starmer needs to stop the “smash the gangs” rubbish as quite clearly it’s making no difference. Reeves needs to go. And we need to start having an honest conversation about the NHS and whether there is a “better way”.
Badenoch - well, she’s quite useless. She won’t be around for much longer I think.
Apart from that, really fascinating time in politics
IMHO we should restrict what is available on the NHS. Emergency care, obviously, and basic services. But a lot of things we just can't afford, yes, like latest treatments for X, Y, Z. If we have to borrow money to support our standard if living we aren't a wealthy country.
But I’ve seen little evidence (actually, apart from Reform) wanting to be honest about what the NHS can and can’t do. Even Farage has said it can be done differently, and all Labour ran with was “reform will charge to use the NHS”. Like somehow we don’t already spaff billions from our taxes on it somehow
We don't "spaff billions" on the NHS. We spend broadly comparable figures to other OECD nations (US excepted) for broadly similar health outcomes.
hmmmm
OECD Health Expenditure as Percentage of GDP (2022–2023)
Country
Total Health Expenditure (% of GDP)
Private Health Expenditure (% of GDP)
United States
17.3%
8.5%
Germany
12.7%
2.4%
France
11.7%
2.3%
Japan
10.8%
1.5%
Canada
11.9%
3.0%
Austria
11.4%
2.4%
Belgium
10.9%
2.4%
Australia
10.4%
2.9%
Denmark
10.5%
1.7%
Netherlands
10.8%
1.6%
New Zealand
9.8%
1.9%
United Kingdom
10.9%
1.5%
Finland
9.4%
2.1%
Spain
9.9%
2.4%
Italy
9.3%
2.1%
Iceland
9.3%
1.6%
Slovenia
9.0%
2.2%
South Korea
9.7%
2.8%
Czech Republic
8.4%
1.0%
Chile
9.4%
2.6%
Estonia
7.8%
1.3%
Poland
6.5%
1.9%
Hungary
6.8%
2.2%
Mexico
6.2%
3.2%
Turkey
5.0%
1.5%
Luxembourg
5.5%
0.7%
Thanks for illustrating my point. Our health expenditure is around the median of those countries.
How does Luxembourg get so low? It is because lots of people work there, but don't live there? The biggest outlier, of course, is the US, which has the most cost-ineffective healthcare system going.
And our government health spending is even more median.
If there is to be extra health spending it should come from private sources which is on the low sides in this country.
I see Andrea 'give the finger' Jenkyns' latest genius idea is to house migrants in tents rather than hotels. I'm sure Kent residents will feel a lot better when they're surrounded by migrant camps, though easier to burn down I guess.
The woman is vile in the extreme.
Not sure where she's been, housing migrants/homeless in tents seems to have been unofficial policy for a while.
If the promised improvement in processing asylum applications is achieved then this problem should reduce and hence become less of a campaigning point for Reform. Hence Jenkyns' suggestion, migrant camps will be more unpopular than migrant hostels.
“If…”
Record Number of Channel Crossings so far this year.
Even if Channel crossings are up, you can save money if you are quicker with the processing. The big problem was that the Tories were (deliberately?) slow at processing because... well, it's never been entirely clear. They thought it would put off people coming? They thought a large number would mean they could bang on about the issue and get votes? They were just penny pinching?
I see Andrea 'give the finger' Jenkyns' latest genius idea is to house migrants in tents rather than hotels. I'm sure Kent residents will feel a lot better when they're surrounded by migrant camps, though easier to burn down I guess.
The woman is vile in the extreme.
Not sure where she's been, housing migrants/homeless in tents seems to have been unofficial policy for a while.
If the promised improvement in processing asylum applications is achieved then this problem should reduce and hence become less of a campaigning point for Reform. Hence Jenkyns' suggestion, migrant camps will be more unpopular than migrant hostels.
“If…”
Record Number of Channel Crossings so far this year.
The Channel Crossings are noise.
The real fun is in the selling of work visas for non-existent jobs. All you need is a bunch of barely existent companies.
1) Create a job that pays £45K 2) Get the visa paperwork started. 3) Sell the visa to some poor shmuck in a developing country 4) He arrives and finds no job...
This is now an industry. Visas priced at 15K plus, they say. Some small companies are doing a few hundred visas. A year.
I don’t envy Labour but the clear message from his support at the last GE and before was that people are done with austerity. To double down on it whilst doing stuff that really upsets middle England, like the war on nature, has been politics at its poorest.
How can austerity end without raising taxes which are already at a high level?
Growth. Essentially, it can't. We can't afford the level of welfare we're currently paying for - we've basically got UBI for anyone who can pass a PIP and keeping anyone over 65 in clover.
Which party is going to be brave enough to end the triple lock ? My answer none .
It's not just the state pension, public sector pensions need a 30-40% haircut too. In too many areas we're living well beyond our means and our welfare state is far, far beyond a safety net. Cut a million people from state employment to take us back to 2017, taper the state pension for higher rate tax payers, merge NI and income tax so that non-working income is taxed at the same rate as working income, cut to £2k the cash ISA allowance, push through a 30-40% haircut for defined benefit pensions (even for people currently receiving them), introduce much, much tougher criteria to receive disability benefits and exclude all but 5% of the most serious mental health cases by default. The rest can go back to work or live on £450 per month or whatever UC is for unemployed people. Also get rid of UC, move back to the old system if JSA and ESA, UC is an experiment that hasn't worked, it's just encouraged people to game the system worse than ever.
I think if Labour started that programme today by the end of the parliament we could be in a position to actually pay front line service staff more and attract better quality candidates for teachers, police, nurses etc...
What we have now is an underfunded and hugely over funded state at the same time it's literally the worst of both worlds.
There's no way a haircut to built up public sector pension entitlements would survive a court challenge. Some final salary public sector pensions were too generous, but those days are gone now (although the less generous career average DB pensions are still a draw). Still live recipients of those generous pensions, of course, but I don't think there's much to be done about that.
Cutting future pensions to be earned could work but only with substantial pay increases in many areas. I've looked at civil service roles a few times, but the pay is laughable in tech/science roles, coupled with the insistence of starting new entrants on the bottom of the scale. There's a post I looked at recently that had a range of. £55-£70k. £70k or even £65k would have had me apply, but the guidance was very clear it would be bottom of scale for me coming from outside and the path to pay progression was highly opaque. It was written in some ways as a more senior role, with more line management duties than I have at present, but would have been a pay cut for me. A the same time, I saw a 'lead python developer's post at the same place with the same pay range, which really is ridiculous. If they won't compete, they're not going to get good people and will end up spending more than funding a post properly - either lots of turnover as people gain experience and the leave or someone really mediocre who sits there doing not a great deal.
Parliament is sovereign, it can pass primary legislation to mandate a haircut for db pensions. It will of course make them wildly unpopular with people who lose out but it is absolutely possible.
I've also said many times that pension contributions should be cut and salaries increased in the public sector. People want the money today, not at some nebulous point in the future. A friend of mine was contacted to apply for senior on prem cybersecurity admin but the salary is well below market rate and they make it up in the pension, the overall package isn't dissimilar to what he might get elsewhere but he can't afford the pay cut so politely declined.
But aside from that, we just have too many people doing too little in that £40-60k band in the public sector. Lots of salary collectors creating micro bureaucracies around them to justify their roles. We should sweep the lot of them away and bank the saving, reduce the deficit and bank the subsequent drop in the interest bill as gilt prices increase and yields fall.
Parliament is sovereign, but it should use that power carefully. It would damage the trustworthiness of the state if it were to casually use that power to cancel the liabilities it had accrued.
Max pb is a grade A idiot. The pensioner vote goes way beyond the 67 + people. Anyone over 55 would be furious at his plans as would many of those younger and aware of the realities of life for their parents and other family. Like several well off posters here he thinks the lifestyle of his wealthy family is the norm
The sane way to have handled that, early on in this government's term, would have been
1) Merge NI & Income tax 2) Get rid of all the odds an ends - 3 rates, fixed personal allowance. 3) In the turmoil of the above, put the effective rates up a bit. 4) Pension is "quadruple locked"* to the personal allowance. 5) All the old age extra benefits go in a blender. Come out as taxable/means tested. Sell this as "Mrs Miggins on the basic pension get YY% more money next year"
Can I be Labour Chancellor?
*A Quadruple Lock has to better than a Triple Lock, right?
There may be merit in that plan, but it would have produced winners and losers... and the losers would have kicked up a helluva fuss. Selling the plan is always harder than you think.
The LibDems have also held Watlington on South Oxfordshire District Council in the by-election caused by Freddie van Mierlo (now MP) stepping down:
🔶 Benjamin Higgins (LD) 679 🔵 Richard Riley (Con) 585 🟢 Lucie Ponsford (Grn) 174 🌹 Nick Palmer (Lab) 34
He’s failed to let the Tory in, yet again….
It takes quite some shameless cheek to try and guilt trip the LibDem, Liberal and pro-EU candidates in Runcorn, on the same day as you have put up as Labour candidate in a seat like that…!
Seems to be the tories and Labour haven’t quite grasped the mood out there - seemingly continuing in the same way they have for decades and changing nothing.
Starmer needs to stop the “smash the gangs” rubbish as quite clearly it’s making no difference. Reeves needs to go. And we need to start having an honest conversation about the NHS and whether there is a “better way”.
Badenoch - well, she’s quite useless. She won’t be around for much longer I think.
Apart from that, really fascinating time in politics
IMHO we should restrict what is available on the NHS. Emergency care, obviously, and basic services. But a lot of things we just can't afford, yes, like latest treatments for X, Y, Z. If we have to borrow money to support our standard if living we aren't a wealthy country.
But I’ve seen little evidence (actually, apart from Reform) wanting to be honest about what the NHS can and can’t do. Even Farage has said it can be done differently, and all Labour ran with was “reform will charge to use the NHS”. Like somehow we don’t already spaff billions from our taxes on it somehow
We don't "spaff billions" on the NHS. We spend broadly comparable figures to other OECD nations (US excepted) for broadly similar health outcomes.
hmmmm
OECD Health Expenditure as Percentage of GDP (2022–2023)
Country
Total Health Expenditure (% of GDP)
Private Health Expenditure (% of GDP)
United States
17.3%
8.5%
Germany
12.7%
2.4%
France
11.7%
2.3%
Japan
10.8%
1.5%
Canada
11.9%
3.0%
Austria
11.4%
2.4%
Belgium
10.9%
2.4%
Australia
10.4%
2.9%
Denmark
10.5%
1.7%
Netherlands
10.8%
1.6%
New Zealand
9.8%
1.9%
United Kingdom
10.9%
1.5%
Finland
9.4%
2.1%
Spain
9.9%
2.4%
Italy
9.3%
2.1%
Iceland
9.3%
1.6%
Slovenia
9.0%
2.2%
South Korea
9.7%
2.8%
Czech Republic
8.4%
1.0%
Chile
9.4%
2.6%
Estonia
7.8%
1.3%
Poland
6.5%
1.9%
Hungary
6.8%
2.2%
Mexico
6.2%
3.2%
Turkey
5.0%
1.5%
Luxembourg
5.5%
0.7%
Thanks for illustrating my point. Our health expenditure is around the median of those countries.
How does Luxembourg get so low? It is because lots of people work there, but don't live there? The biggest outlier, of course, is the US, which has the most cost-ineffective healthcare system going.
128,678.19 USD GDP per capita vs 49,463.86 USD (2023) UK will do that.
Outside A&E, it doesn't take too much imagination to think that they are using hospitals in neighbouring countries. A lot.
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
No what's wrong is we arent building houses.
You wouldn't post that if you lived in at some parts of Essex. Maldon is an example; hundreds of homes have been built to the South and West of the town. And a village nearby is protesting about 600 new homes being built. In our small town around 100 extra houses have recently been added, increasing the population by around 10%.
We had similar debates in Stockton-on-Tees when I lived there. The whole borough had been endless housebuilding for a decade. Multiple projects with hundreds of homes per site as well as smaller infill builds. And even bigger ones in the planning stage which are now going up.
The comedy factor? With the 2014 planning regs change the council was deemed to be "not building enough houses", allowing developers to do what they liked regardless of what councillors or even the MP thought.
The issue? The wrong type of houses being built. I lived on a development that ran to nearly 1,000 houses. Part of the site used to have a run down council estate on it, which was bulldozed. A small number of LHA houses added to the project did not adequately replace the hundreds of smaller affordable houses removed.
We're building houses that people can't afford.
And yet still they sell, so people clearly can afford them.
If we build enough, they will become affordable to more people. That's the glory of the market. This is true whether we build a million 5-bedroom detacheds or a million flats (though the former would cause more reshuffling).
David, there is a major difference between being sold and people being able to afford them. Far too many people are trapped paying mortgages they can't afford, which extracts cash from the economy as they can't then spend it on stuff in shops and hospitality.
Other property is bought by landlords to let to the people who can't afford a mortgage at all. Or where the exorbitant rent is paid by the state.
Either way you look at it the market is broken. We need to build a significant number of smaller houses and apartment blocks. But we can't do that - councils and housing associations are communist and broke, developers only want to build executive style homes, and MPs have too many rentier types in their ranks who refuse reforms.
The market is primarily broken by planning restrictions and micromanagement. Bringing prices down - which means expanding supply - is the biggest single thing that could address all the above problems. The details of what's built is secondary (though far from irrelevant).
As an aside, very high mortgage repayments doesn't extract money from the economy (much) - but it does recycle it from younger adults (especially) paying those mortgages, to inheritance receivers.
Easy money, openness to dodgy foreign money, and too low taxation on property ownership generally, are critical factors.
We should also consider other factors in the economy. Uber, Deliveroo and Amazon not investing in employees, the likes of Apple and Starbucks taking money out of the economy with questionable schemes to avoid paying tax in the UK, etc. Communities need affordable housing. They also need businesses who are invested in their success.
Very Trumpian logic. Buying things from foreign companies means our money is being taken?
If I go to Starbucks and purchase a hot beverage, most of the work is being done in the UK, but Starbucks UK claims it makes very little profit because it has to pay Starbucks International lots of money for the Starbucks branding. I am effectively buying something from a local company, but they make the accounting look as though I am buying something from a foreign company.
The coffee blend that determines how it tastes was formulated abroad and made from raw materials imported from abroad. If you want to capture some of that value for the state, then apply a tariff.
I see Andrea 'give the finger' Jenkyns' latest genius idea is to house migrants in tents rather than hotels. I'm sure Kent residents will feel a lot better when they're surrounded by migrant camps, though easier to burn down I guess.
The woman is vile in the extreme.
Not sure where she's been, housing migrants/homeless in tents seems to have been unofficial policy for a while.
If the promised improvement in processing asylum applications is achieved then this problem should reduce and hence become less of a campaigning point for Reform. Hence Jenkyns' suggestion, migrant camps will be more unpopular than migrant hostels.
“If…”
Record Number of Channel Crossings so far this year.
The Channel Crossings are noise.
The real fun is in the selling of work visas for non-existent jobs. All you need is a bunch of barely existent companies.
1) Create a job that pays £45K 2) Get the visa paperwork started. 3) Sell the visa to some poor shmuck in a developing country 4) He arrives and finds no job...
This is now an industry. Visas priced at 15K plus, they say. Some small companies are doing a few hundred visas. A year.
Its not even £45k fake job. Its £38k, but there is a massive list of excepts that mean it can be as low as £25k.
You can also do there is a job working as a "chef", but the poor sod turns up works 100hr a week put only paid for a portion of that, then deductions for housing, etc etc etc.
Seems to be the tories and Labour haven’t quite grasped the mood out there - seemingly continuing in the same way they have for decades and changing nothing.
Starmer needs to stop the “smash the gangs” rubbish as quite clearly it’s making no difference. Reeves needs to go. And we need to start having an honest conversation about the NHS and whether there is a “better way”.
Badenoch - well, she’s quite useless. She won’t be around for much longer I think.
Apart from that, really fascinating time in politics
IMHO we should restrict what is available on the NHS. Emergency care, obviously, and basic services. But a lot of things we just can't afford, yes, like latest treatments for X, Y, Z. If we have to borrow money to support our standard if living we aren't a wealthy country.
But I’ve seen little evidence (actually, apart from Reform) wanting to be honest about what the NHS can and can’t do. Even Farage has said it can be done differently, and all Labour ran with was “reform will charge to use the NHS”. Like somehow we don’t already spaff billions from our taxes on it somehow
We don't "spaff billions" on the NHS. We spend broadly comparable figures to other OECD nations (US excepted) for broadly similar health outcomes.
hmmmm
OECD Health Expenditure as Percentage of GDP (2022–2023)
Country
Total Health Expenditure (% of GDP)
Private Health Expenditure (% of GDP)
United States
17.3%
8.5%
Germany
12.7%
2.4%
France
11.7%
2.3%
Japan
10.8%
1.5%
Canada
11.9%
3.0%
Austria
11.4%
2.4%
Belgium
10.9%
2.4%
Australia
10.4%
2.9%
Denmark
10.5%
1.7%
Netherlands
10.8%
1.6%
New Zealand
9.8%
1.9%
United Kingdom
10.9%
1.5%
Finland
9.4%
2.1%
Spain
9.9%
2.4%
Italy
9.3%
2.1%
Iceland
9.3%
1.6%
Slovenia
9.0%
2.2%
South Korea
9.7%
2.8%
Czech Republic
8.4%
1.0%
Chile
9.4%
2.6%
Estonia
7.8%
1.3%
Poland
6.5%
1.9%
Hungary
6.8%
2.2%
Mexico
6.2%
3.2%
Turkey
5.0%
1.5%
Luxembourg
5.5%
0.7%
Thanks for illustrating my point. Our health expenditure is around the median of those countries.
How does Luxembourg get so low? It is because lots of people work there, but don't live there? The biggest outlier, of course, is the US, which has the most cost-ineffective healthcare system going.
128,678.19 USD GDP per capita vs 49,463.86 USD (2023) UK will do that.
I think it's more to do with a healthcare industry successfully capturing legislators. The US bans itself from negotiating on drug prices, for example, something the NHS generally does very effectively.
I don’t envy Labour but the clear message from his support at the last GE and before was that people are done with austerity. To double down on it whilst doing stuff that really upsets middle England, like the war on nature, has been politics at its poorest.
How can austerity end without raising taxes which are already at a high level?
Growth. Essentially, it can't. We can't afford the level of welfare we're currently paying for - we've basically got UBI for anyone who can pass a PIP and keeping anyone over 65 in clover.
Which party is going to be brave enough to end the triple lock ? My answer none .
It's not just the state pension, public sector pensions need a 30-40% haircut too. In too many areas we're living well beyond our means and our welfare state is far, far beyond a safety net. Cut a million people from state employment to take us back to 2017, taper the state pension for higher rate tax payers, merge NI and income tax so that non-working income is taxed at the same rate as working income, cut to £2k the cash ISA allowance, push through a 30-40% haircut for defined benefit pensions (even for people currently receiving them), introduce much, much tougher criteria to receive disability benefits and exclude all but 5% of the most serious mental health cases by default. The rest can go back to work or live on £450 per month or whatever UC is for unemployed people. Also get rid of UC, move back to the old system if JSA and ESA, UC is an experiment that hasn't worked, it's just encouraged people to game the system worse than ever.
I think if Labour started that programme today by the end of the parliament we could be in a position to actually pay front line service staff more and attract better quality candidates for teachers, police, nurses etc...
What we have now is an underfunded and hugely over funded state at the same time it's literally the worst of both worlds.
There's no way a haircut to built up public sector pension entitlements would survive a court challenge. Some final salary public sector pensions were too generous, but those days are gone now (although the less generous career average DB pensions are still a draw). Still live recipients of those generous pensions, of course, but I don't think there's much to be done about that.
Cutting future pensions to be earned could work but only with substantial pay increases in many areas. I've looked at civil service roles a few times, but the pay is laughable in tech/science roles, coupled with the insistence of starting new entrants on the bottom of the scale. There's a post I looked at recently that had a range of. £55-£70k. £70k or even £65k would have had me apply, but the guidance was very clear it would be bottom of scale for me coming from outside and the path to pay progression was highly opaque. It was written in some ways as a more senior role, with more line management duties than I have at present, but would have been a pay cut for me. A the same time, I saw a 'lead python developer's post at the same place with the same pay range, which really is ridiculous. If they won't compete, they're not going to get good people and will end up spending more than funding a post properly - either lots of turnover as people gain experience and the leave or someone really mediocre who sits there doing not a great deal.
Parliament is sovereign, it can pass primary legislation to mandate a haircut for db pensions. It will of course make them wildly unpopular with people who lose out but it is absolutely possible.
I've also said many times that pension contributions should be cut and salaries increased in the public sector. People want the money today, not at some nebulous point in the future. A friend of mine was contacted to apply for senior on prem cybersecurity admin but the salary is well below market rate and they make it up in the pension, the overall package isn't dissimilar to what he might get elsewhere but he can't afford the pay cut so politely declined.
But aside from that, we just have too many people doing too little in that £40-60k band in the public sector. Lots of salary collectors creating micro bureaucracies around them to justify their roles. We should sweep the lot of them away and bank the saving, reduce the deficit and bank the subsequent drop in the interest bill as gilt prices increase and yields fall.
Parliament is sovereign, but it should use that power carefully. It would damage the trustworthiness of the state if it were to casually use that power to cancel the liabilities it had accrued.
Max pb is a grade A idiot. The pensioner vote goes way beyond the 67 + people. Anyone over 55 would be furious at his plans as would many of those younger and aware of the realities of life for their parents and other family. Like several well off posters here he thinks the lifestyle of his wealthy family is the norm
The sane way to have handled that, early on in this government's term, would have been
1) Merge NI & Income tax 2) Get rid of all the odds an ends - 3 rates, fixed personal allowance. 3) In the turmoil of the above, put the effective rates up a bit. 4) Pension is "quadruple locked"* to the personal allowance. 5) All the old age extra benefits go in a blender. Come out as taxable/means tested. Sell this as "Mrs Miggins on the basic pension get YY% more money next year"
Can I be Labour Chancellor?
*A Quadruple Lock has to better than a Triple Lock, right?
There may be merit in that plan, but it would have produced winners and losers... and the losers would have kicked up a helluva fuss. Selling the plan is always harder than you think.
It would have the merit of being an actual plan. With a government with a majority of 14,562 in the House of Commons, creating a few losers is what you *should* be doing.
The pitch is that we need to raise more tax and increase efficiency to improve the NHS etc. The markets don't mind spending. They mind unfunded spending. The markets would have reacted to the above, with lower rates on Government borrowing.
As to popularity, I think this would have sold far, far better to Labour voters than what they did. What to @PBLabour think?
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
No what's wrong is we arent building houses.
You wouldn't post that if you lived in at some parts of Essex. Maldon is an example; hundreds of homes have been built to the South and West of the town. And a village nearby is protesting about 600 new homes being built. In our small town around 100 extra houses have recently been added, increasing the population by around 10%.
We had similar debates in Stockton-on-Tees when I lived there. The whole borough had been endless housebuilding for a decade. Multiple projects with hundreds of homes per site as well as smaller infill builds. And even bigger ones in the planning stage which are now going up.
The comedy factor? With the 2014 planning regs change the council was deemed to be "not building enough houses", allowing developers to do what they liked regardless of what councillors or even the MP thought.
The issue? The wrong type of houses being built. I lived on a development that ran to nearly 1,000 houses. Part of the site used to have a run down council estate on it, which was bulldozed. A small number of LHA houses added to the project did not adequately replace the hundreds of smaller affordable houses removed.
We're building houses that people can't afford.
And yet still they sell, so people clearly can afford them.
If we build enough, they will become affordable to more people. That's the glory of the market. This is true whether we build a million 5-bedroom detacheds or a million flats (though the former would cause more reshuffling).
David, there is a major difference between being sold and people being able to afford them. Far too many people are trapped paying mortgages they can't afford, which extracts cash from the economy as they can't then spend it on stuff in shops and hospitality.
Other property is bought by landlords to let to the people who can't afford a mortgage at all. Or where the exorbitant rent is paid by the state.
Either way you look at it the market is broken. We need to build a significant number of smaller houses and apartment blocks. But we can't do that - councils and housing associations are communist and broke, developers only want to build executive style homes, and MPs have too many rentier types in their ranks who refuse reforms.
The market is primarily broken by planning restrictions and micromanagement. Bringing prices down - which means expanding supply - is the biggest single thing that could address all the above problems. The details of what's built is secondary (though far from irrelevant).
As an aside, very high mortgage repayments doesn't extract money from the economy (much) - but it does recycle it from younger adults (especially) paying those mortgages, to inheritance receivers.
Easy money, openness to dodgy foreign money, and too low taxation on property ownership generally, are critical factors.
We should also consider other factors in the economy. Uber, Deliveroo and Amazon not investing in employees, the likes of Apple and Starbucks taking money out of the economy with questionable schemes to avoid paying tax in the UK, etc. Communities need affordable housing. They also need businesses who are invested in their success.
Very Trumpian logic. Buying things from foreign companies means our money is being taken?
If I go to Starbucks and purchase a hot beverage, most of the work is being done in the UK, but Starbucks UK claims it makes very little profit because it has to pay Starbucks International lots of money for the Starbucks branding. I am effectively buying something from a local company, but they make the accounting look as though I am buying something from a foreign company.
That’s not how transfer pricing works. Unfortunately the public discourse on corporation tax seems still to be stuck in some distorted version of the reality circa 2005.
The local retail subsidiaries of coffee shops, fast food chains etc generally make similar or greater taxable profits than independent local businesses and franchisees.
Seems to be the tories and Labour haven’t quite grasped the mood out there - seemingly continuing in the same way they have for decades and changing nothing.
Starmer needs to stop the “smash the gangs” rubbish as quite clearly it’s making no difference. Reeves needs to go. And we need to start having an honest conversation about the NHS and whether there is a “better way”.
Badenoch - well, she’s quite useless. She won’t be around for much longer I think.
Apart from that, really fascinating time in politics
IMHO we should restrict what is available on the NHS. Emergency care, obviously, and basic services. But a lot of things we just can't afford, yes, like latest treatments for X, Y, Z. If we have to borrow money to support our standard if living we aren't a wealthy country.
I think the brutal but necessary action is to freeze hospital spending in nominal terms until it represents the same proportion of health spending as it did 20 years ago. Tighten up QALYs and revert the emphasis to public health and primary care.
I've hunted down the thread for these two comments, which I think are quite interesting, and almost certainly correct, and deserve a bit more thought. The pickle we are in with health is not that we are poor, as a nation - we are far richer than we were in the 1960s, for example - but that our potential outgoings on health has grown so massively. We can treat people for far more, far more successfully, with the innovations which have happened in health in my lifetime, but the cost of this is massive. And our demographics have shifted: we have a much greater proportion of (expensive to the NHS) old people - especially the super old (85+), who are crippling expensive, and a smaller proportion of 16-64 year olds to pay for it (though a greater number of these are working - but that is a separate quality-of-life issue) A couple of half remembered stats: Over half of NHS spending goes on the over 85s (is this true? It seems incredible. I am happy to be contradicted. It may be 'the under 1s and the over 85s' but that still seems incredible. If we doubled NHS spending, we could improve life expectancies by all of six months. (This stat is a good 30 years old but I can't imagine it's changed much).
I agree with AnneJGP's position - and the implication of Eabhal's position - that this means the NHS has to cut back on what it does. We can't be borrowing from our children to give to our parents. But the logic of which means there will be things which have to be paid for by individuals - which means that those who can afford them will get more life years than those who cannot, but also that this is money which will not get left to children. Which almost has us arriving in the same place by default. Where this all lands is people's lives being shortened - dying when they could have lived - even if this is only by 6 months of low quality life or such. This feels very much like assisted dying by an altogether messier route.
I don't have any good answers for any of this (where 'good' means both logically coherent and electorally popular).
I don’t envy Labour but the clear message from his support at the last GE and before was that people are done with austerity. To double down on it whilst doing stuff that really upsets middle England, like the war on nature, has been politics at its poorest.
How can austerity end without raising taxes which are already at a high level?
Growth. Essentially, it can't. We can't afford the level of welfare we're currently paying for - we've basically got UBI for anyone who can pass a PIP and keeping anyone over 65 in clover.
Which party is going to be brave enough to end the triple lock ? My answer none .
It's not just the state pension, public sector pensions need a 30-40% haircut too. In too many areas we're living well beyond our means and our welfare state is far, far beyond a safety net. Cut a million people from state employment to take us back to 2017, taper the state pension for higher rate tax payers, merge NI and income tax so that non-working income is taxed at the same rate as working income, cut to £2k the cash ISA allowance, push through a 30-40% haircut for defined benefit pensions (even for people currently receiving them), introduce much, much tougher criteria to receive disability benefits and exclude all but 5% of the most serious mental health cases by default. The rest can go back to work or live on £450 per month or whatever UC is for unemployed people. Also get rid of UC, move back to the old system if JSA and ESA, UC is an experiment that hasn't worked, it's just encouraged people to game the system worse than ever.
I think if Labour started that programme today by the end of the parliament we could be in a position to actually pay front line service staff more and attract better quality candidates for teachers, police, nurses etc...
What we have now is an underfunded and hugely over funded state at the same time it's literally the worst of both worlds.
There's no way a haircut to built up public sector pension entitlements would survive a court challenge. Some final salary public sector pensions were too generous, but those days are gone now (although the less generous career average DB pensions are still a draw). Still live recipients of those generous pensions, of course, but I don't think there's much to be done about that.
Cutting future pensions to be earned could work but only with substantial pay increases in many areas. I've looked at civil service roles a few times, but the pay is laughable in tech/science roles, coupled with the insistence of starting new entrants on the bottom of the scale. There's a post I looked at recently that had a range of. £55-£70k. £70k or even £65k would have had me apply, but the guidance was very clear it would be bottom of scale for me coming from outside and the path to pay progression was highly opaque. It was written in some ways as a more senior role, with more line management duties than I have at present, but would have been a pay cut for me. A the same time, I saw a 'lead python developer's post at the same place with the same pay range, which really is ridiculous. If they won't compete, they're not going to get good people and will end up spending more than funding a post properly - either lots of turnover as people gain experience and the leave or someone really mediocre who sits there doing not a great deal.
Parliament is sovereign, it can pass primary legislation to mandate a haircut for db pensions. It will of course make them wildly unpopular with people who lose out but it is absolutely possible.
I've also said many times that pension contributions should be cut and salaries increased in the public sector. People want the money today, not at some nebulous point in the future. A friend of mine was contacted to apply for senior on prem cybersecurity admin but the salary is well below market rate and they make it up in the pension, the overall package isn't dissimilar to what he might get elsewhere but he can't afford the pay cut so politely declined.
But aside from that, we just have too many people doing too little in that £40-60k band in the public sector. Lots of salary collectors creating micro bureaucracies around them to justify their roles. We should sweep the lot of them away and bank the saving, reduce the deficit and bank the subsequent drop in the interest bill as gilt prices increase and yields fall.
Parliament is sovereign, but it should use that power carefully. It would damage the trustworthiness of the state if it were to casually use that power to cancel the liabilities it had accrued.
Max pb is a grade A idiot. The pensioner vote goes way beyond the 67 + people. Anyone over 55 would be furious at his plans as would many of those younger and aware of the realities of life for their parents and other family. Like several well off posters here he thinks the lifestyle of his wealthy family is the norm
The sane way to have handled that, early on in this government's term, would have been
1) Merge NI & Income tax 2) Get rid of all the odds an ends - 3 rates, fixed personal allowance. 3) In the turmoil of the above, put the effective rates up a bit. 4) Pension is "quadruple locked"* to the personal allowance. 5) All the old age extra benefits go in a blender. Come out as taxable/means tested. Sell this as "Mrs Miggins on the basic pension get YY% more money next year"
Can I be Labour Chancellor?
*A Quadruple Lock has to better than a Triple Lock, right?
An 8% increase in income tax on pensions wouldn’t work - which is why the reverse WFA and my 3% bit was suggested
5% NI and 5% extra on income tax would work but pensioners would scream (so it needed to have been done now).
And the pension / personal allowance problem is arriving very soon - that’s going to be a problem that needs fixing this / next year at the latest because by 2027 pensions will be above the allowance
I see Andrea 'give the finger' Jenkyns' latest genius idea is to house migrants in tents rather than hotels. I'm sure Kent residents will feel a lot better when they're surrounded by migrant camps, though easier to burn down I guess.
The woman is vile in the extreme.
Not sure where she's been, housing migrants/homeless in tents seems to have been unofficial policy for a while.
If the promised improvement in processing asylum applications is achieved then this problem should reduce and hence become less of a campaigning point for Reform. Hence Jenkyns' suggestion, migrant camps will be more unpopular than migrant hostels.
“If…”
Record Number of Channel Crossings so far this year.
The Channel Crossings are noise.
The real fun is in the selling of work visas for non-existent jobs. All you need is a bunch of barely existent companies.
1) Create a job that pays £45K 2) Get the visa paperwork started. 3) Sell the visa to some poor shmuck in a developing country 4) He arrives and finds no job...
This is now an industry. Visas priced at 15K plus, they say. Some small companies are doing a few hundred visas. A year.
Its not even £45k fake job. Its £38k, but there is a massive list of excepts that mean it can be as low as £25k.
You can also do there is a job working as a "chef", but the poor sod turns up works 100hr a week put only paid for a portion of that, then deductions for housing, etc etc etc.
The salary is pure fiction, so you can make it anything you want. The paper number just has to be above any floor the government sets.
The other fun bit is that the fake job is added to the job stats as an unfilled (as yet) vacancy. So no matter how many immigrants come here, there are always more "jobs". Interesting, eh?
I don’t envy Labour but the clear message from his support at the last GE and before was that people are done with austerity. To double down on it whilst doing stuff that really upsets middle England, like the war on nature, has been politics at its poorest.
How can austerity end without raising taxes which are already at a high level?
Growth. Essentially, it can't. We can't afford the level of welfare we're currently paying for - we've basically got UBI for anyone who can pass a PIP and keeping anyone over 65 in clover.
Which party is going to be brave enough to end the triple lock ? My answer none .
It's not just the state pension, public sector pensions need a 30-40% haircut too. In too many areas we're living well beyond our means and our welfare state is far, far beyond a safety net. Cut a million people from state employment to take us back to 2017, taper the state pension for higher rate tax payers, merge NI and income tax so that non-working income is taxed at the same rate as working income, cut to £2k the cash ISA allowance, push through a 30-40% haircut for defined benefit pensions (even for people currently receiving them), introduce much, much tougher criteria to receive disability benefits and exclude all but 5% of the most serious mental health cases by default. The rest can go back to work or live on £450 per month or whatever UC is for unemployed people. Also get rid of UC, move back to the old system if JSA and ESA, UC is an experiment that hasn't worked, it's just encouraged people to game the system worse than ever.
I think if Labour started that programme today by the end of the parliament we could be in a position to actually pay front line service staff more and attract better quality candidates for teachers, police, nurses etc...
What we have now is an underfunded and hugely over funded state at the same time it's literally the worst of both worlds.
There's no way a haircut to built up public sector pension entitlements would survive a court challenge. Some final salary public sector pensions were too generous, but those days are gone now (although the less generous career average DB pensions are still a draw). Still live recipients of those generous pensions, of course, but I don't think there's much to be done about that.
Cutting future pensions to be earned could work but only with substantial pay increases in many areas. I've looked at civil service roles a few times, but the pay is laughable in tech/science roles, coupled with the insistence of starting new entrants on the bottom of the scale. There's a post I looked at recently that had a range of. £55-£70k. £70k or even £65k would have had me apply, but the guidance was very clear it would be bottom of scale for me coming from outside and the path to pay progression was highly opaque. It was written in some ways as a more senior role, with more line management duties than I have at present, but would have been a pay cut for me. A the same time, I saw a 'lead python developer's post at the same place with the same pay range, which really is ridiculous. If they won't compete, they're not going to get good people and will end up spending more than funding a post properly - either lots of turnover as people gain experience and the leave or someone really mediocre who sits there doing not a great deal.
Parliament is sovereign, it can pass primary legislation to mandate a haircut for db pensions. It will of course make them wildly unpopular with people who lose out but it is absolutely possible.
I've also said many times that pension contributions should be cut and salaries increased in the public sector. People want the money today, not at some nebulous point in the future. A friend of mine was contacted to apply for senior on prem cybersecurity admin but the salary is well below market rate and they make it up in the pension, the overall package isn't dissimilar to what he might get elsewhere but he can't afford the pay cut so politely declined.
But aside from that, we just have too many people doing too little in that £40-60k band in the public sector. Lots of salary collectors creating micro bureaucracies around them to justify their roles. We should sweep the lot of them away and bank the saving, reduce the deficit and bank the subsequent drop in the interest bill as gilt prices increase and yields fall.
Parliament is sovereign, but it should use that power carefully. It would damage the trustworthiness of the state if it were to casually use that power to cancel the liabilities it had accrued.
Max pb is a grade A idiot. The pensioner vote goes way beyond the 67 + people. Anyone over 55 would be furious at his plans as would many of those younger and aware of the realities of life for their parents and other family. Like several well off posters here he thinks the lifestyle of his wealthy family is the norm
The sane way to have handled that, early on in this government's term, would have been
1) Merge NI & Income tax 2) Get rid of all the odds an ends - 3 rates, fixed personal allowance. 3) In the turmoil of the above, put the effective rates up a bit. 4) Pension is "quadruple locked"* to the personal allowance. 5) All the old age extra benefits go in a blender. Come out as taxable/means tested. Sell this as "Mrs Miggins on the basic pension get YY% more money next year"
Can I be Labour Chancellor?
*A Quadruple Lock has to better than a Triple Lock, right?
I'd support that. What I think is interesting, and where the govt has got it wrong, is that you (if I've read the tone of your posts correctly) and I are both pragmatic centrists, not supporters of Labour but not hostile either, and yet we're both well to the left of the current government.
I do wonder what genuinely left-leaning Labour members think in private about their government.
Germany's Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party has been designated as right-wing extremist by the country's federal office for the protection of the constitution.
The Reform revolution looks somewhat anemic this morning. If you can’t turn out a big protest vote at times like this, the general election is going to be challenging.
hmmm - this was a safe seat.
Election Year
Labour
Reform UK
Conservative
Green
Liberal Democrat
Liberal
Social Democratic Party
2019 (Notional)
48.8%
4.8%
36.8%
2.9%
6.7%
–
–
2024
52.9%
18.1%
16.0%
6.4%
5.1%
1.1%
0.3%
2025 (By-election)
38.7%
38.7%
–
–
–
–
–
Look at that Conservative fall, though.
Eh?
37 percent (notional) in 2019, 16 percent last year, 7 percent yesterday.
Yes, a lot of the commentary here is about how bad Labour did in Runcorn, but it wasn't really a safe seat based on the 2019 results. It was on a relatively thin 12% margin against the Tories. In a situation where a Labour government is doing politically unpopular things, it would have been easy for the Tories to overcome this margin in a by-election. The fact that the Labour MP resigned in scandal would have further supressed the Labour vote.
The seat only became a very safe seat in 2024 because the right-wing vote was split between Reform & Conservative.
Compared to 2019, the Labour vote has only reduced by 10 percentage points, but the Tory vote has reduced by 30 percentage points.
The thing that flattered the Labour (and Lib Dem) seat count last year was how inefficient the RefCon split was. Con on 24% and Ref on 14% without much geographic sorting allowed the centre-left parties to come through on the side in a lot of places. The current split (Ref 26% Con 20%, or thereabouts) probably isn't that much more efficient, maybe a bit worse.
There must come a point where the slider moves to "lots of Reform seats becuase the Conservatives are dead"; I wonder where that is?
If Reform keep that 39% vote share, there is no meaningful split on the right.
I don’t envy Labour but the clear message from his support at the last GE and before was that people are done with austerity. To double down on it whilst doing stuff that really upsets middle England, like the war on nature, has been politics at its poorest.
How can austerity end without raising taxes which are already at a high level?
Growth. Essentially, it can't. We can't afford the level of welfare we're currently paying for - we've basically got UBI for anyone who can pass a PIP and keeping anyone over 65 in clover.
Which party is going to be brave enough to end the triple lock ? My answer none .
It's not just the state pension, public sector pensions need a 30-40% haircut too. In too many areas we're living well beyond our means and our welfare state is far, far beyond a safety net. Cut a million people from state employment to take us back to 2017, taper the state pension for higher rate tax payers, merge NI and income tax so that non-working income is taxed at the same rate as working income, cut to £2k the cash ISA allowance, push through a 30-40% haircut for defined benefit pensions (even for people currently receiving them), introduce much, much tougher criteria to receive disability benefits and exclude all but 5% of the most serious mental health cases by default. The rest can go back to work or live on £450 per month or whatever UC is for unemployed people. Also get rid of UC, move back to the old system if JSA and ESA, UC is an experiment that hasn't worked, it's just encouraged people to game the system worse than ever.
I think if Labour started that programme today by the end of the parliament we could be in a position to actually pay front line service staff more and attract better quality candidates for teachers, police, nurses etc...
What we have now is an underfunded and hugely over funded state at the same time it's literally the worst of both worlds.
Non working income should not always be taxed at the same level as earned income.
Why would anyone start a business if they had to pay (the equiv.) of employers and employees NI on their own income, for example.
It would be a massive attack on the tenets of capitalism. And would surely lead even small business people like me, who are nevertheless net contributors to the economy and creators of jobs, to leave.
I don’t envy Labour but the clear message from his support at the last GE and before was that people are done with austerity. To double down on it whilst doing stuff that really upsets middle England, like the war on nature, has been politics at its poorest.
How can austerity end without raising taxes which are already at a high level?
Growth. Essentially, it can't. We can't afford the level of welfare we're currently paying for - we've basically got UBI for anyone who can pass a PIP and keeping anyone over 65 in clover.
Which party is going to be brave enough to end the triple lock ? My answer none .
It's not just the state pension, public sector pensions need a 30-40% haircut too. In too many areas we're living well beyond our means and our welfare state is far, far beyond a safety net. Cut a million people from state employment to take us back to 2017, taper the state pension for higher rate tax payers, merge NI and income tax so that non-working income is taxed at the same rate as working income, cut to £2k the cash ISA allowance, push through a 30-40% haircut for defined benefit pensions (even for people currently receiving them), introduce much, much tougher criteria to receive disability benefits and exclude all but 5% of the most serious mental health cases by default. The rest can go back to work or live on £450 per month or whatever UC is for unemployed people. Also get rid of UC, move back to the old system if JSA and ESA, UC is an experiment that hasn't worked, it's just encouraged people to game the system worse than ever.
I think if Labour started that programme today by the end of the parliament we could be in a position to actually pay front line service staff more and attract better quality candidates for teachers, police, nurses etc...
What we have now is an underfunded and hugely over funded state at the same time it's literally the worst of both worlds.
There's no way a haircut to built up public sector pension entitlements would survive a court challenge. Some final salary public sector pensions were too generous, but those days are gone now (although the less generous career average DB pensions are still a draw). Still live recipients of those generous pensions, of course, but I don't think there's much to be done about that.
Cutting future pensions to be earned could work but only with substantial pay increases in many areas. I've looked at civil service roles a few times, but the pay is laughable in tech/science roles, coupled with the insistence of starting new entrants on the bottom of the scale. There's a post I looked at recently that had a range of. £55-£70k. £70k or even £65k would have had me apply, but the guidance was very clear it would be bottom of scale for me coming from outside and the path to pay progression was highly opaque. It was written in some ways as a more senior role, with more line management duties than I have at present, but would have been a pay cut for me. A the same time, I saw a 'lead python developer's post at the same place with the same pay range, which really is ridiculous. If they won't compete, they're not going to get good people and will end up spending more than funding a post properly - either lots of turnover as people gain experience and the leave or someone really mediocre who sits there doing not a great deal.
Parliament is sovereign, it can pass primary legislation to mandate a haircut for db pensions. It will of course make them wildly unpopular with people who lose out but it is absolutely possible.
I've also said many times that pension contributions should be cut and salaries increased in the public sector. People want the money today, not at some nebulous point in the future. A friend of mine was contacted to apply for senior on prem cybersecurity admin but the salary is well below market rate and they make it up in the pension, the overall package isn't dissimilar to what he might get elsewhere but he can't afford the pay cut so politely declined.
But aside from that, we just have too many people doing too little in that £40-60k band in the public sector. Lots of salary collectors creating micro bureaucracies around them to justify their roles. We should sweep the lot of them away and bank the saving, reduce the deficit and bank the subsequent drop in the interest bill as gilt prices increase and yields fall.
Parliament is sovereign, but it should use that power carefully. It would damage the trustworthiness of the state if it were to casually use that power to cancel the liabilities it had accrued.
Max pb is a grade A idiot. The pensioner vote goes way beyond the 67 + people. Anyone over 55 would be furious at his plans as would many of those younger and aware of the realities of life for their parents and other family. Like several well off posters here he thinks the lifestyle of his wealthy family is the norm
The sane way to have handled that, early on in this government's term, would have been
1) Merge NI & Income tax 2) Get rid of all the odds an ends - 3 rates, fixed personal allowance. 3) In the turmoil of the above, put the effective rates up a bit. 4) Pension is "quadruple locked"* to the personal allowance. 5) All the old age extra benefits go in a blender. Come out as taxable/means tested. Sell this as "Mrs Miggins on the basic pension get YY% more money next year"
Can I be Labour Chancellor?
*A Quadruple Lock has to better than a Triple Lock, right?
There may be merit in that plan, but it would have produced winners and losers... and the losers would have kicked up a helluva fuss. Selling the plan is always harder than you think.
It would have the merit of being an actual plan. With a government with a majority of 14,562 in the House of Commons, creating a few losers is what you *should* be doing.
The pitch is that we need to raise more tax and increase efficiency to improve the NHS etc. The markets don't mind spending. They mind unfunded spending. The markets would have reacted to the above, with lower rates on Government borrowing.
As to popularity, I think this would have sold far, far better to Labour voters than what they did. What to @PBLabour think?
You might be right. However, that stonking Labour majority was won on a promise of not raising various taxes and your plan does not correspond to that promise. Either Labour would have had to campaign on your plan (and thus might have done worse in the election) or Labour would have to rip up their campaign promises.
I think we'd probably be in a better position if Labour had campaigned on your plan and then implemented it, but I can understand Labour's caution.
Germany's Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party has been designated as right-wing extremist by the country's federal office for the protection of the constitution.
Tony Diver @Tony_Diver · 20m Labour source in Doncaster says the party is facing an “extinction event” on the council, despite winning the mayoralty. There is talk Reform could win a council majority in Ed Miliband’s back yard.
I didn't bet on the mayorals but that's due to tardiness. If the bookies had offered mayoral bets (they took them off the machines and wouldn't do it over the counter) by the time I had got there, I would have bet a Reform clean sweep. So lots of losers there, but...
Wow. Another Batley & Spen seemed like the impossible dream yet LAB came within a ridiculous 6 - SIX! - votes of doing it. 'Close but no cigar' does not apply here. SKS, if he smoked, would be lighting one up and rightly so. The strong LAB performance (against the most challenging backdrop for an incumbent imaginable) is the big story here.
Agree. The really important binary divide at the moment is between those who might vote for Reform and those who certainly won't. Such evidence as Runcorn provides is that both groups are large, and that those who are anti Reform will vote tactically in substantial numbers.
If this is correct it will, if sustained over time, lead us back to a sort of quasi 2 party system in most of England - the Reform camp and the Anti Reform camp.
Also, if correct, it sharpens the Tory dilemma, possibly to the point of destruction or absorption.
If the current political impasse continues then the next GE is going to definitely be contested between those two camps of Pro-Reform vs Not Reform.
We have seen, for instance in France, how powerful that can be. But FPTP also makes it a numbers game in terms of how the voter demographics fall in each constituency.
For instance, if you’re looking at leafy parts of the northern and western Home Counties, the commuter belts around cities like Leeds, Manchester, Birmingham, and nice, well-heeled parts of the South West, you are going to see sizeable “stop-Reform” movements that I think will be to the benefit of Labour and the LDs.
Conversely in the smaller county towns, the coasts and the East, that “Stop Reform” coalition probably can’t build itself a large enough vote to stop REFUK (and the Tories in places) from winning.
At the moment it very much feels like we’re going to get some kind of coalition (even if not a formal one) at the next GE. I find it hard to see, given the geographic splits, how one party can engineer a majority right now. If anyone can, it’s Labour, but it will be tough.
I think they're just totally boxed in and socially incapable of squaring the circle.
The Tories are like the poor - they will always be with us. The Conservative Party will not die until it is buried at the crossroads with a stake through its heart.
It always surprises me how willing the left are to use exclusionary and violent imagery about their political opponents
I don’t envy Labour but the clear message from his support at the last GE and before was that people are done with austerity. To double down on it whilst doing stuff that really upsets middle England, like the war on nature, has been politics at its poorest.
How can austerity end without raising taxes which are already at a high level?
Growth. Essentially, it can't. We can't afford the level of welfare we're currently paying for - we've basically got UBI for anyone who can pass a PIP and keeping anyone over 65 in clover.
Which party is going to be brave enough to end the triple lock ? My answer none .
It's not just the state pension, public sector pensions need a 30-40% haircut too. In too many areas we're living well beyond our means and our welfare state is far, far beyond a safety net. Cut a million people from state employment to take us back to 2017, taper the state pension for higher rate tax payers, merge NI and income tax so that non-working income is taxed at the same rate as working income, cut to £2k the cash ISA allowance, push through a 30-40% haircut for defined benefit pensions (even for people currently receiving them), introduce much, much tougher criteria to receive disability benefits and exclude all but 5% of the most serious mental health cases by default. The rest can go back to work or live on £450 per month or whatever UC is for unemployed people. Also get rid of UC, move back to the old system if JSA and ESA, UC is an experiment that hasn't worked, it's just encouraged people to game the system worse than ever.
I think if Labour started that programme today by the end of the parliament we could be in a position to actually pay front line service staff more and attract better quality candidates for teachers, police, nurses etc...
What we have now is an underfunded and hugely over funded state at the same time it's literally the worst of both worlds.
And how would you handle the inevitable public sector strikes?
Germany's Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party has been designated as right-wing extremist by the country's federal office for the protection of the constitution.
Does that mean they are banned?
It is thought the change in designation of the AfD enables domestic intelligence agencies to lower the threshold for using informants and surveillance in monitoring the party.
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
No what's wrong is we arent building houses.
You wouldn't post that if you lived in at some parts of Essex. Maldon is an example; hundreds of homes have been built to the South and West of the town. And a village nearby is protesting about 600 new homes being built. In our small town around 100 extra houses have recently been added, increasing the population by around 10%.
We had similar debates in Stockton-on-Tees when I lived there. The whole borough had been endless housebuilding for a decade. Multiple projects with hundreds of homes per site as well as smaller infill builds. And even bigger ones in the planning stage which are now going up.
The comedy factor? With the 2014 planning regs change the council was deemed to be "not building enough houses", allowing developers to do what they liked regardless of what councillors or even the MP thought.
The issue? The wrong type of houses being built. I lived on a development that ran to nearly 1,000 houses. Part of the site used to have a run down council estate on it, which was bulldozed. A small number of LHA houses added to the project did not adequately replace the hundreds of smaller affordable houses removed.
We're building houses that people can't afford.
And yet still they sell, so people clearly can afford them.
If we build enough, they will become affordable to more people. That's the glory of the market. This is true whether we build a million 5-bedroom detacheds or a million flats (though the former would cause more reshuffling).
David, there is a major difference between being sold and people being able to afford them. Far too many people are trapped paying mortgages they can't afford, which extracts cash from the economy as they can't then spend it on stuff in shops and hospitality.
Other property is bought by landlords to let to the people who can't afford a mortgage at all. Or where the exorbitant rent is paid by the state.
Either way you look at it the market is broken. We need to build a significant number of smaller houses and apartment blocks. But we can't do that - councils and housing associations are communist and broke, developers only want to build executive style homes, and MPs have too many rentier types in their ranks who refuse reforms.
The market is primarily broken by planning restrictions and micromanagement. Bringing prices down - which means expanding supply - is the biggest single thing that could address all the above problems. The details of what's built is secondary (though far from irrelevant).
As an aside, very high mortgage repayments doesn't extract money from the economy (much) - but it does recycle it from younger adults (especially) paying those mortgages, to inheritance receivers.
Easy money, openness to dodgy foreign money, and too low taxation on property ownership generally, are critical factors.
We should also consider other factors in the economy. Uber, Deliveroo and Amazon not investing in employees, the likes of Apple and Starbucks taking money out of the economy with questionable schemes to avoid paying tax in the UK, etc. Communities need affordable housing. They also need businesses who are invested in their success.
Very Trumpian logic. Buying things from foreign companies means our money is being taken?
If I go to Starbucks and purchase a hot beverage, most of the work is being done in the UK, but Starbucks UK claims it makes very little profit because it has to pay Starbucks International lots of money for the Starbucks branding. I am effectively buying something from a local company, but they make the accounting look as though I am buying something from a foreign company.
That’s not how transfer pricing works. Unfortunately the public discourse on corporation tax seems still to be stuck in some distorted version of the reality circa 2005.
The local retail subsidiaries of coffee shops, fast food chains etc generally make similar or greater taxable profits than independent local businesses and franchisees.
Well my small bet on Lab in Runcorn and Helsby turned out to be a value loser. Oh well. But more generally, I'd say there was more value in the second favourites last night than in the favourites. And also, Reform still struggle to get their vote out. I just need about a dozen nights like last night in order to win at slightly favourable odds 5 times out of 12 and I'll be a slight net winner
It’s supposed to be Casino’s job to explain why losing bets is such good value for money?
Not only is backing he favourite a poor strategy to long-term success (the 'picking up pennies in front of the steam-roller' argument), there is very rarely much fun in that approach. And really, for most of us, why do we gamble? The £20 profit I would have made from my bet would have been nice, but would it have been life-changing? I would have got far more value from my stake from the feeling of 'I said that would happen even though the majority didn't'.
Will that do?
It was just a joke. Despite being the site’s king of the value loser, Casino seems to do alright on it in the round.
I know it was a joke Ian - and I was tickled - sorry, I was trying to reply in a spirit of equal levity by cooking up a half-baked reason why I had really 'won'. Which I have now killed stone dead by explaining.
Tony Diver @Tony_Diver · 20m Labour source in Doncaster says the party is facing an “extinction event” on the council, despite winning the mayoralty. There is talk Reform could win a council majority in Ed Miliband’s back yard.
Is there a specific reason for this difference e.g. is the Mayor very popular?
I didn't bet on the mayorals but that's due to tardiness. If the bookies had offered mayoral bets (they took them off the machines and wouldn't do it over the counter) by the time I had got there, I would have bet a Reform clean sweep. So lots of losers there, but...
Comments
https://x.com/StephenGethins/status/1918227532521918856
Good morning PB.
At this point mid-term in a Tory Government the Lib Dems would be probably be winning a tory seat in a by-election like this by a 5 figure majority.
Reform are the only party whose voters support Trump, IMO that puts a very distinct ceiling on their vote come a GE. We are also finally now going to see Reform actually have to deliver on their promises in those areas that they have been successful.
Unless either Reform or the Tories deliver a knockout blow to the other I think the value is on another Labour win in 4 years, aided heavily by tactical voting if Reform are in the running.
But Britain doesn't really have the luxury of picking and choosing where to grow its economy. It needs to reinforce the economic success of the wider London area as well as lay the foundations for improving the performance of the north.
If the promised improvement in processing asylum applications is achieved then this problem should reduce and hence become less of a campaigning point for Reform. Hence Jenkyns' suggestion, migrant camps will be more unpopular than migrant hostels.
(This might cause mass homelessness, but something moving towards that might work).
Politically impossible. 😢
As an aside, very high mortgage repayments doesn't extract money from the economy (much) - but it does recycle it from younger adults (especially) paying those mortgages, to inheritance receivers.
The seat only became a very safe seat in 2024 because the right-wing vote was split between Reform & Conservative.
Compared to 2019, the Labour vote has only reduced by 10 percentage points, but the Tory vote has reduced by 30 percentage points.
In the past this was (in England) Lab v Con with a subset of LD v Con =Lab or LD v Con, covering almost all seats.
The unacknowledged arrangement whereby almost all seats are in reality contested by either Lab or LD but not both remains intact, even though Reform takes votes off Labour.
It's the broad right which has smashed up. The pressure therefore for a formal pact, an informal or accidental pact (like Lab and LD) or a single party called 'We Are Everything Apart From Lab or LD'.
I should think most One Nation Tories (such as me) have already gone away with no immediate plans to return.
One to watch.
Will that do?
Such "influencing" is really a mild version of values which we find in more extreme form in the corruption within Trump's setup with his oligarchs, exploiting a systemic setup which has proven to be ... er ... not very resilient.
For second homes, I think we can aspire at the very least to remove loopholes.
A (in my view) parallel example was around countryside access, and how an agreement was reached around a decade ago between stakeholders - NFU, CLA, Ramblers etc - on a way to proceed with respect to the right to claim historic Rights of Way as public footpaths. The Theresa Coffey became Minister, and threw it all into the bin on her own authority as Minister, at one week's notice.
https://www.oss.org.uk/environment-minister-breaks-government-pledge-to-save-historic-paths/
https://xkcd.com/763/?trk=feed_main-feed-card-text
https://open.substack.com/pub/sfhwebb/p/which-areas-of-london-are-on-the?r=1cycu5&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
Robert Saunders
@robertsaunders.bsky.social
· 35m
Turnout in the West of England mayoral election was 30%. So as a proportion of the total electorate, the figures would be:
LAB: 7.5%
REF: 6.7%
GRE: 6%
CON: 5%
LIB: 4.2%
https://bsky.app/profile/robertsaunders.bsky.social/post/3lo6gp4ijzs2x
As for the above, it the headline story on the BBC. I am not sure how you see it is pro-Israel either. That is massively overstepping the mark if it turns out it was Israel, impossible to justify.
Though to be fair to Razedabode, I don't think (?) this is the point he was trying to make.
There must come a point where the slider moves to "lots of Reform seats becuase the Conservatives are dead"; I wonder where that is?
Sadly my inflated daily charge rate goes mostly to pay for inflated management salaries, the Chief Exec's rather nice bonus, and shareholders, but it does mean I know what the actual market rate is because it's roughly what I'm paid.
And don't forget when working these things out that there are genuinely hidden costs of employment that are covered in a headline day rate and you have to factor them in. My comment above is a bit tongue-in-cheek - but also bear in mind that there is an overhead in managing contracts (on both sides) that also goes away if you employ people directly.
How does Luxembourg get so low? It is because lots of people work there, but don't live there? The biggest outlier, of course, is the US, which has the most cost-ineffective healthcare system going.
If this is correct it will, if sustained over time, lead us back to a sort of quasi 2 party system in most of England - the Reform camp and the Anti Reform camp.
Also, if correct, it sharpens the Tory dilemma, possibly to the point of destruction or absorption.
Record Number of Channel Crossings so far this year.
1) Merge NI & Income tax
2) Get rid of all the odds an ends - 3 rates, fixed personal allowance.
3) In the turmoil of the above, put the effective rates up a bit.
4) Pension is "quadruple locked"* to the personal allowance.
5) All the old age extra benefits go in a blender. Come out as taxable/means tested. Sell this as "Mrs Miggins on the basic pension get YY% more money next year"
Can I be Labour Chancellor?
*A Quadruple Lock has to better than a Triple Lock, right?
The opposite of what the country needs to be done.
But the issue was the crap presentation - as I multiple times I would have reversed the change in November while increasing income tax by 3p to reverse the 4p NI deduction.
That would have left poorer pensioners better off while fixing the mess Hunt made to public sector finances for zero actual benefit to the Tory party
Double spending on BUPA. And, increasingly, this is what is happening. The work scheme for private health are being used more and more.
https://bsky.app/profile/oxfordclarion.bsky.social/post/3lo6j64rsrs2l
The LibDems have also held Watlington on South Oxfordshire District Council in the by-election caused by Freddie van Mierlo (now MP) stepping down:
🔶 Benjamin Higgins (LD) 679
🔵 Richard Riley (Con) 585
🟢 Lucie Ponsford (Grn) 174
🌹 Nick Palmer (Lab) 34
I wondered if I had totally re-read it. Not so. More than three quarters voted to leave - the highest total in the country. I lost all faith in the BBC as being unbiased - they could not have got it so wrong without being totally biased.
The Lincolnshire Mayor vote shows that little has changed. The Lincolnshire independence vote came to 8% along with the 42% for Reform. No doubt the BBC were gobsmacked again.
If there is to be extra health spending it should come from private sources which is on the low sides in this country.
The real fun is in the selling of work visas for non-existent jobs. All you need is a bunch of barely existent companies.
1) Create a job that pays £45K
2) Get the visa paperwork started.
3) Sell the visa to some poor shmuck in a developing country
4) He arrives and finds no job...
This is now an industry. Visas priced at 15K plus, they say. Some small companies are doing a few hundred visas. A year.
It takes quite some shameless cheek to try and guilt trip the LibDem, Liberal and pro-EU candidates in Runcorn, on the same day as you have put up as Labour candidate in a seat like that…!
You can also do there is a job working as a "chef", but the poor sod turns up works 100hr a week put only paid for a portion of that, then deductions for housing, etc etc etc.
The pitch is that we need to raise more tax and increase efficiency to improve the NHS etc. The markets don't mind spending. They mind unfunded spending. The markets would have reacted to the above, with lower rates on Government borrowing.
As to popularity, I think this would have sold far, far better to Labour voters than what they did. What to @PBLabour think?
The local retail subsidiaries of coffee shops, fast food chains etc generally make similar or greater taxable profits than independent local businesses and franchisees.
The pickle we are in with health is not that we are poor, as a nation - we are far richer than we were in the 1960s, for example - but that our potential outgoings on health has grown so massively. We can treat people for far more, far more successfully, with the innovations which have happened in health in my lifetime, but the cost of this is massive. And our demographics have shifted: we have a much greater proportion of (expensive to the NHS) old people - especially the super old (85+), who are crippling expensive, and a smaller proportion of 16-64 year olds to pay for it (though a greater number of these are working - but that is a separate quality-of-life issue)
A couple of half remembered stats:
Over half of NHS spending goes on the over 85s (is this true? It seems incredible. I am happy to be contradicted. It may be 'the under 1s and the over 85s' but that still seems incredible.
If we doubled NHS spending, we could improve life expectancies by all of six months. (This stat is a good 30 years old but I can't imagine it's changed much).
I agree with AnneJGP's position - and the implication of Eabhal's position - that this means the NHS has to cut back on what it does. We can't be borrowing from our children to give to our parents. But the logic of which means there will be things which have to be paid for by individuals - which means that those who can afford them will get more life years than those who cannot, but also that this is money which will not get left to children. Which almost has us arriving in the same place by default.
Where this all lands is people's lives being shortened - dying when they could have lived - even if this is only by 6 months of low quality life or such. This feels very much like assisted dying by an altogether messier route.
I don't have any good answers for any of this (where 'good' means both logically coherent and electorally popular).
5% NI and 5% extra on income tax would work but pensioners would scream (so it needed to have been done now).
And the pension / personal allowance problem is arriving very soon - that’s going to be a problem that needs fixing this / next year at the latest because by 2027 pensions will be above the allowance
The other fun bit is that the fake job is added to the job stats as an unfilled (as yet) vacancy. So no matter how many immigrants come here, there are always more "jobs". Interesting, eh?
I do wonder what genuinely left-leaning Labour members think in private about their government.
Why would anyone start a business if they had to pay (the equiv.) of employers and employees NI on their own income, for example.
It would be a massive attack on the tenets of capitalism. And would surely lead even small business people like me, who are nevertheless net contributors to the economy and creators of jobs, to leave.
I think we'd probably be in a better position if Labour had campaigned on your plan and then implemented it, but I can understand Labour's caution.
@Tony_Diver
·
20m
Labour source in Doncaster says the party is facing an “extinction event” on the council, despite winning the mayoralty. There is talk Reform could win a council majority in Ed Miliband’s back yard.
Here are my hot takes. Please treat them with the contempt that hot takes deserve.
- I won my Runcorn bet so that's good.
- I didn't bet on the mayorals but that's due to tardiness. If the bookies had offered mayoral bets (they took them off the machines and wouldn't do it over the counter) by the time I had got there, I would have bet a Reform clean sweep. So lots of losers there, but...
- ...I TOLD YOU WE WERE IGNORING NORTH TYNESIDE. John Falkenstein at 7/1 was a very good value loser who came in only 500 votes short.
- Where were the LibDems?
- Did the Greens overperform or underperform?
- Reform did very well, but was it as well as their polls suggested?
More considered takes later on, possibly over the long weekend.We have seen, for instance in France, how powerful that can be. But FPTP also makes it a numbers game in terms of how the voter demographics fall in each constituency.
For instance, if you’re looking at leafy parts of the northern and western Home Counties, the commuter belts around cities like Leeds, Manchester, Birmingham, and nice, well-heeled parts of the South West, you are going to see sizeable “stop-Reform” movements that I think will be to the benefit of Labour and the LDs.
Conversely in the smaller county towns, the coasts and the East, that “Stop Reform” coalition probably can’t build itself a large enough vote to stop REFUK (and the Tories in places) from winning.
At the moment it very much feels like we’re going to get some kind of coalition (even if not a formal one) at the next GE. I find it hard to see, given the geographic splits, how one party can engineer a majority right now. If anyone can, it’s Labour, but it will be tough.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwy6zk9wkrdo