I just had lunch with a former colleague who is now head of a public sector quango. He is, or was for the 25 years I've known him anyway, a man of few discernible political opinions, and the few one can discern are centrist and non-controversial.
To my astonishment, more or less as soon as we sat down, he launched a scathing attack on the current government, in particular the big NI rise, which had forced him to cut staff and the endless pandering to the Net Zero mob, which complicated his job in other ways. He said he wished SKS's policies had been scrutinised before the election so people could have seen how they didn't add up. I haven't been this surprised by a friend's politics since my former university friend, who I remember selling the Socialist Worker, told me that the atmosphere on his campus was much too woke even for him.
Anyway, my point is, centrist public sector quangocrats should be a natural constituency for our centrist, public sector quangocrat PM. If Starmer is losing them (based on this sample of one), he really IS in trouble.
Many people don't understand how damaging to smaller (and especially family-run) businesses the increase in NI was.
On the contrary, the change was good for small family-run businesses due to the change in the employment allowance. Any business with 7* or fewer employees was better off.
It was large employers of minimum-wage staff who were hammered the most.
*from memory.
Not anecdotally amongst my circle it wasn't.
It's quite complicated and there are eligibility criteria for it, but for most small businesses it will have either meant a tax cut or a significant mitigation. They've doubled it from £5000 to £10,500, so you'd have to have a reasonable NICs bill before the overall changes to NICs becomes a net negative.
My back-of-envelope was that about 2/3rds of businesses (with employees) will be better off, representing about 4 million workers in the smallest companies.
Are you however taking into account that a lot of employees they never had to pay ni for before they now do as the amount they can earn before employer ni has dropped from 9100 to 5000
before this anyone on min wage could work 15 hours a week and not cost their employer ni
after this comes in and the increase in minimum wage any worker on min wage starts costing their employer ni at just under 8 hours
prediction is a lot will reduce part time worker hours from 16 to 8 and take on more part time workers.
I can see it now tesco's and the co op do a deal.... we have all these 16 hour a week workers, we will reduce their hours to 8 and they can come work for you 8 hours a week if you do the same with yours and hey both avoid that employer ni tax increase
The marginal costs are insignificant. Part time workers get paid badly. They happily accept that.
- County Durham has, I think, the largest majority - so they may try radical things. I wonder what will happen to Durham's restricted entry to traffic zone, if still in place? That's the sort of symbol the counter-revolutionaries might assault. When it went in I seem to recall lots of frothing.
The thing with that restricted entry zone is that it's made the busiest part of Durham a pedestrian friendly area but still allows local residents to get to and from their houses / the school.
They may hate it but I suspect anyone in the area would hate the impact of it's removal far more. Especially when it grinds to a halt because you can't exactly have many cars on Cathedral Green and even now it's usually full
Durham was the example I used when Reform claimed there were no LTNs in their council areas. There are - and thousands of them.
I 100% agree that the rise in National Insurance - which hits the poorest and discourages employment - is monumentally stupid.
We want to maximize the number of people in work, and reduce the barriers to employment for those with the fewest skills, and NI is a disastrous tax on this group.
I just had lunch with a former colleague who is now head of a public sector quango. He is, or was for the 25 years I've known him anyway, a man of few discernible political opinions, and the few one can discern are centrist and non-controversial.
To my astonishment, more or less as soon as we sat down, he launched a scathing attack on the current government, in particular the big NI rise, which had forced him to cut staff and the endless pandering to the Net Zero mob, which complicated his job in other ways. He said he wished SKS's policies had been scrutinised before the election so people could have seen how they didn't add up. I haven't been this surprised by a friend's politics since my former university friend, who I remember selling the Socialist Worker, told me that the atmosphere on his campus was much too woke even for him.
Anyway, my point is, centrist public sector quangocrats should be a natural constituency for our centrist, public sector quangocrat PM. If Starmer is losing them (based on this sample of one), he really IS in trouble.
Many people don't understand how damaging to smaller (and especially family-run) businesses the increase in NI was.
On the contrary, the change was good for small family-run businesses due to the change in the employment allowance. Any business with 7* or fewer employees was better off.
It was large employers of minimum-wage staff who were hammered the most.
*from memory.
7!?! Try 4. I took on my 5th employee this month, I'm now worse off than I would have been before the changes. As a small business owner, I hate this government with a passion, every single change is for the worse.
In particular they don't understand that turnover taxes (which is what employers NI is, also business rates) are ruinous, particularly if you are trying to bootstrap and scale a business. Tax profits by all means - if you're making a profit, there is money there for the state to skim off. But taxing turnover is horrendous because it's just another drain on your finances regardless of if you are making money or not.
The problem is that none of them have ever been where I am. They've not had to try and manage cash flow to magic up wages every month. They haven't remortgaged their house to put their own money into an enterprise as a initial source of funds. They haven't worked for 4 years unpaid (which is basically what I did, fortunately I had a wife to live off!) to fund the management buyout of a failing business and then managed to turn it round. They've never taken a chance on an employee with a dubious employment history in the hope that they would come good.
They have no knowledge, no understanding, no ability - other than to keep trying to see if the pips squeak yet. And yet they have the nerve to claim they want growth. The engine of the economy is small and micro businesses - but government sets out by tax and regulation to systematically destroy them.
I've no idea if Farage will be better - it's going to be difficult to be worse. But I'll rejoice to see the day that the smarmy griming idiot who is presently prime minister is booted out of a job he neither deserves nor has the ability to do. I would never employ a man that stupid and damaging to sweep my workshop floor.
There seems to be quite a measure of central coordination telling Council leaders what to do from Reform HQ. Havinbg discovered that the DEI stuff that will be cut to save 10s of millions does npt in general exist, or are basic legal duties, it will be ... interesting. Is such instruction from a political party legal? I think that question has a complex answer.
One target everywhere seems to be working from home. I've no idea why they think this will change anything, other than they will need to reconfigure a lot of buildings.
- Andrea the Regional Mayor of Greater Lincs seems to be reverse ferreting with some alacrity, and may even have noticed that 10k jobs depend on renewable energy. - County Durham has, I think, the largest majority - so they may try radical things. I wonder what will happen to Durham's restricted entry to traffic zone, if still in place? That's the sort of symbol the counter-revolutionaries might assault. When it went in I seem to recall lots of frothing. - Notts (mine) will have problems with making everyone work from offices if they try, because the brand new ones are smaller. There are some noises about wanting to spend money on keeping County Hall, West Bridgford open. The last cost estimate I saw was £50m to stay there, compared to eventual ~£20m cost of the new offices in the centre of the county, rather than the extreme south. - The Hull & surrounding area Mayor seems to have vanished. He is a former boxer with a good reputation (as a boxer) but no experience. It has been put out that he is some kind of mascot, but that's not what a Regional Mayor is for. - Kent CC also sounds quite juicy.
My forecast: increased Trade Union Membership in Reform run Councils.
WFH will be an interesting one to watch. Whatever its demerits, it is cheaper than providing a load of desk space in County Hall. Do councils really want to spend money on that, especially in a context where lack of money is pouring in?
More generally, leaders of these councils have got significant mandates in their own names. If they are being expected to run as Farage franchises, how long until they say "thanks but no thanks"?
Can councils afford to buy back (and refurbish) the offices they've closed down. One look at your typical council budget will reveal that the very obvious answer is no chance...
If most councils are like my last council (slough) they have plenty of office space they own that they can't rent out because they refuse to be realistic about office rent they can move into that.
For context the company I worked for then leased a floor on a four story council building, another company leased the floor above. The other floors unrented. Just prior to covid so it wasn't covid related the lease was up, council wanted a lot more rent, company said you are joking arent you. You cant even rent out the other 2 floors at the current rent. Council stuck to its guns we said fine bye and rented another office building at 3/4 of the price. Other company did too a few months later as the council was just as intransigent with them.
If they had just kept the rent the same both companies would have swallowed it probably as not worth the effort of moving but from what I gather the increase they wanted was in the region of 40%
I just had lunch with a former colleague who is now head of a public sector quango. He is, or was for the 25 years I've known him anyway, a man of few discernible political opinions, and the few one can discern are centrist and non-controversial.
To my astonishment, more or less as soon as we sat down, he launched a scathing attack on the current government, in particular the big NI rise, which had forced him to cut staff and the endless pandering to the Net Zero mob, which complicated his job in other ways. He said he wished SKS's policies had been scrutinised before the election so people could have seen how they didn't add up. I haven't been this surprised by a friend's politics since my former university friend, who I remember selling the Socialist Worker, told me that the atmosphere on his campus was much too woke even for him.
Anyway, my point is, centrist public sector quangocrats should be a natural constituency for our centrist, public sector quangocrat PM. If Starmer is losing them (based on this sample of one), he really IS in trouble.
Many people don't understand how damaging to smaller (and especially family-run) businesses the increase in NI was.
On the contrary, the change was good for small family-run businesses due to the change in the employment allowance. Any business with 7* or fewer employees was better off.
It was large employers of minimum-wage staff who were hammered the most.
*from memory.
Not anecdotally amongst my circle it wasn't.
It's quite complicated and there are eligibility criteria for it, but for most small businesses it will have either meant a tax cut or a significant mitigation. They've doubled it from £5000 to £10,500, so you'd have to have a reasonable NICs bill before the overall changes to NICs becomes a net negative.
My back-of-envelope was that about 2/3rds of businesses (with employees) will be better off, representing about 4 million workers in the smallest companies.
Are you however taking into account that a lot of employees they never had to pay ni for before they now do as the amount they can earn before employer ni has dropped from 9100 to 5000
before this anyone on min wage could work 15 hours a week and not cost their employer ni
after this comes in and the increase in minimum wage any worker on min wage starts costing their employer ni at just under 8 hours
prediction is a lot will reduce part time worker hours from 16 to 8 and take on more part time workers.
I can see it now tesco's and the co op do a deal.... we have all these 16 hour a week workers, we will reduce their hours to 8 and they can come work for you 8 hours a week if you do the same with yours and hey both avoid that employer ni tax increase
Wouldn't you still need to have more than 15 employees working 15 hours a week, before you paid any Employers NI? So, not many very small businesses.
Obviously the likes of Tesco have that, but then is it really going to be worth it for them to double up on staff? There must be huge costs in just training and managing extra people, in dealing with people more likely to have other jobs, be less invested in staying etc. It may add to their costs, but I doubt it's worth having so many just do a day's work each week.
I'd love to know the secret of earning enough money so you can afford to retire by your early to mid 50s.
My mortgage alone stretches to 62.
Being fortunate enough to have been born in an era of affordable housing, or fortunate enough to have parents who helped you onto the ladder.
Though I wouldn't want to retire in my early 50s, I'd be bored shitless. As much as I enjoy my holidays from work and weekends etc I do enjoy the routine of having stuff to do.
I reckon I'd find things that didn't bore me shitless but weren't the corporate grindstone.
IMO people retiring that early need a serious long-term volunteer role, such as restoring a local windmill or something equally significant.
Restoring a windmill..
Look, I retired early, at 56. I'd not turn my nose up at restoring a windmill. I'd prefer though to use my skills in (say) working on fusion power.
Conclusion In conclusion, our study suggests an increased hazard of lymphoma and skin cancers among tattooed individuals, demonstrated through two designs: a twin cohort and a case-cotwin study. We are concerned that tattoo ink interacting with surrounding cells may have severe consequences. Studies that pinpoint the etiological pathway of tattoo ink induced carcinogenesis are recommended to benefit public health.
You mean injecting random chemicals of dubious provenance into the skin, where they stay for decades, is bad for the skin?
Crazy talk
Look at it this way, the way I do and used to cause regular rows with my doctor
A) you are going to die someday B ) you can do all these things to prolong your life, eat healthy, exercise, moderate your alcohol and drug intake, dont put chemicals under your skin your chances of living to 90 increase radically
or you can ignore all of B and probably only live till 75 - 80
However take route B yes on average you will live longer but the chances of having dementia/having to have someone wipe your bum for that decade also increase significantly
I prefer not to take option B and hopefully die compis mentis without someone wiping my arse for a decade personally
Each person should make their own choice I do think the medical people however only ever present the you can live till 90 side as if its all upside without pointing out your chances of either mental or physical infirmity for the last few years increases significantly
Pick your risks - skin cancer and lymphoma are fucked up ways to die. Involving long, painful decline.
Exactly the shit you don’t want.
The trick is to die, but be healthy up to the point that you just stop. My grandmother for example - 89, living in her own place (sheltered accommodation), they came in one morning… found her dressed for the day, sitting in her arm chair. Morning cup of tea going cold.
Or my father-in-law - 98, going up and down 4 flights of stairs in the house daily. One day, didn’t feel right. Hospital that evening, didn’t make it through the next day.
Except both melanoma and lymphoma are far more treatable than even only a few years ago.
I just had lunch with a former colleague who is now head of a public sector quango. He is, or was for the 25 years I've known him anyway, a man of few discernible political opinions, and the few one can discern are centrist and non-controversial.
To my astonishment, more or less as soon as we sat down, he launched a scathing attack on the current government, in particular the big NI rise, which had forced him to cut staff and the endless pandering to the Net Zero mob, which complicated his job in other ways. He said he wished SKS's policies had been scrutinised before the election so people could have seen how they didn't add up. I haven't been this surprised by a friend's politics since my former university friend, who I remember selling the Socialist Worker, told me that the atmosphere on his campus was much too woke even for him.
Anyway, my point is, centrist public sector quangocrats should be a natural constituency for our centrist, public sector quangocrat PM. If Starmer is losing them (based on this sample of one), he really IS in trouble.
Many people don't understand how damaging to smaller (and especially family-run) businesses the increase in NI was.
On the contrary, the change was good for small family-run businesses due to the change in the employment allowance. Any business with 7* or fewer employees was better off.
It was large employers of minimum-wage staff who were hammered the most.
*from memory.
Not anecdotally amongst my circle it wasn't.
It's quite complicated and there are eligibility criteria for it, but for most small businesses it will have either meant a tax cut or a significant mitigation. They've doubled it from £5000 to £10,500, so you'd have to have a reasonable NICs bill before the overall changes to NICs becomes a net negative.
My back-of-envelope was that about 2/3rds of businesses (with employees) will be better off, representing about 4 million workers in the smallest companies.
Are you however taking into account that a lot of employees they never had to pay ni for before they now do as the amount they can earn before employer ni has dropped from 9100 to 5000
before this anyone on min wage could work 15 hours a week and not cost their employer ni
after this comes in and the increase in minimum wage any worker on min wage starts costing their employer ni at just under 8 hours
prediction is a lot will reduce part time worker hours from 16 to 8 and take on more part time workers.
I can see it now tesco's and the co op do a deal.... we have all these 16 hour a week workers, we will reduce their hours to 8 and they can come work for you 8 hours a week if you do the same with yours and hey both avoid that employer ni tax increase
The marginal costs are insignificant. Part time workers get paid badly. They happily accept that.
Who here is talking about part time workers and how badly they are paid? I am pointing out if you can get a part time worker for 7 odd hours before having to pay employers ni and reducing their hours from 15 to 7 and you can do a swap so their part time workers are also reduced from 15 hours to 7. However you swap so you take on their part time workers for an extra 7 hours and they take on yours.
Say you have 100k of these workers each you both save £29.38 tax per week per worker. That is £152,776,000 a year you are saving
I just had lunch with a former colleague who is now head of a public sector quango. He is, or was for the 25 years I've known him anyway, a man of few discernible political opinions, and the few one can discern are centrist and non-controversial.
To my astonishment, more or less as soon as we sat down, he launched a scathing attack on the current government, in particular the big NI rise, which had forced him to cut staff and the endless pandering to the Net Zero mob, which complicated his job in other ways. He said he wished SKS's policies had been scrutinised before the election so people could have seen how they didn't add up. I haven't been this surprised by a friend's politics since my former university friend, who I remember selling the Socialist Worker, told me that the atmosphere on his campus was much too woke even for him.
Anyway, my point is, centrist public sector quangocrats should be a natural constituency for our centrist, public sector quangocrat PM. If Starmer is losing them (based on this sample of one), he really IS in trouble.
Many people don't understand how damaging to smaller (and especially family-run) businesses the increase in NI was.
On the contrary, the change was good for small family-run businesses due to the change in the employment allowance. Any business with 7* or fewer employees was better off.
It was large employers of minimum-wage staff who were hammered the most.
*from memory.
7!?! Try 4. I took on my 5th employee this month, I'm now worse off than I would have been before the changes. As a small business owner, I hate this government with a passion, every single change is for the worse.
In particular they don't understand that turnover taxes (which is what employers NI is, also business rates) are ruinous, particularly if you are trying to bootstrap and scale a business. Tax profits by all means - if you're making a profit, there is money there for the state to skim off. But taxing turnover is horrendous because it's just another drain on your finances regardless of if you are making money or not.
The problem is that none of them have ever been where I am. They've not had to try and manage cash flow to magic up wages every month. They haven't remortgaged their house to put their own money into an enterprise as a initial source of funds. They haven't worked for 4 years unpaid (which is basically what I did, fortunately I had a wife to live off!) to fund the management buyout of a failing business and then managed to turn it round. They've never taken a chance on an employee with a dubious employment history in the hope that they would come good.
They have no knowledge, no understanding, no ability - other than to keep trying to see if the pips squeak yet. And yet they have the nerve to claim they want growth. The engine of the economy is small and micro businesses - but government sets out by tax and regulation to systematically destroy them.
I've no idea if Farage will be better - it's going to be difficult to be worse. But I'll rejoice to see the day that the smarmy griming idiot who is presently prime minister is booted out of a job he neither deserves nor has the ability to do. I would never employ a man that stupid and damaging to sweep my workshop floor.
I'm not about to argue that life isn't extremely difficult for small businesses, or that the changes to NICs were overall a good thing for the economy, but changing the employment allowance is obviously a good thing for small employers.
I think the government should go further and increase it again at the next budget.
I just had lunch with a former colleague who is now head of a public sector quango. He is, or was for the 25 years I've known him anyway, a man of few discernible political opinions, and the few one can discern are centrist and non-controversial.
To my astonishment, more or less as soon as we sat down, he launched a scathing attack on the current government, in particular the big NI rise, which had forced him to cut staff and the endless pandering to the Net Zero mob, which complicated his job in other ways. He said he wished SKS's policies had been scrutinised before the election so people could have seen how they didn't add up. I haven't been this surprised by a friend's politics since my former university friend, who I remember selling the Socialist Worker, told me that the atmosphere on his campus was much too woke even for him.
Anyway, my point is, centrist public sector quangocrats should be a natural constituency for our centrist, public sector quangocrat PM. If Starmer is losing them (based on this sample of one), he really IS in trouble.
Many people don't understand how damaging to smaller (and especially family-run) businesses the increase in NI was.
On the contrary, the change was good for small family-run businesses due to the change in the employment allowance. Any business with 7* or fewer employees was better off.
It was large employers of minimum-wage staff who were hammered the most.
*from memory.
Not anecdotally amongst my circle it wasn't.
It's quite complicated and there are eligibility criteria for it, but for most small businesses it will have either meant a tax cut or a significant mitigation. They've doubled it from £5000 to £10,500, so you'd have to have a reasonable NICs bill before the overall changes to NICs becomes a net negative.
My back-of-envelope was that about 2/3rds of businesses (with employees) will be better off, representing about 4 million workers in the smallest companies.
Are you however taking into account that a lot of employees they never had to pay ni for before they now do as the amount they can earn before employer ni has dropped from 9100 to 5000
before this anyone on min wage could work 15 hours a week and not cost their employer ni
after this comes in and the increase in minimum wage any worker on min wage starts costing their employer ni at just under 8 hours
prediction is a lot will reduce part time worker hours from 16 to 8 and take on more part time workers.
I can see it now tesco's and the co op do a deal.... we have all these 16 hour a week workers, we will reduce their hours to 8 and they can come work for you 8 hours a week if you do the same with yours and hey both avoid that employer ni tax increase
The marginal costs are insignificant. Part time workers get paid badly. They happily accept that.
Who here is talking about part time workers and how badly they are paid? I am pointing out if you can get a part time worker for 7 odd hours before having to pay employers ni and reducing their hours from 15 to 7 and you can do a swap so their part time workers are also reduced from 15 hours to 7. However you swap so you take on their part time workers for an extra 7 hours and they take on yours.
Say you have 100k of these workers each you both save £29.38 tax per week per worker. That is £152,776,000 a year you are saving
"Who here is talking about part time workers.. etc" Er, you.
I just had lunch with a former colleague who is now head of a public sector quango. He is, or was for the 25 years I've known him anyway, a man of few discernible political opinions, and the few one can discern are centrist and non-controversial.
To my astonishment, more or less as soon as we sat down, he launched a scathing attack on the current government, in particular the big NI rise, which had forced him to cut staff and the endless pandering to the Net Zero mob, which complicated his job in other ways. He said he wished SKS's policies had been scrutinised before the election so people could have seen how they didn't add up. I haven't been this surprised by a friend's politics since my former university friend, who I remember selling the Socialist Worker, told me that the atmosphere on his campus was much too woke even for him.
Anyway, my point is, centrist public sector quangocrats should be a natural constituency for our centrist, public sector quangocrat PM. If Starmer is losing them (based on this sample of one), he really IS in trouble.
Many people don't understand how damaging to smaller (and especially family-run) businesses the increase in NI was.
On the contrary, the change was good for small family-run businesses due to the change in the employment allowance. Any business with 7* or fewer employees was better off.
It was large employers of minimum-wage staff who were hammered the most.
*from memory.
7!?! Try 4. I took on my 5th employee this month, I'm now worse off than I would have been before the changes. As a small business owner, I hate this government with a passion, every single change is for the worse.
In particular they don't understand that turnover taxes (which is what employers NI is, also business rates) are ruinous, particularly if you are trying to bootstrap and scale a business. Tax profits by all means - if you're making a profit, there is money there for the state to skim off. But taxing turnover is horrendous because it's just another drain on your finances regardless of if you are making money or not.
The problem is that none of them have ever been where I am. They've not had to try and manage cash flow to magic up wages every month. They haven't remortgaged their house to put their own money into an enterprise as a initial source of funds. They haven't worked for 4 years unpaid (which is basically what I did, fortunately I had a wife to live off!) to fund the management buyout of a failing business and then managed to turn it round. They've never taken a chance on an employee with a dubious employment history in the hope that they would come good.
They have no knowledge, no understanding, no ability - other than to keep trying to see if the pips squeak yet. And yet they have the nerve to claim they want growth. The engine of the economy is small and micro businesses - but government sets out by tax and regulation to systematically destroy them.
I've no idea if Farage will be better - it's going to be difficult to be worse. But I'll rejoice to see the day that the smarmy griming idiot who is presently prime minister is booted out of a job he neither deserves nor has the ability to do. I would never employ a man that stupid and damaging to sweep my workshop floor.
I'm not about to argue that life isn't extremely difficult for small businesses, or that the changes to NICs were overall a good thing for the economy, but changing the employment allowance is obviously a good thing for small employers.
I think the government should go further and increase it again at the next budget.
Unless you are a small business owner with employees I trust @theProle telling how it is over your bland assertions that its not true and he is wrong sorry
I just had lunch with a former colleague who is now head of a public sector quango. He is, or was for the 25 years I've known him anyway, a man of few discernible political opinions, and the few one can discern are centrist and non-controversial.
To my astonishment, more or less as soon as we sat down, he launched a scathing attack on the current government, in particular the big NI rise, which had forced him to cut staff and the endless pandering to the Net Zero mob, which complicated his job in other ways. He said he wished SKS's policies had been scrutinised before the election so people could have seen how they didn't add up. I haven't been this surprised by a friend's politics since my former university friend, who I remember selling the Socialist Worker, told me that the atmosphere on his campus was much too woke even for him.
Anyway, my point is, centrist public sector quangocrats should be a natural constituency for our centrist, public sector quangocrat PM. If Starmer is losing them (based on this sample of one), he really IS in trouble.
Many people don't understand how damaging to smaller (and especially family-run) businesses the increase in NI was.
On the contrary, the change was good for small family-run businesses due to the change in the employment allowance. Any business with 7* or fewer employees was better off.
It was large employers of minimum-wage staff who were hammered the most.
*from memory.
7!?! Try 4. I took on my 5th employee this month, I'm now worse off than I would have been before the changes. As a small business owner, I hate this government with a passion, every single change is for the worse.
In particular they don't understand that turnover taxes (which is what employers NI is, also business rates) are ruinous, particularly if you are trying to bootstrap and scale a business. Tax profits by all means - if you're making a profit, there is money there for the state to skim off. But taxing turnover is horrendous because it's just another drain on your finances regardless of if you are making money or not.
The problem is that none of them have ever been where I am. They've not had to try and manage cash flow to magic up wages every month. They haven't remortgaged their house to put their own money into an enterprise as a initial source of funds. They haven't worked for 4 years unpaid (which is basically what I did, fortunately I had a wife to live off!) to fund the management buyout of a failing business and then managed to turn it round. They've never taken a chance on an employee with a dubious employment history in the hope that they would come good.
They have no knowledge, no understanding, no ability - other than to keep trying to see if the pips squeak yet. And yet they have the nerve to claim they want growth. The engine of the economy is small and micro businesses - but government sets out by tax and regulation to systematically destroy them.
I've no idea if Farage will be better - it's going to be difficult to be worse. But I'll rejoice to see the day that the smarmy griming idiot who is presently prime minister is booted out of a job he neither deserves nor has the ability to do. I would never employ a man that stupid and damaging to sweep my workshop floor.
I gave that a like despite disagreeing about every single change being for the worse. You're right that turnover taxes are a rotten idea.
I just had lunch with a former colleague who is now head of a public sector quango. He is, or was for the 25 years I've known him anyway, a man of few discernible political opinions, and the few one can discern are centrist and non-controversial.
To my astonishment, more or less as soon as we sat down, he launched a scathing attack on the current government, in particular the big NI rise, which had forced him to cut staff and the endless pandering to the Net Zero mob, which complicated his job in other ways. He said he wished SKS's policies had been scrutinised before the election so people could have seen how they didn't add up. I haven't been this surprised by a friend's politics since my former university friend, who I remember selling the Socialist Worker, told me that the atmosphere on his campus was much too woke even for him.
Anyway, my point is, centrist public sector quangocrats should be a natural constituency for our centrist, public sector quangocrat PM. If Starmer is losing them (based on this sample of one), he really IS in trouble.
Many people don't understand how damaging to smaller (and especially family-run) businesses the increase in NI was.
On the contrary, the change was good for small family-run businesses due to the change in the employment allowance. Any business with 7* or fewer employees was better off.
It was large employers of minimum-wage staff who were hammered the most.
*from memory.
7!?! Try 4. I took on my 5th employee this month, I'm now worse off than I would have been before the changes. As a small business owner, I hate this government with a passion, every single change is for the worse.
In particular they don't understand that turnover taxes (which is what employers NI is, also business rates) are ruinous, particularly if you are trying to bootstrap and scale a business. Tax profits by all means - if you're making a profit, there is money there for the state to skim off. But taxing turnover is horrendous because it's just another drain on your finances regardless of if you are making money or not.
The problem is that none of them have ever been where I am. They've not had to try and manage cash flow to magic up wages every month. They haven't remortgaged their house to put their own money into an enterprise as a initial source of funds. They haven't worked for 4 years unpaid (which is basically what I did, fortunately I had a wife to live off!) to fund the management buyout of a failing business and then managed to turn it round. They've never taken a chance on an employee with a dubious employment history in the hope that they would come good.
They have no knowledge, no understanding, no ability - other than to keep trying to see if the pips squeak yet. And yet they have the nerve to claim they want growth. The engine of the economy is small and micro businesses - but government sets out by tax and regulation to systematically destroy them.
I've no idea if Farage will be better - it's going to be difficult to be worse. But I'll rejoice to see the day that the smarmy griming idiot who is presently prime minister is booted out of a job he neither deserves nor has the ability to do. I would never employ a man that stupid and damaging to sweep my workshop floor.
I'm not about to argue that life isn't extremely difficult for small businesses, or that the changes to NICs were overall a good thing for the economy, but changing the employment allowance is obviously a good thing for small employers.
I think the government should go further and increase it again at the next budget.
Unless you are a small business owner with employees I trust theProle telling how it is over your bland assertions that its not true and he is wrong sorry
Do you think removing the employment allowance would help a small employer?
I'd love to know the secret of earning enough money so you can afford to retire by your early to mid 50s.
My mortgage alone stretches to 62.
Being fortunate enough to have been born in an era of affordable housing, or fortunate enough to have parents who helped you onto the ladder.
Though I wouldn't want to retire in my early 50s, I'd be bored shitless. As much as I enjoy my holidays from work and weekends etc I do enjoy the routine of having stuff to do.
I reckon I'd find things that didn't bore me shitless but weren't the corporate grindstone.
IMO people retiring that early need a serious long-term volunteer role, such as restoring a local windmill or something equally significant.
Restoring a windmill..
Look, I retired early, at 56. I'd not turn my nose up at restoring a windmill. I'd prefer though to use my skills in (say) working on fusion power.
Offer me that, and then we're talking.
That sounds like fun. Probably best if I pass though as it might result in a very large hole in the ground.
I just had lunch with a former colleague who is now head of a public sector quango. He is, or was for the 25 years I've known him anyway, a man of few discernible political opinions, and the few one can discern are centrist and non-controversial.
To my astonishment, more or less as soon as we sat down, he launched a scathing attack on the current government, in particular the big NI rise, which had forced him to cut staff and the endless pandering to the Net Zero mob, which complicated his job in other ways. He said he wished SKS's policies had been scrutinised before the election so people could have seen how they didn't add up. I haven't been this surprised by a friend's politics since my former university friend, who I remember selling the Socialist Worker, told me that the atmosphere on his campus was much too woke even for him.
Anyway, my point is, centrist public sector quangocrats should be a natural constituency for our centrist, public sector quangocrat PM. If Starmer is losing them (based on this sample of one), he really IS in trouble.
Many people don't understand how damaging to smaller (and especially family-run) businesses the increase in NI was.
On the contrary, the change was good for small family-run businesses due to the change in the employment allowance. Any business with 7* or fewer employees was better off.
It was large employers of minimum-wage staff who were hammered the most.
*from memory.
7!?! Try 4. I took on my 5th employee this month, I'm now worse off than I would have been before the changes. As a small business owner, I hate this government with a passion, every single change is for the worse.
In particular they don't understand that turnover taxes (which is what employers NI is, also business rates) are ruinous, particularly if you are trying to bootstrap and scale a business. Tax profits by all means - if you're making a profit, there is money there for the state to skim off. But taxing turnover is horrendous because it's just another drain on your finances regardless of if you are making money or not.
The problem is that none of them have ever been where I am. They've not had to try and manage cash flow to magic up wages every month. They haven't remortgaged their house to put their own money into an enterprise as a initial source of funds. They haven't worked for 4 years unpaid (which is basically what I did, fortunately I had a wife to live off!) to fund the management buyout of a failing business and then managed to turn it round. They've never taken a chance on an employee with a dubious employment history in the hope that they would come good.
They have no knowledge, no understanding, no ability - other than to keep trying to see if the pips squeak yet. And yet they have the nerve to claim they want growth. The engine of the economy is small and micro businesses - but government sets out by tax and regulation to systematically destroy them.
I've no idea if Farage will be better - it's going to be difficult to be worse. But I'll rejoice to see the day that the smarmy griming idiot who is presently prime minister is booted out of a job he neither deserves nor has the ability to do. I would never employ a man that stupid and damaging to sweep my workshop floor.
I'm not about to argue that life isn't extremely difficult for small businesses, or that the changes to NICs were overall a good thing for the economy, but changing the employment allowance is obviously a good thing for small employers.
I think the government should go further and increase it again at the next budget.
Unless you are a small business owner with employees I trust theProle telling how it is over your bland assertions that its not true and he is wrong sorry
Do you think removing the employment allowance would help a small employer?
Where did I ever imply that, I am just saying we have someone who is telling you that taking a 5 employee on is costing him more in tax and you from your ivory tower is insisting its not true. The changes are bad and you are wrong that it doesn't effect small companies
I'd love to know the secret of earning enough money so you can afford to retire by your early to mid 50s.
My mortgage alone stretches to 62.
Being fortunate enough to have been born in an era of affordable housing, or fortunate enough to have parents who helped you onto the ladder.
Though I wouldn't want to retire in my early 50s, I'd be bored shitless. As much as I enjoy my holidays from work and weekends etc I do enjoy the routine of having stuff to do.
I reckon I'd find things that didn't bore me shitless but weren't the corporate grindstone.
IMO people retiring that early need a serious long-term volunteer role, such as restoring a local windmill or something equally significant.
Restoring a windmill..
Look, I retired early, at 56. I'd not turn my nose up at restoring a windmill. I'd prefer though to use my skills in (say) working on fusion power.
I'd love to know the secret of earning enough money so you can afford to retire by your early to mid 50s.
My mortgage alone stretches to 62.
Being fortunate enough to have been born in an era of affordable housing, or fortunate enough to have parents who helped you onto the ladder.
Though I wouldn't want to retire in my early 50s, I'd be bored shitless. As much as I enjoy my holidays from work and weekends etc I do enjoy the routine of having stuff to do.
I reckon I'd find things that didn't bore me shitless but weren't the corporate grindstone.
IMO people retiring that early need a serious long-term volunteer role, such as restoring a local windmill or something equally significant.
Restoring a windmill..
Look, I retired early, at 56. I'd not turn my nose up at restoring a windmill. I'd prefer though to use my skills in (say) working on fusion power.
Offer me that, and then we're talking.
That sounds like fun. Probably best if I pass though as it might result in a very large hole in the ground.
Look, Musk is all sorts of wrong on all sorts of things, but his see what it is theme is quite right.
But hey - as you're a doubter then just pop your address here and we can make it handy for you to see all the explosions and success at first hand.
(Could a well meaning fusion experiment cause huge destruction - who knows, the CERN stuff where they create momentary black holes is more scary (possibly not what they actually do, just what the press say).
I just had lunch with a former colleague who is now head of a public sector quango. He is, or was for the 25 years I've known him anyway, a man of few discernible political opinions, and the few one can discern are centrist and non-controversial.
To my astonishment, more or less as soon as we sat down, he launched a scathing attack on the current government, in particular the big NI rise, which had forced him to cut staff and the endless pandering to the Net Zero mob, which complicated his job in other ways. He said he wished SKS's policies had been scrutinised before the election so people could have seen how they didn't add up. I haven't been this surprised by a friend's politics since my former university friend, who I remember selling the Socialist Worker, told me that the atmosphere on his campus was much too woke even for him.
Anyway, my point is, centrist public sector quangocrats should be a natural constituency for our centrist, public sector quangocrat PM. If Starmer is losing them (based on this sample of one), he really IS in trouble.
Many people don't understand how damaging to smaller (and especially family-run) businesses the increase in NI was.
On the contrary, the change was good for small family-run businesses due to the change in the employment allowance. Any business with 7* or fewer employees was better off.
It was large employers of minimum-wage staff who were hammered the most.
*from memory.
7!?! Try 4. I took on my 5th employee this month, I'm now worse off than I would have been before the changes. As a small business owner, I hate this government with a passion, every single change is for the worse.
In particular they don't understand that turnover taxes (which is what employers NI is, also business rates) are ruinous, particularly if you are trying to bootstrap and scale a business. Tax profits by all means - if you're making a profit, there is money there for the state to skim off. But taxing turnover is horrendous because it's just another drain on your finances regardless of if you are making money or not.
The problem is that none of them have ever been where I am. They've not had to try and manage cash flow to magic up wages every month. They haven't remortgaged their house to put their own money into an enterprise as a initial source of funds. They haven't worked for 4 years unpaid (which is basically what I did, fortunately I had a wife to live off!) to fund the management buyout of a failing business and then managed to turn it round. They've never taken a chance on an employee with a dubious employment history in the hope that they would come good.
They have no knowledge, no understanding, no ability - other than to keep trying to see if the pips squeak yet. And yet they have the nerve to claim they want growth. The engine of the economy is small and micro businesses - but government sets out by tax and regulation to systematically destroy them.
I've no idea if Farage will be better - it's going to be difficult to be worse. But I'll rejoice to see the day that the smarmy griming idiot who is presently prime minister is booted out of a job he neither deserves nor has the ability to do. I would never employ a man that stupid and damaging to sweep my workshop floor.
I'm not about to argue that life isn't extremely difficult for small businesses, or that the changes to NICs were overall a good thing for the economy, but changing the employment allowance is obviously a good thing for small employers.
I think the government should go further and increase it again at the next budget.
Unless you are a small business owner with employees I trust theProle telling how it is over your bland assertions that its not true and he is wrong sorry
Do you think removing the employment allowance would help a small employer?
Where did I ever imply that, I am just saying we have someone who is telling you that taking a 5 employee on is costing him more in tax and you from your ivory tower is insisting its not true. The changes are bad and you are wrong that it doesn't effect small companies
I didn't state that at all. The only reason I know about this is because a family friend with a small business pointed it out to me (which is why I think it's mad that Labour didn't trumpet it at the budget).
I just had lunch with a former colleague who is now head of a public sector quango. He is, or was for the 25 years I've known him anyway, a man of few discernible political opinions, and the few one can discern are centrist and non-controversial.
To my astonishment, more or less as soon as we sat down, he launched a scathing attack on the current government, in particular the big NI rise, which had forced him to cut staff and the endless pandering to the Net Zero mob, which complicated his job in other ways. He said he wished SKS's policies had been scrutinised before the election so people could have seen how they didn't add up. I haven't been this surprised by a friend's politics since my former university friend, who I remember selling the Socialist Worker, told me that the atmosphere on his campus was much too woke even for him.
Anyway, my point is, centrist public sector quangocrats should be a natural constituency for our centrist, public sector quangocrat PM. If Starmer is losing them (based on this sample of one), he really IS in trouble.
Many people don't understand how damaging to smaller (and especially family-run) businesses the increase in NI was.
On the contrary, the change was good for small family-run businesses due to the change in the employment allowance. Any business with 7* or fewer employees was better off.
It was large employers of minimum-wage staff who were hammered the most.
*from memory.
Not anecdotally amongst my circle it wasn't.
It's quite complicated and there are eligibility criteria for it, but for most small businesses it will have either meant a tax cut or a significant mitigation. They've doubled it from £5000 to £10,500, so you'd have to have a reasonable NICs bill before the overall changes to NICs becomes a net negative.
My back-of-envelope was that about 2/3rds of businesses (with employees) will be better off, representing about 4 million workers in the smallest companies.
Are you however taking into account that a lot of employees they never had to pay ni for before they now do as the amount they can earn before employer ni has dropped from 9100 to 5000
Yes, it takes that into account. That additional cost is offset by the change in the allowance.
My dodgy assumption is that most small employers (fewer than 10 people) have lower average salaries that bigger ones. That's true to an extent, but I think my figure is an overestimate on that basis. Still, even if it's not true for all of the smallest businesses on an absolute basis, the budget was relatively better the smaller your business was.
(If Labour was any good at comms, they would have been shouting that from the rooftops).
I consider(ed) myself extremely well informed and yet had no idea this was the case. Truly a huge comms fail. The big business/small business divide is a pretty good fault line - very well exploited by the Brexit campaigners in the referendum.
I just had lunch with a former colleague who is now head of a public sector quango. He is, or was for the 25 years I've known him anyway, a man of few discernible political opinions, and the few one can discern are centrist and non-controversial.
To my astonishment, more or less as soon as we sat down, he launched a scathing attack on the current government, in particular the big NI rise, which had forced him to cut staff and the endless pandering to the Net Zero mob, which complicated his job in other ways. He said he wished SKS's policies had been scrutinised before the election so people could have seen how they didn't add up. I haven't been this surprised by a friend's politics since my former university friend, who I remember selling the Socialist Worker, told me that the atmosphere on his campus was much too woke even for him.
Anyway, my point is, centrist public sector quangocrats should be a natural constituency for our centrist, public sector quangocrat PM. If Starmer is losing them (based on this sample of one), he really IS in trouble.
Many people don't understand how damaging to smaller (and especially family-run) businesses the increase in NI was.
On the contrary, the change was good for small family-run businesses due to the change in the employment allowance. Any business with 7* or fewer employees was better off.
It was large employers of minimum-wage staff who were hammered the most.
*from memory.
Not anecdotally amongst my circle it wasn't.
It's quite complicated and there are eligibility criteria for it, but for most small businesses it will have either meant a tax cut or a significant mitigation. They've doubled it from £5000 to £10,500, so you'd have to have a reasonable NICs bill before the overall changes to NICs becomes a net negative.
My back-of-envelope was that about 2/3rds of businesses (with employees) will be better off, representing about 4 million workers in the smallest companies.
Are you however taking into account that a lot of employees they never had to pay ni for before they now do as the amount they can earn before employer ni has dropped from 9100 to 5000
Yes, it takes that into account. That additional cost is offset by the change in the allowance.
My dodgy assumption is that most small employers (fewer than 10 people) have lower average salaries that bigger ones. That's true to an extent, but I think my figure is an overestimate on that basis. Still, even if it's not true for all of the smallest businesses on an absolute basis, the budget was relatively better the smaller your business was.
(If Labour was any good at comms, they would have been shouting that from the rooftops).
I consider(ed) myself extremely well informed and yet had no idea this was the case. Truly a huge comms fail. The big business/small business divide is a pretty good fault line - very well exploited by the Brexit campaigners in the referendum.
Just to point out you have eabhals assertions vs TheProles actual experience where he is saying taking on a 5th employee has increased the tax bill....
I'd love to know the secret of earning enough money so you can afford to retire by your early to mid 50s.
My mortgage alone stretches to 62.
Being fortunate enough to have been born in an era of affordable housing, or fortunate enough to have parents who helped you onto the ladder.
Though I wouldn't want to retire in my early 50s, I'd be bored shitless. As much as I enjoy my holidays from work and weekends etc I do enjoy the routine of having stuff to do.
I reckon I'd find things that didn't bore me shitless but weren't the corporate grindstone.
IMO people retiring that early need a serious long-term volunteer role, such as restoring a local windmill or something equally significant.
Restoring a windmill..
Look, I retired early, at 56. I'd not turn my nose up at restoring a windmill. I'd prefer though to use my skills in (say) working on fusion power.
No. Their approach might be correct, but if it is then they'll be a stepping stone rather than the money-spinner.
The only interesting company (from a commercial point of view) in the Fusion space is First Light Fusion. They have a non-zero chance of success in my view. Very, very close to zero though.
The thing is about fusion is that you just need to find a way to be a dating agency for hydrogen. Building stars might be overkill.
I'd love to know the secret of earning enough money so you can afford to retire by your early to mid 50s.
My mortgage alone stretches to 62.
Sell house down south, move somewhere nice up north. Profit.
Better still live and buy a house up north, find attractive young damsel who owns a house down south, marry her and get her to move north. Sell her house, pay off both mortgages and then some. Thus wife and I are mortgage free in our mid 30s.
We're contemplating another mortgage, but only need to borrow about £100k to trade up from a 3 bed ex-council house to a rural 4-5 bed detached cottage sort of thing - I'd hope to pay it off in under 10 years.
Can I apply for your scheme if I am already married?
I wonder how many married couples keep both houses - I'd say it's not uncommon, but perhaps less common than a decade ago.
Probably more common at both times for couples not married yet, so that their is a plan B in case the relationship goes phut.
I'd love to know the secret of earning enough money so you can afford to retire by your early to mid 50s.
My mortgage alone stretches to 62.
Being fortunate enough to have been born in an era of affordable housing, or fortunate enough to have parents who helped you onto the ladder.
Though I wouldn't want to retire in my early 50s, I'd be bored shitless. As much as I enjoy my holidays from work and weekends etc I do enjoy the routine of having stuff to do.
I reckon I'd find things that didn't bore me shitless but weren't the corporate grindstone.
IMO people retiring that early need a serious long-term volunteer role, such as restoring a local windmill or something equally significant.
Why? If I retired tomorrow I still have more than 24 hours of stuff I want to do in a day without volunteering for some shitty local windmill project
If you have 24 hours of stuff - great.
It's easy to lose focus, and drift, due to loss of routine.
I posted this in response to @isam 's question about his mum's hip replacement yesterday, and a further PM that may be of more general interest. It's in 2 halves because I waffle. If it's not useful, feel free to ignore.
Home adaptations are the responsibility of the local authority aiui. I think It's called a Disabled Facilities Grant. They cover things like moving around the house.
It's possible there may be edge cases around "elderly or disabled?", but you find out by asking.
For basic equipment that comes in a van eg bath board, high loo seat, toilet support frames, maybe standalone shower seat, walking frame or wheelchair, you get them on loan (not the loo seat - they don't want those back) from the British Red Cross service. They should send someone out to do an assessment.
I'm not sure what they are on about with their "talk to Buckinghamshire".
(There may I suppose be anomalies by area, and Havering is Havering.)
My suggested contact is the Age UK helpline: Age UK Advice Line - 0800 678 1602
To add a little.
The category of things like grab handles outside the door, or in the shower, a wall mounted shower seat, taps with lever handles not screws, a shower with rainfall and handset, and that type of small job are probably best tackled from own money by a handyman with common sense in perhaps a day (eg use long screws - 70mm in the wright-supporting block work or bricks for handles that will bear weight, which may not be supplied).
For anything that gets wet, fluted plastic for grab handles is important; you cannot compromise on that. For other places stainless steel or chrome seems less institutional. And making showers non slip is important - even now I use stick on patches from Amazon. Croydex are a reliable brand, and Screwfix "Trade Rated" a sound recommendation.
You can get that done in days or weeks, for low hundreds all in, but take time to think carefully. With my mum we spent half an hour chatting and thinking with her sitting on the loo about where she wanted grab handles etc. That type of approach also helps to bring it all into the open.
The grants tend to address things that are more like building work eg adding a downstairs loo or shower in a new subdivided room. They take longer, but you may get thousands. I know someone who had a lift installed in a 2 bed terrace on a grant under a council obligation.
I posted this in response to @isam 's question about his mum's hip replacement yesterday, and a further PM that may be of more general interest. It's in 2 halves because I waffle. If it's not useful or relevant, feel free to ignore.
Home adaptations are the responsibility of the local authority aiui. I think It's called a Disabled Facilities Grant. They cover things like moving around the house.
It's possible there may be edge cases around "elderly or disabled?", but you find out by asking.
For basic equipment that comes in a van eg bath board, high loo seat, toilet support frames, maybe standalone shower seat, walking frame or wheelchair, you get them on loan (not the loo seat - they don't want those back) from the British Red Cross service. They should send someone out to do an assessment.
I'm not sure what they are on about with their "talk to Buckinghamshire".
(There may I suppose be anomalies by area, and Havering is Havering.)
My suggested contact is the Age UK helpline: Age UK Advice Line - 0800 678 1602 ---------------------
To add a little.
The category of things like grab handles outside the door, or in the shower, a wall mounted shower seat, taps with lever handles not screws, a shower with rainfall and handset, and that type of small job are probably best tackled from own money by a handyman with common sense in perhaps a day (eg use long screws - 70mm in the wright-supporting block work or bricks for handles that will bear weight, which may not be supplied).
For anything that gets wet, fluted plastic for grab handles is important; you cannot compromise on that. For other places stainless steel or chrome seems less institutional. And making showers non slip is important - even now I use stick on patches from Amazon. Croydex are a reliable brand, and Screwfix "Trade Rated" a sound recommendation.
You can get that done in days or weeks, for low hundreds all in, but take time to think carefully. With my mum we spent half an hour chatting and thinking with her sitting on the loo about where she wanted grab handles etc. That type of approach also helps to bring it all into the open.
The grants tend to address things that are more like building work eg adding a downstairs loo or shower in a new subdivided room. They take longer, but you may get thousands. I know someone who had a lift installed in a 2 bed terrace on a grant under a council obligation.
It pays to make sure that she needs to be active as far as possible to do things, especially with a replaced hip. But be ready for a series of fall back positions as she becomes less mobile over the years.
My mum made a decision herself to sleep upstairs as long as possible, as she wanted to make herself walk upstairs.
I wrote up a series of articles and a thread over at Buildhub about "accessible ablutions" on what I did. There's a good range of material, and products / costs. We also had to fit a shower room downstairs.
I just had lunch with a former colleague who is now head of a public sector quango. He is, or was for the 25 years I've known him anyway, a man of few discernible political opinions, and the few one can discern are centrist and non-controversial.
To my astonishment, more or less as soon as we sat down, he launched a scathing attack on the current government, in particular the big NI rise, which had forced him to cut staff and the endless pandering to the Net Zero mob, which complicated his job in other ways. He said he wished SKS's policies had been scrutinised before the election so people could have seen how they didn't add up. I haven't been this surprised by a friend's politics since my former university friend, who I remember selling the Socialist Worker, told me that the atmosphere on his campus was much too woke even for him.
Anyway, my point is, centrist public sector quangocrats should be a natural constituency for our centrist, public sector quangocrat PM. If Starmer is losing them (based on this sample of one), he really IS in trouble.
Many people don't understand how damaging to smaller (and especially family-run) businesses the increase in NI was.
On the contrary, the change was good for small family-run businesses due to the change in the employment allowance. Any business with 7* or fewer employees was better off.
It was large employers of minimum-wage staff who were hammered the most.
*from memory.
Not anecdotally amongst my circle it wasn't.
It's quite complicated and there are eligibility criteria for it, but for most small businesses it will have either meant a tax cut or a significant mitigation. They've doubled it from £5000 to £10,500, so you'd have to have a reasonable NICs bill before the overall changes to NICs becomes a net negative.
My back-of-envelope was that about 2/3rds of businesses (with employees) will be better off, representing about 4 million workers in the smallest companies.
Are you however taking into account that a lot of employees they never had to pay ni for before they now do as the amount they can earn before employer ni has dropped from 9100 to 5000
Yes, it takes that into account. That additional cost is offset by the change in the allowance.
My dodgy assumption is that most small employers (fewer than 10 people) have lower average salaries that bigger ones. That's true to an extent, but I think my figure is an overestimate on that basis. Still, even if it's not true for all of the smallest businesses on an absolute basis, the budget was relatively better the smaller your business was.
(If Labour was any good at comms, they would have been shouting that from the rooftops).
I consider(ed) myself extremely well informed and yet had no idea this was the case. Truly a huge comms fail. The big business/small business divide is a pretty good fault line - very well exploited by the Brexit campaigners in the referendum.
Just to point out you have eabhals assertions vs TheProles actual experience where he is saying taking on a 5th employee has increased the tax bill....
It depends on how much Prole's employees are paid.
Employment allowance change = +£5,500 Drop in secondary threshold charged at 15% = - £3,075
The rest depends on salaries charged at the 1.2% increase in the rate for wages above £9,100. I think that means that Prole has to pay his five staff around £50,000 a year before the NICs changes becomes a net negative (someone check the maths).
(Note there are some types of businesses where the EA does not apply, so it may be the case that Prole doesn't enjoy it).
I just had lunch with a former colleague who is now head of a public sector quango. He is, or was for the 25 years I've known him anyway, a man of few discernible political opinions, and the few one can discern are centrist and non-controversial.
To my astonishment, more or less as soon as we sat down, he launched a scathing attack on the current government, in particular the big NI rise, which had forced him to cut staff and the endless pandering to the Net Zero mob, which complicated his job in other ways. He said he wished SKS's policies had been scrutinised before the election so people could have seen how they didn't add up. I haven't been this surprised by a friend's politics since my former university friend, who I remember selling the Socialist Worker, told me that the atmosphere on his campus was much too woke even for him.
Anyway, my point is, centrist public sector quangocrats should be a natural constituency for our centrist, public sector quangocrat PM. If Starmer is losing them (based on this sample of one), he really IS in trouble.
Many people don't understand how damaging to smaller (and especially family-run) businesses the increase in NI was.
On the contrary, the change was good for small family-run businesses due to the change in the employment allowance. Any business with 7* or fewer employees was better off.
It was large employers of minimum-wage staff who were hammered the most.
*from memory.
7!?! Try 4. I took on my 5th employee this month, I'm now worse off than I would have been before the changes. As a small business owner, I hate this government with a passion, every single change is for the worse.
In particular they don't understand that turnover taxes (which is what employers NI is, also business rates) are ruinous, particularly if you are trying to bootstrap and scale a business. Tax profits by all means - if you're making a profit, there is money there for the state to skim off. But taxing turnover is horrendous because it's just another drain on your finances regardless of if you are making money or not.
The problem is that none of them have ever been where I am. They've not had to try and manage cash flow to magic up wages every month. They haven't remortgaged their house to put their own money into an enterprise as a initial source of funds. They haven't worked for 4 years unpaid (which is basically what I did, fortunately I had a wife to live off!) to fund the management buyout of a failing business and then managed to turn it round. They've never taken a chance on an employee with a dubious employment history in the hope that they would come good.
They have no knowledge, no understanding, no ability - other than to keep trying to see if the pips squeak yet. And yet they have the nerve to claim they want growth. The engine of the economy is small and micro businesses - but government sets out by tax and regulation to systematically destroy them.
I've no idea if Farage will be better - it's going to be difficult to be worse. But I'll rejoice to see the day that the smarmy griming idiot who is presently prime minister is booted out of a job he neither deserves nor has the ability to do. I would never employ a man that stupid and damaging to sweep my workshop floor.
I'm not about to argue that life isn't extremely difficult for small businesses, or that the changes to NICs were overall a good thing for the economy, but changing the employment allowance is obviously a good thing for small employers.
I think the government should go further and increase it again at the next budget.
Unless you are a small business owner with employees I trust theProle telling how it is over your bland assertions that its not true and he is wrong sorry
Do you think removing the employment allowance would help a small employer?
The government made some very damaging changes to NI. At the same time they bumped the employment allowance, which made it a bit less ruinous for micro businesses. You have to look at these measures as a package, given they are came as a package.
When I ran the numbers last year, IIRC at the sorts of rates we pay very small employers (2-3 staff) win from the changes (companies with just one on payroll don't get the employment allowance, so get completely shafted). With 4 employees, it was a wash, 5 or more and you lost out.
The thing is, if the government wants growth, it's the SME sector that will have to deliver it - but turnover taxes which essentially increase as you scale (so employees 5 and 6 cost you lots more than 3 and 4) and particularly stupid - if you could shift lots of 4 employee businesses to being 6 employee businesses, that should do amazing things for gdp.
I'd love to know the secret of earning enough money so you can afford to retire by your early to mid 50s.
My mortgage alone stretches to 62.
Being fortunate enough to have been born in an era of affordable housing, or fortunate enough to have parents who helped you onto the ladder.
Though I wouldn't want to retire in my early 50s, I'd be bored shitless. As much as I enjoy my holidays from work and weekends etc I do enjoy the routine of having stuff to do.
I reckon I'd find things that didn't bore me shitless but weren't the corporate grindstone.
IMO people retiring that early need a serious long-term volunteer role, such as restoring a local windmill or something equally significant.
Restoring a windmill..
Look, I retired early, at 56. I'd not turn my nose up at restoring a windmill. I'd prefer though to use my skills in (say) working on fusion power.
Offer me that, and then we're talking.
That sounds like fun. Probably best if I pass though as it might result in a very large hole in the ground.
Look, Musk is all sorts of wrong on all sorts of things, but his see what it is theme is quite right.
But hey - as you're a doubter then just pop your address here and we can make it handy for you to see all the explosions and success at first hand.
(Could a well meaning fusion experiment cause huge destruction - who knows, the CERN stuff where they create momentary black holes is more scary (possibly not what they actually do, just what the press say).
I'm one of those people who knows how a lot of things work, but can't make any of them work. I have had so many DIY accidents you don't want me near anything dangerous.
I just had lunch with a former colleague who is now head of a public sector quango. He is, or was for the 25 years I've known him anyway, a man of few discernible political opinions, and the few one can discern are centrist and non-controversial.
To my astonishment, more or less as soon as we sat down, he launched a scathing attack on the current government, in particular the big NI rise, which had forced him to cut staff and the endless pandering to the Net Zero mob, which complicated his job in other ways. He said he wished SKS's policies had been scrutinised before the election so people could have seen how they didn't add up. I haven't been this surprised by a friend's politics since my former university friend, who I remember selling the Socialist Worker, told me that the atmosphere on his campus was much too woke even for him.
Anyway, my point is, centrist public sector quangocrats should be a natural constituency for our centrist, public sector quangocrat PM. If Starmer is losing them (based on this sample of one), he really IS in trouble.
Many people don't understand how damaging to smaller (and especially family-run) businesses the increase in NI was.
On the contrary, the change was good for small family-run businesses due to the change in the employment allowance. Any business with 7* or fewer employees was better off.
It was large employers of minimum-wage staff who were hammered the most.
*from memory.
Not anecdotally amongst my circle it wasn't.
It's quite complicated and there are eligibility criteria for it, but for most small businesses it will have either meant a tax cut or a significant mitigation. They've doubled it from £5000 to £10,500, so you'd have to have a reasonable NICs bill before the overall changes to NICs becomes a net negative.
My back-of-envelope was that about 2/3rds of businesses (with employees) will be better off, representing about 4 million workers in the smallest companies.
Are you however taking into account that a lot of employees they never had to pay ni for before they now do as the amount they can earn before employer ni has dropped from 9100 to 5000
Yes, it takes that into account. That additional cost is offset by the change in the allowance.
My dodgy assumption is that most small employers (fewer than 10 people) have lower average salaries that bigger ones. That's true to an extent, but I think my figure is an overestimate on that basis. Still, even if it's not true for all of the smallest businesses on an absolute basis, the budget was relatively better the smaller your business was.
(If Labour was any good at comms, they would have been shouting that from the rooftops).
I consider(ed) myself extremely well informed and yet had no idea this was the case. Truly a huge comms fail. The big business/small business divide is a pretty good fault line - very well exploited by the Brexit campaigners in the referendum.
I just had lunch with a former colleague who is now head of a public sector quango. He is, or was for the 25 years I've known him anyway, a man of few discernible political opinions, and the few one can discern are centrist and non-controversial.
To my astonishment, more or less as soon as we sat down, he launched a scathing attack on the current government, in particular the big NI rise, which had forced him to cut staff and the endless pandering to the Net Zero mob, which complicated his job in other ways. He said he wished SKS's policies had been scrutinised before the election so people could have seen how they didn't add up. I haven't been this surprised by a friend's politics since my former university friend, who I remember selling the Socialist Worker, told me that the atmosphere on his campus was much too woke even for him.
Anyway, my point is, centrist public sector quangocrats should be a natural constituency for our centrist, public sector quangocrat PM. If Starmer is losing them (based on this sample of one), he really IS in trouble.
Many people don't understand how damaging to smaller (and especially family-run) businesses the increase in NI was.
On the contrary, the change was good for small family-run businesses due to the change in the employment allowance. Any business with 7* or fewer employees was better off.
It was large employers of minimum-wage staff who were hammered the most.
*from memory.
Not anecdotally amongst my circle it wasn't.
It's quite complicated and there are eligibility criteria for it, but for most small businesses it will have either meant a tax cut or a significant mitigation. They've doubled it from £5000 to £10,500, so you'd have to have a reasonable NICs bill before the overall changes to NICs becomes a net negative.
My back-of-envelope was that about 2/3rds of businesses (with employees) will be better off, representing about 4 million workers in the smallest companies.
Are you however taking into account that a lot of employees they never had to pay ni for before they now do as the amount they can earn before employer ni has dropped from 9100 to 5000
Yes, it takes that into account. That additional cost is offset by the change in the allowance.
My dodgy assumption is that most small employers (fewer than 10 people) have lower average salaries that bigger ones. That's true to an extent, but I think my figure is an overestimate on that basis. Still, even if it's not true for all of the smallest businesses on an absolute basis, the budget was relatively better the smaller your business was.
(If Labour was any good at comms, they would have been shouting that from the rooftops).
I consider(ed) myself extremely well informed and yet had no idea this was the case. Truly a huge comms fail. The big business/small business divide is a pretty good fault line - very well exploited by the Brexit campaigners in the referendum.
Just to point out you have eabhals assertions vs TheProles actual experience where he is saying taking on a 5th employee has increased the tax bill....
It depends on how much Prole's employees are paid.
Employment allowance change = +£5,500 Drop in secondary threshold charged at 15% = - £3,075
The rest depends on salaries charged at the 1.2% increase in the rate for wages above £9,100. I think that means that Prole has to pay his five staff around £50,000 a year before the NICs changes becomes a net negative (someone check the maths).
(Note there are some types of businesses where the EA does not apply, so it may be the case that Prole doesn't enjoy it).
The cut off point for charging ni dropped from 9100 to 5000
Conclusion In conclusion, our study suggests an increased hazard of lymphoma and skin cancers among tattooed individuals, demonstrated through two designs: a twin cohort and a case-cotwin study. We are concerned that tattoo ink interacting with surrounding cells may have severe consequences. Studies that pinpoint the etiological pathway of tattoo ink induced carcinogenesis are recommended to benefit public health.
You mean injecting random chemicals of dubious provenance into the skin, where they stay for decades, is bad for the skin?
Crazy talk
Look at it this way, the way I do and used to cause regular rows with my doctor
A) you are going to die someday B ) you can do all these things to prolong your life, eat healthy, exercise, moderate your alcohol and drug intake, dont put chemicals under your skin your chances of living to 90 increase radically
or you can ignore all of B and probably only live till 75 - 80
However take route B yes on average you will live longer but the chances of having dementia/having to have someone wipe your bum for that decade also increase significantly
I prefer not to take option B and hopefully die compis mentis without someone wiping my arse for a decade personally
Each person should make their own choice I do think the medical people however only ever present the you can live till 90 side as if its all upside without pointing out your chances of either mental or physical infirmity for the last few years increases significantly
Pick your risks - skin cancer and lymphoma are fucked up ways to die. Involving long, painful decline.
Exactly the shit you don’t want.
The trick is to die, but be healthy up to the point that you just stop. My grandmother for example - 89, living in her own place (sheltered accommodation), they came in one morning… found her dressed for the day, sitting in her arm chair. Morning cup of tea going cold.
Or my father-in-law - 98, going up and down 4 flights of stairs in the house daily. One day, didn’t feel right. Hospital that evening, didn’t make it through the next day.
The manager of the care home where my mother had been steadily going downhill rang me on Saturday evening; someone wants to speak to you. It was my 92 year old mother. She asked me how I was, how my wife and children were, assured me she was well. Then “Love to you all” and she rang off. Early on the Sunday morning the care home manager rang again. Mother had died in her sleep, apparently early that morning.
I just had lunch with a former colleague who is now head of a public sector quango. He is, or was for the 25 years I've known him anyway, a man of few discernible political opinions, and the few one can discern are centrist and non-controversial.
To my astonishment, more or less as soon as we sat down, he launched a scathing attack on the current government, in particular the big NI rise, which had forced him to cut staff and the endless pandering to the Net Zero mob, which complicated his job in other ways. He said he wished SKS's policies had been scrutinised before the election so people could have seen how they didn't add up. I haven't been this surprised by a friend's politics since my former university friend, who I remember selling the Socialist Worker, told me that the atmosphere on his campus was much too woke even for him.
Anyway, my point is, centrist public sector quangocrats should be a natural constituency for our centrist, public sector quangocrat PM. If Starmer is losing them (based on this sample of one), he really IS in trouble.
Many people don't understand how damaging to smaller (and especially family-run) businesses the increase in NI was.
On the contrary, the change was good for small family-run businesses due to the change in the employment allowance. Any business with 7* or fewer employees was better off.
It was large employers of minimum-wage staff who were hammered the most.
*from memory.
Not anecdotally amongst my circle it wasn't.
It's quite complicated and there are eligibility criteria for it, but for most small businesses it will have either meant a tax cut or a significant mitigation. They've doubled it from £5000 to £10,500, so you'd have to have a reasonable NICs bill before the overall changes to NICs becomes a net negative.
My back-of-envelope was that about 2/3rds of businesses (with employees) will be better off, representing about 4 million workers in the smallest companies.
Are you however taking into account that a lot of employees they never had to pay ni for before they now do as the amount they can earn before employer ni has dropped from 9100 to 5000
Yes, it takes that into account. That additional cost is offset by the change in the allowance.
My dodgy assumption is that most small employers (fewer than 10 people) have lower average salaries that bigger ones. That's true to an extent, but I think my figure is an overestimate on that basis. Still, even if it's not true for all of the smallest businesses on an absolute basis, the budget was relatively better the smaller your business was.
(If Labour was any good at comms, they would have been shouting that from the rooftops).
I consider(ed) myself extremely well informed and yet had no idea this was the case. Truly a huge comms fail. The big business/small business divide is a pretty good fault line - very well exploited by the Brexit campaigners in the referendum.
Just to point out you have eabhals assertions vs TheProles actual experience where he is saying taking on a 5th employee has increased the tax bill....
It depends on how much Prole's employees are paid.
Employment allowance change = +£5,500 Drop in secondary threshold charged at 15% = - £3,075
The rest depends on salaries charged at the 1.2% increase in the rate for wages above £9,100. I think that means that Prole has to pay his five staff around £50,000 a year before the NICs changes becomes a net negative (someone check the maths).
(Note there are some types of businesses where the EA does not apply, so it may be the case that Prole doesn't enjoy it).
The cut off point for charging ni dropped from 9100 to 5000
I just had lunch with a former colleague who is now head of a public sector quango. He is, or was for the 25 years I've known him anyway, a man of few discernible political opinions, and the few one can discern are centrist and non-controversial.
To my astonishment, more or less as soon as we sat down, he launched a scathing attack on the current government, in particular the big NI rise, which had forced him to cut staff and the endless pandering to the Net Zero mob, which complicated his job in other ways. He said he wished SKS's policies had been scrutinised before the election so people could have seen how they didn't add up. I haven't been this surprised by a friend's politics since my former university friend, who I remember selling the Socialist Worker, told me that the atmosphere on his campus was much too woke even for him.
Anyway, my point is, centrist public sector quangocrats should be a natural constituency for our centrist, public sector quangocrat PM. If Starmer is losing them (based on this sample of one), he really IS in trouble.
Many people don't understand how damaging to smaller (and especially family-run) businesses the increase in NI was.
On the contrary, the change was good for small family-run businesses due to the change in the employment allowance. Any business with 7* or fewer employees was better off.
It was large employers of minimum-wage staff who were hammered the most.
*from memory.
Not anecdotally amongst my circle it wasn't.
It's quite complicated and there are eligibility criteria for it, but for most small businesses it will have either meant a tax cut or a significant mitigation. They've doubled it from £5000 to £10,500, so you'd have to have a reasonable NICs bill before the overall changes to NICs becomes a net negative.
My back-of-envelope was that about 2/3rds of businesses (with employees) will be better off, representing about 4 million workers in the smallest companies.
Are you however taking into account that a lot of employees they never had to pay ni for before they now do as the amount they can earn before employer ni has dropped from 9100 to 5000
Yes, it takes that into account. That additional cost is offset by the change in the allowance.
My dodgy assumption is that most small employers (fewer than 10 people) have lower average salaries that bigger ones. That's true to an extent, but I think my figure is an overestimate on that basis. Still, even if it's not true for all of the smallest businesses on an absolute basis, the budget was relatively better the smaller your business was.
(If Labour was any good at comms, they would have been shouting that from the rooftops).
I consider(ed) myself extremely well informed and yet had no idea this was the case. Truly a huge comms fail. The big business/small business divide is a pretty good fault line - very well exploited by the Brexit campaigners in the referendum.
Just to point out you have eabhals assertions vs TheProles actual experience where he is saying taking on a 5th employee has increased the tax bill....
It depends on how much Prole's employees are paid.
Employment allowance change = +£5,500 Drop in secondary threshold charged at 15% = - £3,075
The rest depends on salaries charged at the 1.2% increase in the rate for wages above £9,100. I think that means that Prole has to pay his five staff around £50,000 a year before the NICs changes becomes a net negative (someone check the maths).
(Note there are some types of businesses where the EA does not apply, so it may be the case that Prole doesn't enjoy it).
The cut off point for charging ni dropped from 9100 to 5000
and my understanding is pay them 4999 you pay nothing....pay them 5001 and you pay 15% on all of it
I just had lunch with a former colleague who is now head of a public sector quango. He is, or was for the 25 years I've known him anyway, a man of few discernible political opinions, and the few one can discern are centrist and non-controversial.
To my astonishment, more or less as soon as we sat down, he launched a scathing attack on the current government, in particular the big NI rise, which had forced him to cut staff and the endless pandering to the Net Zero mob, which complicated his job in other ways. He said he wished SKS's policies had been scrutinised before the election so people could have seen how they didn't add up. I haven't been this surprised by a friend's politics since my former university friend, who I remember selling the Socialist Worker, told me that the atmosphere on his campus was much too woke even for him.
Anyway, my point is, centrist public sector quangocrats should be a natural constituency for our centrist, public sector quangocrat PM. If Starmer is losing them (based on this sample of one), he really IS in trouble.
Many people don't understand how damaging to smaller (and especially family-run) businesses the increase in NI was.
On the contrary, the change was good for small family-run businesses due to the change in the employment allowance. Any business with 7* or fewer employees was better off.
It was large employers of minimum-wage staff who were hammered the most.
*from memory.
7!?! Try 4. I took on my 5th employee this month, I'm now worse off than I would have been before the changes. As a small business owner, I hate this government with a passion, every single change is for the worse.
In particular they don't understand that turnover taxes (which is what employers NI is, also business rates) are ruinous, particularly if you are trying to bootstrap and scale a business. Tax profits by all means - if you're making a profit, there is money there for the state to skim off. But taxing turnover is horrendous because it's just another drain on your finances regardless of if you are making money or not.
The problem is that none of them have ever been where I am. They've not had to try and manage cash flow to magic up wages every month. They haven't remortgaged their house to put their own money into an enterprise as a initial source of funds. They haven't worked for 4 years unpaid (which is basically what I did, fortunately I had a wife to live off!) to fund the management buyout of a failing business and then managed to turn it round. They've never taken a chance on an employee with a dubious employment history in the hope that they would come good.
They have no knowledge, no understanding, no ability - other than to keep trying to see if the pips squeak yet. And yet they have the nerve to claim they want growth. The engine of the economy is small and micro businesses - but government sets out by tax and regulation to systematically destroy them.
I've no idea if Farage will be better - it's going to be difficult to be worse. But I'll rejoice to see the day that the smarmy griming idiot who is presently prime minister is booted out of a job he neither deserves nor has the ability to do. I would never employ a man that stupid and damaging to sweep my workshop floor.
I'm not about to argue that life isn't extremely difficult for small businesses, or that the changes to NICs were overall a good thing for the economy, but changing the employment allowance is obviously a good thing for small employers.
I think the government should go further and increase it again at the next budget.
Unless you are a small business owner with employees I trust theProle telling how it is over your bland assertions that its not true and he is wrong sorry
Do you think removing the employment allowance would help a small employer?
The government made some very damaging changes to NI. At the same time they bumped the employment allowance, which made it a bit less ruinous for micro businesses. You have to look at these measures as a package, given they are came as a package.
When I ran the numbers last year, IIRC at the sorts of rates we pay very small employers (2-3 staff) win from the changes (companies with just one on payroll don't get the employment allowance, so get completely shafted). With 4 employees, it was a wash, 5 or more and you lost out.
The thing is, if the government wants growth, it's the SME sector that will have to deliver it - but turnover taxes which essentially increase as you scale (so employees 5 and 6 cost you lots more than 3 and 4) and particularly stupid - if you could shift lots of 4 employee businesses to being 6 employee businesses, that should do amazing things for gdp.
It depends on how much you pay your staff. But yes, I agree with that entirely.
Perhaps a smarter way to do it is to ramp up employer NICs as headcount increases, with a large £20-30k allowance to begin with.
I just had lunch with a former colleague who is now head of a public sector quango. He is, or was for the 25 years I've known him anyway, a man of few discernible political opinions, and the few one can discern are centrist and non-controversial.
To my astonishment, more or less as soon as we sat down, he launched a scathing attack on the current government, in particular the big NI rise, which had forced him to cut staff and the endless pandering to the Net Zero mob, which complicated his job in other ways. He said he wished SKS's policies had been scrutinised before the election so people could have seen how they didn't add up. I haven't been this surprised by a friend's politics since my former university friend, who I remember selling the Socialist Worker, told me that the atmosphere on his campus was much too woke even for him.
Anyway, my point is, centrist public sector quangocrats should be a natural constituency for our centrist, public sector quangocrat PM. If Starmer is losing them (based on this sample of one), he really IS in trouble.
Many people don't understand how damaging to smaller (and especially family-run) businesses the increase in NI was.
On the contrary, the change was good for small family-run businesses due to the change in the employment allowance. Any business with 7* or fewer employees was better off.
It was large employers of minimum-wage staff who were hammered the most.
*from memory.
Not anecdotally amongst my circle it wasn't.
It's quite complicated and there are eligibility criteria for it, but for most small businesses it will have either meant a tax cut or a significant mitigation. They've doubled it from £5000 to £10,500, so you'd have to have a reasonable NICs bill before the overall changes to NICs becomes a net negative.
My back-of-envelope was that about 2/3rds of businesses (with employees) will be better off, representing about 4 million workers in the smallest companies.
Are you however taking into account that a lot of employees they never had to pay ni for before they now do as the amount they can earn before employer ni has dropped from 9100 to 5000
Yes, it takes that into account. That additional cost is offset by the change in the allowance.
My dodgy assumption is that most small employers (fewer than 10 people) have lower average salaries that bigger ones. That's true to an extent, but I think my figure is an overestimate on that basis. Still, even if it's not true for all of the smallest businesses on an absolute basis, the budget was relatively better the smaller your business was.
(If Labour was any good at comms, they would have been shouting that from the rooftops).
I consider(ed) myself extremely well informed and yet had no idea this was the case. Truly a huge comms fail. The big business/small business divide is a pretty good fault line - very well exploited by the Brexit campaigners in the referendum.
Just to point out you have eabhals assertions vs TheProles actual experience where he is saying taking on a 5th employee has increased the tax bill....
It depends on how much Prole's employees are paid.
Employment allowance change = +£5,500 Drop in secondary threshold charged at 15% = - £3,075
The rest depends on salaries charged at the 1.2% increase in the rate for wages above £9,100. I think that means that Prole has to pay his five staff around £50,000 a year before the NICs changes becomes a net negative (someone check the maths).
(Note there are some types of businesses where the EA does not apply, so it may be the case that Prole doesn't enjoy it).
The cut off point for charging ni dropped from 9100 to 5000
I just had lunch with a former colleague who is now head of a public sector quango. He is, or was for the 25 years I've known him anyway, a man of few discernible political opinions, and the few one can discern are centrist and non-controversial.
To my astonishment, more or less as soon as we sat down, he launched a scathing attack on the current government, in particular the big NI rise, which had forced him to cut staff and the endless pandering to the Net Zero mob, which complicated his job in other ways. He said he wished SKS's policies had been scrutinised before the election so people could have seen how they didn't add up. I haven't been this surprised by a friend's politics since my former university friend, who I remember selling the Socialist Worker, told me that the atmosphere on his campus was much too woke even for him.
Anyway, my point is, centrist public sector quangocrats should be a natural constituency for our centrist, public sector quangocrat PM. If Starmer is losing them (based on this sample of one), he really IS in trouble.
Many people don't understand how damaging to smaller (and especially family-run) businesses the increase in NI was.
On the contrary, the change was good for small family-run businesses due to the change in the employment allowance. Any business with 7* or fewer employees was better off.
It was large employers of minimum-wage staff who were hammered the most.
*from memory.
Not anecdotally amongst my circle it wasn't.
It's quite complicated and there are eligibility criteria for it, but for most small businesses it will have either meant a tax cut or a significant mitigation. They've doubled it from £5000 to £10,500, so you'd have to have a reasonable NICs bill before the overall changes to NICs becomes a net negative.
My back-of-envelope was that about 2/3rds of businesses (with employees) will be better off, representing about 4 million workers in the smallest companies.
Are you however taking into account that a lot of employees they never had to pay ni for before they now do as the amount they can earn before employer ni has dropped from 9100 to 5000
Yes, it takes that into account. That additional cost is offset by the change in the allowance.
My dodgy assumption is that most small employers (fewer than 10 people) have lower average salaries that bigger ones. That's true to an extent, but I think my figure is an overestimate on that basis. Still, even if it's not true for all of the smallest businesses on an absolute basis, the budget was relatively better the smaller your business was.
(If Labour was any good at comms, they would have been shouting that from the rooftops).
I consider(ed) myself extremely well informed and yet had no idea this was the case. Truly a huge comms fail. The big business/small business divide is a pretty good fault line - very well exploited by the Brexit campaigners in the referendum.
Just to point out you have eabhals assertions vs TheProles actual experience where he is saying taking on a 5th employee has increased the tax bill....
It depends on how much Prole's employees are paid.
Employment allowance change = +£5,500 Drop in secondary threshold charged at 15% = - £3,075
The rest depends on salaries charged at the 1.2% increase in the rate for wages above £9,100. I think that means that Prole has to pay his five staff around £50,000 a year before the NICs changes becomes a net negative (someone check the maths).
(Note there are some types of businesses where the EA does not apply, so it may be the case that Prole doesn't enjoy it).
The cut off point for charging ni dropped from 9100 to 5000
Yes. (9100-5000)*5*0.15 = £3,075.
Haven't you forgotten the rate going up?
Rate went up from 13.8% to 15%. So you need to apply 15% to the wages from £5k to £9.1k, and 1.2% to anything over £9.1k. That's how I backed out the £50k salary figure.
I just had lunch with a former colleague who is now head of a public sector quango. He is, or was for the 25 years I've known him anyway, a man of few discernible political opinions, and the few one can discern are centrist and non-controversial.
To my astonishment, more or less as soon as we sat down, he launched a scathing attack on the current government, in particular the big NI rise, which had forced him to cut staff and the endless pandering to the Net Zero mob, which complicated his job in other ways. He said he wished SKS's policies had been scrutinised before the election so people could have seen how they didn't add up. I haven't been this surprised by a friend's politics since my former university friend, who I remember selling the Socialist Worker, told me that the atmosphere on his campus was much too woke even for him.
Anyway, my point is, centrist public sector quangocrats should be a natural constituency for our centrist, public sector quangocrat PM. If Starmer is losing them (based on this sample of one), he really IS in trouble.
Many people don't understand how damaging to smaller (and especially family-run) businesses the increase in NI was.
On the contrary, the change was good for small family-run businesses due to the change in the employment allowance. Any business with 7* or fewer employees was better off.
It was large employers of minimum-wage staff who were hammered the most.
*from memory.
Not anecdotally amongst my circle it wasn't.
It's quite complicated and there are eligibility criteria for it, but for most small businesses it will have either meant a tax cut or a significant mitigation. They've doubled it from £5000 to £10,500, so you'd have to have a reasonable NICs bill before the overall changes to NICs becomes a net negative.
My back-of-envelope was that about 2/3rds of businesses (with employees) will be better off, representing about 4 million workers in the smallest companies.
Are you however taking into account that a lot of employees they never had to pay ni for before they now do as the amount they can earn before employer ni has dropped from 9100 to 5000
Yes, it takes that into account. That additional cost is offset by the change in the allowance.
My dodgy assumption is that most small employers (fewer than 10 people) have lower average salaries that bigger ones. That's true to an extent, but I think my figure is an overestimate on that basis. Still, even if it's not true for all of the smallest businesses on an absolute basis, the budget was relatively better the smaller your business was.
(If Labour was any good at comms, they would have been shouting that from the rooftops).
I consider(ed) myself extremely well informed and yet had no idea this was the case. Truly a huge comms fail. The big business/small business divide is a pretty good fault line - very well exploited by the Brexit campaigners in the referendum.
Just to point out you have eabhals assertions vs TheProles actual experience where he is saying taking on a 5th employee has increased the tax bill....
It depends on how much Prole's employees are paid.
Employment allowance change = +£5,500 Drop in secondary threshold charged at 15% = - £3,075
The rest depends on salaries charged at the 1.2% increase in the rate for wages above £9,100. I think that means that Prole has to pay his five staff around £50,000 a year before the NICs changes becomes a net negative (someone check the maths).
(Note there are some types of businesses where the EA does not apply, so it may be the case that Prole doesn't enjoy it).
The cut off point for charging ni dropped from 9100 to 5000
Yes. (9100-5000)*5*0.15 = £3,075.
Haven't you forgotten the rate going up?
Rate went up from 13.8% to 15%. So you need to apply 15% to the wages from £5k to £9.1k, and 1.2% to anything over £9.1k. That's how I backed out the £50k salary figure.
Your maths is wrong. 5 lots of £41,200 would do it, not £50k
Conclusion In conclusion, our study suggests an increased hazard of lymphoma and skin cancers among tattooed individuals, demonstrated through two designs: a twin cohort and a case-cotwin study. We are concerned that tattoo ink interacting with surrounding cells may have severe consequences. Studies that pinpoint the etiological pathway of tattoo ink induced carcinogenesis are recommended to benefit public health.
You mean injecting random chemicals of dubious provenance into the skin, where they stay for decades, is bad for the skin?
Crazy talk
Look at it this way, the way I do and used to cause regular rows with my doctor
A) you are going to die someday B ) you can do all these things to prolong your life, eat healthy, exercise, moderate your alcohol and drug intake, dont put chemicals under your skin your chances of living to 90 increase radically
or you can ignore all of B and probably only live till 75 - 80
However take route B yes on average you will live longer but the chances of having dementia/having to have someone wipe your bum for that decade also increase significantly
I prefer not to take option B and hopefully die compis mentis without someone wiping my arse for a decade personally
Each person should make their own choice I do think the medical people however only ever present the you can live till 90 side as if its all upside without pointing out your chances of either mental or physical infirmity for the last few years increases significantly
Pick your risks - skin cancer and lymphoma are fucked up ways to die. Involving long, painful decline.
Exactly the shit you don’t want.
The trick is to die, but be healthy up to the point that you just stop. My grandmother for example - 89, living in her own place (sheltered accommodation), they came in one morning… found her dressed for the day, sitting in her arm chair. Morning cup of tea going cold.
Or my father-in-law - 98, going up and down 4 flights of stairs in the house daily. One day, didn’t feel right. Hospital that evening, didn’t make it through the next day.
Yep, that's the way
Happened to an old friend of mine. Died simply and quietly in his old chair, on his own, with no visible signs of struggle, and - no joke - a beatific smile on his face. Someone came in and found him that way
Tho only downside is that he was 27 and a heroin addict and he still had the foil of smack in one hand, which had just killed him. But still. Good way to go
The 21% for Labour in todays YouGov poll was apparently their lowest score with them since Oct 2019. I feel like it can’t really be true, but I guess the local election scores back it up
Conclusion In conclusion, our study suggests an increased hazard of lymphoma and skin cancers among tattooed individuals, demonstrated through two designs: a twin cohort and a case-cotwin study. We are concerned that tattoo ink interacting with surrounding cells may have severe consequences. Studies that pinpoint the etiological pathway of tattoo ink induced carcinogenesis are recommended to benefit public health.
You mean injecting random chemicals of dubious provenance into the skin, where they stay for decades, is bad for the skin?
Crazy talk
Look at it this way, the way I do and used to cause regular rows with my doctor
A) you are going to die someday B ) you can do all these things to prolong your life, eat healthy, exercise, moderate your alcohol and drug intake, dont put chemicals under your skin your chances of living to 90 increase radically
or you can ignore all of B and probably only live till 75 - 80
However take route B yes on average you will live longer but the chances of having dementia/having to have someone wipe your bum for that decade also increase significantly
I prefer not to take option B and hopefully die compis mentis without someone wiping my arse for a decade personally
Each person should make their own choice I do think the medical people however only ever present the you can live till 90 side as if its all upside without pointing out your chances of either mental or physical infirmity for the last few years increases significantly
Pick your risks - skin cancer and lymphoma are fucked up ways to die. Involving long, painful decline.
Exactly the shit you don’t want.
The trick is to die, but be healthy up to the point that you just stop. My grandmother for example - 89, living in her own place (sheltered accommodation), they came in one morning… found her dressed for the day, sitting in her arm chair. Morning cup of tea going cold.
Or my father-in-law - 98, going up and down 4 flights of stairs in the house daily. One day, didn’t feel right. Hospital that evening, didn’t make it through the next day.
Yep, that's the way
Happened to an old friend of mine. Died simply and quietly in his old chair, on his own, with no visible signs of struggle, and - no joke - a beatific smile on his face. Someone came in and found him that way
Tho only downside is that he was 27 and a heroin addict and he still had the foil of smack in one hand, which had just killed him. But still. Good way to go
Happened to my dad back in 2017, he turned 80 a few months earlier, Mum and I found him dead in the shower one morning. Heart failure.
I posted this in response to @isam 's question about his mum's hip replacement yesterday, and a further PM that may be of more general interest. It's in 2 halves because I waffle. If it's not useful, feel free to ignore.
Home adaptations are the responsibility of the local authority aiui. I think It's called a Disabled Facilities Grant. They cover things like moving around the house.
It's possible there may be edge cases around "elderly or disabled?", but you find out by asking.
For basic equipment that comes in a van eg bath board, high loo seat, toilet support frames, maybe standalone shower seat, walking frame or wheelchair, you get them on loan (not the loo seat - they don't want those back) from the British Red Cross service. They should send someone out to do an assessment.
I'm not sure what they are on about with their "talk to Buckinghamshire".
(There may I suppose be anomalies by area, and Havering is Havering.)
My suggested contact is the Age UK helpline: Age UK Advice Line - 0800 678 1602
To add a little.
The category of things like grab handles outside the door, or in the shower, a wall mounted shower seat, taps with lever handles not screws, a shower with rainfall and handset, and that type of small job are probably best tackled from own money by a handyman with common sense in perhaps a day (eg use long screws - 70mm in the wright-supporting block work or bricks for handles that will bear weight, which may not be supplied).
For anything that gets wet, fluted plastic for grab handles is important; you cannot compromise on that. For other places stainless steel or chrome seems less institutional. And making showers non slip is important - even now I use stick on patches from Amazon. Croydex are a reliable brand, and Screwfix "Trade Rated" a sound recommendation.
You can get that done in days or weeks, for low hundreds all in, but take time to think carefully. With my mum we spent half an hour chatting and thinking with her sitting on the loo about where she wanted grab handles etc. That type of approach also helps to bring it all into the open.
The grants tend to address things that are more like building work eg adding a downstairs loo or shower in a new subdivided room. They take longer, but you may get thousands. I know someone who had a lift installed in a 2 bed terrace on a grant under a council obligation.
At best they take years, just had infirm relative get told they needed it but as they had no budget then tough luck, including a care package.
Conclusion In conclusion, our study suggests an increased hazard of lymphoma and skin cancers among tattooed individuals, demonstrated through two designs: a twin cohort and a case-cotwin study. We are concerned that tattoo ink interacting with surrounding cells may have severe consequences. Studies that pinpoint the etiological pathway of tattoo ink induced carcinogenesis are recommended to benefit public health.
You mean injecting random chemicals of dubious provenance into the skin, where they stay for decades, is bad for the skin?
Crazy talk
Look at it this way, the way I do and used to cause regular rows with my doctor
A) you are going to die someday B ) you can do all these things to prolong your life, eat healthy, exercise, moderate your alcohol and drug intake, dont put chemicals under your skin your chances of living to 90 increase radically
or you can ignore all of B and probably only live till 75 - 80
However take route B yes on average you will live longer but the chances of having dementia/having to have someone wipe your bum for that decade also increase significantly
I prefer not to take option B and hopefully die compis mentis without someone wiping my arse for a decade personally
Each person should make their own choice I do think the medical people however only ever present the you can live till 90 side as if its all upside without pointing out your chances of either mental or physical infirmity for the last few years increases significantly
Pick your risks - skin cancer and lymphoma are fucked up ways to die. Involving long, painful decline.
Exactly the shit you don’t want.
The trick is to die, but be healthy up to the point that you just stop. My grandmother for example - 89, living in her own place (sheltered accommodation), they came in one morning… found her dressed for the day, sitting in her arm chair. Morning cup of tea going cold.
Or my father-in-law - 98, going up and down 4 flights of stairs in the house daily. One day, didn’t feel right. Hospital that evening, didn’t make it through the next day.
Yep, that's the way
Happened to an old friend of mine. Died simply and quietly in his old chair, on his own, with no visible signs of struggle, and - no joke - a beatific smile on his face. Someone came in and found him that way
Tho only downside is that he was 27 and a heroin addict and he still had the foil of smack in one hand, which had just killed him. But still. Good way to go
Happened to my dad back in 2017, he turned 80 a few months earlier, Mum and I found him dead in the shower one morning. Heart failure.
Ah, I'm sorry. Did he enjoy that last hit of heroin?
I just had lunch with a former colleague who is now head of a public sector quango. He is, or was for the 25 years I've known him anyway, a man of few discernible political opinions, and the few one can discern are centrist and non-controversial.
To my astonishment, more or less as soon as we sat down, he launched a scathing attack on the current government, in particular the big NI rise, which had forced him to cut staff and the endless pandering to the Net Zero mob, which complicated his job in other ways. He said he wished SKS's policies had been scrutinised before the election so people could have seen how they didn't add up. I haven't been this surprised by a friend's politics since my former university friend, who I remember selling the Socialist Worker, told me that the atmosphere on his campus was much too woke even for him.
Anyway, my point is, centrist public sector quangocrats should be a natural constituency for our centrist, public sector quangocrat PM. If Starmer is losing them (based on this sample of one), he really IS in trouble.
Many people don't understand how damaging to smaller (and especially family-run) businesses the increase in NI was.
On the contrary, the change was good for small family-run businesses due to the change in the employment allowance. Any business with 7* or fewer employees was better off.
It was large employers of minimum-wage staff who were hammered the most.
*from memory.
Not anecdotally amongst my circle it wasn't.
It's quite complicated and there are eligibility criteria for it, but for most small businesses it will have either meant a tax cut or a significant mitigation. They've doubled it from £5000 to £10,500, so you'd have to have a reasonable NICs bill before the overall changes to NICs becomes a net negative.
My back-of-envelope was that about 2/3rds of businesses (with employees) will be better off, representing about 4 million workers in the smallest companies.
Are you however taking into account that a lot of employees they never had to pay ni for before they now do as the amount they can earn before employer ni has dropped from 9100 to 5000
Yes, it takes that into account. That additional cost is offset by the change in the allowance.
My dodgy assumption is that most small employers (fewer than 10 people) have lower average salaries that bigger ones. That's true to an extent, but I think my figure is an overestimate on that basis. Still, even if it's not true for all of the smallest businesses on an absolute basis, the budget was relatively better the smaller your business was.
(If Labour was any good at comms, they would have been shouting that from the rooftops).
I consider(ed) myself extremely well informed and yet had no idea this was the case. Truly a huge comms fail. The big business/small business divide is a pretty good fault line - very well exploited by the Brexit campaigners in the referendum.
Just to point out you have eabhals assertions vs TheProles actual experience where he is saying taking on a 5th employee has increased the tax bill....
It depends on how much Prole's employees are paid.
Employment allowance change = +£5,500 Drop in secondary threshold charged at 15% = - £3,075
The rest depends on salaries charged at the 1.2% increase in the rate for wages above £9,100. I think that means that Prole has to pay his five staff around £50,000 a year before the NICs changes becomes a net negative (someone check the maths).
(Note there are some types of businesses where the EA does not apply, so it may be the case that Prole doesn't enjoy it).
The cut off point for charging ni dropped from 9100 to 5000
Yes. (9100-5000)*5*0.15 = £3,075.
Haven't you forgotten the rate going up?
Rate went up from 13.8% to 15%. So you need to apply 15% to the wages from £5k to £9.1k, and 1.2% to anything over £9.1k. That's how I backed out the £50k salary figure.
Your maths is wrong. 5 lots of £41,200 would do it, not £50k
I think that still leaves you £500 up. I get £49,500.
The 21% for Labour in todays YouGov poll was apparently their lowest score with them since Oct 2019. I feel like it can’t really be true, but I guess the local election scores back it up
Their lowest ever GE UK opinion poll score is 18% once with YouGov in July 2019 (and they had 5 19%s with YouGov around then too and they bottomed out at 18% with Ipsos just before the 2009 Euro and Local elections. They've never dipped below 20% with anyone else
I just had lunch with a former colleague who is now head of a public sector quango. He is, or was for the 25 years I've known him anyway, a man of few discernible political opinions, and the few one can discern are centrist and non-controversial.
To my astonishment, more or less as soon as we sat down, he launched a scathing attack on the current government, in particular the big NI rise, which had forced him to cut staff and the endless pandering to the Net Zero mob, which complicated his job in other ways. He said he wished SKS's policies had been scrutinised before the election so people could have seen how they didn't add up. I haven't been this surprised by a friend's politics since my former university friend, who I remember selling the Socialist Worker, told me that the atmosphere on his campus was much too woke even for him.
Anyway, my point is, centrist public sector quangocrats should be a natural constituency for our centrist, public sector quangocrat PM. If Starmer is losing them (based on this sample of one), he really IS in trouble.
Many people don't understand how damaging to smaller (and especially family-run) businesses the increase in NI was.
On the contrary, the change was good for small family-run businesses due to the change in the employment allowance. Any business with 7* or fewer employees was better off.
It was large employers of minimum-wage staff who were hammered the most.
*from memory.
7!?! Try 4. I took on my 5th employee this month, I'm now worse off than I would have been before the changes. As a small business owner, I hate this government with a passion, every single change is for the worse.
In particular they don't understand that turnover taxes (which is what employers NI is, also business rates) are ruinous, particularly if you are trying to bootstrap and scale a business. Tax profits by all means - if you're making a profit, there is money there for the state to skim off. But taxing turnover is horrendous because it's just another drain on your finances regardless of if you are making money or not.
The problem is that none of them have ever been where I am. They've not had to try and manage cash flow to magic up wages every month. They haven't remortgaged their house to put their own money into an enterprise as a initial source of funds. They haven't worked for 4 years unpaid (which is basically what I did, fortunately I had a wife to live off!) to fund the management buyout of a failing business and then managed to turn it round. They've never taken a chance on an employee with a dubious employment history in the hope that they would come good.
They have no knowledge, no understanding, no ability - other than to keep trying to see if the pips squeak yet. And yet they have the nerve to claim they want growth. The engine of the economy is small and micro businesses - but government sets out by tax and regulation to systematically destroy them.
I've no idea if Farage will be better - it's going to be difficult to be worse. But I'll rejoice to see the day that the smarmy griming idiot who is presently prime minister is booted out of a job he neither deserves nor has the ability to do. I would never employ a man that stupid and damaging to sweep my workshop floor.
But Keir wants us to be an "AI Powerhouse" and "It will give the industry the foundation it needs and will turbocharge the Plan for Change". And, surely, even if he's not an expert in small businesses, he's an expert in "AI"?
Conclusion In conclusion, our study suggests an increased hazard of lymphoma and skin cancers among tattooed individuals, demonstrated through two designs: a twin cohort and a case-cotwin study. We are concerned that tattoo ink interacting with surrounding cells may have severe consequences. Studies that pinpoint the etiological pathway of tattoo ink induced carcinogenesis are recommended to benefit public health.
You mean injecting random chemicals of dubious provenance into the skin, where they stay for decades, is bad for the skin?
Crazy talk
Look at it this way, the way I do and used to cause regular rows with my doctor
A) you are going to die someday B ) you can do all these things to prolong your life, eat healthy, exercise, moderate your alcohol and drug intake, dont put chemicals under your skin your chances of living to 90 increase radically
or you can ignore all of B and probably only live till 75 - 80
However take route B yes on average you will live longer but the chances of having dementia/having to have someone wipe your bum for that decade also increase significantly
I prefer not to take option B and hopefully die compis mentis without someone wiping my arse for a decade personally
Each person should make their own choice I do think the medical people however only ever present the you can live till 90 side as if its all upside without pointing out your chances of either mental or physical infirmity for the last few years increases significantly
Pick your risks - skin cancer and lymphoma are fucked up ways to die. Involving long, painful decline.
Exactly the shit you don’t want.
The trick is to die, but be healthy up to the point that you just stop. My grandmother for example - 89, living in her own place (sheltered accommodation), they came in one morning… found her dressed for the day, sitting in her arm chair. Morning cup of tea going cold.
Or my father-in-law - 98, going up and down 4 flights of stairs in the house daily. One day, didn’t feel right. Hospital that evening, didn’t make it through the next day.
Yep, that's the way
Happened to an old friend of mine. Died simply and quietly in his old chair, on his own, with no visible signs of struggle, and - no joke - a beatific smile on his face. Someone came in and found him that way
Tho only downside is that he was 27 and a heroin addict and he still had the foil of smack in one hand, which had just killed him. But still. Good way to go
I just had lunch with a former colleague who is now head of a public sector quango. He is, or was for the 25 years I've known him anyway, a man of few discernible political opinions, and the few one can discern are centrist and non-controversial.
To my astonishment, more or less as soon as we sat down, he launched a scathing attack on the current government, in particular the big NI rise, which had forced him to cut staff and the endless pandering to the Net Zero mob, which complicated his job in other ways. He said he wished SKS's policies had been scrutinised before the election so people could have seen how they didn't add up. I haven't been this surprised by a friend's politics since my former university friend, who I remember selling the Socialist Worker, told me that the atmosphere on his campus was much too woke even for him.
Anyway, my point is, centrist public sector quangocrats should be a natural constituency for our centrist, public sector quangocrat PM. If Starmer is losing them (based on this sample of one), he really IS in trouble.
Many people don't understand how damaging to smaller (and especially family-run) businesses the increase in NI was.
On the contrary, the change was good for small family-run businesses due to the change in the employment allowance. Any business with 7* or fewer employees was better off.
It was large employers of minimum-wage staff who were hammered the most.
*from memory.
Not anecdotally amongst my circle it wasn't.
It's quite complicated and there are eligibility criteria for it, but for most small businesses it will have either meant a tax cut or a significant mitigation. They've doubled it from £5000 to £10,500, so you'd have to have a reasonable NICs bill before the overall changes to NICs becomes a net negative.
My back-of-envelope was that about 2/3rds of businesses (with employees) will be better off, representing about 4 million workers in the smallest companies.
Are you however taking into account that a lot of employees they never had to pay ni for before they now do as the amount they can earn before employer ni has dropped from 9100 to 5000
Yes, it takes that into account. That additional cost is offset by the change in the allowance.
My dodgy assumption is that most small employers (fewer than 10 people) have lower average salaries that bigger ones. That's true to an extent, but I think my figure is an overestimate on that basis. Still, even if it's not true for all of the smallest businesses on an absolute basis, the budget was relatively better the smaller your business was.
(If Labour was any good at comms, they would have been shouting that from the rooftops).
I consider(ed) myself extremely well informed and yet had no idea this was the case. Truly a huge comms fail. The big business/small business divide is a pretty good fault line - very well exploited by the Brexit campaigners in the referendum.
Just to point out you have eabhals assertions vs TheProles actual experience where he is saying taking on a 5th employee has increased the tax bill....
It depends on how much Prole's employees are paid.
Employment allowance change = +£5,500 Drop in secondary threshold charged at 15% = - £3,075
The rest depends on salaries charged at the 1.2% increase in the rate for wages above £9,100. I think that means that Prole has to pay his five staff around £50,000 a year before the NICs changes becomes a net negative (someone check the maths).
(Note there are some types of businesses where the EA does not apply, so it may be the case that Prole doesn't enjoy it).
The cut off point for charging ni dropped from 9100 to 5000
Yes. (9100-5000)*5*0.15 = £3,075.
Haven't you forgotten the rate going up?
Rate went up from 13.8% to 15%. So you need to apply 15% to the wages from £5k to £9.1k, and 1.2% to anything over £9.1k. That's how I backed out the £50k salary figure.
Your maths is wrong. 5 lots of £41,200 would do it, not £50k
I think that still leaves you £500 up. I get £49,500.
The 21% for Labour in todays YouGov poll was apparently their lowest score with them since Oct 2019. I feel like it can’t really be true, but I guess the local election scores back it up
Tories back up a bit, Lib Dems down a bit. Feels a bit more realistic - I didn't really see the Lib Dems overtaking the Tories and still don't.
I'd love to know the secret of earning enough money so you can afford to retire by your early to mid 50s.
My mortgage alone stretches to 62.
Being fortunate enough to have been born in an era of affordable housing, or fortunate enough to have parents who helped you onto the ladder.
Though I wouldn't want to retire in my early 50s, I'd be bored shitless. As much as I enjoy my holidays from work and weekends etc I do enjoy the routine of having stuff to do.
I reckon I'd find things that didn't bore me shitless but weren't the corporate grindstone.
IMO people retiring that early need a serious long-term volunteer role, such as restoring a local windmill or something equally significant.
Certainly my plan if I ever do finish early and I’m in good health is to do just that. Well, not windmills (I can’t say I would want it too significant) but things in the community, work with local animal rescues, wildlife projects etc. it would still be important for me to have a purpose, I’d just like it if my purpose was a bit different, and also give me some time to achieve some other ambitions.
I think the future will be more of a phase out than a big bang retirement.
I'm in my late 20s and already I'm seeing lots of my mates transition from FT work to 7-9 days/fortnight working. The Directors in my department at my old work were exclusively 3/4 days a week when I left. The marginal rates past £100k are so punitive it makes sense to go early and then scale back the hours as pay increases.
I've just made the move to a company which will be sold in 5ish years, and after that I'll either do one more go round or do similar for a good few years.
The only reason McDonnell would want the whip back is if he were planning to stand as a Labour candidate next time. He's already 73 (JCorbz is 76). Clearly they are both as stubborn as anything, but do they really want to sign up for another five years in four years' time?
The only reason McDonnell would want the whip back is if he were planning to stand as a Labour candidate next time. He's already 73 (JCorbz is 76). Clearly they are both as stubborn as anything, but do they really want to sign up for another five years in four years' time?
McDonnell also has a heart condition. I'll be very surprised if he stands again.
The only reason McDonnell would want the whip back is if he were planning to stand as a Labour candidate next time. He's already 73 (JCorbz is 76). Clearly they are both as stubborn as anything, but do they really want to sign up for another five years in four years' time?
McDonnell also has a heart condition. I'll be very surprised if he stands again.
I wonder if his idea is backing a Rayner challenge or if they plan one of the left to run. - Trickett, Burgon, maybe Lewis? All the older socialist group plus Long Bailey have had a dart
I mean, FFS. Mine is on 'do not disturb' from 9.30pm to 7am. And that means I am healthier and more productive when I'm awake.
And, as it turns out, he wasn't needed. Which is the way it should be as if safety depends on one individual that's about as unsafe as it's possible to be.
Maybe he could have an emergency pager by his bed, but really.
I mean, FFS. Mine is on 'do not disturb' from 9.30pm to 7am. And that means I am healthier and more productive when I'm awake.
And, as it turns out, he wasn't needed. Which is the way it should be as if safety depends on one individual that's about as unsafe as it's possible to be.
Maybe he could have an emergency pager by his bed, but really.
Nah, even when I have my phone on do not disturb certain people can still contact me if I customise it.
Family, some close friends, and key people at work.
Oh sorry, I thought the header "I am prolier than thou" was about or written by @kinabalu.
Pre-ascension.
How long have you been on PB?
Everybody knows I am primus inter pares of PB proles, surely you must be familiar with me being the grandson of humble immigrants to the UK.
Your father wasn't a toolmaker by any chance, was he?
My father was even more working class, he was a doctor.
Danny Baker tells the story of being given a private room during his childhood appendectomy because they'd misheard his father's occupation – he was a docker.
I mean, FFS. Mine is on 'do not disturb' from 9.30pm to 7am. And that means I am healthier and more productive when I'm awake.
And, as it turns out, he wasn't needed. Which is the way it should be as if safety depends on one individual that's about as unsafe as it's possible to be.
Maybe he could have an emergency pager by his bed, but really.
Nah, even when I have my phone on do not disturb certain people can still contact me if I customise it.
Family, some close friends, and key people at work.
Yep my phone is configured so that if my parents or wife ring me twice in quick succession, no matter the time of day, it will actually ring.
Of course other phones may not have that built in bit of functionality...
I'd love to know the secret of earning enough money so you can afford to retire by your early to mid 50s.
My mortgage alone stretches to 62.
Working from home years before the pandemic. Very busy. I'd picked out four horses the night before but did not have time to place any bets. The first won, unbacked.
So as I dialled into a client meeting, I placed a £5 trixie on the other three (that's three doubles and a treble) coming to £20.
That evening I went to the kebab shop and watched the last race in the betting shop next door. All three of my horses had won at big prices, coming to £7 or £8,000.
Got home, logged in, £32,000. Instead of a £5 trixie costing £20, I had in my rush accidentally placed a £20 trixie.
Paid off the mortgage that week, and started saving instead.
So that is my advice. Take up gambling. Can't go wrong!
For the sake of my sanity, I never did work out what I'd have won if I'd included the first horse, but not accidentally over-staked the bet.
I'd love to know the secret of earning enough money so you can afford to retire by your early to mid 50s.
My mortgage alone stretches to 62.
Working from home years before the pandemic. Very busy. I'd picked out four horses the night before but did not have time to place any bets. The first won, unbacked.
So as I dialled into a client meeting, I placed a £5 trixie on the other three (that's three doubles and a treble) coming to £20.
That evening I went to the kebab shop and watched the last race in the betting shop next door. All three of my horses had won at big prices, coming to £7 or £8,000.
Got home, logged in, £32,000. Instead of a £5 trixie costing £20, I had in my rush accidentally placed a £20 trixie.
Paid off the mortgage that week, and started saving instead.
So that is my advice. Take up gambling. Can't go wrong!
For the sake of my sanity, I never did work out what I'd have won if I'd included the first horse, but not accidentally over-staked the bet.
I mean, FFS. Mine is on 'do not disturb' from 9.30pm to 7am. And that means I am healthier and more productive when I'm awake.
And, as it turns out, he wasn't needed. Which is the way it should be as if safety depends on one individual that's about as unsafe as it's possible to be.
Maybe he could have an emergency pager by his bed, but really.
Nah, even when I have my phone on do not disturb certain people can still contact me if I customise it.
Family, some close friends, and key people at work.
Yep my phone is configured so that if my parents or wife ring me twice in quick succession, no matter the time of day, it will actually ring.
Of course other phones may not have that built in bit of functionality...
There seems to be quite a measure of central coordination telling Council leaders what to do from Reform HQ. Havinbg discovered that the DEI stuff that will be cut to save 10s of millions does npt in general exist, or are basic legal duties, it will be ... interesting. Is such instruction from a political party legal? I think that question has a complex answer.
One target everywhere seems to be working from home. I've no idea why they think this will change anything, other than they will need to reconfigure a lot of buildings.
- Andrea the Regional Mayor of Greater Lincs seems to be reverse ferreting with some alacrity, and may even have noticed that 10k jobs depend on renewable energy. - County Durham has, I think, the largest majority - so they may try radical things. I wonder what will happen to Durham's restricted entry to traffic zone, if still in place? That's the sort of symbol the counter-revolutionaries might assault. When it went in I seem to recall lots of frothing. - Notts (mine) will have problems with making everyone work from offices if they try, because the brand new ones are smaller. There are some noises about wanting to spend money on keeping County Hall, West Bridgford open. The last cost estimate I saw was £50m to stay there, compared to eventual ~£20m cost of the new offices in the centre of the county, rather than the extreme south. - The Hull & surrounding area Mayor seems to have vanished. He is a former boxer with a good reputation (as a boxer) but no experience. It has been put out that he is some kind of mascot, but that's not what a Regional Mayor is for. - Kent CC also sounds quite juicy.
My forecast: increased Trade Union Membership in Reform run Councils.
WFH will be an interesting one to watch. Whatever its demerits, it is cheaper than providing a load of desk space in County Hall. Do councils really want to spend money on that, especially in a context where lack of money is pouring in?
More generally, leaders of these councils have got significant mandates in their own names. If they are being expected to run as Farage franchises, how long until they say "thanks but no thanks"?
Can councils afford to buy back (and refurbish) the offices they've closed down. One look at your typical council budget will reveal that the very obvious answer is no chance...
My international megacorp employer told us to work from home during the London Olympics. Then they realised if we worked from home they could sell the building. That's why I was WFH a decade before it became fashionable.
Same with HMG. The Conservative government, at the same time as Jacob Rees-Mogg was leaving notes on empty desks, was busy offloading empty office space.
Sure there are social and business costs to WFH but in the short term at least, workers save time and money on commuting and employers save on accommodation. Sod the long term.
I'd love to know the secret of earning enough money so you can afford to retire by your early to mid 50s.
My mortgage alone stretches to 62.
Being fortunate enough to have been born in an era of affordable housing, or fortunate enough to have parents who helped you onto the ladder.
Though I wouldn't want to retire in my early 50s, I'd be bored shitless. As much as I enjoy my holidays from work and weekends etc I do enjoy the routine of having stuff to do.
I reckon I'd find things that didn't bore me shitless but weren't the corporate grindstone.
IMO people retiring that early need a serious long-term volunteer role, such as restoring a local windmill or something equally significant.
Restoring a windmill..
Look, I retired early, at 56. I'd not turn my nose up at restoring a windmill. I'd prefer though to use my skills in (say) working on fusion power.
This is a party that once had a membership numbered in millions. Now they hold a young cons event for people from all over the country and get about twenty in a pub.
This is a party that once had a membership numbered in millions. Now they hold a young cons event for people from all over the country and get about twenty in a pub.
Still points to Kemi, she's trying.
Good time to be a young Conservative. Buy the dip.
This is a party that once had a membership numbered in millions. Now they hold a young cons event for people from all over the country and get about twenty in a pub.
Don’t want to stereotype, but sounds like the type whose son might stab a girl if he gets the brush off
The man arrested on suspicion of mowing down dozens of people with a car during a Liverpool Football Club victory parade is a middle-class father who lives in a detached suburban home.
Don’t want to stereotype, but sounds like the type whose son might stab a girl if he gets the brush off
The man arrested on suspicion of mowing down dozens of people with a car during a Liverpool Football Club victory parade is a middle-class father who lives in a detached suburban home.
The Labour Government getting absolutely hammered on ITV News for dramatically reducing police numbers since 2010.
As I've mentioned before, I believe the Conservatives lost their majority in the 2017 election not over social care but because of the two terrorist outrages during the election campaign itself – London Bridge and the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester – and Theresa May's denial that axing thousands of police had made any difference.
Don’t want to stereotype, but sounds like the type whose son might stab a girl if he gets the brush off
The man arrested on suspicion of mowing down dozens of people with a car during a Liverpool Football Club victory parade is a middle-class father who lives in a detached suburban home.
Don’t want to stereotype, but sounds like the type whose son might stab a girl if he gets the brush off
The man arrested on suspicion of mowing down dozens of people with a car during a Liverpool Football Club victory parade is a middle-class father who lives in a detached suburban home.
Don’t want to stereotype, but sounds like the type whose son might stab a girl if he gets the brush off
The man arrested on suspicion of mowing down dozens of people with a car during a Liverpool Football Club victory parade is a middle-class father who lives in a detached suburban home.
Don’t want to stereotype, but sounds like the type whose son might stab a girl if he gets the brush off
The man arrested on suspicion of mowing down dozens of people with a car during a Liverpool Football Club victory parade is a middle-class father who lives in a detached suburban home.
There seems to be quite a measure of central coordination telling Council leaders what to do from Reform HQ. Havinbg discovered that the DEI stuff that will be cut to save 10s of millions does npt in general exist, or are basic legal duties, it will be ... interesting. Is such instruction from a political party legal? I think that question has a complex answer.
One target everywhere seems to be working from home. I've no idea why they think this will change anything, other than they will need to reconfigure a lot of buildings.
- Andrea the Regional Mayor of Greater Lincs seems to be reverse ferreting with some alacrity, and may even have noticed that 10k jobs depend on renewable energy. - County Durham has, I think, the largest majority - so they may try radical things. I wonder what will happen to Durham's restricted entry to traffic zone, if still in place? That's the sort of symbol the counter-revolutionaries might assault. When it went in I seem to recall lots of frothing. - Notts (mine) will have problems with making everyone work from offices if they try, because the brand new ones are smaller. There are some noises about wanting to spend money on keeping County Hall, West Bridgford open. The last cost estimate I saw was £50m to stay there, compared to eventual ~£20m cost of the new offices in the centre of the county, rather than the extreme south. - The Hull & surrounding area Mayor seems to have vanished. He is a former boxer with a good reputation (as a boxer) but no experience. It has been put out that he is some kind of mascot, but that's not what a Regional Mayor is for. - Kent CC also sounds quite juicy.
My forecast: increased Trade Union Membership in Reform run Councils.
WFH will be an interesting one to watch. Whatever its demerits, it is cheaper than providing a load of desk space in County Hall. Do councils really want to spend money on that, especially in a context where lack of money is pouring in?
More generally, leaders of these councils have got significant mandates in their own names. If they are being expected to run as Farage franchises, how long until they say "thanks but no thanks"?
Can councils afford to buy back (and refurbish) the offices they've closed down. One look at your typical council budget will reveal that the very obvious answer is no chance...
My international megacorp employer told us to work from home during the London Olympics. Then they realised if we worked from home they could sell the building. That's why I was WFH a decade before it became fashionable.
Same with HMG. The Conservative government, at the same time as Jacob Rees-Mogg was leaving notes on empty desks, was busy offloading empty office space.
Sure there are social and business costs to WFH but in the short term at least, workers save time and money on commuting and employers save on accommodation. Sod the long term.
I bought a car back in 2004 with a similar win. At the time it was still possible to pay blackjack and make money or breakeven with the bonus incentives and the x times play through rules.
I got bored and managed to convert my £100 to £10000. Careful playing meant afterwards meant I was able to walk away with most of the money - so thank you to the Barclay Brothers whose casino it was.
I'd love to know the secret of earning enough money so you can afford to retire by your early to mid 50s.
My mortgage alone stretches to 62.
Being fortunate enough to have been born in an era of affordable housing, or fortunate enough to have parents who helped you onto the ladder.
Though I wouldn't want to retire in my early 50s, I'd be bored shitless. As much as I enjoy my holidays from work and weekends etc I do enjoy the routine of having stuff to do.
I reckon I'd find things that didn't bore me shitless but weren't the corporate grindstone.
IMO people retiring that early need a serious long-term volunteer role, such as restoring a local windmill or something equally significant.
Restoring a windmill..
Look, I retired early, at 56. I'd not turn my nose up at restoring a windmill. I'd prefer though to use my skills in (say) working on fusion power.
Infectious diseases are the classic challenge to a liberalism based on individualism. Because one person’s right to roam freely leads to a higher disease risk for everyone else. The way to square the circle is to have such a good public health response that you don’t need to make the choice, but that’s not where we were in March 2020.
We could’ve done more carrot and less stick - that would be the more liberal solution - but the Johnson administration was wedded to stick and disliked carrots.
And who was it that advised the government to be wedded to the illiberal solution, oh right, it was you. You pushed the country into lockdowns and now you're blaming everyone else having seen how damaging it's been. Sorry, there's no forgiveness from me. You condemned millions of kids to a substandard education and life chances because you couldn't make the hard decisions.
Don’t want to stereotype, but sounds like the type whose son might stab a girl if he gets the brush off
The man arrested on suspicion of mowing down dozens of people with a car during a Liverpool Football Club victory parade is a middle-class father who lives in a detached suburban home.
The driver who RAN OVER the fans outside Espanyol's stadium was A WOMAN.
She got nervous when people started hitting her car, and tried to get out of there, running over dozens of fans in the process.
Bit of an unfair comparison there.
One was the result of a coked up dickhead who accelerated at people who should be done for attempted murder, the other is the tragic result of letting women drive.
Infectious diseases are the classic challenge to a liberalism based on individualism. Because one person’s right to roam freely leads to a higher disease risk for everyone else. The way to square the circle is to have such a good public health response that you don’t need to make the choice, but that’s not where we were in March 2020.
We could’ve done more carrot and less stick - that would be the more liberal solution - but the Johnson administration was wedded to stick and disliked carrots.
And who was it that advised the government to be wedded to the illiberal solution, oh right, it was you. You pushed the country into lockdowns and now you're blaming everyone else having seen how damaging it's been. Sorry, there's no forgiveness from me. You condemned millions of kids to a substandard education and life chances because you couldn't make the hard decisions.
Johnson did, Max. Advisers advise.
He could have sold us a lockdown that left kids free to go to school and the playpark. But he didn't.
Infectious diseases are the classic challenge to a liberalism based on individualism. Because one person’s right to roam freely leads to a higher disease risk for everyone else. The way to square the circle is to have such a good public health response that you don’t need to make the choice, but that’s not where we were in March 2020.
We could’ve done more carrot and less stick - that would be the more liberal solution - but the Johnson administration was wedded to stick and disliked carrots.
And who was it that advised the government to be wedded to the illiberal solution, oh right, it was you. You pushed the country into lockdowns and now you're blaming everyone else having seen how damaging it's been. Sorry, there's no forgiveness from me. You condemned millions of kids to a substandard education and life chances because you couldn't make the hard decisions.
Johnson did, Max. Advisers advise.
He could have sold us a lockdown that left kids free to go to school and the playpark. But he didn't.
He couldn’t really,given the ‘experts’ lining up against it, including diet SAGE, given a lot of,prominence by the media
I mean, FFS. Mine is on 'do not disturb' from 9.30pm to 7am. And that means I am healthier and more productive when I'm awake.
And, as it turns out, he wasn't needed. Which is the way it should be as if safety depends on one individual that's about as unsafe as it's possible to be.
Maybe he could have an emergency pager by his bed, but really.
It's a story about the rank stupidity of Net Zero and this silly scapegoating of an individual is designed to distract from that.
Infectious diseases are the classic challenge to a liberalism based on individualism. Because one person’s right to roam freely leads to a higher disease risk for everyone else. The way to square the circle is to have such a good public health response that you don’t need to make the choice, but that’s not where we were in March 2020.
We could’ve done more carrot and less stick - that would be the more liberal solution - but the Johnson administration was wedded to stick and disliked carrots.
And who was it that advised the government to be wedded to the illiberal solution, oh right, it was you. You pushed the country into lockdowns and now you're blaming everyone else having seen how damaging it's been. Sorry, there's no forgiveness from me. You condemned millions of kids to a substandard education and life chances because you couldn't make the hard decisions.
Johnson did, Max. Advisers advise.
He could have sold us a lockdown that left kids free to go to school and the playpark. But he didn't.
He couldn’t really,given the ‘experts’ lining up against it, including diet SAGE, given a lot of,prominence by the media
Comments
I 100% agree that the rise in National Insurance - which hits the poorest and discourages employment - is monumentally stupid.
We want to maximize the number of people in work, and reduce the barriers to employment for those with the fewest skills, and NI is a disastrous tax on this group.
In particular they don't understand that turnover taxes (which is what employers NI is, also business rates) are ruinous, particularly if you are trying to bootstrap and scale a business. Tax profits by all means - if you're making a profit, there is money there for the state to skim off. But taxing turnover is horrendous because it's just another drain on your finances regardless of if you are making money or not.
The problem is that none of them have ever been where I am. They've not had to try and manage cash flow to magic up wages every month. They haven't remortgaged their house to put their own money into an enterprise as a initial source of funds. They haven't worked for 4 years unpaid (which is basically what I did, fortunately I had a wife to live off!) to fund the management buyout of a failing business and then managed to turn it round. They've never taken a chance on an employee with a dubious employment history in the hope that they would come good.
They have no knowledge, no understanding, no ability - other than to keep trying to see if the pips squeak yet. And yet they have the nerve to claim they want growth. The engine of the economy is small and micro businesses - but government sets out by tax and regulation to systematically destroy them.
I've no idea if Farage will be better - it's going to be difficult to be worse. But I'll rejoice to see the day that the smarmy griming idiot who is presently prime minister is booted out of a job he neither deserves nor has the ability to do. I would never employ a man that stupid and damaging to sweep my workshop floor.
For context the company I worked for then leased a floor on a four story council building, another company leased the floor above. The other floors unrented. Just prior to covid so it wasn't covid related the lease was up, council wanted a lot more rent, company said you are joking arent you. You cant even rent out the other 2 floors at the current rent. Council stuck to its guns we said fine bye and rented another office building at 3/4 of the price. Other company did too a few months later as the council was just as intransigent with them.
If they had just kept the rent the same both companies would have swallowed it probably as not worth the effort of moving but from what I gather the increase they wanted was in the region of 40%
Obviously the likes of Tesco have that, but then is it really going to be worth it for them to double up on staff? There must be huge costs in just training and managing extra people, in dealing with people more likely to have other jobs, be less invested in staying etc. It may add to their costs, but I doubt it's worth having so many just do a day's work each week.
Look, I retired early, at 56. I'd not turn my nose up at restoring a windmill. I'd prefer though to use my skills in (say) working on fusion power.
Offer me that, and then we're talking.
Say you have 100k of these workers each you both save £29.38 tax per week per worker. That is £152,776,000 a year you are saving
I think the government should go further and increase it again at the next budget.
You're right that turnover taxes are a rotten idea.
Highest quality tweet ever. 'Man will go to work'
https://step.ukaea.uk/west-burton/
Any chance it gets built?
But hey - as you're a doubter then just pop your address here and we can make it handy for you to see all the explosions and success at first hand.
(Could a well meaning fusion experiment cause huge destruction - who knows, the CERN stuff where they create momentary black holes is more scary (possibly not what they actually do, just what the press say).
The only interesting company (from a commercial point of view) in the Fusion space is First Light Fusion. They have a non-zero chance of success in my view. Very, very close to zero though.
The thing is about fusion is that you just need to find a way to be a dating agency for hydrogen. Building stars might be overkill.
Probably more common at both times for couples not married yet, so that their is a plan B in case the relationship goes phut.
It's easy to lose focus, and drift, due to loss of routine.
I think we've discussed this on PB recently.
Home adaptations are the responsibility of the local authority aiui. I think It's called a Disabled Facilities Grant. They cover things like moving around the house.
Who can get one (this includes "injury"): https://www.disabilityrightsuk.org/resources/disabled-facilities-grants#Who
what it can cover: https://www.disabilityrightsuk.org/resources/disabled-facilities-grants#What
It's possible there may be edge cases around "elderly or disabled?", but you find out by asking.
For basic equipment that comes in a van eg bath board, high loo seat, toilet support frames, maybe standalone shower seat, walking frame or wheelchair, you get them on loan (not the loo seat - they don't want those back) from the British Red Cross service. They should send someone out to do an assessment.
I'm not sure what they are on about with their "talk to Buckinghamshire".
(There may I suppose be anomalies by area, and Havering is Havering.)
My suggested contact is the Age UK helpline:
Age UK Advice Line - 0800 678 1602
To add a little.
The category of things like grab handles outside the door, or in the shower, a wall mounted shower seat, taps with lever handles not screws, a shower with rainfall and handset, and that type of small job are probably best tackled from own money by a handyman with common sense in perhaps a day (eg use long screws - 70mm in the wright-supporting block work or bricks for handles that will bear weight, which may not be supplied).
For anything that gets wet, fluted plastic for grab handles is important; you cannot compromise on that. For other places stainless steel or chrome seems less institutional. And making showers non slip is important - even now I use stick on patches from Amazon. Croydex are a reliable brand, and Screwfix "Trade Rated" a sound recommendation.
You can get that done in days or weeks, for low hundreds all in, but take time to think carefully. With my mum we spent half an hour chatting and thinking with her sitting on the loo about where she wanted grab handles etc. That type of approach also helps to bring it all into the open.
The grants tend to address things that are more like building work eg adding a downstairs loo or shower in a new subdivided room. They take longer, but you may get thousands. I know someone who had a lift installed in a 2 bed terrace on a grant under a council obligation.
My mum made a decision herself to sleep upstairs as long as possible, as she wanted to make herself walk upstairs.
I wrote up a series of articles and a thread over at Buildhub about "accessible ablutions" on what I did. There's a good range of material, and products / costs. We also had to fit a shower room downstairs.
Here's a link:
https://forum.buildhub.org.uk/blogs/entry/622-adapting-a-house-for-people-who-are-frail-elderly-or-disabled/
HTH
* My gran broke her second hip before the first one recovered, and that sent her from a walking stick to a zimmer or armchair forever.
Q: "On Iran, did you warn Prime Minister Netanyahu against taking some sort of actions that could disrupt the talks there in a phone call last week?"
President Trump: "Well, I'd like to be honest. Yes I did."
Employment allowance change = +£5,500
Drop in secondary threshold charged at 15% = - £3,075
The rest depends on salaries charged at the 1.2% increase in the rate for wages above £9,100. I think that means that Prole has to pay his five staff around £50,000 a year before the NICs changes becomes a net negative (someone check the maths).
(Note there are some types of businesses where the EA does not apply, so it may be the case that Prole doesn't enjoy it).
When I ran the numbers last year, IIRC at the sorts of rates we pay very small employers (2-3 staff) win from the changes (companies with just one on payroll don't get the employment allowance, so get completely shafted). With 4 employees, it was a wash, 5 or more and you lost out.
The thing is, if the government wants growth, it's the SME sector that will have to deliver it - but turnover taxes which essentially increase as you scale (so employees 5 and 6 cost you lots more than 3 and 4) and particularly stupid - if you could shift lots of 4 employee businesses to being 6 employee businesses, that should do amazing things for gdp.
Early on the Sunday morning the care home manager rang again. Mother had died in her sleep, apparently early that morning.
https://x.com/DavidMarkDC/status/1927777858795061531
Still blows my mind that his grandfather was born in 1790.
Perhaps a smarter way to do it is to ramp up employer NICs as headcount increases, with a large £20-30k allowance to begin with.
Happened to an old friend of mine. Died simply and quietly in his old chair, on his own, with no visible signs of struggle, and - no joke - a beatific smile on his face. Someone came in and found him that way
Tho only downside is that he was 27 and a heroin addict and he still had the foil of smack in one hand, which had just killed him. But still. Good way to go
((5500 - (9100-5000)*0.15*5)/0.012 + 9100*5)/5
*Trump Always Chickens Out
I want someone to make hats now
Surely?
Trust in The Plan for Change. And the AI.
Trust in Keir.
John McDonnell calls for grassroots leadership challenge to Starmer government
In opinion piece for the Guardian, former chancellor says party members, unions and MPs should ‘take back control’
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/may/28/john-mcdonnell-calls-for-grassroots-leadership-challenge-to-keir-starmer-government
I'm in my late 20s and already I'm seeing lots of my mates transition from FT work to 7-9 days/fortnight working. The Directors in my department at my old work were exclusively 3/4 days a week when I left. The marginal rates past £100k are so punitive it makes sense to go early and then scale back the hours as pay increases.
I've just made the move to a company which will be sold in 5ish years, and after that I'll either do one more go round or do similar for a good few years.
But - seriously? This report is criticising somebody for having his phone on silent while he is asleep?
Heathrow chief asleep as airport closed - report
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62n0y3nepzo
I mean, FFS. Mine is on 'do not disturb' from 9.30pm to 7am. And that means I am healthier and more productive when I'm awake.
And, as it turns out, he wasn't needed. Which is the way it should be as if safety depends on one individual that's about as unsafe as it's possible to be.
Maybe he could have an emergency pager by his bed, but really.
Family, some close friends, and key people at work.
Of course other phones may not have that built in bit of functionality...
So as I dialled into a client meeting, I placed a £5 trixie on the other three (that's three doubles and a treble) coming to £20.
That evening I went to the kebab shop and watched the last race in the betting shop next door. All three of my horses had won at big prices, coming to £7 or £8,000.
Got home, logged in, £32,000. Instead of a £5 trixie costing £20, I had in my rush accidentally placed a £20 trixie.
Paid off the mortgage that week, and started saving instead.
So that is my advice. Take up gambling. Can't go wrong!
For the sake of my sanity, I never did work out what I'd have won if I'd included the first horse, but not accidentally over-staked the bet.
Same with HMG. The Conservative government, at the same time as Jacob Rees-Mogg was leaving notes on empty desks, was busy offloading empty office space.
Sure there are social and business costs to WFH but in the short term at least, workers save time and money on commuting and employers save on accommodation. Sod the long term.
Kemi Badenoch
@KemiBadenoch
Dear Young Conservatives,
You asked for a YC social—and we made it happen! 🍻
https://x.com/KemiBadenoch/status/1927774640702628078
This is a party that once had a membership numbered in millions. Now they hold a young cons event for people from all over the country and get about twenty in a pub.
Still points to Kemi, she's trying.
The man arrested on suspicion of mowing down dozens of people with a car during a Liverpool Football Club victory parade is a middle-class father who lives in a detached suburban home.
https://www.thetimes.com/article/333a4a84-1a83-4531-a329-e7345d184f96?shareToken=e8f0b577e6437b666c23c168ca53089e
https://x.com/barcauniversal/status/1923106955494645828
The driver who RAN OVER the fans outside Espanyol's stadium was A WOMAN.
She got nervous when people started hitting her car, and tried to get out of there, running over dozens of fans in the process.
"Man wrongly identified as Liverpool parade driver speaks out"
Man wrongly identified as Liverpool parade driver speaks out
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cdedg865725o
I got bored and managed to convert my £100 to £10000. Careful playing meant afterwards meant I was able to walk away with most of the money - so thank you to the Barclay Brothers whose casino it was.
One was the result of a coked up dickhead who accelerated at people who should be done for attempted murder, the other is the tragic result of letting women drive.
I'll get my coat.
He could have sold us a lockdown that left kids free to go to school and the playpark. But he didn't.
https://x.com/bristoliver/status/1927414020426101165?s=61
It won't work.
Could he have persuaded the public and convinced parliament? Perhaps not.