Burnham may not have much to play with until his first budget, but in the meantime he's using the limited options he's got extremely well.
Today's announcement on the £2 bus fare cap is well targeted. The prime beneficiaries are going to be those who are younger or on lower incomes (because car ownership is highly correlated with income) and who are in work or studying and rely on the bus for that. Strivers who need to make work pay. But it still applies across the board if you're below pensionable age, so no-one's really going to object. There are also indirect benefits - an upturn in bus usage could bring back some services previously lost or increase the frequency of services - even pensioners relying on buses will benefit if that happens. So it's well targeted in terms of rewarding those who need to be rewarded, and well targeted in terms of likely political impact.
Who actually uses peasant wagons?
I use “peasant wagons” and certainly am no peasant, as do plenty of my friends who aren’t peasants, some are a hundred million and more plus change from being peasants. We all use them if we are heading into town for drinks, if heading into the office or town where there is a good chance of it ending up involving drinks.
In our twenties we would likely drive in and leave cars overnight but you still had the issue of getting in to get your car the next day (lift from friend, taxi, bus) and also you had the problem of potentially being over the limit if picking up in the morning whereas we got over ourselves and realised how silly it was.
I can be on the bus, about forty mins journey and along the way people I know will get on, generally for the same reason. Some of these people are old business contacts or clients and I know they are worth crazy money but they don’t worry about the optics of taking an easy service to go and do what they want to do.
Will always get a taxi back at the end of the night as it’s easier when drinking and usually after the buses stop around midnight.
The same when I lived in Switzerland. I would travel in and home most days with the owner of the Commune’s Manor House, a hedgie, and other similar, Swiss, Brits, others, nobody felt any embarrassment about using a bus.
To caveat the above we have a great bus service, clean, good routes, cheap. Huge amounts of school buses so rarely plagued by gangs of school kids. No eating or drinking allowed so no grim smells.
I only use trains, taxis or walk.
Buses are slow, crap and full of undesirables.
Buses being full of anyone would make a change.
I wonder if this is another North/South divide though. Around here buses are the primary/sole means of public transport.
My wife has used them to get to work for a very long time and has never complained about undesirables. I never take them as I drive so can't comment.
For what it's worth, I did find the guy who reviewed every bus timetable in the country to see how far he could get in the UK using just buses (not coaches) in a single day pretty cool.
I'm fine with the nerdery and timetable analysis 👌
I enjoyed that too - it was about 5 years ago, I think? I remember he passed me on the way.
What I toko from the video was a) how quickly it is possible to get about by bus in much of the country, and b) how nice buses are nowadays - it is a far cry from the only GMPTE buses of the 80s with smoking and music on the move upstairs.
Buses #1 problem is that people do not find them legible in the same way that they do with trains. When the Beeching review closed so much rural rail in the 1960s, it made economic sense - the bus could do the job of the train just as well and more cheaply in those areas. But people - especially people from outside the area - do not treat a bus route the same as a train line. I remember going to a wedding near Cockermouth, and so many people getting a train to Penrith and then a taxi - because they wouldn't put in the tiny amount of effort to understand the bus route which pretty much replaces the old pre-beeching route. The bus would be just as quick as a train - it just isn't legible in the same way. A similar problem exists for more mundane services in local areas: where I live in suburban South Manchester, buses offer so much opportunity if you know where they go - but so many do not: it is obvious where a tram goes, but far less obvious where a bus goes without a bit of thought.
A further thought in favour of the bus: a good chunk of the population can't drive, either because they are too young, do not have a car, or never learned. The bus provides a great service for these people. My daughters' schoolfriends are largely beyond an attractive walking distance (many are 2-m miles away) - buses offer an excellent opportunity for teenagers to get about unaccompanied.
The google maps app is utterly brilliant at giving you the best public transport option - even a geek like me can't hold every bus route in Greater Manchester in my head, and certainly not the rest of the country.
Next time you get a train to an unfamiliar part of the country, I urge you to try the Google maps public transport layer to suggest ways of completing your journey which aren't taxi - you might be pleasantly surprised at how easy it is.
Trains will always beat buses mate, and Beeching was an arsehole.
Trains absolutely do not always beat buses.
My wife gets a bus to work. She gets a bus from near our house, then gets off the bus near her work, one town over.
If she wanted to get a train she would need to get a taxi to the the train station (or a bus to the train station), then a train, then a taxi from the train station to work (or a bus).
There is no advantage in doing so.
Trains may be great somewhere like London, but try living in the rest of the country. Buses can operate without tracks on existing roads which mean they can go to far more places, which is why far more people use buses than trains outside areas like London.
Trains are cleaner, nicer, more efficient, more serene, more sophisticated, and have more riding flexibility, as you can change carriage, use the toilet, walk up and down etc.
.
But trains only go where our forebears were wise enough to put down rails, and provided your Tory forebear Ernest Marples didn’t then sign off tearing them up.
We could... you know... build new railway lines? .
With all this talk of reversing the Beeching cuts, a huge money pot for doing that sort of thing was EU funding, which, I believe, we're no longer entitled to.
'DONALD Trump is reportedly furious at Ed Miliband being appointed as the UK’s Foreign Secretary under Andy Burnham’s new-look Cabinet.
Miliband, the former Leader of the Opposition, is feared to be a “point of friction” between the US and UK after several jibes and disagreements with Trump in recent years.'
We were not exactly thrilled at Hesketh as his pick for defence either.
In MAGA world countries are expected to suck it up when Trump's officials insult and attack them but only choose officials themselves that have Trump's stamp of approval. They don't inhabit the real world but I doubt many really get out much.
Well as everyone else is yapping on about Buses and Trains I might as well join in.
In the last month or so I've used both. Round trip to Glasgow from Inverness to see my son and he came back with me.
Inverness to Glasgow on the Ember bus from Inverness to Buchanan street; Bit busy but fine, nice Journey, new coach, cumfy seats...cost £0 as I have a Scotcard for oldies!..Oh wait I think I paid £1 to book my seat.
Return train from Queenstreet £14.00 each one way special offer as it was Sunday. Quiet train okay seats, but a table. Not as nice views as the bus but okay.
Lesson: When discussing Train v Bus it depends on why, where and when you are travelling,as much as anything else!
Burnham has an aspiration to do something, he can't do anything til the Budget anyway.
They need to see what fiscal leeway they have, they would have had a fair dollop had it not been for Iran and Trump, the need about 10bn to do anyting meaningful to allowances but there could well be incremental things they could add in.
A set ladder over 3-4 years of x % to cover inflation plus 1% as an example.
A specific increase for those of pensionable age to link to State Pension standard amount so no one purely on State Pension pasy tax on it
My hunch would be to find a way of balancing the tax allowance for pensioners to the triple lock, so that you start to unlock the triple lock to a median point where you commit to ensuring it by inceasing personal allowances instead initially for pensioners with then an aim of increasing for all!
Putting aside the right wing ad hominem, I vote Labour in GE’s, I don’t see how this article is ‘right wing’ either.
why shouldn’t pensioners pay tax above the threshold ? It’s income after all. Those purely on the state oension do get other passported benefits.
I think Dan Neidle is right. Leave this and target NI, it’s a tax on employment. We need more employment and to make work pay.
We were canvassed by our MP and his aides at the weekend. One thing I told them is work doesn’t pay in this country.
The rational thing is for pensioners to pay tax on their income in the same way as everyone else. But as we saw with the WFA debacle, rationality goes out the window when it comes to pensioners.
I continue to blame Clive Dunn and St Winifred's School Choir.
I blame Reeves for simply not reversing Hunt’s uncosted employee NI cuts that removed all headroom
Which is bullshit.
Hunts freeze on threshold fully funded the Employee NI change.
It was a net tax rise.
If you are going to tax, better to do it through more honest and visible taxation rather than stealth and more stealth?
Indeed, which is why we should be abolishing NI and having a single rate of income tax that is paid by everyone the same, honestly and visibly.
Not taxing employment more than unearned incomes.
That is possible but you'd need to unravel NI from the pension system which will take at least some thought and legislation. On a wider point about differential taxation of earned and unearned income, the government is supposed to be looking at private equity, dividends and capital gains tax.
The need to unravel NI from the pensions system can be a long-term problem if you set employee NI to 1% in the short term, and change the income tax 20% rate to I think 28% renenue-neutral.
Any changes upwards of tax rates of capital gains will absolutely cost more than they raise. Arthur Laffer is waving from the door of the Treasury.
Any mad idea of taxing CG at income tax levels will drive hundreds of billions in investment vehicles offshore almost immediately. Dubai and Singapore are actively looking to recruit global PE funds.
You already get NIC "contributions" at 0% so no problem with setting a global 0% threshold rate for NICs, merge income tax, and still keep contributions based on income as it currently is.
Massive increase in income tax for pensioners though from 20% to 28%... It's why I would be doing it very slowly...
Merging income tax and NI is one of those 'easy fixes' that people who have only ever been on PAYE suggest.
It would be a massive increase in tax for pensioners and the self employed. Both groups who vote heavily....
That is precisely the point.
Pensioners and the self-employed should be liable for the same taxes as those on PAYE.
Everyone who earns the same amount should be taxed the same.
I would make it net tax revenue so cut the overall rate so those who are working for their income on PAYE get a tax cut, funded by taxing others the same as they would now be paying.
Yes but would it work politically as explained above large voting blocks would be against it.
There are large voting blocs against any change.
Taxes should be simple, low and evenly applied. Complicating it to appeal to voter blocs and dumping the burden on people in paid employment just harms everyone else and harms the economy by overtaxing employment.
But you have to get elected to effect the change.
They've already been elected.
With a manifesto promise that they are committed to not breaking
To not increase taxes on working families, yes.
What I propose would be a tax cut for them.
Its more in line with the manifesto than jacking up NI was.
Not quite what the manifesto actually says is” Labour will not increase taxes on working people. Which is why we will not increase National insurance the basic rate, higher or additional rates of income tax or VAT”. So they did specifically rule out increase in tax and NI.
Additionally in clarification they explained people had worked all there lives were included in their definition of working people.
Precisely.
Merge the two and there is no net increase, indeed it could be a combined cut and sold as such. All while not increasing, indeed reducing, the tax on working people.
Its more justifiable than the sophistry around the National Insurance increase.
No some working people according to the clarification would have their tax raised. It would be a breach of the manifesto
All working people did when NICs were increased, hence the sophistry around "ah but we didn't mean Employers NICs". It was still a very clear and unambiguous rise in tax.
A merger would simplify rates and not be a net increase. There would be winners and losers but there always are.
No a merger would just lead to welfare dependency from cradle to grave on tax funded welfare, with not even any attempt to have a contributory element for that welfare whether for unemployment benefit or the state pension
No it would not.
We already have welfare dependency. A merger would reduce it by lowering the proportion of taxes levied on those who work and would not change benefits one iota. 🤦♂️
You seem to have this delusion that a merger would increase benefits. It will not.
Yes it would. Most OECD nations fund their unemployment benefits via contributions to unemployment insurance and receipt of the full state pension also requiring sufficient social insurance contributions too.
Income tax would rise of course anyway as it would have NI merged into it and those on unemployment benefit or the state pension would not ever need to contribute a penny to claim them in full
They already don't need to contribute a penny to claim in full and you can keep the contribution link (indeed strengthen it) to the new combined rate.
All that would change is that currently those on taxable benefits don't pay NICs on their benefit income while those who work for their income do.
Why do you think those working for their income should be taxed more than those on benefits?
You can scrap NI credits and then ensure the full contribution link is kept for the state pension and JSA. Pensioners of course contributed to NIC throughout their working life anyway
You could keep the contribution link to a combined income tax rate, no need to abolish the contribution thresholds.
Pensioners of course never paid toward their own pensions, which is why we not only have no savings to pay for them but we are paying interest on debt instead.
Why should those on benefits be taxed less than those working for the same income?
Just because pensioners contributed something does not mean that they contributed enough.
What's clear now is that the contributions that current pensioners made over the past 60+ or so years has turned out to be woefully short of what is needed to fund the benefits and services to which they now consider themselves entitled. Yet they just don't seem to get that hard truth. And it shouldn't be down just to the next two or three generations to make up the shortfall alone.
Can you prove that dumb theory. If I had invested my NI payments for 50 years I would get significantly more guaranteed than state pension
Which would be great if NI was savings for a pension that have been set aside.
Its not, its a tax, and one that was spent in full as we have ran a deficit due to overspending almost every year.
Burnham may not have much to play with until his first budget, but in the meantime he's using the limited options he's got extremely well.
Today's announcement on the £2 bus fare cap is well targeted. The prime beneficiaries are going to be those who are younger or on lower incomes (because car ownership is highly correlated with income) and who are in work or studying and rely on the bus for that. Strivers who need to make work pay. But it still applies across the board if you're below pensionable age, so no-one's really going to object. There are also indirect benefits - an upturn in bus usage could bring back some services previously lost or increase the frequency of services - even pensioners relying on buses will benefit if that happens. So it's well targeted in terms of rewarding those who need to be rewarded, and well targeted in terms of likely political impact.
Who actually uses peasant wagons?
I use “peasant wagons” and certainly am no peasant, as do plenty of my friends who aren’t peasants, some are a hundred million and more plus change from being peasants. We all use them if we are heading into town for drinks, if heading into the office or town where there is a good chance of it ending up involving drinks.
In our twenties we would likely drive in and leave cars overnight but you still had the issue of getting in to get your car the next day (lift from friend, taxi, bus) and also you had the problem of potentially being over the limit if picking up in the morning whereas we got over ourselves and realised how silly it was.
I can be on the bus, about forty mins journey and along the way people I know will get on, generally for the same reason. Some of these people are old business contacts or clients and I know they are worth crazy money but they don’t worry about the optics of taking an easy service to go and do what they want to do.
Will always get a taxi back at the end of the night as it’s easier when drinking and usually after the buses stop around midnight.
The same when I lived in Switzerland. I would travel in and home most days with the owner of the Commune’s Manor House, a hedgie, and other similar, Swiss, Brits, others, nobody felt any embarrassment about using a bus.
To caveat the above we have a great bus service, clean, good routes, cheap. Huge amounts of school buses so rarely plagued by gangs of school kids. No eating or drinking allowed so no grim smells.
I only use trains, taxis or walk.
Buses are slow, crap and full of undesirables.
Buses being full of anyone would make a change.
I wonder if this is another North/South divide though. Around here buses are the primary/sole means of public transport.
My wife has used them to get to work for a very long time and has never complained about undesirables. I never take them as I drive so can't comment.
For what it's worth, I did find the guy who reviewed every bus timetable in the country to see how far he could get in the UK using just buses (not coaches) in a single day pretty cool.
I'm fine with the nerdery and timetable analysis 👌
I enjoyed that too - it was about 5 years ago, I think? I remember he passed me on the way.
What I toko from the video was a) how quickly it is possible to get about by bus in much of the country, and b) how nice buses are nowadays - it is a far cry from the only GMPTE buses of the 80s with smoking and music on the move upstairs.
Buses #1 problem is that people do not find them legible in the same way that they do with trains. When the Beeching review closed so much rural rail in the 1960s, it made economic sense - the bus could do the job of the train just as well and more cheaply in those areas. But people - especially people from outside the area - do not treat a bus route the same as a train line. I remember going to a wedding near Cockermouth, and so many people getting a train to Penrith and then a taxi - because they wouldn't put in the tiny amount of effort to understand the bus route which pretty much replaces the old pre-beeching route. The bus would be just as quick as a train - it just isn't legible in the same way. A similar problem exists for more mundane services in local areas: where I live in suburban South Manchester, buses offer so much opportunity if you know where they go - but so many do not: it is obvious where a tram goes, but far less obvious where a bus goes without a bit of thought.
A further thought in favour of the bus: a good chunk of the population can't drive, either because they are too young, do not have a car, or never learned. The bus provides a great service for these people. My daughters' schoolfriends are largely beyond an attractive walking distance (many are 2-m miles away) - buses offer an excellent opportunity for teenagers to get about unaccompanied.
The google maps app is utterly brilliant at giving you the best public transport option - even a geek like me can't hold every bus route in Greater Manchester in my head, and certainly not the rest of the country.
Next time you get a train to an unfamiliar part of the country, I urge you to try the Google maps public transport layer to suggest ways of completing your journey which aren't taxi - you might be pleasantly surprised at how easy it is.
Trains will always beat buses mate, and Beeching was an arsehole.
Trains absolutely do not always beat buses.
My wife gets a bus to work. She gets a bus from near our house, then gets off the bus near her work, one town over.
If she wanted to get a train she would need to get a taxi to the the train station (or a bus to the train station), then a train, then a taxi from the train station to work (or a bus).
There is no advantage in doing so.
Trains may be great somewhere like London, but try living in the rest of the country. Buses can operate without tracks on existing roads which mean they can go to far more places, which is why far more people use buses than trains outside areas like London.
Trains are cleaner, nicer, more efficient, more serene, more sophisticated, and have more riding flexibility, as you can change carriage, use the toilet, walk up and down etc.
.
But trains only go where our forebears were wise enough to put down rails, and provided your Tory forebear Ernest Marples didn’t then sign off tearing them up.
We could... you know... build new railway lines? .
Recent evidence tends to suggest otherwise.
Probably cheaper to charter the passengers helicopter flights, based on costs for HS2.
Refusal should count as a black mark against future promotions.
As discussed yesterday, there's a very real chance that No10 North doesn't outlive Burnham, so why would you go? You could be swapping your family home in e.g. Hackney for easily a 6 figure loss (3 forced sales, 2 forced purchases and 2 lots of stamp duty) and a family home in e.g. West Ham in 3-4 years time. Plus it's likely your partner has a career which won't neatly synchronise with a relocation.
Thinking you can just relocate people show's a lack of understanding about real life in the 2020s, maybe it would have worked in the 1980s.
Indeed. See the disasterous relocation of the ONS:
"The ONS moved its statistical functions out of London in 2007, with most of them going to Newport.
About 90% of London-based staff chose to leave ONS rather than relocate."
Why is that a disaster?
great for Newport indeed, pathetic that everything is London centric, could save a fortune moving all government jobs out
It was a disaster as the ONS lost 90% of their staff and had to recruit them again.
And the people who they recruited were not of the same calibre of those who left - simply because Newport doesn't have the number of statisticians in the surrounding area to choice from that London offered.
Burnham may not have much to play with until his first budget, but in the meantime he's using the limited options he's got extremely well.
Today's announcement on the £2 bus fare cap is well targeted. The prime beneficiaries are going to be those who are younger or on lower incomes (because car ownership is highly correlated with income) and who are in work or studying and rely on the bus for that. Strivers who need to make work pay. But it still applies across the board if you're below pensionable age, so no-one's really going to object. There are also indirect benefits - an upturn in bus usage could bring back some services previously lost or increase the frequency of services - even pensioners relying on buses will benefit if that happens. So it's well targeted in terms of rewarding those who need to be rewarded, and well targeted in terms of likely political impact.
Who actually uses peasant wagons?
CR, your attitude is hurting mainly you here. Buses are very good at what they do. A few points:
- Firstly, more people use buses than any other form of public transport. - Secondly, if you're in a rural area, buses tend to be about as fast as driving if you can put in the modicum of effort to check a timetable in advance. I remember a stage night I went on: we were staying at a hotel in Warwick, and were going to the cricket at Stratford. I timed my arrival at the hotel to meet the bus, and got to Stratford more quickly and far more cheaply than those in the group for whom bus wasn't part of their mental landscape and insisted on using taxis. - If you live in an urban area most bus journeys are less annoying than having to park. - You can use the bus while drunk. - At the age of 51, sitting upstairs on the front seat of a bus is still as thrilling as it was at the age of 7.
Seriously, check out the bus opportunities from wherever you live and use them - it will take you new places to be drunk. Taxis are for losers and people
No-one I know uses buses.
Everybody I know uses buses.
That's because the bus service where I live (Brighton) is superb, with buses to pretty much all parts of the city every few minutes, and judicious use of bus lanes that means they're quicker than cars on most journeys. They've also introduced express buses that have limited stops so are even faster. And, of course, because the service is so good the buses are very busy.
It's also a joy to use buses for longer journeys - for example, on the coastal route from Brighton to Eastbourne, which runs every 5-10 minutes, you get stunning views from the top deck that don't exist from a car.
That's it - my paean to buses is over.
I think this chat is representative of this site and its demographic.
I never ever use them. We live in the south-east and drive or commute to London. All other times we drive, as we have kids, but even if not I'd only ever use them in very particular conditions.
Exceptions? The IoW where the service is extremely good and reliable, and London.
I suspect it is location and the quality of the bus service where you live.
Big cities (Leeds, London. Manchester. Liverpool, Edinburgh. Glasgow) the bus services are frequent and get you exactly where you want to be in the same time as driving (or even less).
Round here to get to an office I used to work out would require 2 buses both only running 3 times an hour so you could have a 20 minute gap if you are unlucky with timing. Even without it a 15 minute car journey would take 40 minutes so you could be talking an hour.
Add on waiting in the rain and you can see why people drive...
Oh, sure - the bus can't do everything. There is no public transport model which gets everyone cheaply and regularly from everywhere to everywhere outside of very high density areas. But that's not to say it can't do anything. People who refuse to consider the bus - and many do - are cutting themselves off from a service which can be as efficient and pleasant as a train or a tram for no good reason.
It really is fucking not mate.
A train is far far more pleasant than a fucking bus.
Says the person with no experience in riding buses.
Perhaps you should listen more to those who do.
I have sufficient experience in riding buses to know I don't like riding buses, like most people.
Don't be a bus wanker.
I've linked to this before, on the importance of growing provincial cities and limits of buses as mass transit;
If you're serious about making an area richer, you need a city (lots of customers, lots of trade in goods and ideas, a choice of potential staff, a choice of potential employers). surrounded by a comfortably tubby commuter belt.
Buss can help, but the unreliability of their journey times is a problem. (Anecdote: when I started my current job, one of the superloop buses looked like the way to get there; a few weeks saw me shift to a slower, but more predictable, rail route.)
So: commuter rail and tram. But the UK has a terrible record there. Partly, I suspect, because proud towns don't want to be commuter suburbs. Is Makerfield, for example, up for that? But also because it means spending money now, largely to benefit other people's children.
Over to you, Prime Minister.
Extensions to commuter rail and tram are immensely popular.
It's a mystery to me why the Restoring Your Railway programme was cancelled by this administration, as well as a tragedy.
I agree with the sentiment, but RYR was a classic example of too much process getting in the way of what should be a really simple decision. All the bullshit about competitive bids from local councils, MP endorsements, three-stage processes etc. etc.
Sometimes things should be really simple. The existing Leicester-Coalville-Burton line should be reopened to passenger trains. Wantage & Grove (22,000 residents, right on the Great Western Main Line) should get a station. None of these are cheap but nor are they hard decisions. Any commitment to public transport that does not include "we are reopening Leicester-Coalville-Burton" in the first announcement has failed.
Shocked to here this...so out of character for one of he nicest blokes in cricket.
Former Australia batter David Warner has pleaded guilty to drink driving, after being charged following a random breath test in Sydney in April. The plea had been expected after his lawyer, Bobby Hill, said after a court hearing in May that the cricketer accepted responsibility and knew his behaviour had been "foolish" and "reckless".
Sentencing has been set for 18 August, when Warner faces a minimum disqualification from driving of six months, a potential fine of up to A$2,200 ($1,500; £1,150) and a potential prison sentence of up to nine months.
The best infrastructure investment we should be making is building bridges.
Both sides of rivers typically are well-settled but can be very difficult to get from one side to the other, and often entails going through a town or city centre.
Build bridges that cars/buses/bikes/pedestrians can use and you enable connections across almost all modes of transport and also alleviate the need to travel needlessly through a congested town or city centre just to cross the water.
Certainly more politically fleet footed than Starmer I think.
True, although that's a very low bar. And to be fair to Starmer, it wasn't just him. Abolishing WFA was Reeves' brainchild, Starmer's crime was that he didn't knock the idea on the head.
Burnham has an aspiration to do something, he can't do anything til the Budget anyway.
They need to see what fiscal leeway they have, they would have had a fair dollop had it not been for Iran and Trump, the need about 10bn to do anyting meaningful to allowances but there could well be incremental things they could add in.
A set ladder over 3-4 years of x % to cover inflation plus 1% as an example.
A specific increase for those of pensionable age to link to State Pension standard amount so no one purely on State Pension pasy tax on it
My hunch would be to find a way of balancing the tax allowance for pensioners to the triple lock, so that you start to unlock the triple lock to a median point where you commit to ensuring it by inceasing personal allowances instead initially for pensioners with then an aim of increasing for all!
Putting aside the right wing ad hominem, I vote Labour in GE’s, I don’t see how this article is ‘right wing’ either.
why shouldn’t pensioners pay tax above the threshold ? It’s income after all. Those purely on the state oension do get other passported benefits.
I think Dan Neidle is right. Leave this and target NI, it’s a tax on employment. We need more employment and to make work pay.
We were canvassed by our MP and his aides at the weekend. One thing I told them is work doesn’t pay in this country.
The rational thing is for pensioners to pay tax on their income in the same way as everyone else. But as we saw with the WFA debacle, rationality goes out the window when it comes to pensioners.
I continue to blame Clive Dunn and St Winifred's School Choir.
I blame Reeves for simply not reversing Hunt’s uncosted employee NI cuts that removed all headroom
Which is bullshit.
Hunts freeze on threshold fully funded the Employee NI change.
It was a net tax rise.
If you are going to tax, better to do it through more honest and visible taxation rather than stealth and more stealth?
Indeed, which is why we should be abolishing NI and having a single rate of income tax that is paid by everyone the same, honestly and visibly.
Not taxing employment more than unearned incomes.
That is possible but you'd need to unravel NI from the pension system which will take at least some thought and legislation. On a wider point about differential taxation of earned and unearned income, the government is supposed to be looking at private equity, dividends and capital gains tax.
The need to unravel NI from the pensions system can be a long-term problem if you set employee NI to 1% in the short term, and change the income tax 20% rate to I think 28% renenue-neutral.
Any changes upwards of tax rates of capital gains will absolutely cost more than they raise. Arthur Laffer is waving from the door of the Treasury.
Any mad idea of taxing CG at income tax levels will drive hundreds of billions in investment vehicles offshore almost immediately. Dubai and Singapore are actively looking to recruit global PE funds.
You already get NIC "contributions" at 0% so no problem with setting a global 0% threshold rate for NICs, merge income tax, and still keep contributions based on income as it currently is.
Massive increase in income tax for pensioners though from 20% to 28%... It's why I would be doing it very slowly...
Merging income tax and NI is one of those 'easy fixes' that people who have only ever been on PAYE suggest.
It would be a massive increase in tax for pensioners and the self employed. Both groups who vote heavily....
That is precisely the point.
Pensioners and the self-employed should be liable for the same taxes as those on PAYE.
Everyone who earns the same amount should be taxed the same.
I would make it net tax revenue so cut the overall rate so those who are working for their income on PAYE get a tax cut, funded by taxing others the same as they would now be paying.
Yes but would it work politically as explained above large voting blocks would be against it.
There are large voting blocs against any change.
Taxes should be simple, low and evenly applied. Complicating it to appeal to voter blocs and dumping the burden on people in paid employment just harms everyone else and harms the economy by overtaxing employment.
But you have to get elected to effect the change.
They've already been elected.
With a manifesto promise that they are committed to not breaking
To not increase taxes on working families, yes.
What I propose would be a tax cut for them.
Its more in line with the manifesto than jacking up NI was.
Not quite what the manifesto actually says is” Labour will not increase taxes on working people. Which is why we will not increase National insurance the basic rate, higher or additional rates of income tax or VAT”. So they did specifically rule out increase in tax and NI.
Additionally in clarification they explained people had worked all there lives were included in their definition of working people.
Precisely.
Merge the two and there is no net increase, indeed it could be a combined cut and sold as such. All while not increasing, indeed reducing, the tax on working people.
Its more justifiable than the sophistry around the National Insurance increase.
No some working people according to the clarification would have their tax raised. It would be a breach of the manifesto
All working people did when NICs were increased, hence the sophistry around "ah but we didn't mean Employers NICs". It was still a very clear and unambiguous rise in tax.
A merger would simplify rates and not be a net increase. There would be winners and losers but there always are.
No a merger would just lead to welfare dependency from cradle to grave on tax funded welfare, with not even any attempt to have a contributory element for that welfare whether for unemployment benefit or the state pension
No it would not.
We already have welfare dependency. A merger would reduce it by lowering the proportion of taxes levied on those who work and would not change benefits one iota. 🤦♂️
You seem to have this delusion that a merger would increase benefits. It will not.
Yes it would. Most OECD nations fund their unemployment benefits via contributions to unemployment insurance and receipt of the full state pension also requiring sufficient social insurance contributions too.
Income tax would rise of course anyway as it would have NI merged into it and those on unemployment benefit or the state pension would not ever need to contribute a penny to claim them in full
They already don't need to contribute a penny to claim in full and you can keep the contribution link (indeed strengthen it) to the new combined rate.
All that would change is that currently those on taxable benefits don't pay NICs on their benefit income while those who work for their income do.
Why do you think those working for their income should be taxed more than those on benefits?
You can scrap NI credits and then ensure the full contribution link is kept for the state pension and JSA. Pensioners of course contributed to NIC throughout their working life anyway
You could keep the contribution link to a combined income tax rate, no need to abolish the contribution thresholds.
Pensioners of course never paid toward their own pensions, which is why we not only have no savings to pay for them but we are paying interest on debt instead.
Why should those on benefits be taxed less than those working for the same income?
Just because pensioners contributed something does not mean that they contributed enough.
What's clear now is that the contributions that current pensioners made over the past 60+ or so years has turned out to be woefully short of what is needed to fund the benefits and services to which they now consider themselves entitled. Yet they just don't seem to get that hard truth. And it shouldn't be down just to the next two or three generations to make up the shortfall alone.
Can you prove that dumb theory. If I had invested my NI payments for 50 years I would get significantly more guaranteed than state pension
Which would be great if NI was savings for a pension that have been set aside.
Its not, its a tax, and one that was spent in full as we have ran a deficit due to overspending almost every year.
Just because the government overspends and does not put it aside for correct purpose does not mean it should be reclassified as a tax.
Burnham has an aspiration to do something, he can't do anything til the Budget anyway.
They need to see what fiscal leeway they have, they would have had a fair dollop had it not been for Iran and Trump, the need about 10bn to do anyting meaningful to allowances but there could well be incremental things they could add in.
A set ladder over 3-4 years of x % to cover inflation plus 1% as an example.
A specific increase for those of pensionable age to link to State Pension standard amount so no one purely on State Pension pasy tax on it
My hunch would be to find a way of balancing the tax allowance for pensioners to the triple lock, so that you start to unlock the triple lock to a median point where you commit to ensuring it by inceasing personal allowances instead initially for pensioners with then an aim of increasing for all!
Putting aside the right wing ad hominem, I vote Labour in GE’s, I don’t see how this article is ‘right wing’ either.
why shouldn’t pensioners pay tax above the threshold ? It’s income after all. Those purely on the state oension do get other passported benefits.
I think Dan Neidle is right. Leave this and target NI, it’s a tax on employment. We need more employment and to make work pay.
We were canvassed by our MP and his aides at the weekend. One thing I told them is work doesn’t pay in this country.
The rational thing is for pensioners to pay tax on their income in the same way as everyone else. But as we saw with the WFA debacle, rationality goes out the window when it comes to pensioners.
I continue to blame Clive Dunn and St Winifred's School Choir.
I blame Reeves for simply not reversing Hunt’s uncosted employee NI cuts that removed all headroom
Which is bullshit.
Hunts freeze on threshold fully funded the Employee NI change.
It was a net tax rise.
If you are going to tax, better to do it through more honest and visible taxation rather than stealth and more stealth?
Indeed, which is why we should be abolishing NI and having a single rate of income tax that is paid by everyone the same, honestly and visibly.
Not taxing employment more than unearned incomes.
That is possible but you'd need to unravel NI from the pension system which will take at least some thought and legislation. On a wider point about differential taxation of earned and unearned income, the government is supposed to be looking at private equity, dividends and capital gains tax.
The need to unravel NI from the pensions system can be a long-term problem if you set employee NI to 1% in the short term, and change the income tax 20% rate to I think 28% renenue-neutral.
Any changes upwards of tax rates of capital gains will absolutely cost more than they raise. Arthur Laffer is waving from the door of the Treasury.
Any mad idea of taxing CG at income tax levels will drive hundreds of billions in investment vehicles offshore almost immediately. Dubai and Singapore are actively looking to recruit global PE funds.
You already get NIC "contributions" at 0% so no problem with setting a global 0% threshold rate for NICs, merge income tax, and still keep contributions based on income as it currently is.
Massive increase in income tax for pensioners though from 20% to 28%... It's why I would be doing it very slowly...
Merging income tax and NI is one of those 'easy fixes' that people who have only ever been on PAYE suggest.
It would be a massive increase in tax for pensioners and the self employed. Both groups who vote heavily....
That is precisely the point.
Pensioners and the self-employed should be liable for the same taxes as those on PAYE.
Everyone who earns the same amount should be taxed the same.
I would make it net tax revenue so cut the overall rate so those who are working for their income on PAYE get a tax cut, funded by taxing others the same as they would now be paying.
Yes but would it work politically as explained above large voting blocks would be against it.
There are large voting blocs against any change.
Taxes should be simple, low and evenly applied. Complicating it to appeal to voter blocs and dumping the burden on people in paid employment just harms everyone else and harms the economy by overtaxing employment.
But you have to get elected to effect the change.
They've already been elected.
With a manifesto promise that they are committed to not breaking
To not increase taxes on working families, yes.
What I propose would be a tax cut for them.
Its more in line with the manifesto than jacking up NI was.
Not quite what the manifesto actually says is” Labour will not increase taxes on working people. Which is why we will not increase National insurance the basic rate, higher or additional rates of income tax or VAT”. So they did specifically rule out increase in tax and NI.
Additionally in clarification they explained people had worked all there lives were included in their definition of working people.
Precisely.
Merge the two and there is no net increase, indeed it could be a combined cut and sold as such. All while not increasing, indeed reducing, the tax on working people.
Its more justifiable than the sophistry around the National Insurance increase.
No some working people according to the clarification would have their tax raised. It would be a breach of the manifesto
All working people did when NICs were increased, hence the sophistry around "ah but we didn't mean Employers NICs". It was still a very clear and unambiguous rise in tax.
A merger would simplify rates and not be a net increase. There would be winners and losers but there always are.
No a merger would just lead to welfare dependency from cradle to grave on tax funded welfare, with not even any attempt to have a contributory element for that welfare whether for unemployment benefit or the state pension
No it would not.
We already have welfare dependency. A merger would reduce it by lowering the proportion of taxes levied on those who work and would not change benefits one iota. 🤦♂️
You seem to have this delusion that a merger would increase benefits. It will not.
Yes it would. Most OECD nations fund their unemployment benefits via contributions to unemployment insurance and receipt of the full state pension also requiring sufficient social insurance contributions too.
Income tax would rise of course anyway as it would have NI merged into it and those on unemployment benefit or the state pension would not ever need to contribute a penny to claim them in full
They already don't need to contribute a penny to claim in full and you can keep the contribution link (indeed strengthen it) to the new combined rate.
All that would change is that currently those on taxable benefits don't pay NICs on their benefit income while those who work for their income do.
Why do you think those working for their income should be taxed more than those on benefits?
You can scrap NI credits and then ensure the full contribution link is kept for the state pension and JSA. Pensioners of course contributed to NIC throughout their working life anyway
You could keep the contribution link to a combined income tax rate, no need to abolish the contribution thresholds.
Pensioners of course never paid toward their own pensions, which is why we not only have no savings to pay for them but we are paying interest on debt instead.
Why should those on benefits be taxed less than those working for the same income?
They could not claim the state pension in full without a sufficient rate of NI contributions, scrap NI credits and only those who have contributed can get it, everyone else has to get pension credits
People already can get NI Credits though.
What is wrong with a package that combines abolishing NI Credits, merging Income Tax and NICs and migrating NI contributions to be Income Tax contributions?
You keep the contributory nature that you want but eliminate the distortion of taxing working people more. What is wrong with that?
As I also said, scrap NI Credits. If you haven't contributed enough you shouldn't get JSA or the full state pension, just pension credits or UC.
I agree with you on that but identifying what had been contributed for state pensions and JSA and what was to fund other areas of government spending from income tax would be administratively costly
Why would there be any administration costs since we don't do that already, so there would be no change there. The system in place is a binary "contribute or not" based on income over the threshold, we don't tally how much people have contributed - and that threshold could easily be migrated to a combined tax.
Merge it all and there would be just the one tax - and keep contribution requirements in place, not proposing abolishing those.
We should tally how much people have contributed, certainly to get the full state pension and full JSA only a certain level of contributions would enable that
Burnham has an aspiration to do something, he can't do anything til the Budget anyway.
They need to see what fiscal leeway they have, they would have had a fair dollop had it not been for Iran and Trump, the need about 10bn to do anyting meaningful to allowances but there could well be incremental things they could add in.
A set ladder over 3-4 years of x % to cover inflation plus 1% as an example.
A specific increase for those of pensionable age to link to State Pension standard amount so no one purely on State Pension pasy tax on it
My hunch would be to find a way of balancing the tax allowance for pensioners to the triple lock, so that you start to unlock the triple lock to a median point where you commit to ensuring it by inceasing personal allowances instead initially for pensioners with then an aim of increasing for all!
Putting aside the right wing ad hominem, I vote Labour in GE’s, I don’t see how this article is ‘right wing’ either.
why shouldn’t pensioners pay tax above the threshold ? It’s income after all. Those purely on the state oension do get other passported benefits.
I think Dan Neidle is right. Leave this and target NI, it’s a tax on employment. We need more employment and to make work pay.
We were canvassed by our MP and his aides at the weekend. One thing I told them is work doesn’t pay in this country.
The rational thing is for pensioners to pay tax on their income in the same way as everyone else. But as we saw with the WFA debacle, rationality goes out the window when it comes to pensioners.
I continue to blame Clive Dunn and St Winifred's School Choir.
I blame Reeves for simply not reversing Hunt’s uncosted employee NI cuts that removed all headroom
Which is bullshit.
Hunts freeze on threshold fully funded the Employee NI change.
It was a net tax rise.
If you are going to tax, better to do it through more honest and visible taxation rather than stealth and more stealth?
Indeed, which is why we should be abolishing NI and having a single rate of income tax that is paid by everyone the same, honestly and visibly.
Not taxing employment more than unearned incomes.
That is possible but you'd need to unravel NI from the pension system which will take at least some thought and legislation. On a wider point about differential taxation of earned and unearned income, the government is supposed to be looking at private equity, dividends and capital gains tax.
The need to unravel NI from the pensions system can be a long-term problem if you set employee NI to 1% in the short term, and change the income tax 20% rate to I think 28% renenue-neutral.
Any changes upwards of tax rates of capital gains will absolutely cost more than they raise. Arthur Laffer is waving from the door of the Treasury.
Any mad idea of taxing CG at income tax levels will drive hundreds of billions in investment vehicles offshore almost immediately. Dubai and Singapore are actively looking to recruit global PE funds.
You already get NIC "contributions" at 0% so no problem with setting a global 0% threshold rate for NICs, merge income tax, and still keep contributions based on income as it currently is.
Massive increase in income tax for pensioners though from 20% to 28%... It's why I would be doing it very slowly...
Merging income tax and NI is one of those 'easy fixes' that people who have only ever been on PAYE suggest.
It would be a massive increase in tax for pensioners and the self employed. Both groups who vote heavily....
That is precisely the point.
Pensioners and the self-employed should be liable for the same taxes as those on PAYE.
Everyone who earns the same amount should be taxed the same.
I would make it net tax revenue so cut the overall rate so those who are working for their income on PAYE get a tax cut, funded by taxing others the same as they would now be paying.
Yes but would it work politically as explained above large voting blocks would be against it.
There are large voting blocs against any change.
Taxes should be simple, low and evenly applied. Complicating it to appeal to voter blocs and dumping the burden on people in paid employment just harms everyone else and harms the economy by overtaxing employment.
But you have to get elected to effect the change.
They've already been elected.
With a manifesto promise that they are committed to not breaking
To not increase taxes on working families, yes.
What I propose would be a tax cut for them.
Its more in line with the manifesto than jacking up NI was.
Not quite what the manifesto actually says is” Labour will not increase taxes on working people. Which is why we will not increase National insurance the basic rate, higher or additional rates of income tax or VAT”. So they did specifically rule out increase in tax and NI.
Additionally in clarification they explained people had worked all there lives were included in their definition of working people.
Precisely.
Merge the two and there is no net increase, indeed it could be a combined cut and sold as such. All while not increasing, indeed reducing, the tax on working people.
Its more justifiable than the sophistry around the National Insurance increase.
No some working people according to the clarification would have their tax raised. It would be a breach of the manifesto
All working people did when NICs were increased, hence the sophistry around "ah but we didn't mean Employers NICs". It was still a very clear and unambiguous rise in tax.
A merger would simplify rates and not be a net increase. There would be winners and losers but there always are.
No a merger would just lead to welfare dependency from cradle to grave on tax funded welfare, with not even any attempt to have a contributory element for that welfare whether for unemployment benefit or the state pension
No it would not.
We already have welfare dependency. A merger would reduce it by lowering the proportion of taxes levied on those who work and would not change benefits one iota. 🤦♂️
You seem to have this delusion that a merger would increase benefits. It will not.
Yes it would. Most OECD nations fund their unemployment benefits via contributions to unemployment insurance and receipt of the full state pension also requiring sufficient social insurance contributions too.
Income tax would rise of course anyway as it would have NI merged into it and those on unemployment benefit or the state pension would not ever need to contribute a penny to claim them in full
They already don't need to contribute a penny to claim in full and you can keep the contribution link (indeed strengthen it) to the new combined rate.
All that would change is that currently those on taxable benefits don't pay NICs on their benefit income while those who work for their income do.
Why do you think those working for their income should be taxed more than those on benefits?
You can scrap NI credits and then ensure the full contribution link is kept for the state pension and JSA. Pensioners of course contributed to NIC throughout their working life anyway
You could keep the contribution link to a combined income tax rate, no need to abolish the contribution thresholds.
Pensioners of course never paid toward their own pensions, which is why we not only have no savings to pay for them but we are paying interest on debt instead.
Why should those on benefits be taxed less than those working for the same income?
They could not claim the state pension in full without a sufficient rate of NI contributions, scrap NI credits and only those who have contributed can get it, everyone else has to get pension credits
People already can get NI Credits though.
What is wrong with a package that combines abolishing NI Credits, merging Income Tax and NICs and migrating NI contributions to be Income Tax contributions?
You keep the contributory nature that you want but eliminate the distortion of taxing working people more. What is wrong with that?
As I also said, scrap NI Credits. If you haven't contributed enough you shouldn't get JSA or the full state pension, just pension credits or UC.
I agree with you on that but identifying what had been contributed for state pensions and JSA and what was to fund other areas of government spending from income tax would be administratively costly
Why would there be any administration costs since we don't do that already, so there would be no change there. The system in place is a binary "contribute or not" based on income over the threshold, we don't tally how much people have contributed - and that threshold could easily be migrated to a combined tax.
Merge it all and there would be just the one tax - and keep contribution requirements in place, not proposing abolishing those.
We should tally how much people have contributed, certainly to get the full state pension and full JSA only a certain level of contributions would enable that
But we don't, and there is no reason that can't be done with a merged Income Tax.
Whether we should merge tax rates, and whether we should have contributions, are two completely unrelated discussions.
It could be done but would require significantly higher administrative costs as I said, certainly than just doing it on a solely assessed NI contributions basis
No, it would require less administrative costs.
Whatever the NI income threshold is set at, just set it as an Income Tax income threshold. Job done.
You would then need to calculate the personal allowance and then the income tax minimum contributions threshold on top of that and then the basic and higher rates etc
Burnham has an aspiration to do something, he can't do anything til the Budget anyway.
They need to see what fiscal leeway they have, they would have had a fair dollop had it not been for Iran and Trump, the need about 10bn to do anyting meaningful to allowances but there could well be incremental things they could add in.
A set ladder over 3-4 years of x % to cover inflation plus 1% as an example.
A specific increase for those of pensionable age to link to State Pension standard amount so no one purely on State Pension pasy tax on it
My hunch would be to find a way of balancing the tax allowance for pensioners to the triple lock, so that you start to unlock the triple lock to a median point where you commit to ensuring it by inceasing personal allowances instead initially for pensioners with then an aim of increasing for all!
Putting aside the right wing ad hominem, I vote Labour in GE’s, I don’t see how this article is ‘right wing’ either.
why shouldn’t pensioners pay tax above the threshold ? It’s income after all. Those purely on the state oension do get other passported benefits.
I think Dan Neidle is right. Leave this and target NI, it’s a tax on employment. We need more employment and to make work pay.
We were canvassed by our MP and his aides at the weekend. One thing I told them is work doesn’t pay in this country.
The rational thing is for pensioners to pay tax on their income in the same way as everyone else. But as we saw with the WFA debacle, rationality goes out the window when it comes to pensioners.
I continue to blame Clive Dunn and St Winifred's School Choir.
I blame Reeves for simply not reversing Hunt’s uncosted employee NI cuts that removed all headroom
Which is bullshit.
Hunts freeze on threshold fully funded the Employee NI change.
It was a net tax rise.
If you are going to tax, better to do it through more honest and visible taxation rather than stealth and more stealth?
Indeed, which is why we should be abolishing NI and having a single rate of income tax that is paid by everyone the same, honestly and visibly.
Not taxing employment more than unearned incomes.
That is possible but you'd need to unravel NI from the pension system which will take at least some thought and legislation. On a wider point about differential taxation of earned and unearned income, the government is supposed to be looking at private equity, dividends and capital gains tax.
The need to unravel NI from the pensions system can be a long-term problem if you set employee NI to 1% in the short term, and change the income tax 20% rate to I think 28% renenue-neutral.
Any changes upwards of tax rates of capital gains will absolutely cost more than they raise. Arthur Laffer is waving from the door of the Treasury.
Any mad idea of taxing CG at income tax levels will drive hundreds of billions in investment vehicles offshore almost immediately. Dubai and Singapore are actively looking to recruit global PE funds.
You already get NIC "contributions" at 0% so no problem with setting a global 0% threshold rate for NICs, merge income tax, and still keep contributions based on income as it currently is.
Massive increase in income tax for pensioners though from 20% to 28%... It's why I would be doing it very slowly...
Merging income tax and NI is one of those 'easy fixes' that people who have only ever been on PAYE suggest.
It would be a massive increase in tax for pensioners and the self employed. Both groups who vote heavily....
That is precisely the point.
Pensioners and the self-employed should be liable for the same taxes as those on PAYE.
Everyone who earns the same amount should be taxed the same.
I would make it net tax revenue so cut the overall rate so those who are working for their income on PAYE get a tax cut, funded by taxing others the same as they would now be paying.
Yes but would it work politically as explained above large voting blocks would be against it.
There are large voting blocs against any change.
Taxes should be simple, low and evenly applied. Complicating it to appeal to voter blocs and dumping the burden on people in paid employment just harms everyone else and harms the economy by overtaxing employment.
But you have to get elected to effect the change.
They've already been elected.
With a manifesto promise that they are committed to not breaking
To not increase taxes on working families, yes.
What I propose would be a tax cut for them.
Its more in line with the manifesto than jacking up NI was.
Not quite what the manifesto actually says is” Labour will not increase taxes on working people. Which is why we will not increase National insurance the basic rate, higher or additional rates of income tax or VAT”. So they did specifically rule out increase in tax and NI.
Additionally in clarification they explained people had worked all there lives were included in their definition of working people.
Precisely.
Merge the two and there is no net increase, indeed it could be a combined cut and sold as such. All while not increasing, indeed reducing, the tax on working people.
Its more justifiable than the sophistry around the National Insurance increase.
No some working people according to the clarification would have their tax raised. It would be a breach of the manifesto
All working people did when NICs were increased, hence the sophistry around "ah but we didn't mean Employers NICs". It was still a very clear and unambiguous rise in tax.
A merger would simplify rates and not be a net increase. There would be winners and losers but there always are.
No a merger would just lead to welfare dependency from cradle to grave on tax funded welfare, with not even any attempt to have a contributory element for that welfare whether for unemployment benefit or the state pension
No it would not.
We already have welfare dependency. A merger would reduce it by lowering the proportion of taxes levied on those who work and would not change benefits one iota. 🤦♂️
You seem to have this delusion that a merger would increase benefits. It will not.
Yes it would. Most OECD nations fund their unemployment benefits via contributions to unemployment insurance and receipt of the full state pension also requiring sufficient social insurance contributions too.
Income tax would rise of course anyway as it would have NI merged into it and those on unemployment benefit or the state pension would not ever need to contribute a penny to claim them in full
They already don't need to contribute a penny to claim in full and you can keep the contribution link (indeed strengthen it) to the new combined rate.
All that would change is that currently those on taxable benefits don't pay NICs on their benefit income while those who work for their income do.
Why do you think those working for their income should be taxed more than those on benefits?
You can scrap NI credits and then ensure the full contribution link is kept for the state pension and JSA. Pensioners of course contributed to NIC throughout their working life anyway
You could keep the contribution link to a combined income tax rate, no need to abolish the contribution thresholds.
Pensioners of course never paid toward their own pensions, which is why we not only have no savings to pay for them but we are paying interest on debt instead.
Why should those on benefits be taxed less than those working for the same income?
Just because pensioners contributed something does not mean that they contributed enough.
What's clear now is that the contributions that current pensioners made over the past 60+ or so years has turned out to be woefully short of what is needed to fund the benefits and services to which they now consider themselves entitled. Yet they just don't seem to get that hard truth. And it shouldn't be down just to the next two or three generations to make up the shortfall alone.
Can you prove that dumb theory. If I had invested my NI payments for 50 years I would get significantly more guaranteed than state pension
Which would be great if NI was savings for a pension that have been set aside.
Its not, its a tax, and one that was spent in full as we have ran a deficit due to overspending almost every year.
Just because the government overspends and does not put it aside for correct purpose does not mean it should be reclassified as a tax.
Refusal should count as a black mark against future promotions.
As discussed yesterday, there's a very real chance that No10 North doesn't outlive Burnham, so why would you go? You could be swapping your family home in e.g. Hackney for easily a 6 figure loss (3 forced sales, 2 forced purchases and 2 lots of stamp duty) and a family home in e.g. West Ham in 3-4 years time. Plus it's likely your partner has a career which won't neatly synchronise with a relocation.
Thinking you can just relocate people show's a lack of understanding about real life in the 2020s, maybe it would have worked in the 1980s.
Indeed. See the disasterous relocation of the ONS:
"The ONS moved its statistical functions out of London in 2007, with most of them going to Newport.
About 90% of London-based staff chose to leave ONS rather than relocate."
Why is that a disaster?
great for Newport indeed, pathetic that everything is London centric, could save a fortune moving all government jobs out
It was a disaster as the ONS lost 90% of their staff and had to recruit them again.
And the people who they recruited were not of the same calibre of those who left - simply because Newport doesn't have the number of statisticians in the surrounding area to choice from that London offered.
Still poor excuse for almost all jobs being in London. They have fostered that choice over many many years and a bit of discomfort as they deLondonise is well worth the hassle.
Burnham may not have much to play with until his first budget, but in the meantime he's using the limited options he's got extremely well.
Today's announcement on the £2 bus fare cap is well targeted. The prime beneficiaries are going to be those who are younger or on lower incomes (because car ownership is highly correlated with income) and who are in work or studying and rely on the bus for that. Strivers who need to make work pay. But it still applies across the board if you're below pensionable age, so no-one's really going to object. There are also indirect benefits - an upturn in bus usage could bring back some services previously lost or increase the frequency of services - even pensioners relying on buses will benefit if that happens. So it's well targeted in terms of rewarding those who need to be rewarded, and well targeted in terms of likely political impact.
Who actually uses peasant wagons?
CR, your attitude is hurting mainly you here. Buses are very good at what they do. A few points:
- Firstly, more people use buses than any other form of public transport. - Secondly, if you're in a rural area, buses tend to be about as fast as driving if you can put in the modicum of effort to check a timetable in advance. I remember a stage night I went on: we were staying at a hotel in Warwick, and were going to the cricket at Stratford. I timed my arrival at the hotel to meet the bus, and got to Stratford more quickly and far more cheaply than those in the group for whom bus wasn't part of their mental landscape and insisted on using taxis. - If you live in an urban area most bus journeys are less annoying than having to park. - You can use the bus while drunk. - At the age of 51, sitting upstairs on the front seat of a bus is still as thrilling as it was at the age of 7.
Seriously, check out the bus opportunities from wherever you live and use them - it will take you new places to be drunk. Taxis are for losers and people
No-one I know uses buses.
Everybody I know uses buses.
That's because the bus service where I live (Brighton) is superb, with buses to pretty much all parts of the city every few minutes, and judicious use of bus lanes that means they're quicker than cars on most journeys. They've also introduced express buses that have limited stops so are even faster. And, of course, because the service is so good the buses are very busy.
It's also a joy to use buses for longer journeys - for example, on the coastal route from Brighton to Eastbourne, which runs every 5-10 minutes, you get stunning views from the top deck that don't exist from a car.
That's it - my paean to buses is over.
I think this chat is representative of this site and its demographic.
I never ever use them. We live in the south-east and drive or commute to London. All other times we drive, as we have kids, but even if not I'd only ever use them in very particular conditions.
Exceptions? The IoW where the service is extremely good and reliable, and London.
I suspect it is location and the quality of the bus service where you live.
Big cities (Leeds, London. Manchester. Liverpool, Edinburgh. Glasgow) the bus services are frequent and get you exactly where you want to be in the same time as driving (or even less).
Round here to get to an office I used to work out would require 2 buses both only running 3 times an hour so you could have a 20 minute gap if you are unlucky with timing. Even without it a 15 minute car journey would take 40 minutes so you could be talking an hour.
Add on waiting in the rain and you can see why people drive...
Oh, sure - the bus can't do everything. There is no public transport model which gets everyone cheaply and regularly from everywhere to everywhere outside of very high density areas. But that's not to say it can't do anything. People who refuse to consider the bus - and many do - are cutting themselves off from a service which can be as efficient and pleasant as a train or a tram for no good reason.
It really is fucking not mate.
A train is far far more pleasant than a fucking bus.
Says the person with no experience in riding buses.
Perhaps you should listen more to those who do.
I have sufficient experience in riding buses to know I don't like riding buses, like most people.
Don't be a bus wanker.
I've linked to this before, on the importance of growing provincial cities and limits of buses as mass transit;
If you're serious about making an area richer, you need a city (lots of customers, lots of trade in goods and ideas, a choice of potential staff, a choice of potential employers). surrounded by a comfortably tubby commuter belt.
Buss can help, but the unreliability of their journey times is a problem. (Anecdote: when I started my current job, one of the superloop buses looked like the way to get there; a few weeks saw me shift to a slower, but more predictable, rail route.)
So: commuter rail and tram. But the UK has a terrible record there. Partly, I suspect, because proud towns don't want to be commuter suburbs. Is Makerfield, for example, up for that? But also because it means spending money now, largely to benefit other people's children.
Over to you, Prime Minister.
Extensions to commuter rail and tram are immensely popular.
It's a mystery to me why the Restoring Your Railway programme was cancelled by this administration, as well as a tragedy.
I agree with the sentiment, but RYR was a classic example of too much process getting in the way of what should be a really simple decision. All the bullshit about competitive bids from local councils, MP endorsements, three-stage processes etc. etc.
Sometimes things should be really simple. The existing Leicester-Coalville-Burton line should be reopened to passenger trains. Wantage & Grove should get a station. None of these are cheap but nor are they hard decisions. Any commitment to public transport that does not include "we are reopening Leicester-Coalville-Burton" in the first announcement has failed.
Britain spends a lot of time and money on bids, reviews and the rest seemingly as a way to delay spending money on actually doing things, because in the short term it's cheaper to run a consultation and a review than it is to build the thing.
But in the long term you've still spent a pile of money and have nothing to show for it. Wikipedia has this delightful sentence on Heathrow expansion.
"In early December 2006, the Department for Transport published a progress report on the strategy which confirmed the original vision of expanding the runways."
Twenty years ago they were already multiple layers deep on the reports and strategy for Heathrow expansion, and it still hasn't started.
Burnham has an aspiration to do something, he can't do anything til the Budget anyway.
They need to see what fiscal leeway they have, they would have had a fair dollop had it not been for Iran and Trump, the need about 10bn to do anyting meaningful to allowances but there could well be incremental things they could add in.
A set ladder over 3-4 years of x % to cover inflation plus 1% as an example.
A specific increase for those of pensionable age to link to State Pension standard amount so no one purely on State Pension pasy tax on it
My hunch would be to find a way of balancing the tax allowance for pensioners to the triple lock, so that you start to unlock the triple lock to a median point where you commit to ensuring it by inceasing personal allowances instead initially for pensioners with then an aim of increasing for all!
Putting aside the right wing ad hominem, I vote Labour in GE’s, I don’t see how this article is ‘right wing’ either.
why shouldn’t pensioners pay tax above the threshold ? It’s income after all. Those purely on the state oension do get other passported benefits.
I think Dan Neidle is right. Leave this and target NI, it’s a tax on employment. We need more employment and to make work pay.
We were canvassed by our MP and his aides at the weekend. One thing I told them is work doesn’t pay in this country.
The rational thing is for pensioners to pay tax on their income in the same way as everyone else. But as we saw with the WFA debacle, rationality goes out the window when it comes to pensioners.
I continue to blame Clive Dunn and St Winifred's School Choir.
I blame Reeves for simply not reversing Hunt’s uncosted employee NI cuts that removed all headroom
Which is bullshit.
Hunts freeze on threshold fully funded the Employee NI change.
It was a net tax rise.
If you are going to tax, better to do it through more honest and visible taxation rather than stealth and more stealth?
Indeed, which is why we should be abolishing NI and having a single rate of income tax that is paid by everyone the same, honestly and visibly.
Not taxing employment more than unearned incomes.
That is possible but you'd need to unravel NI from the pension system which will take at least some thought and legislation. On a wider point about differential taxation of earned and unearned income, the government is supposed to be looking at private equity, dividends and capital gains tax.
The need to unravel NI from the pensions system can be a long-term problem if you set employee NI to 1% in the short term, and change the income tax 20% rate to I think 28% renenue-neutral.
Any changes upwards of tax rates of capital gains will absolutely cost more than they raise. Arthur Laffer is waving from the door of the Treasury.
Any mad idea of taxing CG at income tax levels will drive hundreds of billions in investment vehicles offshore almost immediately. Dubai and Singapore are actively looking to recruit global PE funds.
You already get NIC "contributions" at 0% so no problem with setting a global 0% threshold rate for NICs, merge income tax, and still keep contributions based on income as it currently is.
Massive increase in income tax for pensioners though from 20% to 28%... It's why I would be doing it very slowly...
Merging income tax and NI is one of those 'easy fixes' that people who have only ever been on PAYE suggest.
It would be a massive increase in tax for pensioners and the self employed. Both groups who vote heavily....
That is precisely the point.
Pensioners and the self-employed should be liable for the same taxes as those on PAYE.
Everyone who earns the same amount should be taxed the same.
I would make it net tax revenue so cut the overall rate so those who are working for their income on PAYE get a tax cut, funded by taxing others the same as they would now be paying.
Yes but would it work politically as explained above large voting blocks would be against it.
There are large voting blocs against any change.
Taxes should be simple, low and evenly applied. Complicating it to appeal to voter blocs and dumping the burden on people in paid employment just harms everyone else and harms the economy by overtaxing employment.
But you have to get elected to effect the change.
They've already been elected.
With a manifesto promise that they are committed to not breaking
To not increase taxes on working families, yes.
What I propose would be a tax cut for them.
Its more in line with the manifesto than jacking up NI was.
Not quite what the manifesto actually says is” Labour will not increase taxes on working people. Which is why we will not increase National insurance the basic rate, higher or additional rates of income tax or VAT”. So they did specifically rule out increase in tax and NI.
Additionally in clarification they explained people had worked all there lives were included in their definition of working people.
Precisely.
Merge the two and there is no net increase, indeed it could be a combined cut and sold as such. All while not increasing, indeed reducing, the tax on working people.
Its more justifiable than the sophistry around the National Insurance increase.
No some working people according to the clarification would have their tax raised. It would be a breach of the manifesto
All working people did when NICs were increased, hence the sophistry around "ah but we didn't mean Employers NICs". It was still a very clear and unambiguous rise in tax.
A merger would simplify rates and not be a net increase. There would be winners and losers but there always are.
No a merger would just lead to welfare dependency from cradle to grave on tax funded welfare, with not even any attempt to have a contributory element for that welfare whether for unemployment benefit or the state pension
No it would not.
We already have welfare dependency. A merger would reduce it by lowering the proportion of taxes levied on those who work and would not change benefits one iota. 🤦♂️
You seem to have this delusion that a merger would increase benefits. It will not.
Yes it would. Most OECD nations fund their unemployment benefits via contributions to unemployment insurance and receipt of the full state pension also requiring sufficient social insurance contributions too.
Income tax would rise of course anyway as it would have NI merged into it and those on unemployment benefit or the state pension would not ever need to contribute a penny to claim them in full
They already don't need to contribute a penny to claim in full and you can keep the contribution link (indeed strengthen it) to the new combined rate.
All that would change is that currently those on taxable benefits don't pay NICs on their benefit income while those who work for their income do.
Why do you think those working for their income should be taxed more than those on benefits?
You can scrap NI credits and then ensure the full contribution link is kept for the state pension and JSA. Pensioners of course contributed to NIC throughout their working life anyway
You could keep the contribution link to a combined income tax rate, no need to abolish the contribution thresholds.
Pensioners of course never paid toward their own pensions, which is why we not only have no savings to pay for them but we are paying interest on debt instead.
Why should those on benefits be taxed less than those working for the same income?
They could not claim the state pension in full without a sufficient rate of NI contributions, scrap NI credits and only those who have contributed can get it, everyone else has to get pension credits
People already can get NI Credits though.
What is wrong with a package that combines abolishing NI Credits, merging Income Tax and NICs and migrating NI contributions to be Income Tax contributions?
You keep the contributory nature that you want but eliminate the distortion of taxing working people more. What is wrong with that?
As I also said, scrap NI Credits. If you haven't contributed enough you shouldn't get JSA or the full state pension, just pension credits or UC.
I agree with you on that but identifying what had been contributed for state pensions and JSA and what was to fund other areas of government spending from income tax would be administratively costly
Why would there be any administration costs since we don't do that already, so there would be no change there. The system in place is a binary "contribute or not" based on income over the threshold, we don't tally how much people have contributed - and that threshold could easily be migrated to a combined tax.
Merge it all and there would be just the one tax - and keep contribution requirements in place, not proposing abolishing those.
We should tally how much people have contributed, certainly to get the full state pension and full JSA only a certain level of contributions would enable that
Burnham has an aspiration to do something, he can't do anything til the Budget anyway.
They need to see what fiscal leeway they have, they would have had a fair dollop had it not been for Iran and Trump, the need about 10bn to do anyting meaningful to allowances but there could well be incremental things they could add in.
A set ladder over 3-4 years of x % to cover inflation plus 1% as an example.
A specific increase for those of pensionable age to link to State Pension standard amount so no one purely on State Pension pasy tax on it
My hunch would be to find a way of balancing the tax allowance for pensioners to the triple lock, so that you start to unlock the triple lock to a median point where you commit to ensuring it by inceasing personal allowances instead initially for pensioners with then an aim of increasing for all!
Putting aside the right wing ad hominem, I vote Labour in GE’s, I don’t see how this article is ‘right wing’ either.
why shouldn’t pensioners pay tax above the threshold ? It’s income after all. Those purely on the state oension do get other passported benefits.
I think Dan Neidle is right. Leave this and target NI, it’s a tax on employment. We need more employment and to make work pay.
We were canvassed by our MP and his aides at the weekend. One thing I told them is work doesn’t pay in this country.
The rational thing is for pensioners to pay tax on their income in the same way as everyone else. But as we saw with the WFA debacle, rationality goes out the window when it comes to pensioners.
I continue to blame Clive Dunn and St Winifred's School Choir.
I blame Reeves for simply not reversing Hunt’s uncosted employee NI cuts that removed all headroom
Which is bullshit.
Hunts freeze on threshold fully funded the Employee NI change.
It was a net tax rise.
If you are going to tax, better to do it through more honest and visible taxation rather than stealth and more stealth?
Indeed, which is why we should be abolishing NI and having a single rate of income tax that is paid by everyone the same, honestly and visibly.
Not taxing employment more than unearned incomes.
That is possible but you'd need to unravel NI from the pension system which will take at least some thought and legislation. On a wider point about differential taxation of earned and unearned income, the government is supposed to be looking at private equity, dividends and capital gains tax.
The need to unravel NI from the pensions system can be a long-term problem if you set employee NI to 1% in the short term, and change the income tax 20% rate to I think 28% renenue-neutral.
Any changes upwards of tax rates of capital gains will absolutely cost more than they raise. Arthur Laffer is waving from the door of the Treasury.
Any mad idea of taxing CG at income tax levels will drive hundreds of billions in investment vehicles offshore almost immediately. Dubai and Singapore are actively looking to recruit global PE funds.
You already get NIC "contributions" at 0% so no problem with setting a global 0% threshold rate for NICs, merge income tax, and still keep contributions based on income as it currently is.
Massive increase in income tax for pensioners though from 20% to 28%... It's why I would be doing it very slowly...
Merging income tax and NI is one of those 'easy fixes' that people who have only ever been on PAYE suggest.
It would be a massive increase in tax for pensioners and the self employed. Both groups who vote heavily....
That is precisely the point.
Pensioners and the self-employed should be liable for the same taxes as those on PAYE.
Everyone who earns the same amount should be taxed the same.
I would make it net tax revenue so cut the overall rate so those who are working for their income on PAYE get a tax cut, funded by taxing others the same as they would now be paying.
Yes but would it work politically as explained above large voting blocks would be against it.
There are large voting blocs against any change.
Taxes should be simple, low and evenly applied. Complicating it to appeal to voter blocs and dumping the burden on people in paid employment just harms everyone else and harms the economy by overtaxing employment.
But you have to get elected to effect the change.
They've already been elected.
With a manifesto promise that they are committed to not breaking
To not increase taxes on working families, yes.
What I propose would be a tax cut for them.
Its more in line with the manifesto than jacking up NI was.
Not quite what the manifesto actually says is” Labour will not increase taxes on working people. Which is why we will not increase National insurance the basic rate, higher or additional rates of income tax or VAT”. So they did specifically rule out increase in tax and NI.
Additionally in clarification they explained people had worked all there lives were included in their definition of working people.
Precisely.
Merge the two and there is no net increase, indeed it could be a combined cut and sold as such. All while not increasing, indeed reducing, the tax on working people.
Its more justifiable than the sophistry around the National Insurance increase.
No some working people according to the clarification would have their tax raised. It would be a breach of the manifesto
All working people did when NICs were increased, hence the sophistry around "ah but we didn't mean Employers NICs". It was still a very clear and unambiguous rise in tax.
A merger would simplify rates and not be a net increase. There would be winners and losers but there always are.
No a merger would just lead to welfare dependency from cradle to grave on tax funded welfare, with not even any attempt to have a contributory element for that welfare whether for unemployment benefit or the state pension
No it would not.
We already have welfare dependency. A merger would reduce it by lowering the proportion of taxes levied on those who work and would not change benefits one iota. 🤦♂️
You seem to have this delusion that a merger would increase benefits. It will not.
Yes it would. Most OECD nations fund their unemployment benefits via contributions to unemployment insurance and receipt of the full state pension also requiring sufficient social insurance contributions too.
Income tax would rise of course anyway as it would have NI merged into it and those on unemployment benefit or the state pension would not ever need to contribute a penny to claim them in full
They already don't need to contribute a penny to claim in full and you can keep the contribution link (indeed strengthen it) to the new combined rate.
All that would change is that currently those on taxable benefits don't pay NICs on their benefit income while those who work for their income do.
Why do you think those working for their income should be taxed more than those on benefits?
You can scrap NI credits and then ensure the full contribution link is kept for the state pension and JSA. Pensioners of course contributed to NIC throughout their working life anyway
You could keep the contribution link to a combined income tax rate, no need to abolish the contribution thresholds.
Pensioners of course never paid toward their own pensions, which is why we not only have no savings to pay for them but we are paying interest on debt instead.
Why should those on benefits be taxed less than those working for the same income?
They could not claim the state pension in full without a sufficient rate of NI contributions, scrap NI credits and only those who have contributed can get it, everyone else has to get pension credits
People already can get NI Credits though.
What is wrong with a package that combines abolishing NI Credits, merging Income Tax and NICs and migrating NI contributions to be Income Tax contributions?
You keep the contributory nature that you want but eliminate the distortion of taxing working people more. What is wrong with that?
As I also said, scrap NI Credits. If you haven't contributed enough you shouldn't get JSA or the full state pension, just pension credits or UC.
I agree with you on that but identifying what had been contributed for state pensions and JSA and what was to fund other areas of government spending from income tax would be administratively costly
Why would there be any administration costs since we don't do that already, so there would be no change there. The system in place is a binary "contribute or not" based on income over the threshold, we don't tally how much people have contributed - and that threshold could easily be migrated to a combined tax.
Merge it all and there would be just the one tax - and keep contribution requirements in place, not proposing abolishing those.
We should tally how much people have contributed, certainly to get the full state pension and full JSA only a certain level of contributions would enable that
But we don't, and there is no reason that can't be done with a merged Income Tax.
Whether we should merge tax rates, and whether we should have contributions, are two completely unrelated discussions.
It could be done but would require significantly higher administrative costs as I said, certainly than just doing it on a solely assessed NI contributions basis
No, it would require less administrative costs.
Whatever the NI income threshold is set at, just set it as an Income Tax income threshold. Job done.
You would then need to calculate the personal allowance and then the income tax minimum contributions threshold on top of that and then the basic and higher rates etc
No you would not.
Currently a threshold is set to "get NI contributions". Currently a threshold is set to actually pay contributions.
Those two are not aligned.
Merge the two and you just move the "get NI contributions" threshold to a "get IC contributions" threshold and carry on just the same.
Burnham has an aspiration to do something, he can't do anything til the Budget anyway.
They need to see what fiscal leeway they have, they would have had a fair dollop had it not been for Iran and Trump, the need about 10bn to do anyting meaningful to allowances but there could well be incremental things they could add in.
A set ladder over 3-4 years of x % to cover inflation plus 1% as an example.
A specific increase for those of pensionable age to link to State Pension standard amount so no one purely on State Pension pasy tax on it
My hunch would be to find a way of balancing the tax allowance for pensioners to the triple lock, so that you start to unlock the triple lock to a median point where you commit to ensuring it by inceasing personal allowances instead initially for pensioners with then an aim of increasing for all!
Putting aside the right wing ad hominem, I vote Labour in GE’s, I don’t see how this article is ‘right wing’ either.
why shouldn’t pensioners pay tax above the threshold ? It’s income after all. Those purely on the state oension do get other passported benefits.
I think Dan Neidle is right. Leave this and target NI, it’s a tax on employment. We need more employment and to make work pay.
We were canvassed by our MP and his aides at the weekend. One thing I told them is work doesn’t pay in this country.
The rational thing is for pensioners to pay tax on their income in the same way as everyone else. But as we saw with the WFA debacle, rationality goes out the window when it comes to pensioners.
I continue to blame Clive Dunn and St Winifred's School Choir.
I blame Reeves for simply not reversing Hunt’s uncosted employee NI cuts that removed all headroom
Which is bullshit.
Hunts freeze on threshold fully funded the Employee NI change.
It was a net tax rise.
If you are going to tax, better to do it through more honest and visible taxation rather than stealth and more stealth?
Indeed, which is why we should be abolishing NI and having a single rate of income tax that is paid by everyone the same, honestly and visibly.
Not taxing employment more than unearned incomes.
That is possible but you'd need to unravel NI from the pension system which will take at least some thought and legislation. On a wider point about differential taxation of earned and unearned income, the government is supposed to be looking at private equity, dividends and capital gains tax.
The need to unravel NI from the pensions system can be a long-term problem if you set employee NI to 1% in the short term, and change the income tax 20% rate to I think 28% renenue-neutral.
Any changes upwards of tax rates of capital gains will absolutely cost more than they raise. Arthur Laffer is waving from the door of the Treasury.
Any mad idea of taxing CG at income tax levels will drive hundreds of billions in investment vehicles offshore almost immediately. Dubai and Singapore are actively looking to recruit global PE funds.
You already get NIC "contributions" at 0% so no problem with setting a global 0% threshold rate for NICs, merge income tax, and still keep contributions based on income as it currently is.
Massive increase in income tax for pensioners though from 20% to 28%... It's why I would be doing it very slowly...
Merging income tax and NI is one of those 'easy fixes' that people who have only ever been on PAYE suggest.
It would be a massive increase in tax for pensioners and the self employed. Both groups who vote heavily....
That is precisely the point.
Pensioners and the self-employed should be liable for the same taxes as those on PAYE.
Everyone who earns the same amount should be taxed the same.
I would make it net tax revenue so cut the overall rate so those who are working for their income on PAYE get a tax cut, funded by taxing others the same as they would now be paying.
Yes but would it work politically as explained above large voting blocks would be against it.
There are large voting blocs against any change.
Taxes should be simple, low and evenly applied. Complicating it to appeal to voter blocs and dumping the burden on people in paid employment just harms everyone else and harms the economy by overtaxing employment.
But you have to get elected to effect the change.
They've already been elected.
With a manifesto promise that they are committed to not breaking
To not increase taxes on working families, yes.
What I propose would be a tax cut for them.
Its more in line with the manifesto than jacking up NI was.
Not quite what the manifesto actually says is” Labour will not increase taxes on working people. Which is why we will not increase National insurance the basic rate, higher or additional rates of income tax or VAT”. So they did specifically rule out increase in tax and NI.
Additionally in clarification they explained people had worked all there lives were included in their definition of working people.
Precisely.
Merge the two and there is no net increase, indeed it could be a combined cut and sold as such. All while not increasing, indeed reducing, the tax on working people.
Its more justifiable than the sophistry around the National Insurance increase.
No some working people according to the clarification would have their tax raised. It would be a breach of the manifesto
All working people did when NICs were increased, hence the sophistry around "ah but we didn't mean Employers NICs". It was still a very clear and unambiguous rise in tax.
A merger would simplify rates and not be a net increase. There would be winners and losers but there always are.
No a merger would just lead to welfare dependency from cradle to grave on tax funded welfare, with not even any attempt to have a contributory element for that welfare whether for unemployment benefit or the state pension
No it would not.
We already have welfare dependency. A merger would reduce it by lowering the proportion of taxes levied on those who work and would not change benefits one iota. 🤦♂️
You seem to have this delusion that a merger would increase benefits. It will not.
Yes it would. Most OECD nations fund their unemployment benefits via contributions to unemployment insurance and receipt of the full state pension also requiring sufficient social insurance contributions too.
Income tax would rise of course anyway as it would have NI merged into it and those on unemployment benefit or the state pension would not ever need to contribute a penny to claim them in full
They already don't need to contribute a penny to claim in full and you can keep the contribution link (indeed strengthen it) to the new combined rate.
All that would change is that currently those on taxable benefits don't pay NICs on their benefit income while those who work for their income do.
Why do you think those working for their income should be taxed more than those on benefits?
You can scrap NI credits and then ensure the full contribution link is kept for the state pension and JSA. Pensioners of course contributed to NIC throughout their working life anyway
You could keep the contribution link to a combined income tax rate, no need to abolish the contribution thresholds.
Pensioners of course never paid toward their own pensions, which is why we not only have no savings to pay for them but we are paying interest on debt instead.
Why should those on benefits be taxed less than those working for the same income?
Just because pensioners contributed something does not mean that they contributed enough.
What's clear now is that the contributions that current pensioners made over the past 60+ or so years has turned out to be woefully short of what is needed to fund the benefits and services to which they now consider themselves entitled. Yet they just don't seem to get that hard truth. And it shouldn't be down just to the next two or three generations to make up the shortfall alone.
Can you prove that dumb theory. If I had invested my NI payments for 50 years I would get significantly more guaranteed than state pension
Which would be great if NI was savings for a pension that have been set aside.
Its not, its a tax, and one that was spent in full as we have ran a deficit due to overspending almost every year.
Just because the government overspends and does not put it aside for correct purpose does not mean it should be reclassified as a tax.
Its not being reclassified as a tax.
It is a tax.
It always has been a tax.
It is defined in law as a tax.
It is defined in international treaties as a tax.
A tax by any other name is still a tax.
my state pension gets taxed at 48% already is that not enough for you
Burnham has an aspiration to do something, he can't do anything til the Budget anyway.
They need to see what fiscal leeway they have, they would have had a fair dollop had it not been for Iran and Trump, the need about 10bn to do anyting meaningful to allowances but there could well be incremental things they could add in.
A set ladder over 3-4 years of x % to cover inflation plus 1% as an example.
A specific increase for those of pensionable age to link to State Pension standard amount so no one purely on State Pension pasy tax on it
My hunch would be to find a way of balancing the tax allowance for pensioners to the triple lock, so that you start to unlock the triple lock to a median point where you commit to ensuring it by inceasing personal allowances instead initially for pensioners with then an aim of increasing for all!
Putting aside the right wing ad hominem, I vote Labour in GE’s, I don’t see how this article is ‘right wing’ either.
why shouldn’t pensioners pay tax above the threshold ? It’s income after all. Those purely on the state oension do get other passported benefits.
I think Dan Neidle is right. Leave this and target NI, it’s a tax on employment. We need more employment and to make work pay.
We were canvassed by our MP and his aides at the weekend. One thing I told them is work doesn’t pay in this country.
The rational thing is for pensioners to pay tax on their income in the same way as everyone else. But as we saw with the WFA debacle, rationality goes out the window when it comes to pensioners.
I continue to blame Clive Dunn and St Winifred's School Choir.
I blame Reeves for simply not reversing Hunt’s uncosted employee NI cuts that removed all headroom
Which is bullshit.
Hunts freeze on threshold fully funded the Employee NI change.
It was a net tax rise.
If you are going to tax, better to do it through more honest and visible taxation rather than stealth and more stealth?
Indeed, which is why we should be abolishing NI and having a single rate of income tax that is paid by everyone the same, honestly and visibly.
Not taxing employment more than unearned incomes.
That is possible but you'd need to unravel NI from the pension system which will take at least some thought and legislation. On a wider point about differential taxation of earned and unearned income, the government is supposed to be looking at private equity, dividends and capital gains tax.
The need to unravel NI from the pensions system can be a long-term problem if you set employee NI to 1% in the short term, and change the income tax 20% rate to I think 28% renenue-neutral.
Any changes upwards of tax rates of capital gains will absolutely cost more than they raise. Arthur Laffer is waving from the door of the Treasury.
Any mad idea of taxing CG at income tax levels will drive hundreds of billions in investment vehicles offshore almost immediately. Dubai and Singapore are actively looking to recruit global PE funds.
You already get NIC "contributions" at 0% so no problem with setting a global 0% threshold rate for NICs, merge income tax, and still keep contributions based on income as it currently is.
Massive increase in income tax for pensioners though from 20% to 28%... It's why I would be doing it very slowly...
Merging income tax and NI is one of those 'easy fixes' that people who have only ever been on PAYE suggest.
It would be a massive increase in tax for pensioners and the self employed. Both groups who vote heavily....
That is precisely the point.
Pensioners and the self-employed should be liable for the same taxes as those on PAYE.
Everyone who earns the same amount should be taxed the same.
I would make it net tax revenue so cut the overall rate so those who are working for their income on PAYE get a tax cut, funded by taxing others the same as they would now be paying.
Yes but would it work politically as explained above large voting blocks would be against it.
There are large voting blocs against any change.
Taxes should be simple, low and evenly applied. Complicating it to appeal to voter blocs and dumping the burden on people in paid employment just harms everyone else and harms the economy by overtaxing employment.
But you have to get elected to effect the change.
They've already been elected.
With a manifesto promise that they are committed to not breaking
To not increase taxes on working families, yes.
What I propose would be a tax cut for them.
Its more in line with the manifesto than jacking up NI was.
Not quite what the manifesto actually says is” Labour will not increase taxes on working people. Which is why we will not increase National insurance the basic rate, higher or additional rates of income tax or VAT”. So they did specifically rule out increase in tax and NI.
Additionally in clarification they explained people had worked all there lives were included in their definition of working people.
Precisely.
Merge the two and there is no net increase, indeed it could be a combined cut and sold as such. All while not increasing, indeed reducing, the tax on working people.
Its more justifiable than the sophistry around the National Insurance increase.
No some working people according to the clarification would have their tax raised. It would be a breach of the manifesto
All working people did when NICs were increased, hence the sophistry around "ah but we didn't mean Employers NICs". It was still a very clear and unambiguous rise in tax.
A merger would simplify rates and not be a net increase. There would be winners and losers but there always are.
No a merger would just lead to welfare dependency from cradle to grave on tax funded welfare, with not even any attempt to have a contributory element for that welfare whether for unemployment benefit or the state pension
No it would not.
We already have welfare dependency. A merger would reduce it by lowering the proportion of taxes levied on those who work and would not change benefits one iota. 🤦♂️
You seem to have this delusion that a merger would increase benefits. It will not.
Yes it would. Most OECD nations fund their unemployment benefits via contributions to unemployment insurance and receipt of the full state pension also requiring sufficient social insurance contributions too.
Income tax would rise of course anyway as it would have NI merged into it and those on unemployment benefit or the state pension would not ever need to contribute a penny to claim them in full
They already don't need to contribute a penny to claim in full and you can keep the contribution link (indeed strengthen it) to the new combined rate.
All that would change is that currently those on taxable benefits don't pay NICs on their benefit income while those who work for their income do.
Why do you think those working for their income should be taxed more than those on benefits?
You can scrap NI credits and then ensure the full contribution link is kept for the state pension and JSA. Pensioners of course contributed to NIC throughout their working life anyway
You could keep the contribution link to a combined income tax rate, no need to abolish the contribution thresholds.
Pensioners of course never paid toward their own pensions, which is why we not only have no savings to pay for them but we are paying interest on debt instead.
Why should those on benefits be taxed less than those working for the same income?
Just because pensioners contributed something does not mean that they contributed enough.
What's clear now is that the contributions that current pensioners made over the past 60+ or so years has turned out to be woefully short of what is needed to fund the benefits and services to which they now consider themselves entitled. Yet they just don't seem to get that hard truth. And it shouldn't be down just to the next two or three generations to make up the shortfall alone.
Can you prove that dumb theory. If I had invested my NI payments for 50 years I would get significantly more guaranteed than state pension
Which would be great if NI was savings for a pension that have been set aside.
Its not, its a tax, and one that was spent in full as we have ran a deficit due to overspending almost every year.
Just because the government overspends and does not put it aside for correct purpose does not mean it should be reclassified as a tax.
Its not being reclassified as a tax.
It is a tax.
It always has been a tax.
It is defined in law as a tax.
It is defined in international treaties as a tax.
A tax by any other name is still a tax.
my state pension gets taxed at 48% already is that not enough for you
Your state pension, and any other pension, should get taxed the same as a salaried income of the same level is. No more, no less.
Ideally that would be at a lower rate than salaried income currently pays.
Burnham may not have much to play with until his first budget, but in the meantime he's using the limited options he's got extremely well.
Today's announcement on the £2 bus fare cap is well targeted. The prime beneficiaries are going to be those who are younger or on lower incomes (because car ownership is highly correlated with income) and who are in work or studying and rely on the bus for that. Strivers who need to make work pay. But it still applies across the board if you're below pensionable age, so no-one's really going to object. There are also indirect benefits - an upturn in bus usage could bring back some services previously lost or increase the frequency of services - even pensioners relying on buses will benefit if that happens. So it's well targeted in terms of rewarding those who need to be rewarded, and well targeted in terms of likely political impact.
Who actually uses peasant wagons?
CR, your attitude is hurting mainly you here. Buses are very good at what they do. A few points:
- Firstly, more people use buses than any other form of public transport. - Secondly, if you're in a rural area, buses tend to be about as fast as driving if you can put in the modicum of effort to check a timetable in advance. I remember a stage night I went on: we were staying at a hotel in Warwick, and were going to the cricket at Stratford. I timed my arrival at the hotel to meet the bus, and got to Stratford more quickly and far more cheaply than those in the group for whom bus wasn't part of their mental landscape and insisted on using taxis. - If you live in an urban area most bus journeys are less annoying than having to park. - You can use the bus while drunk. - At the age of 51, sitting upstairs on the front seat of a bus is still as thrilling as it was at the age of 7.
Seriously, check out the bus opportunities from wherever you live and use them - it will take you new places to be drunk. Taxis are for losers and people
No-one I know uses buses.
Everybody I know uses buses.
That's because the bus service where I live (Brighton) is superb, with buses to pretty much all parts of the city every few minutes, and judicious use of bus lanes that means they're quicker than cars on most journeys. They've also introduced express buses that have limited stops so are even faster. And, of course, because the service is so good the buses are very busy.
It's also a joy to use buses for longer journeys - for example, on the coastal route from Brighton to Eastbourne, which runs every 5-10 minutes, you get stunning views from the top deck that don't exist from a car.
That's it - my paean to buses is over.
I think this chat is representative of this site and its demographic.
I never ever use them. We live in the south-east and drive or commute to London. All other times we drive, as we have kids, but even if not I'd only ever use them in very particular conditions.
Exceptions? The IoW where the service is extremely good and reliable, and London.
I suspect it is location and the quality of the bus service where you live.
Big cities (Leeds, London. Manchester. Liverpool, Edinburgh. Glasgow) the bus services are frequent and get you exactly where you want to be in the same time as driving (or even less).
Round here to get to an office I used to work out would require 2 buses both only running 3 times an hour so you could have a 20 minute gap if you are unlucky with timing. Even without it a 15 minute car journey would take 40 minutes so you could be talking an hour.
Add on waiting in the rain and you can see why people drive...
Oh, sure - the bus can't do everything. There is no public transport model which gets everyone cheaply and regularly from everywhere to everywhere outside of very high density areas. But that's not to say it can't do anything. People who refuse to consider the bus - and many do - are cutting themselves off from a service which can be as efficient and pleasant as a train or a tram for no good reason.
It really is fucking not mate.
A train is far far more pleasant than a fucking bus.
Says the person with no experience in riding buses.
Perhaps you should listen more to those who do.
I have sufficient experience in riding buses to know I don't like riding buses, like most people.
Don't be a bus wanker.
I've linked to this before, on the importance of growing provincial cities and limits of buses as mass transit;
If you're serious about making an area richer, you need a city (lots of customers, lots of trade in goods and ideas, a choice of potential staff, a choice of potential employers). surrounded by a comfortably tubby commuter belt.
Buss can help, but the unreliability of their journey times is a problem. (Anecdote: when I started my current job, one of the superloop buses looked like the way to get there; a few weeks saw me shift to a slower, but more predictable, rail route.)
So: commuter rail and tram. But the UK has a terrible record there. Partly, I suspect, because proud towns don't want to be commuter suburbs. Is Makerfield, for example, up for that? But also because it means spending money now, largely to benefit other people's children.
Over to you, Prime Minister.
Extensions to commuter rail and tram are immensely popular.
It's a mystery to me why the Restoring Your Railway programme was cancelled by this administration, as well as a tragedy.
I agree with the sentiment, but RYR was a classic example of too much process getting in the way of what should be a really simple decision. All the bullshit about competitive bids from local councils, MP endorsements, three-stage processes etc. etc.
Sometimes things should be really simple. The existing Leicester-Coalville-Burton line should be reopened to passenger trains. Wantage & Grove should get a station. None of these are cheap but nor are they hard decisions. Any commitment to public transport that does not include "we are reopening Leicester-Coalville-Burton" in the first announcement has failed.
Britain spends a lot of time and money on bids, reviews and the rest seemingly as a way to delay spending money on actually doing things, because in the short term it's cheaper to run a consultation and a review than it is to build the thing.
But in the long term you've still spent a pile of money and have nothing to show for it. Wikipedia has this delightful sentence on Heathrow expansion.
"In early December 2006, the Department for Transport published a progress report on the strategy which confirmed the original vision of expanding the runways."
Twenty years ago they were already multiple layers deep on the reports and strategy for Heathrow expansion, and it still hasn't started.
In the time we have been pissing around with one airport runway, China have built a mega sized international airport...and a whole new city of 20 million people to go with it.
Burnham has an aspiration to do something, he can't do anything til the Budget anyway.
They need to see what fiscal leeway they have, they would have had a fair dollop had it not been for Iran and Trump, the need about 10bn to do anyting meaningful to allowances but there could well be incremental things they could add in.
A set ladder over 3-4 years of x % to cover inflation plus 1% as an example.
A specific increase for those of pensionable age to link to State Pension standard amount so no one purely on State Pension pasy tax on it
My hunch would be to find a way of balancing the tax allowance for pensioners to the triple lock, so that you start to unlock the triple lock to a median point where you commit to ensuring it by inceasing personal allowances instead initially for pensioners with then an aim of increasing for all!
Putting aside the right wing ad hominem, I vote Labour in GE’s, I don’t see how this article is ‘right wing’ either.
why shouldn’t pensioners pay tax above the threshold ? It’s income after all. Those purely on the state oension do get other passported benefits.
I think Dan Neidle is right. Leave this and target NI, it’s a tax on employment. We need more employment and to make work pay.
We were canvassed by our MP and his aides at the weekend. One thing I told them is work doesn’t pay in this country.
The rational thing is for pensioners to pay tax on their income in the same way as everyone else. But as we saw with the WFA debacle, rationality goes out the window when it comes to pensioners.
I continue to blame Clive Dunn and St Winifred's School Choir.
I blame Reeves for simply not reversing Hunt’s uncosted employee NI cuts that removed all headroom
Which is bullshit.
Hunts freeze on threshold fully funded the Employee NI change.
It was a net tax rise.
If you are going to tax, better to do it through more honest and visible taxation rather than stealth and more stealth?
Indeed, which is why we should be abolishing NI and having a single rate of income tax that is paid by everyone the same, honestly and visibly.
Not taxing employment more than unearned incomes.
That is possible but you'd need to unravel NI from the pension system which will take at least some thought and legislation. On a wider point about differential taxation of earned and unearned income, the government is supposed to be looking at private equity, dividends and capital gains tax.
The need to unravel NI from the pensions system can be a long-term problem if you set employee NI to 1% in the short term, and change the income tax 20% rate to I think 28% renenue-neutral.
Any changes upwards of tax rates of capital gains will absolutely cost more than they raise. Arthur Laffer is waving from the door of the Treasury.
Any mad idea of taxing CG at income tax levels will drive hundreds of billions in investment vehicles offshore almost immediately. Dubai and Singapore are actively looking to recruit global PE funds.
You already get NIC "contributions" at 0% so no problem with setting a global 0% threshold rate for NICs, merge income tax, and still keep contributions based on income as it currently is.
Massive increase in income tax for pensioners though from 20% to 28%... It's why I would be doing it very slowly...
Merging income tax and NI is one of those 'easy fixes' that people who have only ever been on PAYE suggest.
It would be a massive increase in tax for pensioners and the self employed. Both groups who vote heavily....
That is precisely the point.
Pensioners and the self-employed should be liable for the same taxes as those on PAYE.
Everyone who earns the same amount should be taxed the same.
I would make it net tax revenue so cut the overall rate so those who are working for their income on PAYE get a tax cut, funded by taxing others the same as they would now be paying.
Yes but would it work politically as explained above large voting blocks would be against it.
There are large voting blocs against any change.
Taxes should be simple, low and evenly applied. Complicating it to appeal to voter blocs and dumping the burden on people in paid employment just harms everyone else and harms the economy by overtaxing employment.
But you have to get elected to effect the change.
They've already been elected.
With a manifesto promise that they are committed to not breaking
To not increase taxes on working families, yes.
What I propose would be a tax cut for them.
Its more in line with the manifesto than jacking up NI was.
Not quite what the manifesto actually says is” Labour will not increase taxes on working people. Which is why we will not increase National insurance the basic rate, higher or additional rates of income tax or VAT”. So they did specifically rule out increase in tax and NI.
Additionally in clarification they explained people had worked all there lives were included in their definition of working people.
Precisely.
Merge the two and there is no net increase, indeed it could be a combined cut and sold as such. All while not increasing, indeed reducing, the tax on working people.
Its more justifiable than the sophistry around the National Insurance increase.
No some working people according to the clarification would have their tax raised. It would be a breach of the manifesto
All working people did when NICs were increased, hence the sophistry around "ah but we didn't mean Employers NICs". It was still a very clear and unambiguous rise in tax.
A merger would simplify rates and not be a net increase. There would be winners and losers but there always are.
No a merger would just lead to welfare dependency from cradle to grave on tax funded welfare, with not even any attempt to have a contributory element for that welfare whether for unemployment benefit or the state pension
No it would not.
We already have welfare dependency. A merger would reduce it by lowering the proportion of taxes levied on those who work and would not change benefits one iota. 🤦♂️
You seem to have this delusion that a merger would increase benefits. It will not.
Yes it would. Most OECD nations fund their unemployment benefits via contributions to unemployment insurance and receipt of the full state pension also requiring sufficient social insurance contributions too.
Income tax would rise of course anyway as it would have NI merged into it and those on unemployment benefit or the state pension would not ever need to contribute a penny to claim them in full
They already don't need to contribute a penny to claim in full and you can keep the contribution link (indeed strengthen it) to the new combined rate.
All that would change is that currently those on taxable benefits don't pay NICs on their benefit income while those who work for their income do.
Why do you think those working for their income should be taxed more than those on benefits?
You can scrap NI credits and then ensure the full contribution link is kept for the state pension and JSA. Pensioners of course contributed to NIC throughout their working life anyway
You could keep the contribution link to a combined income tax rate, no need to abolish the contribution thresholds.
Pensioners of course never paid toward their own pensions, which is why we not only have no savings to pay for them but we are paying interest on debt instead.
Why should those on benefits be taxed less than those working for the same income?
Just because pensioners contributed something does not mean that they contributed enough.
What's clear now is that the contributions that current pensioners made over the past 60+ or so years has turned out to be woefully short of what is needed to fund the benefits and services to which they now consider themselves entitled. Yet they just don't seem to get that hard truth. And it shouldn't be down just to the next two or three generations to make up the shortfall alone.
Can you prove that dumb theory. If I had invested my NI payments for 50 years I would get significantly more guaranteed than state pension
Which would be great if NI was savings for a pension that have been set aside.
Its not, its a tax, and one that was spent in full as we have ran a deficit due to overspending almost every year.
Just because the government overspends and does not put it aside for correct purpose does not mean it should be reclassified as a tax.
Just abolish NI.
And put the rates of Income Tax up to 27%, 42% and 50%. Should be a net income raiser whilst benefitting earners.
Burnham has an aspiration to do something, he can't do anything til the Budget anyway.
They need to see what fiscal leeway they have, they would have had a fair dollop had it not been for Iran and Trump, the need about 10bn to do anyting meaningful to allowances but there could well be incremental things they could add in.
A set ladder over 3-4 years of x % to cover inflation plus 1% as an example.
A specific increase for those of pensionable age to link to State Pension standard amount so no one purely on State Pension pasy tax on it
My hunch would be to find a way of balancing the tax allowance for pensioners to the triple lock, so that you start to unlock the triple lock to a median point where you commit to ensuring it by inceasing personal allowances instead initially for pensioners with then an aim of increasing for all!
Putting aside the right wing ad hominem, I vote Labour in GE’s, I don’t see how this article is ‘right wing’ either.
why shouldn’t pensioners pay tax above the threshold ? It’s income after all. Those purely on the state oension do get other passported benefits.
I think Dan Neidle is right. Leave this and target NI, it’s a tax on employment. We need more employment and to make work pay.
We were canvassed by our MP and his aides at the weekend. One thing I told them is work doesn’t pay in this country.
The rational thing is for pensioners to pay tax on their income in the same way as everyone else. But as we saw with the WFA debacle, rationality goes out the window when it comes to pensioners.
I continue to blame Clive Dunn and St Winifred's School Choir.
I blame Reeves for simply not reversing Hunt’s uncosted employee NI cuts that removed all headroom
Which is bullshit.
Hunts freeze on threshold fully funded the Employee NI change.
It was a net tax rise.
If you are going to tax, better to do it through more honest and visible taxation rather than stealth and more stealth?
Indeed, which is why we should be abolishing NI and having a single rate of income tax that is paid by everyone the same, honestly and visibly.
Not taxing employment more than unearned incomes.
That is possible but you'd need to unravel NI from the pension system which will take at least some thought and legislation. On a wider point about differential taxation of earned and unearned income, the government is supposed to be looking at private equity, dividends and capital gains tax.
The need to unravel NI from the pensions system can be a long-term problem if you set employee NI to 1% in the short term, and change the income tax 20% rate to I think 28% renenue-neutral.
Any changes upwards of tax rates of capital gains will absolutely cost more than they raise. Arthur Laffer is waving from the door of the Treasury.
Any mad idea of taxing CG at income tax levels will drive hundreds of billions in investment vehicles offshore almost immediately. Dubai and Singapore are actively looking to recruit global PE funds.
You already get NIC "contributions" at 0% so no problem with setting a global 0% threshold rate for NICs, merge income tax, and still keep contributions based on income as it currently is.
Massive increase in income tax for pensioners though from 20% to 28%... It's why I would be doing it very slowly...
Merging income tax and NI is one of those 'easy fixes' that people who have only ever been on PAYE suggest.
It would be a massive increase in tax for pensioners and the self employed. Both groups who vote heavily....
That is precisely the point.
Pensioners and the self-employed should be liable for the same taxes as those on PAYE.
Everyone who earns the same amount should be taxed the same.
I would make it net tax revenue so cut the overall rate so those who are working for their income on PAYE get a tax cut, funded by taxing others the same as they would now be paying.
Yes but would it work politically as explained above large voting blocks would be against it.
There are large voting blocs against any change.
Taxes should be simple, low and evenly applied. Complicating it to appeal to voter blocs and dumping the burden on people in paid employment just harms everyone else and harms the economy by overtaxing employment.
But you have to get elected to effect the change.
They've already been elected.
With a manifesto promise that they are committed to not breaking
To not increase taxes on working families, yes.
What I propose would be a tax cut for them.
Its more in line with the manifesto than jacking up NI was.
Not quite what the manifesto actually says is” Labour will not increase taxes on working people. Which is why we will not increase National insurance the basic rate, higher or additional rates of income tax or VAT”. So they did specifically rule out increase in tax and NI.
Additionally in clarification they explained people had worked all there lives were included in their definition of working people.
Precisely.
Merge the two and there is no net increase, indeed it could be a combined cut and sold as such. All while not increasing, indeed reducing, the tax on working people.
Its more justifiable than the sophistry around the National Insurance increase.
No some working people according to the clarification would have their tax raised. It would be a breach of the manifesto
All working people did when NICs were increased, hence the sophistry around "ah but we didn't mean Employers NICs". It was still a very clear and unambiguous rise in tax.
A merger would simplify rates and not be a net increase. There would be winners and losers but there always are.
No a merger would just lead to welfare dependency from cradle to grave on tax funded welfare, with not even any attempt to have a contributory element for that welfare whether for unemployment benefit or the state pension
No it would not.
We already have welfare dependency. A merger would reduce it by lowering the proportion of taxes levied on those who work and would not change benefits one iota. 🤦♂️
You seem to have this delusion that a merger would increase benefits. It will not.
Yes it would. Most OECD nations fund their unemployment benefits via contributions to unemployment insurance and receipt of the full state pension also requiring sufficient social insurance contributions too.
Income tax would rise of course anyway as it would have NI merged into it and those on unemployment benefit or the state pension would not ever need to contribute a penny to claim them in full
They already don't need to contribute a penny to claim in full and you can keep the contribution link (indeed strengthen it) to the new combined rate.
All that would change is that currently those on taxable benefits don't pay NICs on their benefit income while those who work for their income do.
Why do you think those working for their income should be taxed more than those on benefits?
You can scrap NI credits and then ensure the full contribution link is kept for the state pension and JSA. Pensioners of course contributed to NIC throughout their working life anyway
You could keep the contribution link to a combined income tax rate, no need to abolish the contribution thresholds.
Pensioners of course never paid toward their own pensions, which is why we not only have no savings to pay for them but we are paying interest on debt instead.
Why should those on benefits be taxed less than those working for the same income?
Just because pensioners contributed something does not mean that they contributed enough.
What's clear now is that the contributions that current pensioners made over the past 60+ or so years has turned out to be woefully short of what is needed to fund the benefits and services to which they now consider themselves entitled. Yet they just don't seem to get that hard truth. And it shouldn't be down just to the next two or three generations to make up the shortfall alone.
Can you prove that dumb theory. If I had invested my NI payments for 50 years I would get significantly more guaranteed than state pension
Which would be great if NI was savings for a pension that have been set aside.
Its not, its a tax, and one that was spent in full as we have ran a deficit due to overspending almost every year.
Just because the government overspends and does not put it aside for correct purpose does not mean it should be reclassified as a tax.
Just abolish NI.
And put the rates of Income Tax up to 27%, 42% and 50%. Should be a net income raiser whilst benefitting earners.
George Osborne had the politician capital to do this in 2010 and chickened out. I think it was a missed opportunity.
It works both ways for those on the left and right. It simplifies things while I think it raises more taxes, but also make tax you pay much clearer i.e. all this messing around with fiscially dragging the different thresholds is harder to get away with by the government. The objection is always the oldies, but you could just do something like apply a higher tax free threshold to them.
There will be winners and losers, is what all modern politicians seemed so scared of and run away from policies that might have lots of visible / vocal "losers" e.g. see the backing down by Hammond of very minor changes to NI for self employed because the media (who make a lot of money out of self employment limited company vechicles) got super shouty about it.
Burnham has an aspiration to do something, he can't do anything til the Budget anyway.
They need to see what fiscal leeway they have, they would have had a fair dollop had it not been for Iran and Trump, the need about 10bn to do anyting meaningful to allowances but there could well be incremental things they could add in.
A set ladder over 3-4 years of x % to cover inflation plus 1% as an example.
A specific increase for those of pensionable age to link to State Pension standard amount so no one purely on State Pension pasy tax on it
My hunch would be to find a way of balancing the tax allowance for pensioners to the triple lock, so that you start to unlock the triple lock to a median point where you commit to ensuring it by inceasing personal allowances instead initially for pensioners with then an aim of increasing for all!
Putting aside the right wing ad hominem, I vote Labour in GE’s, I don’t see how this article is ‘right wing’ either.
why shouldn’t pensioners pay tax above the threshold ? It’s income after all. Those purely on the state oension do get other passported benefits.
I think Dan Neidle is right. Leave this and target NI, it’s a tax on employment. We need more employment and to make work pay.
We were canvassed by our MP and his aides at the weekend. One thing I told them is work doesn’t pay in this country.
The rational thing is for pensioners to pay tax on their income in the same way as everyone else. But as we saw with the WFA debacle, rationality goes out the window when it comes to pensioners.
I continue to blame Clive Dunn and St Winifred's School Choir.
I blame Reeves for simply not reversing Hunt’s uncosted employee NI cuts that removed all headroom
Which is bullshit.
Hunts freeze on threshold fully funded the Employee NI change.
It was a net tax rise.
If you are going to tax, better to do it through more honest and visible taxation rather than stealth and more stealth?
Indeed, which is why we should be abolishing NI and having a single rate of income tax that is paid by everyone the same, honestly and visibly.
Not taxing employment more than unearned incomes.
That is possible but you'd need to unravel NI from the pension system which will take at least some thought and legislation. On a wider point about differential taxation of earned and unearned income, the government is supposed to be looking at private equity, dividends and capital gains tax.
The need to unravel NI from the pensions system can be a long-term problem if you set employee NI to 1% in the short term, and change the income tax 20% rate to I think 28% renenue-neutral.
Any changes upwards of tax rates of capital gains will absolutely cost more than they raise. Arthur Laffer is waving from the door of the Treasury.
Any mad idea of taxing CG at income tax levels will drive hundreds of billions in investment vehicles offshore almost immediately. Dubai and Singapore are actively looking to recruit global PE funds.
You already get NIC "contributions" at 0% so no problem with setting a global 0% threshold rate for NICs, merge income tax, and still keep contributions based on income as it currently is.
Massive increase in income tax for pensioners though from 20% to 28%... It's why I would be doing it very slowly...
Merging income tax and NI is one of those 'easy fixes' that people who have only ever been on PAYE suggest.
It would be a massive increase in tax for pensioners and the self employed. Both groups who vote heavily....
That is precisely the point.
Pensioners and the self-employed should be liable for the same taxes as those on PAYE.
Everyone who earns the same amount should be taxed the same.
I would make it net tax revenue so cut the overall rate so those who are working for their income on PAYE get a tax cut, funded by taxing others the same as they would now be paying.
Yes but would it work politically as explained above large voting blocks would be against it.
There are large voting blocs against any change.
Taxes should be simple, low and evenly applied. Complicating it to appeal to voter blocs and dumping the burden on people in paid employment just harms everyone else and harms the economy by overtaxing employment.
But you have to get elected to effect the change.
They've already been elected.
With a manifesto promise that they are committed to not breaking
To not increase taxes on working families, yes.
What I propose would be a tax cut for them.
Its more in line with the manifesto than jacking up NI was.
Not quite what the manifesto actually says is” Labour will not increase taxes on working people. Which is why we will not increase National insurance the basic rate, higher or additional rates of income tax or VAT”. So they did specifically rule out increase in tax and NI.
Additionally in clarification they explained people had worked all there lives were included in their definition of working people.
Precisely.
Merge the two and there is no net increase, indeed it could be a combined cut and sold as such. All while not increasing, indeed reducing, the tax on working people.
Its more justifiable than the sophistry around the National Insurance increase.
No some working people according to the clarification would have their tax raised. It would be a breach of the manifesto
All working people did when NICs were increased, hence the sophistry around "ah but we didn't mean Employers NICs". It was still a very clear and unambiguous rise in tax.
A merger would simplify rates and not be a net increase. There would be winners and losers but there always are.
No a merger would just lead to welfare dependency from cradle to grave on tax funded welfare, with not even any attempt to have a contributory element for that welfare whether for unemployment benefit or the state pension
No it would not.
We already have welfare dependency. A merger would reduce it by lowering the proportion of taxes levied on those who work and would not change benefits one iota. 🤦♂️
You seem to have this delusion that a merger would increase benefits. It will not.
Yes it would. Most OECD nations fund their unemployment benefits via contributions to unemployment insurance and receipt of the full state pension also requiring sufficient social insurance contributions too.
Income tax would rise of course anyway as it would have NI merged into it and those on unemployment benefit or the state pension would not ever need to contribute a penny to claim them in full
They already don't need to contribute a penny to claim in full and you can keep the contribution link (indeed strengthen it) to the new combined rate.
All that would change is that currently those on taxable benefits don't pay NICs on their benefit income while those who work for their income do.
Why do you think those working for their income should be taxed more than those on benefits?
You can scrap NI credits and then ensure the full contribution link is kept for the state pension and JSA. Pensioners of course contributed to NIC throughout their working life anyway
You could keep the contribution link to a combined income tax rate, no need to abolish the contribution thresholds.
Pensioners of course never paid toward their own pensions, which is why we not only have no savings to pay for them but we are paying interest on debt instead.
Why should those on benefits be taxed less than those working for the same income?
Just because pensioners contributed something does not mean that they contributed enough.
What's clear now is that the contributions that current pensioners made over the past 60+ or so years has turned out to be woefully short of what is needed to fund the benefits and services to which they now consider themselves entitled. Yet they just don't seem to get that hard truth. And it shouldn't be down just to the next two or three generations to make up the shortfall alone.
Can you prove that dumb theory. If I had invested my NI payments for 50 years I would get significantly more guaranteed than state pension
Which would be great if NI was savings for a pension that have been set aside.
Its not, its a tax, and one that was spent in full as we have ran a deficit due to overspending almost every year.
Just because the government overspends and does not put it aside for correct purpose does not mean it should be reclassified as a tax.
Its not being reclassified as a tax.
It is a tax.
It always has been a tax.
It is defined in law as a tax.
It is defined in international treaties as a tax.
A tax by any other name is still a tax.
my state pension gets taxed at 48% already is that not enough for you
You don't need the money, malc. Government would spend it so much better than you....
Huzzah. We don't want the NHS wasting legal fees on treating patients.
I am afraid as a parent I am with Barnaby's mum. Three people died because of a dereliction of duty. The Health Secretary of the day, Streeting should be in the dock with the others who failed Calocane and his victims.
Same here. People need to be held accountable
The NHS shouldn’t get a free pass just because it’s a national religion
There are about 14 000 clinical negligence claims made against the NHS each year.
Out of interest do you know how many are upheld?
About half.
Medicine is very hard and very dangerous and often gets it wrong. Iatrogenic injuries are a major cause of morbidity.
I don't use the local bus much because it takes about 40 mins to do the same journey that takes 10 mins in a car, since it goes round so many areas on the way to the nearest big town.
Burnham may not have much to play with until his first budget, but in the meantime he's using the limited options he's got extremely well.
Today's announcement on the £2 bus fare cap is well targeted. The prime beneficiaries are going to be those who are younger or on lower incomes (because car ownership is highly correlated with income) and who are in work or studying and rely on the bus for that. Strivers who need to make work pay. But it still applies across the board if you're below pensionable age, so no-one's really going to object. There are also indirect benefits - an upturn in bus usage could bring back some services previously lost or increase the frequency of services - even pensioners relying on buses will benefit if that happens. So it's well targeted in terms of rewarding those who need to be rewarded, and well targeted in terms of likely political impact.
Who actually uses peasant wagons?
CR, your attitude is hurting mainly you here. Buses are very good at what they do. A few points:
- Firstly, more people use buses than any other form of public transport. - Secondly, if you're in a rural area, buses tend to be about as fast as driving if you can put in the modicum of effort to check a timetable in advance. I remember a stage night I went on: we were staying at a hotel in Warwick, and were going to the cricket at Stratford. I timed my arrival at the hotel to meet the bus, and got to Stratford more quickly and far more cheaply than those in the group for whom bus wasn't part of their mental landscape and insisted on using taxis. - If you live in an urban area most bus journeys are less annoying than having to park. - You can use the bus while drunk. - At the age of 51, sitting upstairs on the front seat of a bus is still as thrilling as it was at the age of 7.
Seriously, check out the bus opportunities from wherever you live and use them - it will take you new places to be drunk. Taxis are for losers and people
No-one I know uses buses.
Everybody I know uses buses.
That's because the bus service where I live (Brighton) is superb, with buses to pretty much all parts of the city every few minutes, and judicious use of bus lanes that means they're quicker than cars on most journeys. They've also introduced express buses that have limited stops so are even faster. And, of course, because the service is so good the buses are very busy.
It's also a joy to use buses for longer journeys - for example, on the coastal route from Brighton to Eastbourne, which runs every 5-10 minutes, you get stunning views from the top deck that don't exist from a car.
That's it - my paean to buses is over.
I think this chat is representative of this site and its demographic.
I never ever use them. We live in the south-east and drive or commute to London. All other times we drive, as we have kids, but even if not I'd only ever use them in very particular conditions.
Exceptions? The IoW where the service is extremely good and reliable, and London.
I suspect it is location and the quality of the bus service where you live.
Big cities (Leeds, London. Manchester. Liverpool, Edinburgh. Glasgow) the bus services are frequent and get you exactly where you want to be in the same time as driving (or even less).
Round here to get to an office I used to work out would require 2 buses both only running 3 times an hour so you could have a 20 minute gap if you are unlucky with timing. Even without it a 15 minute car journey would take 40 minutes so you could be talking an hour.
Add on waiting in the rain and you can see why people drive...
Oh, sure - the bus can't do everything. There is no public transport model which gets everyone cheaply and regularly from everywhere to everywhere outside of very high density areas. But that's not to say it can't do anything. People who refuse to consider the bus - and many do - are cutting themselves off from a service which can be as efficient and pleasant as a train or a tram for no good reason.
It really is fucking not mate.
A train is far far more pleasant than a fucking bus.
Says the person with no experience in riding buses.
Perhaps you should listen more to those who do.
I have sufficient experience in riding buses to know I don't like riding buses, like most people.
Don't be a bus wanker.
I've linked to this before, on the importance of growing provincial cities and limits of buses as mass transit;
If you're serious about making an area richer, you need a city (lots of customers, lots of trade in goods and ideas, a choice of potential staff, a choice of potential employers). surrounded by a comfortably tubby commuter belt.
Buss can help, but the unreliability of their journey times is a problem. (Anecdote: when I started my current job, one of the superloop buses looked like the way to get there; a few weeks saw me shift to a slower, but more predictable, rail route.)
So: commuter rail and tram. But the UK has a terrible record there. Partly, I suspect, because proud towns don't want to be commuter suburbs. Is Makerfield, for example, up for that? But also because it means spending money now, largely to benefit other people's children.
Over to you, Prime Minister.
Extensions to commuter rail and tram are immensely popular.
It's a mystery to me why the Restoring Your Railway programme was cancelled by this administration, as well as a tragedy.
I agree with the sentiment, but RYR was a classic example of too much process getting in the way of what should be a really simple decision. All the bullshit about competitive bids from local councils, MP endorsements, three-stage processes etc. etc.
Sometimes things should be really simple. The existing Leicester-Coalville-Burton line should be reopened to passenger trains. Wantage & Grove (22,000 residents, right on the Great Western Main Line) should get a station. None of these are cheap but nor are they hard decisions. Any commitment to public transport that does not include "we are reopening Leicester-Coalville-Burton" in the first announcement has failed.
Buses are a quick win though. Demand can response quickly to reduced fares and there's a lot of unused capacity already. Users see the financial benefits from reduced fares immediately. New routes capacity in response to rising demand can also be put on pretty quickly, no later than the time it takes to build extra buses and train drivers.
By contrast any new or restored fixed rail route including trams requires the best part of a decade to get the infrastructure in place. For example, the intention to restore rail services between Walsall and Wolverhampton was announced in 2017, but it took until 2026 to get the line fully open with modernised extra stations.
One thing I noticed about the £2 bus charge when it was introduced by the Tories, my local bus company where I lived at the time reacted by scrapping return tickets (which were cheaper than £4). Then you could only get two singles or a day ticket (which was ~£6 at time and they increased the price of that as well). So it actually made it more expensive for me to use the bus as I more often than not if I go somewhere on the bus, I will also come back via it. A more common usage for me was I needed to make a number of journeys throughtout the day and it was a ballache to keep parking different places (and often have to pay).
Burnham may not have much to play with until his first budget, but in the meantime he's using the limited options he's got extremely well.
Today's announcement on the £2 bus fare cap is well targeted. The prime beneficiaries are going to be those who are younger or on lower incomes (because car ownership is highly correlated with income) and who are in work or studying and rely on the bus for that. Strivers who need to make work pay. But it still applies across the board if you're below pensionable age, so no-one's really going to object. There are also indirect benefits - an upturn in bus usage could bring back some services previously lost or increase the frequency of services - even pensioners relying on buses will benefit if that happens. So it's well targeted in terms of rewarding those who need to be rewarded, and well targeted in terms of likely political impact.
Who actually uses peasant wagons?
I use “peasant wagons” and certainly am no peasant, as do plenty of my friends who aren’t peasants, some are a hundred million and more plus change from being peasants. We all use them if we are heading into town for drinks, if heading into the office or town where there is a good chance of it ending up involving drinks.
In our twenties we would likely drive in and leave cars overnight but you still had the issue of getting in to get your car the next day (lift from friend, taxi, bus) and also you had the problem of potentially being over the limit if picking up in the morning whereas we got over ourselves and realised how silly it was.
I can be on the bus, about forty mins journey and along the way people I know will get on, generally for the same reason. Some of these people are old business contacts or clients and I know they are worth crazy money but they don’t worry about the optics of taking an easy service to go and do what they want to do.
Will always get a taxi back at the end of the night as it’s easier when drinking and usually after the buses stop around midnight.
The same when I lived in Switzerland. I would travel in and home most days with the owner of the Commune’s Manor House, a hedgie, and other similar, Swiss, Brits, others, nobody felt any embarrassment about using a bus.
To caveat the above we have a great bus service, clean, good routes, cheap. Huge amounts of school buses so rarely plagued by gangs of school kids. No eating or drinking allowed so no grim smells.
I only use trains, taxis or walk.
Buses are slow, crap and full of undesirables.
Buses being full of anyone would make a change.
I wonder if this is another North/South divide though. Around here buses are the primary/sole means of public transport.
My wife has used them to get to work for a very long time and has never complained about undesirables. I never take them as I drive so can't comment.
For what it's worth, I did find the guy who reviewed every bus timetable in the country to see how far he could get in the UK using just buses (not coaches) in a single day pretty cool.
I'm fine with the nerdery and timetable analysis 👌
I enjoyed that too - it was about 5 years ago, I think? I remember he passed me on the way.
What I toko from the video was a) how quickly it is possible to get about by bus in much of the country, and b) how nice buses are nowadays - it is a far cry from the only GMPTE buses of the 80s with smoking and music on the move upstairs.
Buses #1 problem is that people do not find them legible in the same way that they do with trains. When the Beeching review closed so much rural rail in the 1960s, it made economic sense - the bus could do the job of the train just as well and more cheaply in those areas. But people - especially people from outside the area - do not treat a bus route the same as a train line. I remember going to a wedding near Cockermouth, and so many people getting a train to Penrith and then a taxi - because they wouldn't put in the tiny amount of effort to understand the bus route which pretty much replaces the old pre-beeching route. The bus would be just as quick as a train - it just isn't legible in the same way. A similar problem exists for more mundane services in local areas: where I live in suburban South Manchester, buses offer so much opportunity if you know where they go - but so many do not: it is obvious where a tram goes, but far less obvious where a bus goes without a bit of thought.
A further thought in favour of the bus: a good chunk of the population can't drive, either because they are too young, do not have a car, or never learned. The bus provides a great service for these people. My daughters' schoolfriends are largely beyond an attractive walking distance (many are 2-m miles away) - buses offer an excellent opportunity for teenagers to get about unaccompanied.
The google maps app is utterly brilliant at giving you the best public transport option - even a geek like me can't hold every bus route in Greater Manchester in my head, and certainly not the rest of the country.
Next time you get a train to an unfamiliar part of the country, I urge you to try the Google maps public transport layer to suggest ways of completing your journey which aren't taxi - you might be pleasantly surprised at how easy it is.
Trains will always beat buses mate, and Beeching was an arsehole.
Trains absolutely do not always beat buses.
My wife gets a bus to work. She gets a bus from near our house, then gets off the bus near her work, one town over.
If she wanted to get a train she would need to get a taxi to the the train station (or a bus to the train station), then a train, then a taxi from the train station to work (or a bus).
There is no advantage in doing so.
Trains may be great somewhere like London, but try living in the rest of the country. Buses can operate without tracks on existing roads which mean they can go to far more places, which is why far more people use buses than trains outside areas like London.
Trains are cleaner, nicer, more efficient, more serene, more sophisticated, and have more riding flexibility, as you can change carriage, use the toilet, walk up and down etc.
.
But trains only go where our forebears were wise enough to put down rails, and provided your Tory forebear Ernest Marples didn’t then sign off tearing them up.
We could... you know... build new railway lines?
Sorry. Me and my crazy talk.
Not in this country because somehow what costs X pounds in any other country costs 10x pounds here...
I don’t think the WFA decision itself was bad. It was just sold appallingly (actually not sold at all, really).
What we see from Burnham is political confidence that Starmer lacked completely. You can quibble about the bus fare cap etc, but they are doing exactly what they are supposed to do: send a *political* message that the government cares about the cost of living.
Starmer didn’t really “do” politics. Which is why he was ousted just 2 years after one of the biggest electoral landslides in history.
Burnham has an aspiration to do something, he can't do anything til the Budget anyway.
They need to see what fiscal leeway they have, they would have had a fair dollop had it not been for Iran and Trump, the need about 10bn to do anyting meaningful to allowances but there could well be incremental things they could add in.
A set ladder over 3-4 years of x % to cover inflation plus 1% as an example.
A specific increase for those of pensionable age to link to State Pension standard amount so no one purely on State Pension pasy tax on it
My hunch would be to find a way of balancing the tax allowance for pensioners to the triple lock, so that you start to unlock the triple lock to a median point where you commit to ensuring it by inceasing personal allowances instead initially for pensioners with then an aim of increasing for all!
Putting aside the right wing ad hominem, I vote Labour in GE’s, I don’t see how this article is ‘right wing’ either.
why shouldn’t pensioners pay tax above the threshold ? It’s income after all. Those purely on the state oension do get other passported benefits.
I think Dan Neidle is right. Leave this and target NI, it’s a tax on employment. We need more employment and to make work pay.
We were canvassed by our MP and his aides at the weekend. One thing I told them is work doesn’t pay in this country.
The rational thing is for pensioners to pay tax on their income in the same way as everyone else. But as we saw with the WFA debacle, rationality goes out the window when it comes to pensioners.
I continue to blame Clive Dunn and St Winifred's School Choir.
I blame Reeves for simply not reversing Hunt’s uncosted employee NI cuts that removed all headroom
Which is bullshit.
Hunts freeze on threshold fully funded the Employee NI change.
It was a net tax rise.
If you are going to tax, better to do it through more honest and visible taxation rather than stealth and more stealth?
Indeed, which is why we should be abolishing NI and having a single rate of income tax that is paid by everyone the same, honestly and visibly.
Not taxing employment more than unearned incomes.
That is possible but you'd need to unravel NI from the pension system which will take at least some thought and legislation. On a wider point about differential taxation of earned and unearned income, the government is supposed to be looking at private equity, dividends and capital gains tax.
The need to unravel NI from the pensions system can be a long-term problem if you set employee NI to 1% in the short term, and change the income tax 20% rate to I think 28% renenue-neutral.
Any changes upwards of tax rates of capital gains will absolutely cost more than they raise. Arthur Laffer is waving from the door of the Treasury.
Any mad idea of taxing CG at income tax levels will drive hundreds of billions in investment vehicles offshore almost immediately. Dubai and Singapore are actively looking to recruit global PE funds.
You already get NIC "contributions" at 0% so no problem with setting a global 0% threshold rate for NICs, merge income tax, and still keep contributions based on income as it currently is.
Massive increase in income tax for pensioners though from 20% to 28%... It's why I would be doing it very slowly...
Merging income tax and NI is one of those 'easy fixes' that people who have only ever been on PAYE suggest.
It would be a massive increase in tax for pensioners and the self employed. Both groups who vote heavily....
That is precisely the point.
Pensioners and the self-employed should be liable for the same taxes as those on PAYE.
Everyone who earns the same amount should be taxed the same.
I would make it net tax revenue so cut the overall rate so those who are working for their income on PAYE get a tax cut, funded by taxing others the same as they would now be paying.
Yes but would it work politically as explained above large voting blocks would be against it.
There are large voting blocs against any change.
Taxes should be simple, low and evenly applied. Complicating it to appeal to voter blocs and dumping the burden on people in paid employment just harms everyone else and harms the economy by overtaxing employment.
But you have to get elected to effect the change.
They've already been elected.
With a manifesto promise that they are committed to not breaking
To not increase taxes on working families, yes.
What I propose would be a tax cut for them.
Its more in line with the manifesto than jacking up NI was.
Not quite what the manifesto actually says is” Labour will not increase taxes on working people. Which is why we will not increase National insurance the basic rate, higher or additional rates of income tax or VAT”. So they did specifically rule out increase in tax and NI.
Additionally in clarification they explained people had worked all there lives were included in their definition of working people.
Precisely.
Merge the two and there is no net increase, indeed it could be a combined cut and sold as such. All while not increasing, indeed reducing, the tax on working people.
Its more justifiable than the sophistry around the National Insurance increase.
No some working people according to the clarification would have their tax raised. It would be a breach of the manifesto
All working people did when NICs were increased, hence the sophistry around "ah but we didn't mean Employers NICs". It was still a very clear and unambiguous rise in tax.
A merger would simplify rates and not be a net increase. There would be winners and losers but there always are.
No a merger would just lead to welfare dependency from cradle to grave on tax funded welfare, with not even any attempt to have a contributory element for that welfare whether for unemployment benefit or the state pension
No it would not.
We already have welfare dependency. A merger would reduce it by lowering the proportion of taxes levied on those who work and would not change benefits one iota. 🤦♂️
You seem to have this delusion that a merger would increase benefits. It will not.
Yes it would. Most OECD nations fund their unemployment benefits via contributions to unemployment insurance and receipt of the full state pension also requiring sufficient social insurance contributions too.
Income tax would rise of course anyway as it would have NI merged into it and those on unemployment benefit or the state pension would not ever need to contribute a penny to claim them in full
They already don't need to contribute a penny to claim in full and you can keep the contribution link (indeed strengthen it) to the new combined rate.
All that would change is that currently those on taxable benefits don't pay NICs on their benefit income while those who work for their income do.
Why do you think those working for their income should be taxed more than those on benefits?
You can scrap NI credits and then ensure the full contribution link is kept for the state pension and JSA. Pensioners of course contributed to NIC throughout their working life anyway
You could keep the contribution link to a combined income tax rate, no need to abolish the contribution thresholds.
Pensioners of course never paid toward their own pensions, which is why we not only have no savings to pay for them but we are paying interest on debt instead.
Why should those on benefits be taxed less than those working for the same income?
They could not claim the state pension in full without a sufficient rate of NI contributions, scrap NI credits and only those who have contributed can get it, everyone else has to get pension credits
People already can get NI Credits though.
What is wrong with a package that combines abolishing NI Credits, merging Income Tax and NICs and migrating NI contributions to be Income Tax contributions?
You keep the contributory nature that you want but eliminate the distortion of taxing working people more. What is wrong with that?
As I also said, scrap NI Credits. If you haven't contributed enough you shouldn't get JSA or the full state pension, just pension credits or UC.
I agree with you on that but identifying what had been contributed for state pensions and JSA and what was to fund other areas of government spending from income tax would be administratively costly
Why would there be any administration costs since we don't do that already, so there would be no change there. The system in place is a binary "contribute or not" based on income over the threshold, we don't tally how much people have contributed - and that threshold could easily be migrated to a combined tax.
Merge it all and there would be just the one tax - and keep contribution requirements in place, not proposing abolishing those.
We should tally how much people have contributed, certainly to get the full state pension and full JSA only a certain level of contributions would enable that
Burnham has an aspiration to do something, he can't do anything til the Budget anyway.
They need to see what fiscal leeway they have, they would have had a fair dollop had it not been for Iran and Trump, the need about 10bn to do anyting meaningful to allowances but there could well be incremental things they could add in.
A set ladder over 3-4 years of x % to cover inflation plus 1% as an example.
A specific increase for those of pensionable age to link to State Pension standard amount so no one purely on State Pension pasy tax on it
My hunch would be to find a way of balancing the tax allowance for pensioners to the triple lock, so that you start to unlock the triple lock to a median point where you commit to ensuring it by inceasing personal allowances instead initially for pensioners with then an aim of increasing for all!
Putting aside the right wing ad hominem, I vote Labour in GE’s, I don’t see how this article is ‘right wing’ either.
why shouldn’t pensioners pay tax above the threshold ? It’s income after all. Those purely on the state oension do get other passported benefits.
I think Dan Neidle is right. Leave this and target NI, it’s a tax on employment. We need more employment and to make work pay.
We were canvassed by our MP and his aides at the weekend. One thing I told them is work doesn’t pay in this country.
The rational thing is for pensioners to pay tax on their income in the same way as everyone else. But as we saw with the WFA debacle, rationality goes out the window when it comes to pensioners.
I continue to blame Clive Dunn and St Winifred's School Choir.
I blame Reeves for simply not reversing Hunt’s uncosted employee NI cuts that removed all headroom
Which is bullshit.
Hunts freeze on threshold fully funded the Employee NI change.
It was a net tax rise.
If you are going to tax, better to do it through more honest and visible taxation rather than stealth and more stealth?
Indeed, which is why we should be abolishing NI and having a single rate of income tax that is paid by everyone the same, honestly and visibly.
Not taxing employment more than unearned incomes.
That is possible but you'd need to unravel NI from the pension system which will take at least some thought and legislation. On a wider point about differential taxation of earned and unearned income, the government is supposed to be looking at private equity, dividends and capital gains tax.
The need to unravel NI from the pensions system can be a long-term problem if you set employee NI to 1% in the short term, and change the income tax 20% rate to I think 28% renenue-neutral.
Any changes upwards of tax rates of capital gains will absolutely cost more than they raise. Arthur Laffer is waving from the door of the Treasury.
Any mad idea of taxing CG at income tax levels will drive hundreds of billions in investment vehicles offshore almost immediately. Dubai and Singapore are actively looking to recruit global PE funds.
You already get NIC "contributions" at 0% so no problem with setting a global 0% threshold rate for NICs, merge income tax, and still keep contributions based on income as it currently is.
Massive increase in income tax for pensioners though from 20% to 28%... It's why I would be doing it very slowly...
Merging income tax and NI is one of those 'easy fixes' that people who have only ever been on PAYE suggest.
It would be a massive increase in tax for pensioners and the self employed. Both groups who vote heavily....
That is precisely the point.
Pensioners and the self-employed should be liable for the same taxes as those on PAYE.
Everyone who earns the same amount should be taxed the same.
I would make it net tax revenue so cut the overall rate so those who are working for their income on PAYE get a tax cut, funded by taxing others the same as they would now be paying.
Yes but would it work politically as explained above large voting blocks would be against it.
There are large voting blocs against any change.
Taxes should be simple, low and evenly applied. Complicating it to appeal to voter blocs and dumping the burden on people in paid employment just harms everyone else and harms the economy by overtaxing employment.
But you have to get elected to effect the change.
They've already been elected.
With a manifesto promise that they are committed to not breaking
To not increase taxes on working families, yes.
What I propose would be a tax cut for them.
Its more in line with the manifesto than jacking up NI was.
Not quite what the manifesto actually says is” Labour will not increase taxes on working people. Which is why we will not increase National insurance the basic rate, higher or additional rates of income tax or VAT”. So they did specifically rule out increase in tax and NI.
Additionally in clarification they explained people had worked all there lives were included in their definition of working people.
Precisely.
Merge the two and there is no net increase, indeed it could be a combined cut and sold as such. All while not increasing, indeed reducing, the tax on working people.
Its more justifiable than the sophistry around the National Insurance increase.
No some working people according to the clarification would have their tax raised. It would be a breach of the manifesto
All working people did when NICs were increased, hence the sophistry around "ah but we didn't mean Employers NICs". It was still a very clear and unambiguous rise in tax.
A merger would simplify rates and not be a net increase. There would be winners and losers but there always are.
No a merger would just lead to welfare dependency from cradle to grave on tax funded welfare, with not even any attempt to have a contributory element for that welfare whether for unemployment benefit or the state pension
No it would not.
We already have welfare dependency. A merger would reduce it by lowering the proportion of taxes levied on those who work and would not change benefits one iota. 🤦♂️
You seem to have this delusion that a merger would increase benefits. It will not.
Yes it would. Most OECD nations fund their unemployment benefits via contributions to unemployment insurance and receipt of the full state pension also requiring sufficient social insurance contributions too.
Income tax would rise of course anyway as it would have NI merged into it and those on unemployment benefit or the state pension would not ever need to contribute a penny to claim them in full
They already don't need to contribute a penny to claim in full and you can keep the contribution link (indeed strengthen it) to the new combined rate.
All that would change is that currently those on taxable benefits don't pay NICs on their benefit income while those who work for their income do.
Why do you think those working for their income should be taxed more than those on benefits?
You can scrap NI credits and then ensure the full contribution link is kept for the state pension and JSA. Pensioners of course contributed to NIC throughout their working life anyway
You could keep the contribution link to a combined income tax rate, no need to abolish the contribution thresholds.
Pensioners of course never paid toward their own pensions, which is why we not only have no savings to pay for them but we are paying interest on debt instead.
Why should those on benefits be taxed less than those working for the same income?
They could not claim the state pension in full without a sufficient rate of NI contributions, scrap NI credits and only those who have contributed can get it, everyone else has to get pension credits
People already can get NI Credits though.
What is wrong with a package that combines abolishing NI Credits, merging Income Tax and NICs and migrating NI contributions to be Income Tax contributions?
You keep the contributory nature that you want but eliminate the distortion of taxing working people more. What is wrong with that?
As I also said, scrap NI Credits. If you haven't contributed enough you shouldn't get JSA or the full state pension, just pension credits or UC.
I agree with you on that but identifying what had been contributed for state pensions and JSA and what was to fund other areas of government spending from income tax would be administratively costly
Why would there be any administration costs since we don't do that already, so there would be no change there. The system in place is a binary "contribute or not" based on income over the threshold, we don't tally how much people have contributed - and that threshold could easily be migrated to a combined tax.
Merge it all and there would be just the one tax - and keep contribution requirements in place, not proposing abolishing those.
We should tally how much people have contributed, certainly to get the full state pension and full JSA only a certain level of contributions would enable that
But we don't, and there is no reason that can't be done with a merged Income Tax.
Whether we should merge tax rates, and whether we should have contributions, are two completely unrelated discussions.
It could be done but would require significantly higher administrative costs as I said, certainly than just doing it on a solely assessed NI contributions basis
No, it would require less administrative costs.
Whatever the NI income threshold is set at, just set it as an Income Tax income threshold. Job done.
You would then need to calculate the personal allowance and then the income tax minimum contributions threshold on top of that and then the basic and higher rates etc
No you would not.
Currently a threshold is set to "get NI contributions". Currently a threshold is set to actually pay contributions.
Those two are not aligned.
Merge the two and you just move the "get NI contributions" threshold to a "get IC contributions" threshold and carry on just the same.
All the various thresholds already exist today.
Currently thee is a NI threshold of 26 weeks of contributions over 2 years to get JSA and 35 qualifying years now to get the new state pension. So all those contributions would need to be calculated if you move them to income tax as well as separating out income just to be spent on other government departments not counting towards the contribution to JSA and state pension, whereas NI could just be ringfenced only for JSA and state pension contributions
"So you figure we can't get on to its motive?" "It own itself?" "Swiss citizen, but T-A own the basic software and the mainframe." "That's a good one," the construct said. "Like, I own your brain and what you know, but your thoughts have Swiss citi- zenship. Sure. Lotsa luck, AI."
Burnham may not have much to play with until his first budget, but in the meantime he's using the limited options he's got extremely well.
Today's announcement on the £2 bus fare cap is well targeted. The prime beneficiaries are going to be those who are younger or on lower incomes (because car ownership is highly correlated with income) and who are in work or studying and rely on the bus for that. Strivers who need to make work pay. But it still applies across the board if you're below pensionable age, so no-one's really going to object. There are also indirect benefits - an upturn in bus usage could bring back some services previously lost or increase the frequency of services - even pensioners relying on buses will benefit if that happens. So it's well targeted in terms of rewarding those who need to be rewarded, and well targeted in terms of likely political impact.
Who actually uses peasant wagons?
I use “peasant wagons” and certainly am no peasant, as do plenty of my friends who aren’t peasants, some are a hundred million and more plus change from being peasants. We all use them if we are heading into town for drinks, if heading into the office or town where there is a good chance of it ending up involving drinks.
In our twenties we would likely drive in and leave cars overnight but you still had the issue of getting in to get your car the next day (lift from friend, taxi, bus) and also you had the problem of potentially being over the limit if picking up in the morning whereas we got over ourselves and realised how silly it was.
I can be on the bus, about forty mins journey and along the way people I know will get on, generally for the same reason. Some of these people are old business contacts or clients and I know they are worth crazy money but they don’t worry about the optics of taking an easy service to go and do what they want to do.
Will always get a taxi back at the end of the night as it’s easier when drinking and usually after the buses stop around midnight.
The same when I lived in Switzerland. I would travel in and home most days with the owner of the Commune’s Manor House, a hedgie, and other similar, Swiss, Brits, others, nobody felt any embarrassment about using a bus.
To caveat the above we have a great bus service, clean, good routes, cheap. Huge amounts of school buses so rarely plagued by gangs of school kids. No eating or drinking allowed so no grim smells.
I only use trains, taxis or walk.
Buses are slow, crap and full of undesirables.
Buses being full of anyone would make a change.
I wonder if this is another North/South divide though. Around here buses are the primary/sole means of public transport.
My wife has used them to get to work for a very long time and has never complained about undesirables. I never take them as I drive so can't comment.
For what it's worth, I did find the guy who reviewed every bus timetable in the country to see how far he could get in the UK using just buses (not coaches) in a single day pretty cool.
I'm fine with the nerdery and timetable analysis 👌
I enjoyed that too - it was about 5 years ago, I think? I remember he passed me on the way.
What I toko from the video was a) how quickly it is possible to get about by bus in much of the country, and b) how nice buses are nowadays - it is a far cry from the only GMPTE buses of the 80s with smoking and music on the move upstairs.
Buses #1 problem is that people do not find them legible in the same way that they do with trains. When the Beeching review closed so much rural rail in the 1960s, it made economic sense - the bus could do the job of the train just as well and more cheaply in those areas. But people - especially people from outside the area - do not treat a bus route the same as a train line. I remember going to a wedding near Cockermouth, and so many people getting a train to Penrith and then a taxi - because they wouldn't put in the tiny amount of effort to understand the bus route which pretty much replaces the old pre-beeching route. The bus would be just as quick as a train - it just isn't legible in the same way. A similar problem exists for more mundane services in local areas: where I live in suburban South Manchester, buses offer so much opportunity if you know where they go - but so many do not: it is obvious where a tram goes, but far less obvious where a bus goes without a bit of thought.
A further thought in favour of the bus: a good chunk of the population can't drive, either because they are too young, do not have a car, or never learned. The bus provides a great service for these people. My daughters' schoolfriends are largely beyond an attractive walking distance (many are 2-m miles away) - buses offer an excellent opportunity for teenagers to get about unaccompanied.
The google maps app is utterly brilliant at giving you the best public transport option - even a geek like me can't hold every bus route in Greater Manchester in my head, and certainly not the rest of the country.
Next time you get a train to an unfamiliar part of the country, I urge you to try the Google maps public transport layer to suggest ways of completing your journey which aren't taxi - you might be pleasantly surprised at how easy it is.
Trains will always beat buses mate, and Beeching was an arsehole.
Trains absolutely do not always beat buses.
My wife gets a bus to work. She gets a bus from near our house, then gets off the bus near her work, one town over.
If she wanted to get a train she would need to get a taxi to the the train station (or a bus to the train station), then a train, then a taxi from the train station to work (or a bus).
There is no advantage in doing so.
Trains may be great somewhere like London, but try living in the rest of the country. Buses can operate without tracks on existing roads which mean they can go to far more places, which is why far more people use buses than trains outside areas like London.
Trains are cleaner, nicer, more efficient, more serene, more sophisticated, and have more riding flexibility, as you can change carriage, use the toilet, walk up and down etc.
.
But trains only go where our forebears were wise enough to put down rails, and provided your Tory forebear Ernest Marples didn’t then sign off tearing them up.
We could... you know... build new railway lines?
Sorry. Me and my crazy talk.
Not in this country because somehow what costs X pounds in any other country costs 10x pounds here...
Everything shit in the UK is downstream of dysfunctional planning law.
However I don’t expect the new government to address that because it’s slow, technocratic, and a potential waste of political capital given they have less than 3 years to beat Reform.
Yes, perversely, the greatest strength of the bus - its flexibility - is also its biggest weakness. If there are rails, you can make big lifetime decisions based on them - you can be reasonably confident the service will keep running because there aren't many other places the trains or trams can go. But who makes a lifetime investment decision based on something so ephemeral as a bus route? My view is that the answer to this is much greater levels of bus provision - if there is the physical infrastrucuture there - like quite major bus priority schemes - you can not only start to make buses more attractive, you can give the confidence that the bus is there for good.
Top marks everyone for the bus chat by the way. PB at its best.
There's a proposal in this area (Glasgow and the west of Scotland) to impose bus franchising. Private operators will run the services in a way dictated in detail by the area's publicly owned transport organisation, SPT. The idea is to pull service levels and consistency up to the very high standard of the council-run bus network in Edinburgh.
Unfortunately, one of the biggest operators in the area is McGills, which is owned by the notorious 'billionaire' Easdale brothers. They are fighting the proposal tooth and nail and, trying to delay the process and cost the SPT so much in legal bills they have to drop the idea. McGills has a virtual monopoly in large parts of the west of Scotland (mostly because their competition had unfortunate events happen to them - won't go into detail, for legal reasons) and I don't see its owners giving that up profitable situation without exhausting every option.
Burnham may not have much to play with until his first budget, but in the meantime he's using the limited options he's got extremely well.
Today's announcement on the £2 bus fare cap is well targeted. The prime beneficiaries are going to be those who are younger or on lower incomes (because car ownership is highly correlated with income) and who are in work or studying and rely on the bus for that. Strivers who need to make work pay. But it still applies across the board if you're below pensionable age, so no-one's really going to object. There are also indirect benefits - an upturn in bus usage could bring back some services previously lost or increase the frequency of services - even pensioners relying on buses will benefit if that happens. So it's well targeted in terms of rewarding those who need to be rewarded, and well targeted in terms of likely political impact.
Who actually uses peasant wagons?
I use “peasant wagons” and certainly am no peasant, as do plenty of my friends who aren’t peasants, some are a hundred million and more plus change from being peasants. We all use them if we are heading into town for drinks, if heading into the office or town where there is a good chance of it ending up involving drinks.
In our twenties we would likely drive in and leave cars overnight but you still had the issue of getting in to get your car the next day (lift from friend, taxi, bus) and also you had the problem of potentially being over the limit if picking up in the morning whereas we got over ourselves and realised how silly it was.
I can be on the bus, about forty mins journey and along the way people I know will get on, generally for the same reason. Some of these people are old business contacts or clients and I know they are worth crazy money but they don’t worry about the optics of taking an easy service to go and do what they want to do.
Will always get a taxi back at the end of the night as it’s easier when drinking and usually after the buses stop around midnight.
The same when I lived in Switzerland. I would travel in and home most days with the owner of the Commune’s Manor House, a hedgie, and other similar, Swiss, Brits, others, nobody felt any embarrassment about using a bus.
To caveat the above we have a great bus service, clean, good routes, cheap. Huge amounts of school buses so rarely plagued by gangs of school kids. No eating or drinking allowed so no grim smells.
I only use trains, taxis or walk.
Buses are slow, crap and full of undesirables.
Buses being full of anyone would make a change.
I wonder if this is another North/South divide though. Around here buses are the primary/sole means of public transport.
My wife has used them to get to work for a very long time and has never complained about undesirables. I never take them as I drive so can't comment.
For what it's worth, I did find the guy who reviewed every bus timetable in the country to see how far he could get in the UK using just buses (not coaches) in a single day pretty cool.
I'm fine with the nerdery and timetable analysis 👌
I enjoyed that too - it was about 5 years ago, I think? I remember he passed me on the way.
What I toko from the video was a) how quickly it is possible to get about by bus in much of the country, and b) how nice buses are nowadays - it is a far cry from the only GMPTE buses of the 80s with smoking and music on the move upstairs.
Buses #1 problem is that people do not find them legible in the same way that they do with trains. When the Beeching review closed so much rural rail in the 1960s, it made economic sense - the bus could do the job of the train just as well and more cheaply in those areas. But people - especially people from outside the area - do not treat a bus route the same as a train line. I remember going to a wedding near Cockermouth, and so many people getting a train to Penrith and then a taxi - because they wouldn't put in the tiny amount of effort to understand the bus route which pretty much replaces the old pre-beeching route. The bus would be just as quick as a train - it just isn't legible in the same way. A similar problem exists for more mundane services in local areas: where I live in suburban South Manchester, buses offer so much opportunity if you know where they go - but so many do not: it is obvious where a tram goes, but far less obvious where a bus goes without a bit of thought.
A further thought in favour of the bus: a good chunk of the population can't drive, either because they are too young, do not have a car, or never learned. The bus provides a great service for these people. My daughters' schoolfriends are largely beyond an attractive walking distance (many are 2-m miles away) - buses offer an excellent opportunity for teenagers to get about unaccompanied.
The google maps app is utterly brilliant at giving you the best public transport option - even a geek like me can't hold every bus route in Greater Manchester in my head, and certainly not the rest of the country.
Next time you get a train to an unfamiliar part of the country, I urge you to try the Google maps public transport layer to suggest ways of completing your journey which aren't taxi - you might be pleasantly surprised at how easy it is.
Trains will always beat buses mate, and Beeching was an arsehole.
Trains absolutely do not always beat buses.
My wife gets a bus to work. She gets a bus from near our house, then gets off the bus near her work, one town over.
If she wanted to get a train she would need to get a taxi to the the train station (or a bus to the train station), then a train, then a taxi from the train station to work (or a bus).
There is no advantage in doing so.
Trains may be great somewhere like London, but try living in the rest of the country. Buses can operate without tracks on existing roads which mean they can go to far more places, which is why far more people use buses than trains outside areas like London.
Trains are cleaner, nicer, more efficient, more serene, more sophisticated, and have more riding flexibility, as you can change carriage, use the toilet, walk up and down etc.
.
But trains only go where our forebears were wise enough to put down rails, and provided your Tory forebear Ernest Marples didn’t then sign off tearing them up.
We could... you know... build new railway lines?
Sorry. Me and my crazy talk.
Not in this country because somehow what costs X pounds in any other country costs 10x pounds here...
Everything shit in the UK is downstream of dysfunctional planning law.
However I don’t expect the new government to address that because it’s slow, technocratic, and a potential waste of political capital given they have less than 3 years to beat Reform.
It also gives lots of ammo for opposition politicians to campaign on "concreting over the green spaces". Lib Dems have been particularly effective at that to gain support in targetted seats.
Burnham may not have much to play with until his first budget, but in the meantime he's using the limited options he's got extremely well.
Today's announcement on the £2 bus fare cap is well targeted. The prime beneficiaries are going to be those who are younger or on lower incomes (because car ownership is highly correlated with income) and who are in work or studying and rely on the bus for that. Strivers who need to make work pay. But it still applies across the board if you're below pensionable age, so no-one's really going to object. There are also indirect benefits - an upturn in bus usage could bring back some services previously lost or increase the frequency of services - even pensioners relying on buses will benefit if that happens. So it's well targeted in terms of rewarding those who need to be rewarded, and well targeted in terms of likely political impact.
Who actually uses peasant wagons?
I use “peasant wagons” and certainly am no peasant, as do plenty of my friends who aren’t peasants, some are a hundred million and more plus change from being peasants. We all use them if we are heading into town for drinks, if heading into the office or town where there is a good chance of it ending up involving drinks.
In our twenties we would likely drive in and leave cars overnight but you still had the issue of getting in to get your car the next day (lift from friend, taxi, bus) and also you had the problem of potentially being over the limit if picking up in the morning whereas we got over ourselves and realised how silly it was.
I can be on the bus, about forty mins journey and along the way people I know will get on, generally for the same reason. Some of these people are old business contacts or clients and I know they are worth crazy money but they don’t worry about the optics of taking an easy service to go and do what they want to do.
Will always get a taxi back at the end of the night as it’s easier when drinking and usually after the buses stop around midnight.
The same when I lived in Switzerland. I would travel in and home most days with the owner of the Commune’s Manor House, a hedgie, and other similar, Swiss, Brits, others, nobody felt any embarrassment about using a bus.
To caveat the above we have a great bus service, clean, good routes, cheap. Huge amounts of school buses so rarely plagued by gangs of school kids. No eating or drinking allowed so no grim smells.
I only use trains, taxis or walk.
Buses are slow, crap and full of undesirables.
Buses being full of anyone would make a change.
I wonder if this is another North/South divide though. Around here buses are the primary/sole means of public transport.
My wife has used them to get to work for a very long time and has never complained about undesirables. I never take them as I drive so can't comment.
For what it's worth, I did find the guy who reviewed every bus timetable in the country to see how far he could get in the UK using just buses (not coaches) in a single day pretty cool.
I'm fine with the nerdery and timetable analysis 👌
I enjoyed that too - it was about 5 years ago, I think? I remember he passed me on the way.
What I toko from the video was a) how quickly it is possible to get about by bus in much of the country, and b) how nice buses are nowadays - it is a far cry from the only GMPTE buses of the 80s with smoking and music on the move upstairs.
Buses #1 problem is that people do not find them legible in the same way that they do with trains. When the Beeching review closed so much rural rail in the 1960s, it made economic sense - the bus could do the job of the train just as well and more cheaply in those areas. But people - especially people from outside the area - do not treat a bus route the same as a train line. I remember going to a wedding near Cockermouth, and so many people getting a train to Penrith and then a taxi - because they wouldn't put in the tiny amount of effort to understand the bus route which pretty much replaces the old pre-beeching route. The bus would be just as quick as a train - it just isn't legible in the same way. A similar problem exists for more mundane services in local areas: where I live in suburban South Manchester, buses offer so much opportunity if you know where they go - but so many do not: it is obvious where a tram goes, but far less obvious where a bus goes without a bit of thought.
A further thought in favour of the bus: a good chunk of the population can't drive, either because they are too young, do not have a car, or never learned. The bus provides a great service for these people. My daughters' schoolfriends are largely beyond an attractive walking distance (many are 2-m miles away) - buses offer an excellent opportunity for teenagers to get about unaccompanied.
The google maps app is utterly brilliant at giving you the best public transport option - even a geek like me can't hold every bus route in Greater Manchester in my head, and certainly not the rest of the country.
Next time you get a train to an unfamiliar part of the country, I urge you to try the Google maps public transport layer to suggest ways of completing your journey which aren't taxi - you might be pleasantly surprised at how easy it is.
Trains will always beat buses mate, and Beeching was an arsehole.
Trains absolutely do not always beat buses.
My wife gets a bus to work. She gets a bus from near our house, then gets off the bus near her work, one town over.
If she wanted to get a train she would need to get a taxi to the the train station (or a bus to the train station), then a train, then a taxi from the train station to work (or a bus).
There is no advantage in doing so.
Trains may be great somewhere like London, but try living in the rest of the country. Buses can operate without tracks on existing roads which mean they can go to far more places, which is why far more people use buses than trains outside areas like London.
Trains are cleaner, nicer, more efficient, more serene, more sophisticated, and have more riding flexibility, as you can change carriage, use the toilet, walk up and down etc.
.
But trains only go where our forebears were wise enough to put down rails, and provided your Tory forebear Ernest Marples didn’t then sign off tearing them up.
We could... you know... build new railway lines?
Sorry. Me and my crazy talk.
Not in this country because somehow what costs X pounds in any other country costs 10x pounds here...
Everything shit in the UK is downstream of dysfunctional planning law.
However I don’t expect the new government to address that because it’s slow, technocratic, and a potential waste of political capital given they have less than 3 years to beat Reform.
It also gives lots of ammo for opposition politicians to campaign on "concreting over the green spaces". Lib Dems have been particularly effective at that to gain support in targetted seats.
Burnham may not have much to play with until his first budget, but in the meantime he's using the limited options he's got extremely well.
Today's announcement on the £2 bus fare cap is well targeted. The prime beneficiaries are going to be those who are younger or on lower incomes (because car ownership is highly correlated with income) and who are in work or studying and rely on the bus for that. Strivers who need to make work pay. But it still applies across the board if you're below pensionable age, so no-one's really going to object. There are also indirect benefits - an upturn in bus usage could bring back some services previously lost or increase the frequency of services - even pensioners relying on buses will benefit if that happens. So it's well targeted in terms of rewarding those who need to be rewarded, and well targeted in terms of likely political impact.
Who actually uses peasant wagons?
I use “peasant wagons” and certainly am no peasant, as do plenty of my friends who aren’t peasants, some are a hundred million and more plus change from being peasants. We all use them if we are heading into town for drinks, if heading into the office or town where there is a good chance of it ending up involving drinks.
In our twenties we would likely drive in and leave cars overnight but you still had the issue of getting in to get your car the next day (lift from friend, taxi, bus) and also you had the problem of potentially being over the limit if picking up in the morning whereas we got over ourselves and realised how silly it was.
I can be on the bus, about forty mins journey and along the way people I know will get on, generally for the same reason. Some of these people are old business contacts or clients and I know they are worth crazy money but they don’t worry about the optics of taking an easy service to go and do what they want to do.
Will always get a taxi back at the end of the night as it’s easier when drinking and usually after the buses stop around midnight.
The same when I lived in Switzerland. I would travel in and home most days with the owner of the Commune’s Manor House, a hedgie, and other similar, Swiss, Brits, others, nobody felt any embarrassment about using a bus.
To caveat the above we have a great bus service, clean, good routes, cheap. Huge amounts of school buses so rarely plagued by gangs of school kids. No eating or drinking allowed so no grim smells.
I only use trains, taxis or walk.
Buses are slow, crap and full of undesirables.
Buses being full of anyone would make a change.
I wonder if this is another North/South divide though. Around here buses are the primary/sole means of public transport.
My wife has used them to get to work for a very long time and has never complained about undesirables. I never take them as I drive so can't comment.
For what it's worth, I did find the guy who reviewed every bus timetable in the country to see how far he could get in the UK using just buses (not coaches) in a single day pretty cool.
I'm fine with the nerdery and timetable analysis 👌
I enjoyed that too - it was about 5 years ago, I think? I remember he passed me on the way.
What I toko from the video was a) how quickly it is possible to get about by bus in much of the country, and b) how nice buses are nowadays - it is a far cry from the only GMPTE buses of the 80s with smoking and music on the move upstairs.
Buses #1 problem is that people do not find them legible in the same way that they do with trains. When the Beeching review closed so much rural rail in the 1960s, it made economic sense - the bus could do the job of the train just as well and more cheaply in those areas. But people - especially people from outside the area - do not treat a bus route the same as a train line. I remember going to a wedding near Cockermouth, and so many people getting a train to Penrith and then a taxi - because they wouldn't put in the tiny amount of effort to understand the bus route which pretty much replaces the old pre-beeching route. The bus would be just as quick as a train - it just isn't legible in the same way. A similar problem exists for more mundane services in local areas: where I live in suburban South Manchester, buses offer so much opportunity if you know where they go - but so many do not: it is obvious where a tram goes, but far less obvious where a bus goes without a bit of thought.
A further thought in favour of the bus: a good chunk of the population can't drive, either because they are too young, do not have a car, or never learned. The bus provides a great service for these people. My daughters' schoolfriends are largely beyond an attractive walking distance (many are 2-m miles away) - buses offer an excellent opportunity for teenagers to get about unaccompanied.
The google maps app is utterly brilliant at giving you the best public transport option - even a geek like me can't hold every bus route in Greater Manchester in my head, and certainly not the rest of the country.
Next time you get a train to an unfamiliar part of the country, I urge you to try the Google maps public transport layer to suggest ways of completing your journey which aren't taxi - you might be pleasantly surprised at how easy it is.
Trains will always beat buses mate, and Beeching was an arsehole.
Trains absolutely do not always beat buses.
My wife gets a bus to work. She gets a bus from near our house, then gets off the bus near her work, one town over.
If she wanted to get a train she would need to get a taxi to the the train station (or a bus to the train station), then a train, then a taxi from the train station to work (or a bus).
There is no advantage in doing so.
Trains may be great somewhere like London, but try living in the rest of the country. Buses can operate without tracks on existing roads which mean they can go to far more places, which is why far more people use buses than trains outside areas like London.
Trains are cleaner, nicer, more efficient, more serene, more sophisticated, and have more riding flexibility, as you can change carriage, use the toilet, walk up and down etc.
.
But trains only go where our forebears were wise enough to put down rails, and provided your Tory forebear Ernest Marples didn’t then sign off tearing them up.
We could... you know... build new railway lines?
Sorry. Me and my crazy talk.
Not in this country because somehow what costs X pounds in any other country costs 10x pounds here...
Everything shit in the UK is downstream of dysfunctional planning law.
However I don’t expect the new government to address that because it’s slow, technocratic, and a potential waste of political capital given they have less than 3 years to beat Reform.
I don't think everything shit in the UK is downstream of dysfunctional planning law. I tried an "Iced Dubai-Style Hot Chocolate" from Pret on Monday and it was shit. I'm not seeing how to blame that on planning.
But, sure, lots of things are downstream of dysfunctional planning law.
(and after Ajax, any weapons system ending in -ax should be ... axed.)
The CCA market is getting crowded and this top notch AI generated .png file is about 5 years behind MQ-28/FQ-42/FQ-44 and multiple Chinese systems.
However, it's a shrewd move by BAE to keep them on the UK government's tit for the decade between the end of Typhoon (2030) and the start Tempest serial production (2040). It's also a possible sign that the T-7 vs M-346 battle is lost for BAE/Boeing/Saab.
“keep them on the UK government's tit”
How many CS v Contractor golf days and lunches for Civil Servants and Ministers did it take to achieve that?
By the 2040s we might be at war with the Italian Japanese Fascist Alliance hell bent on world domination? Is that why the projects named after a storm?
Burnham may not have much to play with until his first budget, but in the meantime he's using the limited options he's got extremely well.
Today's announcement on the £2 bus fare cap is well targeted. The prime beneficiaries are going to be those who are younger or on lower incomes (because car ownership is highly correlated with income) and who are in work or studying and rely on the bus for that. Strivers who need to make work pay. But it still applies across the board if you're below pensionable age, so no-one's really going to object. There are also indirect benefits - an upturn in bus usage could bring back some services previously lost or increase the frequency of services - even pensioners relying on buses will benefit if that happens. So it's well targeted in terms of rewarding those who need to be rewarded, and well targeted in terms of likely political impact.
Who actually uses peasant wagons?
CR, your attitude is hurting mainly you here. Buses are very good at what they do. A few points:
- Firstly, more people use buses than any other form of public transport. - Secondly, if you're in a rural area, buses tend to be about as fast as driving if you can put in the modicum of effort to check a timetable in advance. I remember a stage night I went on: we were staying at a hotel in Warwick, and were going to the cricket at Stratford. I timed my arrival at the hotel to meet the bus, and got to Stratford more quickly and far more cheaply than those in the group for whom bus wasn't part of their mental landscape and insisted on using taxis. - If you live in an urban area most bus journeys are less annoying than having to park. - You can use the bus while drunk. - At the age of 51, sitting upstairs on the front seat of a bus is still as thrilling as it was at the age of 7.
Seriously, check out the bus opportunities from wherever you live and use them - it will take you new places to be drunk. Taxis are for losers and people
No-one I know uses buses.
Everybody I know uses buses.
That's because the bus service where I live (Brighton) is superb, with buses to pretty much all parts of the city every few minutes, and judicious use of bus lanes that means they're quicker than cars on most journeys. They've also introduced express buses that have limited stops so are even faster. And, of course, because the service is so good the buses are very busy.
It's also a joy to use buses for longer journeys - for example, on the coastal route from Brighton to Eastbourne, which runs every 5-10 minutes, you get stunning views from the top deck that don't exist from a car.
That's it - my paean to buses is over.
I think this chat is representative of this site and its demographic.
I never ever use them. We live in the south-east and drive or commute to London. All other times we drive, as we have kids, but even if not I'd only ever use them in very particular conditions.
Exceptions? The IoW where the service is extremely good and reliable, and London.
I suspect it is location and the quality of the bus service where you live.
Big cities (Leeds, London. Manchester. Liverpool, Edinburgh. Glasgow) the bus services are frequent and get you exactly where you want to be in the same time as driving (or even less).
Round here to get to an office I used to work out would require 2 buses both only running 3 times an hour so you could have a 20 minute gap if you are unlucky with timing. Even without it a 15 minute car journey would take 40 minutes so you could be talking an hour.
Add on waiting in the rain and you can see why people drive...
Oh, sure - the bus can't do everything. There is no public transport model which gets everyone cheaply and regularly from everywhere to everywhere outside of very high density areas. But that's not to say it can't do anything. People who refuse to consider the bus - and many do - are cutting themselves off from a service which can be as efficient and pleasant as a train or a tram for no good reason.
It really is fucking not mate.
A train is far far more pleasant than a fucking bus.
If you live in Central London, you will often find yourself getting a bus because changing tube lines is a pain, and because the traffic system prioritizes buses (and bicycles).
If you live outside London (and a few major conurbations), then buses are slow, infrequent and unreliable. There is a world of difference between knowing you might wait 5 minutes for your bus, and that it will probably be quicker than driving or an Uber, and having an unknown (but could be 45 minutes) wait, and a slower and less pleasant triop.
I suspect the future will contain a lot of things that are halfway between buses and taxis. You will choose your destination, and you will be picked up, and it will take you to your destination, but you won't be the only passenger. Technology -in busy places- will allow proper routing of passengers in real time, and massively drive down the cost of this kind of transportation.
Burnham may not have much to play with until his first budget, but in the meantime he's using the limited options he's got extremely well.
Today's announcement on the £2 bus fare cap is well targeted. The prime beneficiaries are going to be those who are younger or on lower incomes (because car ownership is highly correlated with income) and who are in work or studying and rely on the bus for that. Strivers who need to make work pay. But it still applies across the board if you're below pensionable age, so no-one's really going to object. There are also indirect benefits - an upturn in bus usage could bring back some services previously lost or increase the frequency of services - even pensioners relying on buses will benefit if that happens. So it's well targeted in terms of rewarding those who need to be rewarded, and well targeted in terms of likely political impact.
Who actually uses peasant wagons?
I use “peasant wagons” and certainly am no peasant, as do plenty of my friends who aren’t peasants, some are a hundred million and more plus change from being peasants. We all use them if we are heading into town for drinks, if heading into the office or town where there is a good chance of it ending up involving drinks.
In our twenties we would likely drive in and leave cars overnight but you still had the issue of getting in to get your car the next day (lift from friend, taxi, bus) and also you had the problem of potentially being over the limit if picking up in the morning whereas we got over ourselves and realised how silly it was.
I can be on the bus, about forty mins journey and along the way people I know will get on, generally for the same reason. Some of these people are old business contacts or clients and I know they are worth crazy money but they don’t worry about the optics of taking an easy service to go and do what they want to do.
Will always get a taxi back at the end of the night as it’s easier when drinking and usually after the buses stop around midnight.
The same when I lived in Switzerland. I would travel in and home most days with the owner of the Commune’s Manor House, a hedgie, and other similar, Swiss, Brits, others, nobody felt any embarrassment about using a bus.
To caveat the above we have a great bus service, clean, good routes, cheap. Huge amounts of school buses so rarely plagued by gangs of school kids. No eating or drinking allowed so no grim smells.
I only use trains, taxis or walk.
Buses are slow, crap and full of undesirables.
Buses being full of anyone would make a change.
I wonder if this is another North/South divide though. Around here buses are the primary/sole means of public transport.
My wife has used them to get to work for a very long time and has never complained about undesirables. I never take them as I drive so can't comment.
For what it's worth, I did find the guy who reviewed every bus timetable in the country to see how far he could get in the UK using just buses (not coaches) in a single day pretty cool.
I'm fine with the nerdery and timetable analysis 👌
I enjoyed that too - it was about 5 years ago, I think? I remember he passed me on the way.
What I toko from the video was a) how quickly it is possible to get about by bus in much of the country, and b) how nice buses are nowadays - it is a far cry from the only GMPTE buses of the 80s with smoking and music on the move upstairs.
Buses #1 problem is that people do not find them legible in the same way that they do with trains. When the Beeching review closed so much rural rail in the 1960s, it made economic sense - the bus could do the job of the train just as well and more cheaply in those areas. But people - especially people from outside the area - do not treat a bus route the same as a train line. I remember going to a wedding near Cockermouth, and so many people getting a train to Penrith and then a taxi - because they wouldn't put in the tiny amount of effort to understand the bus route which pretty much replaces the old pre-beeching route. The bus would be just as quick as a train - it just isn't legible in the same way. A similar problem exists for more mundane services in local areas: where I live in suburban South Manchester, buses offer so much opportunity if you know where they go - but so many do not: it is obvious where a tram goes, but far less obvious where a bus goes without a bit of thought.
A further thought in favour of the bus: a good chunk of the population can't drive, either because they are too young, do not have a car, or never learned. The bus provides a great service for these people. My daughters' schoolfriends are largely beyond an attractive walking distance (many are 2-m miles away) - buses offer an excellent opportunity for teenagers to get about unaccompanied.
The google maps app is utterly brilliant at giving you the best public transport option - even a geek like me can't hold every bus route in Greater Manchester in my head, and certainly not the rest of the country.
Next time you get a train to an unfamiliar part of the country, I urge you to try the Google maps public transport layer to suggest ways of completing your journey which aren't taxi - you might be pleasantly surprised at how easy it is.
Trains will always beat buses mate, and Beeching was an arsehole.
Trains absolutely do not always beat buses.
My wife gets a bus to work. She gets a bus from near our house, then gets off the bus near her work, one town over.
If she wanted to get a train she would need to get a taxi to the the train station (or a bus to the train station), then a train, then a taxi from the train station to work (or a bus).
There is no advantage in doing so.
Trains may be great somewhere like London, but try living in the rest of the country. Buses can operate without tracks on existing roads which mean they can go to far more places, which is why far more people use buses than trains outside areas like London.
Trains are cleaner, nicer, more efficient, more serene, more sophisticated, and have more riding flexibility, as you can change carriage, use the toilet, walk up and down etc.
.
But trains only go where our forebears were wise enough to put down rails, and provided your Tory forebear Ernest Marples didn’t then sign off tearing them up.
We could... you know... build new railway lines?
Sorry. Me and my crazy talk.
Not in this country because somehow what costs X pounds in any other country costs 10x pounds here...
Everything shit in the UK is downstream of dysfunctional planning law.
However I don’t expect the new government to address that because it’s slow, technocratic, and a potential waste of political capital given they have less than 3 years to beat Reform.
It also gives lots of ammo for opposition politicians to campaign on "concreting over the green spaces". Lib Dems have been particularly effective at that to gain support in targetted seats.
America has a massive neuralgia over race. Which you dont really understand until you live here.
Britain has something similar in the intersection of greenspace and the threat posed by the presence of “other people” (ie the lower classes).
"So you figure we can't get on to its motive?" "It own itself?" "Swiss citizen, but T-A own the basic software and the mainframe." "That's a good one," the construct said. "Like, I own your brain and what you know, but your thoughts have Swiss citi- zenship. Sure. Lotsa luck, AI."
OpenAI have the rather slight problem that their best model isn't as good other options and also 12 times the price of those Chinese options...
It's remarkable how little (none at all) of a moat these AI firms have to protect themselves...
Burnham may not have much to play with until his first budget, but in the meantime he's using the limited options he's got extremely well.
Today's announcement on the £2 bus fare cap is well targeted. The prime beneficiaries are going to be those who are younger or on lower incomes (because car ownership is highly correlated with income) and who are in work or studying and rely on the bus for that. Strivers who need to make work pay. But it still applies across the board if you're below pensionable age, so no-one's really going to object. There are also indirect benefits - an upturn in bus usage could bring back some services previously lost or increase the frequency of services - even pensioners relying on buses will benefit if that happens. So it's well targeted in terms of rewarding those who need to be rewarded, and well targeted in terms of likely political impact.
Who actually uses peasant wagons?
CR, your attitude is hurting mainly you here. Buses are very good at what they do. A few points:
- Firstly, more people use buses than any other form of public transport. - Secondly, if you're in a rural area, buses tend to be about as fast as driving if you can put in the modicum of effort to check a timetable in advance. I remember a stage night I went on: we were staying at a hotel in Warwick, and were going to the cricket at Stratford. I timed my arrival at the hotel to meet the bus, and got to Stratford more quickly and far more cheaply than those in the group for whom bus wasn't part of their mental landscape and insisted on using taxis. - If you live in an urban area most bus journeys are less annoying than having to park. - You can use the bus while drunk. - At the age of 51, sitting upstairs on the front seat of a bus is still as thrilling as it was at the age of 7.
Seriously, check out the bus opportunities from wherever you live and use them - it will take you new places to be drunk. Taxis are for losers and people
No-one I know uses buses.
Everybody I know uses buses.
That's because the bus service where I live (Brighton) is superb, with buses to pretty much all parts of the city every few minutes, and judicious use of bus lanes that means they're quicker than cars on most journeys. They've also introduced express buses that have limited stops so are even faster. And, of course, because the service is so good the buses are very busy.
It's also a joy to use buses for longer journeys - for example, on the coastal route from Brighton to Eastbourne, which runs every 5-10 minutes, you get stunning views from the top deck that don't exist from a car.
That's it - my paean to buses is over.
I think this chat is representative of this site and its demographic.
I never ever use them. We live in the south-east and drive or commute to London. All other times we drive, as we have kids, but even if not I'd only ever use them in very particular conditions.
Exceptions? The IoW where the service is extremely good and reliable, and London.
I suspect it is location and the quality of the bus service where you live.
Big cities (Leeds, London. Manchester. Liverpool, Edinburgh. Glasgow) the bus services are frequent and get you exactly where you want to be in the same time as driving (or even less).
Round here to get to an office I used to work out would require 2 buses both only running 3 times an hour so you could have a 20 minute gap if you are unlucky with timing. Even without it a 15 minute car journey would take 40 minutes so you could be talking an hour.
Add on waiting in the rain and you can see why people drive...
Oh, sure - the bus can't do everything. There is no public transport model which gets everyone cheaply and regularly from everywhere to everywhere outside of very high density areas. But that's not to say it can't do anything. People who refuse to consider the bus - and many do - are cutting themselves off from a service which can be as efficient and pleasant as a train or a tram for no good reason.
It really is fucking not mate.
A train is far far more pleasant than a fucking bus.
If you live in Central London, you will often find yourself getting a bus because changing tube lines is a pain, and because the traffic system prioritizes buses (and bicycles).
If you live outside London (and a few major conurbations), then buses are slow, infrequent and unreliable. There is a world of difference between knowing you might wait 5 minutes for your bus, and that it will probably be quicker than driving or an Uber, and having an unknown (but could be 45 minutes) wait, and a slower and less pleasant triop.
I suspect the future will contain a lot of things that are halfway between buses and taxis. You will choose your destination, and you will be picked up, and it will take you to your destination, but you won't be the only passenger. Technology -in busy places- will allow proper routing of passengers in real time, and massively drive down the cost of this kind of transportation.
The problem is: how will it decide which passengers to put together in the same vehicle?
Burnham may not have much to play with until his first budget, but in the meantime he's using the limited options he's got extremely well.
Today's announcement on the £2 bus fare cap is well targeted. The prime beneficiaries are going to be those who are younger or on lower incomes (because car ownership is highly correlated with income) and who are in work or studying and rely on the bus for that. Strivers who need to make work pay. But it still applies across the board if you're below pensionable age, so no-one's really going to object. There are also indirect benefits - an upturn in bus usage could bring back some services previously lost or increase the frequency of services - even pensioners relying on buses will benefit if that happens. So it's well targeted in terms of rewarding those who need to be rewarded, and well targeted in terms of likely political impact.
Who actually uses peasant wagons?
I use “peasant wagons” and certainly am no peasant, as do plenty of my friends who aren’t peasants, some are a hundred million and more plus change from being peasants. We all use them if we are heading into town for drinks, if heading into the office or town where there is a good chance of it ending up involving drinks.
In our twenties we would likely drive in and leave cars overnight but you still had the issue of getting in to get your car the next day (lift from friend, taxi, bus) and also you had the problem of potentially being over the limit if picking up in the morning whereas we got over ourselves and realised how silly it was.
I can be on the bus, about forty mins journey and along the way people I know will get on, generally for the same reason. Some of these people are old business contacts or clients and I know they are worth crazy money but they don’t worry about the optics of taking an easy service to go and do what they want to do.
Will always get a taxi back at the end of the night as it’s easier when drinking and usually after the buses stop around midnight.
The same when I lived in Switzerland. I would travel in and home most days with the owner of the Commune’s Manor House, a hedgie, and other similar, Swiss, Brits, others, nobody felt any embarrassment about using a bus.
To caveat the above we have a great bus service, clean, good routes, cheap. Huge amounts of school buses so rarely plagued by gangs of school kids. No eating or drinking allowed so no grim smells.
I only use trains, taxis or walk.
Buses are slow, crap and full of undesirables.
Buses being full of anyone would make a change.
I wonder if this is another North/South divide though. Around here buses are the primary/sole means of public transport.
My wife has used them to get to work for a very long time and has never complained about undesirables. I never take them as I drive so can't comment.
For what it's worth, I did find the guy who reviewed every bus timetable in the country to see how far he could get in the UK using just buses (not coaches) in a single day pretty cool.
I'm fine with the nerdery and timetable analysis 👌
I enjoyed that too - it was about 5 years ago, I think? I remember he passed me on the way.
What I toko from the video was a) how quickly it is possible to get about by bus in much of the country, and b) how nice buses are nowadays - it is a far cry from the only GMPTE buses of the 80s with smoking and music on the move upstairs.
Buses #1 problem is that people do not find them legible in the same way that they do with trains. When the Beeching review closed so much rural rail in the 1960s, it made economic sense - the bus could do the job of the train just as well and more cheaply in those areas. But people - especially people from outside the area - do not treat a bus route the same as a train line. I remember going to a wedding near Cockermouth, and so many people getting a train to Penrith and then a taxi - because they wouldn't put in the tiny amount of effort to understand the bus route which pretty much replaces the old pre-beeching route. The bus would be just as quick as a train - it just isn't legible in the same way. A similar problem exists for more mundane services in local areas: where I live in suburban South Manchester, buses offer so much opportunity if you know where they go - but so many do not: it is obvious where a tram goes, but far less obvious where a bus goes without a bit of thought.
A further thought in favour of the bus: a good chunk of the population can't drive, either because they are too young, do not have a car, or never learned. The bus provides a great service for these people. My daughters' schoolfriends are largely beyond an attractive walking distance (many are 2-m miles away) - buses offer an excellent opportunity for teenagers to get about unaccompanied.
The google maps app is utterly brilliant at giving you the best public transport option - even a geek like me can't hold every bus route in Greater Manchester in my head, and certainly not the rest of the country.
Next time you get a train to an unfamiliar part of the country, I urge you to try the Google maps public transport layer to suggest ways of completing your journey which aren't taxi - you might be pleasantly surprised at how easy it is.
Trains will always beat buses mate, and Beeching was an arsehole.
Trains absolutely do not always beat buses.
My wife gets a bus to work. She gets a bus from near our house, then gets off the bus near her work, one town over.
If she wanted to get a train she would need to get a taxi to the the train station (or a bus to the train station), then a train, then a taxi from the train station to work (or a bus).
There is no advantage in doing so.
Trains may be great somewhere like London, but try living in the rest of the country. Buses can operate without tracks on existing roads which mean they can go to far more places, which is why far more people use buses than trains outside areas like London.
Trains are cleaner, nicer, more efficient, more serene, more sophisticated, and have more riding flexibility, as you can change carriage, use the toilet, walk up and down etc.
.
But trains only go where our forebears were wise enough to put down rails, and provided your Tory forebear Ernest Marples didn’t then sign off tearing them up.
We could... you know... build new railway lines?
Sorry. Me and my crazy talk.
Not in this country because somehow what costs X pounds in any other country costs 10x pounds here...
Everything shit in the UK is downstream of dysfunctional planning law.
However I don’t expect the new government to address that because it’s slow, technocratic, and a potential waste of political capital given they have less than 3 years to beat Reform.
There is an interesting story on the BBC website today about people living under the M4 in Wales. How was this built back then but we cannot do HS2 now? Has something materially changed? Is it the planning? Built in the 1960's.
"I've got a motorway in my garden - it's my shelter in hot weather"
Burnham may not have much to play with until his first budget, but in the meantime he's using the limited options he's got extremely well.
Today's announcement on the £2 bus fare cap is well targeted. The prime beneficiaries are going to be those who are younger or on lower incomes (because car ownership is highly correlated with income) and who are in work or studying and rely on the bus for that. Strivers who need to make work pay. But it still applies across the board if you're below pensionable age, so no-one's really going to object. There are also indirect benefits - an upturn in bus usage could bring back some services previously lost or increase the frequency of services - even pensioners relying on buses will benefit if that happens. So it's well targeted in terms of rewarding those who need to be rewarded, and well targeted in terms of likely political impact.
Who actually uses peasant wagons?
CR, your attitude is hurting mainly you here. Buses are very good at what they do. A few points:
- Firstly, more people use buses than any other form of public transport. - Secondly, if you're in a rural area, buses tend to be about as fast as driving if you can put in the modicum of effort to check a timetable in advance. I remember a stage night I went on: we were staying at a hotel in Warwick, and were going to the cricket at Stratford. I timed my arrival at the hotel to meet the bus, and got to Stratford more quickly and far more cheaply than those in the group for whom bus wasn't part of their mental landscape and insisted on using taxis. - If you live in an urban area most bus journeys are less annoying than having to park. - You can use the bus while drunk. - At the age of 51, sitting upstairs on the front seat of a bus is still as thrilling as it was at the age of 7.
Seriously, check out the bus opportunities from wherever you live and use them - it will take you new places to be drunk. Taxis are for losers and people
No-one I know uses buses.
Everybody I know uses buses.
That's because the bus service where I live (Brighton) is superb, with buses to pretty much all parts of the city every few minutes, and judicious use of bus lanes that means they're quicker than cars on most journeys. They've also introduced express buses that have limited stops so are even faster. And, of course, because the service is so good the buses are very busy.
It's also a joy to use buses for longer journeys - for example, on the coastal route from Brighton to Eastbourne, which runs every 5-10 minutes, you get stunning views from the top deck that don't exist from a car.
That's it - my paean to buses is over.
I think this chat is representative of this site and its demographic.
I never ever use them. We live in the south-east and drive or commute to London. All other times we drive, as we have kids, but even if not I'd only ever use them in very particular conditions.
Exceptions? The IoW where the service is extremely good and reliable, and London.
I suspect it is location and the quality of the bus service where you live.
Big cities (Leeds, London. Manchester. Liverpool, Edinburgh. Glasgow) the bus services are frequent and get you exactly where you want to be in the same time as driving (or even less).
Round here to get to an office I used to work out would require 2 buses both only running 3 times an hour so you could have a 20 minute gap if you are unlucky with timing. Even without it a 15 minute car journey would take 40 minutes so you could be talking an hour.
Add on waiting in the rain and you can see why people drive...
Oh, sure - the bus can't do everything. There is no public transport model which gets everyone cheaply and regularly from everywhere to everywhere outside of very high density areas. But that's not to say it can't do anything. People who refuse to consider the bus - and many do - are cutting themselves off from a service which can be as efficient and pleasant as a train or a tram for no good reason.
It really is fucking not mate.
A train is far far more pleasant than a fucking bus.
Says the person with no experience in riding buses.
Perhaps you should listen more to those who do.
I have sufficient experience in riding buses to know I don't like riding buses, like most people.
Don't be a bus wanker.
I've linked to this before, on the importance of growing provincial cities and limits of buses as mass transit;
If you're serious about making an area richer, you need a city (lots of customers, lots of trade in goods and ideas, a choice of potential staff, a choice of potential employers). surrounded by a comfortably tubby commuter belt.
Buss can help, but the unreliability of their journey times is a problem. (Anecdote: when I started my current job, one of the superloop buses looked like the way to get there; a few weeks saw me shift to a slower, but more predictable, rail route.)
So: commuter rail and tram. But the UK has a terrible record there. Partly, I suspect, because proud towns don't want to be commuter suburbs. Is Makerfield, for example, up for that? But also because it means spending money now, largely to benefit other people's children.
Over to you, Prime Minister.
Extensions to commuter rail and tram are immensely popular.
It's a mystery to me why the Restoring Your Railway programme was cancelled by this administration, as well as a tragedy.
I agree with the sentiment, but RYR was a classic example of too much process getting in the way of what should be a really simple decision. All the bullshit about competitive bids from local councils, MP endorsements, three-stage processes etc. etc.
Sometimes things should be really simple. The existing Leicester-Coalville-Burton line should be reopened to passenger trains. Wantage & Grove (22,000 residents, right on the Great Western Main Line) should get a station. None of these are cheap but nor are they hard decisions. Any commitment to public transport that does not include "we are reopening Leicester-Coalville-Burton" in the first announcement has failed.
Buses are a quick win though. Demand can response quickly to reduced fares and there's a lot of unused capacity already. Users see the financial benefits from reduced fares immediately. New routes capacity in response to rising demand can also be put on pretty quickly, no later than the time it takes to build extra buses and train drivers.
By contrast any new or restored fixed rail route including trams requires the best part of a decade to get the infrastructure in place. For example, the intention to restore rail services between Walsall and Wolverhampton was announced in 2017, but it took until 2026 to get the line fully open with modernised extra stations.
Oh, absolutely. Which is why the endless cycle of applications, competitive funding streams, reviews, MP endorsements etc. for railway enhancements wastes so much time. Because, as you say, it does take a long time to get the infrastructure in place. The sooner you make the decision to proceed, the sooner it opens.
Burnham may not have much to play with until his first budget, but in the meantime he's using the limited options he's got extremely well.
Today's announcement on the £2 bus fare cap is well targeted. The prime beneficiaries are going to be those who are younger or on lower incomes (because car ownership is highly correlated with income) and who are in work or studying and rely on the bus for that. Strivers who need to make work pay. But it still applies across the board if you're below pensionable age, so no-one's really going to object. There are also indirect benefits - an upturn in bus usage could bring back some services previously lost or increase the frequency of services - even pensioners relying on buses will benefit if that happens. So it's well targeted in terms of rewarding those who need to be rewarded, and well targeted in terms of likely political impact.
Who actually uses peasant wagons?
CR, your attitude is hurting mainly you here. Buses are very good at what they do. A few points:
- Firstly, more people use buses than any other form of public transport. - Secondly, if you're in a rural area, buses tend to be about as fast as driving if you can put in the modicum of effort to check a timetable in advance. I remember a stage night I went on: we were staying at a hotel in Warwick, and were going to the cricket at Stratford. I timed my arrival at the hotel to meet the bus, and got to Stratford more quickly and far more cheaply than those in the group for whom bus wasn't part of their mental landscape and insisted on using taxis. - If you live in an urban area most bus journeys are less annoying than having to park. - You can use the bus while drunk. - At the age of 51, sitting upstairs on the front seat of a bus is still as thrilling as it was at the age of 7.
Seriously, check out the bus opportunities from wherever you live and use them - it will take you new places to be drunk. Taxis are for losers and people
No-one I know uses buses.
Everybody I know uses buses.
That's because the bus service where I live (Brighton) is superb, with buses to pretty much all parts of the city every few minutes, and judicious use of bus lanes that means they're quicker than cars on most journeys. They've also introduced express buses that have limited stops so are even faster. And, of course, because the service is so good the buses are very busy.
It's also a joy to use buses for longer journeys - for example, on the coastal route from Brighton to Eastbourne, which runs every 5-10 minutes, you get stunning views from the top deck that don't exist from a car.
That's it - my paean to buses is over.
I think this chat is representative of this site and its demographic.
I never ever use them. We live in the south-east and drive or commute to London. All other times we drive, as we have kids, but even if not I'd only ever use them in very particular conditions.
Exceptions? The IoW where the service is extremely good and reliable, and London.
I suspect it is location and the quality of the bus service where you live.
Big cities (Leeds, London. Manchester. Liverpool, Edinburgh. Glasgow) the bus services are frequent and get you exactly where you want to be in the same time as driving (or even less).
Round here to get to an office I used to work out would require 2 buses both only running 3 times an hour so you could have a 20 minute gap if you are unlucky with timing. Even without it a 15 minute car journey would take 40 minutes so you could be talking an hour.
Add on waiting in the rain and you can see why people drive...
Oh, sure - the bus can't do everything. There is no public transport model which gets everyone cheaply and regularly from everywhere to everywhere outside of very high density areas. But that's not to say it can't do anything. People who refuse to consider the bus - and many do - are cutting themselves off from a service which can be as efficient and pleasant as a train or a tram for no good reason.
It really is fucking not mate.
A train is far far more pleasant than a fucking bus.
If you live in Central London, you will often find yourself getting a bus because changing tube lines is a pain, and because the traffic system prioritizes buses (and bicycles).
If you live outside London (and a few major conurbations), then buses are slow, infrequent and unreliable. There is a world of difference between knowing you might wait 5 minutes for your bus, and that it will probably be quicker than driving or an Uber, and having an unknown (but could be 45 minutes) wait, and a slower and less pleasant triop.
I suspect the future will contain a lot of things that are halfway between buses and taxis. You will choose your destination, and you will be picked up, and it will take you to your destination, but you won't be the only passenger. Technology -in busy places- will allow proper routing of passengers in real time, and massively drive down the cost of this kind of transportation.
Having to share my ride with the plebs...the horror.
More seriously, isn't that what Zoox approach is? Its a bit like an old fashioned stage coach but self driving and you share it with different people who get in / out at different stops.
shall we had 'buses' onto the unmentionables sections along with the appropriate way to slow down when approaching roundabouts?
I'm guessing that most car drivers would overestimate the percentage of people who drive cars in the UK and underestimate the number of people who rely on buses.
Shocked to here this...so out of character for one of he nicest blokes in cricket.
Former Australia batter David Warner has pleaded guilty to drink driving, after being charged following a random breath test in Sydney in April. The plea had been expected after his lawyer, Bobby Hill, said after a court hearing in May that the cricketer accepted responsibility and knew his behaviour had been "foolish" and "reckless".
Sentencing has been set for 18 August, when Warner faces a minimum disqualification from driving of six months, a potential fine of up to A$2,200 ($1,500; £1,150) and a potential prison sentence of up to nine months.
So, a six month disqualification from driving while he's in prison? Convenient.
Huzzah. We don't want the NHS wasting legal fees on treating patients.
I am afraid as a parent I am with Barnaby's mum. Three people died because of a dereliction of duty. The Health Secretary of the day, Streeting should be in the dock with the others who failed Calocane and his victims.
Same here. People need to be held accountable
The NHS shouldn’t get a free pass just because it’s a national religion
There are about 14 000 clinical negligence claims made against the NHS each year.
Out of interest do you know how many are upheld?
About half.
Medicine is very hard and very dangerous and often gets it wrong. Iatrogenic injuries are a major cause of morbidity.
The cost of settling NHS maternity legal cases exceeds the cost of providing maternity services.
It is a prime area that "spend to save" may well actually be true.
shall we had 'buses' onto the unmentionables sections along with the appropriate way to slow down when approaching roundabouts?
I'm guessing that most car drivers would overestimate the percentage of people who drive cars in the UK and underestimate the number of people who rely on buses.
Both buses and trains are pleb wagons, but I wouldn’t be daft enough to share that on PB of all places,
Yes, perversely, the greatest strength of the bus - its flexibility - is also its biggest weakness. If there are rails, you can make big lifetime decisions based on them - you can be reasonably confident the service will keep running because there aren't many other places the trains or trams can go. But who makes a lifetime investment decision based on something so ephemeral as a bus route? My view is that the answer to this is much greater levels of bus provision - if there is the physical infrastrucuture there - like quite major bus priority schemes - you can not only start to make buses more attractive, you can give the confidence that the bus is there for good.
Top marks everyone for the bus chat by the way. PB at its best.
There's a proposal in this area (Glasgow and the west of Scotland) to impose bus franchising. Private operators will run the services in a way dictated in detail by the area's publicly owned transport organisation, SPT. The idea is to pull service levels and consistency up to the very high standard of the council-run bus network in Edinburgh.
Unfortunately, one of the biggest operators in the area is McGills, which is owned by the notorious 'billionaire' Easdale brothers. They are fighting the proposal tooth and nail and, trying to delay the process and cost the SPT so much in legal bills they have to drop the idea. McGills has a virtual monopoly in large parts of the west of Scotland (mostly because their competition had unfortunate events happen to them - won't go into detail, for legal reasons) and I don't see its owners giving that up profitable situation without exhausting every option.
Feel so lucky having Lothian Buses. Arms-length, profitable, drivers are excellent (always give cyclists loads of space), 120 million journeys a year.
The key thing for me is that I don’t have to check my phone before I leave home because they are so frequent. Bus lanes and bus gates mean they don’t get stuck in private vehicle traffic. It’s insane that this is something special and not the norm.
Burnham may not have much to play with until his first budget, but in the meantime he's using the limited options he's got extremely well.
Today's announcement on the £2 bus fare cap is well targeted. The prime beneficiaries are going to be those who are younger or on lower incomes (because car ownership is highly correlated with income) and who are in work or studying and rely on the bus for that. Strivers who need to make work pay. But it still applies across the board if you're below pensionable age, so no-one's really going to object. There are also indirect benefits - an upturn in bus usage could bring back some services previously lost or increase the frequency of services - even pensioners relying on buses will benefit if that happens. So it's well targeted in terms of rewarding those who need to be rewarded, and well targeted in terms of likely political impact.
Who actually uses peasant wagons?
CR, your attitude is hurting mainly you here. Buses are very good at what they do. A few points:
- Firstly, more people use buses than any other form of public transport. - Secondly, if you're in a rural area, buses tend to be about as fast as driving if you can put in the modicum of effort to check a timetable in advance. I remember a stage night I went on: we were staying at a hotel in Warwick, and were going to the cricket at Stratford. I timed my arrival at the hotel to meet the bus, and got to Stratford more quickly and far more cheaply than those in the group for whom bus wasn't part of their mental landscape and insisted on using taxis. - If you live in an urban area most bus journeys are less annoying than having to park. - You can use the bus while drunk. - At the age of 51, sitting upstairs on the front seat of a bus is still as thrilling as it was at the age of 7.
Seriously, check out the bus opportunities from wherever you live and use them - it will take you new places to be drunk. Taxis are for losers and people
No-one I know uses buses.
Everybody I know uses buses.
That's because the bus service where I live (Brighton) is superb, with buses to pretty much all parts of the city every few minutes, and judicious use of bus lanes that means they're quicker than cars on most journeys. They've also introduced express buses that have limited stops so are even faster. And, of course, because the service is so good the buses are very busy.
It's also a joy to use buses for longer journeys - for example, on the coastal route from Brighton to Eastbourne, which runs every 5-10 minutes, you get stunning views from the top deck that don't exist from a car.
That's it - my paean to buses is over.
I think this chat is representative of this site and its demographic.
I never ever use them. We live in the south-east and drive or commute to London. All other times we drive, as we have kids, but even if not I'd only ever use them in very particular conditions.
Exceptions? The IoW where the service is extremely good and reliable, and London.
I suspect it is location and the quality of the bus service where you live.
Big cities (Leeds, London. Manchester. Liverpool, Edinburgh. Glasgow) the bus services are frequent and get you exactly where you want to be in the same time as driving (or even less).
Round here to get to an office I used to work out would require 2 buses both only running 3 times an hour so you could have a 20 minute gap if you are unlucky with timing. Even without it a 15 minute car journey would take 40 minutes so you could be talking an hour.
Add on waiting in the rain and you can see why people drive...
Oh, sure - the bus can't do everything. There is no public transport model which gets everyone cheaply and regularly from everywhere to everywhere outside of very high density areas. But that's not to say it can't do anything. People who refuse to consider the bus - and many do - are cutting themselves off from a service which can be as efficient and pleasant as a train or a tram for no good reason.
It really is fucking not mate.
A train is far far more pleasant than a fucking bus.
If you live in Central London, you will often find yourself getting a bus because changing tube lines is a pain, and because the traffic system prioritizes buses (and bicycles).
If you live outside London (and a few major conurbations), then buses are slow, infrequent and unreliable. There is a world of difference between knowing you might wait 5 minutes for your bus, and that it will probably be quicker than driving or an Uber, and having an unknown (but could be 45 minutes) wait, and a slower and less pleasant triop.
I suspect the future will contain a lot of things that are halfway between buses and taxis. You will choose your destination, and you will be picked up, and it will take you to your destination, but you won't be the only passenger. Technology -in busy places- will allow proper routing of passengers in real time, and massively drive down the cost of this kind of transportation.
Having to share my ride with the plebs...the horror.
More seriously, isn't that what Zoox approach is? Its a bit like an old fashioned stage coach but self driving and you share it with different people who get in / out at different stops.
Uber tried it about 13 or 14 years ago in San Francisco, called UberPool. But the technology wasn't quite there yet. There weren't enough Ubers on the street at the time, there was a maximum capacity of three riders per vehicle, and smartphones simply weren't pervasive enough wiht lower income demographics (who were the target market).
Still: I remember catching it at 4am from a friend's house, and sharing the ride with two construction workers who told me that it changed their life. Previously, they'd need to wait for a bus, and then get the BART train, before walking at the other end. In the morning, it was an hour and twenty minutes, and cost them $15. UberPool was the same price and took then under 30 minutes.
Huzzah. We don't want the NHS wasting legal fees on treating patients.
I am afraid as a parent I am with Barnaby's mum. Three people died because of a dereliction of duty. The Health Secretary of the day, Streeting should be in the dock with the others who failed Calocane and his victims.
Same here. People need to be held accountable
The NHS shouldn’t get a free pass just because it’s a national religion
There are about 14 000 clinical negligence claims made against the NHS each year.
Out of interest do you know how many are upheld?
About half.
Medicine is very hard and very dangerous and often gets it wrong. Iatrogenic injuries are a major cause of morbidity.
The cost of settling NHS maternity legal cases exceeds the cost of providing maternity services.
It is a prime area that "spend to save" may well actually be true.
But that would result in cuts to the legal departments in the NHS! That would be Fascism!
I don’t think the WFA decision itself was bad. It was just sold appallingly (actually not sold at all, really).
What we see from Burnham is political confidence that Starmer lacked completely. You can quibble about the bus fare cap etc, but they are doing exactly what they are supposed to do: send a *political* message that the government cares about the cost of living.
Starmer didn’t really “do” politics. Which is why he was ousted just 2 years after one of the biggest electoral landslides in history.
He’s also doing broad measures that help everyone, serve a long term goal, all while the benefits are focussed on the poorest. Buses, electricity VAT and even rough sleeping all tick those boxes.
Shocked to here this...so out of character for one of he nicest blokes in cricket.
Former Australia batter David Warner has pleaded guilty to drink driving, after being charged following a random breath test in Sydney in April. The plea had been expected after his lawyer, Bobby Hill, said after a court hearing in May that the cricketer accepted responsibility and knew his behaviour had been "foolish" and "reckless".
Sentencing has been set for 18 August, when Warner faces a minimum disqualification from driving of six months, a potential fine of up to A$2,200 ($1,500; £1,150) and a potential prison sentence of up to nine months.
So, a six month disqualification from driving while he's in prison? Convenient.
Burnham may not have much to play with until his first budget, but in the meantime he's using the limited options he's got extremely well.
Today's announcement on the £2 bus fare cap is well targeted. The prime beneficiaries are going to be those who are younger or on lower incomes (because car ownership is highly correlated with income) and who are in work or studying and rely on the bus for that. Strivers who need to make work pay. But it still applies across the board if you're below pensionable age, so no-one's really going to object. There are also indirect benefits - an upturn in bus usage could bring back some services previously lost or increase the frequency of services - even pensioners relying on buses will benefit if that happens. So it's well targeted in terms of rewarding those who need to be rewarded, and well targeted in terms of likely political impact.
Who actually uses peasant wagons?
CR, your attitude is hurting mainly you here. Buses are very good at what they do. A few points:
- Firstly, more people use buses than any other form of public transport. - Secondly, if you're in a rural area, buses tend to be about as fast as driving if you can put in the modicum of effort to check a timetable in advance. I remember a stage night I went on: we were staying at a hotel in Warwick, and were going to the cricket at Stratford. I timed my arrival at the hotel to meet the bus, and got to Stratford more quickly and far more cheaply than those in the group for whom bus wasn't part of their mental landscape and insisted on using taxis. - If you live in an urban area most bus journeys are less annoying than having to park. - You can use the bus while drunk. - At the age of 51, sitting upstairs on the front seat of a bus is still as thrilling as it was at the age of 7.
Seriously, check out the bus opportunities from wherever you live and use them - it will take you new places to be drunk. Taxis are for losers and people
No-one I know uses buses.
Everybody I know uses buses.
That's because the bus service where I live (Brighton) is superb, with buses to pretty much all parts of the city every few minutes, and judicious use of bus lanes that means they're quicker than cars on most journeys. They've also introduced express buses that have limited stops so are even faster. And, of course, because the service is so good the buses are very busy.
It's also a joy to use buses for longer journeys - for example, on the coastal route from Brighton to Eastbourne, which runs every 5-10 minutes, you get stunning views from the top deck that don't exist from a car.
That's it - my paean to buses is over.
I think this chat is representative of this site and its demographic.
I never ever use them. We live in the south-east and drive or commute to London. All other times we drive, as we have kids, but even if not I'd only ever use them in very particular conditions.
Exceptions? The IoW where the service is extremely good and reliable, and London.
I suspect it is location and the quality of the bus service where you live.
Big cities (Leeds, London. Manchester. Liverpool, Edinburgh. Glasgow) the bus services are frequent and get you exactly where you want to be in the same time as driving (or even less).
Round here to get to an office I used to work out would require 2 buses both only running 3 times an hour so you could have a 20 minute gap if you are unlucky with timing. Even without it a 15 minute car journey would take 40 minutes so you could be talking an hour.
Add on waiting in the rain and you can see why people drive...
Oh, sure - the bus can't do everything. There is no public transport model which gets everyone cheaply and regularly from everywhere to everywhere outside of very high density areas. But that's not to say it can't do anything. People who refuse to consider the bus - and many do - are cutting themselves off from a service which can be as efficient and pleasant as a train or a tram for no good reason.
It really is fucking not mate.
A train is far far more pleasant than a fucking bus.
If you live in Central London, you will often find yourself getting a bus because changing tube lines is a pain, and because the traffic system prioritizes buses (and bicycles).
If you live outside London (and a few major conurbations), then buses are slow, infrequent and unreliable. There is a world of difference between knowing you might wait 5 minutes for your bus, and that it will probably be quicker than driving or an Uber, and having an unknown (but could be 45 minutes) wait, and a slower and less pleasant triop.
I suspect the future will contain a lot of things that are halfway between buses and taxis. You will choose your destination, and you will be picked up, and it will take you to your destination, but you won't be the only passenger. Technology -in busy places- will allow proper routing of passengers in real time, and massively drive down the cost of this kind of transportation.
Minibus taxis plying irregular routes with no formal timetable have been the norm in much of Africa for years. In Malaysia 35 years ago, shared taxis were often used for longer distances too, with the vehicle going when all the seats were full.
Shocked to here this...so out of character for one of he nicest blokes in cricket.
Former Australia batter David Warner has pleaded guilty to drink driving, after being charged following a random breath test in Sydney in April. The plea had been expected after his lawyer, Bobby Hill, said after a court hearing in May that the cricketer accepted responsibility and knew his behaviour had been "foolish" and "reckless".
Sentencing has been set for 18 August, when Warner faces a minimum disqualification from driving of six months, a potential fine of up to A$2,200 ($1,500; £1,150) and a potential prison sentence of up to nine months.
So, a six month disqualification from driving while he's in prison? Convenient.
Burnham may not have much to play with until his first budget, but in the meantime he's using the limited options he's got extremely well.
Today's announcement on the £2 bus fare cap is well targeted. The prime beneficiaries are going to be those who are younger or on lower incomes (because car ownership is highly correlated with income) and who are in work or studying and rely on the bus for that. Strivers who need to make work pay. But it still applies across the board if you're below pensionable age, so no-one's really going to object. There are also indirect benefits - an upturn in bus usage could bring back some services previously lost or increase the frequency of services - even pensioners relying on buses will benefit if that happens. So it's well targeted in terms of rewarding those who need to be rewarded, and well targeted in terms of likely political impact.
Who actually uses peasant wagons?
CR, your attitude is hurting mainly you here. Buses are very good at what they do. A few points:
- Firstly, more people use buses than any other form of public transport. - Secondly, if you're in a rural area, buses tend to be about as fast as driving if you can put in the modicum of effort to check a timetable in advance. I remember a stage night I went on: we were staying at a hotel in Warwick, and were going to the cricket at Stratford. I timed my arrival at the hotel to meet the bus, and got to Stratford more quickly and far more cheaply than those in the group for whom bus wasn't part of their mental landscape and insisted on using taxis. - If you live in an urban area most bus journeys are less annoying than having to park. - You can use the bus while drunk. - At the age of 51, sitting upstairs on the front seat of a bus is still as thrilling as it was at the age of 7.
Seriously, check out the bus opportunities from wherever you live and use them - it will take you new places to be drunk. Taxis are for losers and people
No-one I know uses buses.
Everybody I know uses buses.
That's because the bus service where I live (Brighton) is superb, with buses to pretty much all parts of the city every few minutes, and judicious use of bus lanes that means they're quicker than cars on most journeys. They've also introduced express buses that have limited stops so are even faster. And, of course, because the service is so good the buses are very busy.
It's also a joy to use buses for longer journeys - for example, on the coastal route from Brighton to Eastbourne, which runs every 5-10 minutes, you get stunning views from the top deck that don't exist from a car.
That's it - my paean to buses is over.
I think this chat is representative of this site and its demographic.
I never ever use them. We live in the south-east and drive or commute to London. All other times we drive, as we have kids, but even if not I'd only ever use them in very particular conditions.
Exceptions? The IoW where the service is extremely good and reliable, and London.
I suspect it is location and the quality of the bus service where you live.
Big cities (Leeds, London. Manchester. Liverpool, Edinburgh. Glasgow) the bus services are frequent and get you exactly where you want to be in the same time as driving (or even less).
Round here to get to an office I used to work out would require 2 buses both only running 3 times an hour so you could have a 20 minute gap if you are unlucky with timing. Even without it a 15 minute car journey would take 40 minutes so you could be talking an hour.
Add on waiting in the rain and you can see why people drive...
Oh, sure - the bus can't do everything. There is no public transport model which gets everyone cheaply and regularly from everywhere to everywhere outside of very high density areas. But that's not to say it can't do anything. People who refuse to consider the bus - and many do - are cutting themselves off from a service which can be as efficient and pleasant as a train or a tram for no good reason.
It really is fucking not mate.
A train is far far more pleasant than a fucking bus.
If you live in Central London, you will often find yourself getting a bus because changing tube lines is a pain, and because the traffic system prioritizes buses (and bicycles).
If you live outside London (and a few major conurbations), then buses are slow, infrequent and unreliable. There is a world of difference between knowing you might wait 5 minutes for your bus, and that it will probably be quicker than driving or an Uber, and having an unknown (but could be 45 minutes) wait, and a slower and less pleasant triop.
I suspect the future will contain a lot of things that are halfway between buses and taxis. You will choose your destination, and you will be picked up, and it will take you to your destination, but you won't be the only passenger. Technology -in busy places- will allow proper routing of passengers in real time, and massively drive down the cost of this kind of transportation.
The problem is: how will it decide which passengers to put together in the same vehicle?
That's what modern machine learning systems are great at doing in real time. But it needs a certain density of vehicles and riders, and a lot of processing power.
Burnham may not have much to play with until his first budget, but in the meantime he's using the limited options he's got extremely well.
Today's announcement on the £2 bus fare cap is well targeted. The prime beneficiaries are going to be those who are younger or on lower incomes (because car ownership is highly correlated with income) and who are in work or studying and rely on the bus for that. Strivers who need to make work pay. But it still applies across the board if you're below pensionable age, so no-one's really going to object. There are also indirect benefits - an upturn in bus usage could bring back some services previously lost or increase the frequency of services - even pensioners relying on buses will benefit if that happens. So it's well targeted in terms of rewarding those who need to be rewarded, and well targeted in terms of likely political impact.
Who actually uses peasant wagons?
CR, your attitude is hurting mainly you here. Buses are very good at what they do. A few points:
- Firstly, more people use buses than any other form of public transport. - Secondly, if you're in a rural area, buses tend to be about as fast as driving if you can put in the modicum of effort to check a timetable in advance. I remember a stage night I went on: we were staying at a hotel in Warwick, and were going to the cricket at Stratford. I timed my arrival at the hotel to meet the bus, and got to Stratford more quickly and far more cheaply than those in the group for whom bus wasn't part of their mental landscape and insisted on using taxis. - If you live in an urban area most bus journeys are less annoying than having to park. - You can use the bus while drunk. - At the age of 51, sitting upstairs on the front seat of a bus is still as thrilling as it was at the age of 7.
Seriously, check out the bus opportunities from wherever you live and use them - it will take you new places to be drunk. Taxis are for losers and people
No-one I know uses buses.
Everybody I know uses buses.
That's because the bus service where I live (Brighton) is superb, with buses to pretty much all parts of the city every few minutes, and judicious use of bus lanes that means they're quicker than cars on most journeys. They've also introduced express buses that have limited stops so are even faster. And, of course, because the service is so good the buses are very busy.
It's also a joy to use buses for longer journeys - for example, on the coastal route from Brighton to Eastbourne, which runs every 5-10 minutes, you get stunning views from the top deck that don't exist from a car.
That's it - my paean to buses is over.
I think this chat is representative of this site and its demographic.
I never ever use them. We live in the south-east and drive or commute to London. All other times we drive, as we have kids, but even if not I'd only ever use them in very particular conditions.
Exceptions? The IoW where the service is extremely good and reliable, and London.
I suspect it is location and the quality of the bus service where you live.
Big cities (Leeds, London. Manchester. Liverpool, Edinburgh. Glasgow) the bus services are frequent and get you exactly where you want to be in the same time as driving (or even less).
Round here to get to an office I used to work out would require 2 buses both only running 3 times an hour so you could have a 20 minute gap if you are unlucky with timing. Even without it a 15 minute car journey would take 40 minutes so you could be talking an hour.
Add on waiting in the rain and you can see why people drive...
Oh, sure - the bus can't do everything. There is no public transport model which gets everyone cheaply and regularly from everywhere to everywhere outside of very high density areas. But that's not to say it can't do anything. People who refuse to consider the bus - and many do - are cutting themselves off from a service which can be as efficient and pleasant as a train or a tram for no good reason.
It really is fucking not mate.
A train is far far more pleasant than a fucking bus.
If you live in Central London, you will often find yourself getting a bus because changing tube lines is a pain, and because the traffic system prioritizes buses (and bicycles).
If you live outside London (and a few major conurbations), then buses are slow, infrequent and unreliable. There is a world of difference between knowing you might wait 5 minutes for your bus, and that it will probably be quicker than driving or an Uber, and having an unknown (but could be 45 minutes) wait, and a slower and less pleasant triop.
I suspect the future will contain a lot of things that are halfway between buses and taxis. You will choose your destination, and you will be picked up, and it will take you to your destination, but you won't be the only passenger. Technology -in busy places- will allow proper routing of passengers in real time, and massively drive down the cost of this kind of transportation.
Im curious whether Lime/Voi bikes are going to make buses redundant though (and to an extent cars). It’s difficult to think of a bus journey that I wouldn’t use a hire bike for instead - it’s only availability that limits my use of them.
The one thing that Burnham is good at so far is appearing to do things quickly, something Starmer lacked.
The thing Burnham is most crap at is instantly being asked “and how are you paying for that” and not having an answer! And it will soon prove fatal to his government 😄
This had to be the “tidy up government finances and economy mess” Parliament, did it not? after everything thrown at it during the Populist Boris years.
Wot? No Welfare Reform?
Nothing undermined the Starmerites more and led to their replacement, than their failure to get some Welfare Reform proposal through their enormous back bench majority. And guess who won that for the crazy left?
Loopy Lou was on a roll when she organised, led, and achieved that defeat of the enemy faction, ushering in the archaic thinking, and very wrong for this moment ideology of the Burnham Faction.
Rather than surrendering to populism, Labour should have stood firm against populism, with fiscal prudence and incremental economic rebuilding, and gone to the country on that record in 2029.
That options blown now. It’s gone.
These facts haven’t dropped for the PB herd yet, but within a year everyone will have to concede what actually happened this week ☺️ Loving it loving it loving it 😁
Burnham may not have much to play with until his first budget, but in the meantime he's using the limited options he's got extremely well.
Today's announcement on the £2 bus fare cap is well targeted. The prime beneficiaries are going to be those who are younger or on lower incomes (because car ownership is highly correlated with income) and who are in work or studying and rely on the bus for that. Strivers who need to make work pay. But it still applies across the board if you're below pensionable age, so no-one's really going to object. There are also indirect benefits - an upturn in bus usage could bring back some services previously lost or increase the frequency of services - even pensioners relying on buses will benefit if that happens. So it's well targeted in terms of rewarding those who need to be rewarded, and well targeted in terms of likely political impact.
Who actually uses peasant wagons?
CR, your attitude is hurting mainly you here. Buses are very good at what they do. A few points:
- Firstly, more people use buses than any other form of public transport. - Secondly, if you're in a rural area, buses tend to be about as fast as driving if you can put in the modicum of effort to check a timetable in advance. I remember a stage night I went on: we were staying at a hotel in Warwick, and were going to the cricket at Stratford. I timed my arrival at the hotel to meet the bus, and got to Stratford more quickly and far more cheaply than those in the group for whom bus wasn't part of their mental landscape and insisted on using taxis. - If you live in an urban area most bus journeys are less annoying than having to park. - You can use the bus while drunk. - At the age of 51, sitting upstairs on the front seat of a bus is still as thrilling as it was at the age of 7.
Seriously, check out the bus opportunities from wherever you live and use them - it will take you new places to be drunk. Taxis are for losers and people
No-one I know uses buses.
Everybody I know uses buses.
That's because the bus service where I live (Brighton) is superb, with buses to pretty much all parts of the city every few minutes, and judicious use of bus lanes that means they're quicker than cars on most journeys. They've also introduced express buses that have limited stops so are even faster. And, of course, because the service is so good the buses are very busy.
It's also a joy to use buses for longer journeys - for example, on the coastal route from Brighton to Eastbourne, which runs every 5-10 minutes, you get stunning views from the top deck that don't exist from a car.
That's it - my paean to buses is over.
I think this chat is representative of this site and its demographic.
I never ever use them. We live in the south-east and drive or commute to London. All other times we drive, as we have kids, but even if not I'd only ever use them in very particular conditions.
Exceptions? The IoW where the service is extremely good and reliable, and London.
I suspect it is location and the quality of the bus service where you live.
Big cities (Leeds, London. Manchester. Liverpool, Edinburgh. Glasgow) the bus services are frequent and get you exactly where you want to be in the same time as driving (or even less).
Round here to get to an office I used to work out would require 2 buses both only running 3 times an hour so you could have a 20 minute gap if you are unlucky with timing. Even without it a 15 minute car journey would take 40 minutes so you could be talking an hour.
Add on waiting in the rain and you can see why people drive...
Oh, sure - the bus can't do everything. There is no public transport model which gets everyone cheaply and regularly from everywhere to everywhere outside of very high density areas. But that's not to say it can't do anything. People who refuse to consider the bus - and many do - are cutting themselves off from a service which can be as efficient and pleasant as a train or a tram for no good reason.
It really is fucking not mate.
A train is far far more pleasant than a fucking bus.
If you live in Central London, you will often find yourself getting a bus because changing tube lines is a pain, and because the traffic system prioritizes buses (and bicycles).
If you live outside London (and a few major conurbations), then buses are slow, infrequent and unreliable. There is a world of difference between knowing you might wait 5 minutes for your bus, and that it will probably be quicker than driving or an Uber, and having an unknown (but could be 45 minutes) wait, and a slower and less pleasant triop.
I suspect the future will contain a lot of things that are halfway between buses and taxis. You will choose your destination, and you will be picked up, and it will take you to your destination, but you won't be the only passenger. Technology -in busy places- will allow proper routing of passengers in real time, and massively drive down the cost of this kind of transportation.
Im curious whether Lime/Voi bikes are going to make buses redundant though (and to an extent cars). It’s difficult to think of a bus journey that I wouldn’t use a hire bike for instead - it’s only availability that limits my use of them.
All the startups that have tried these scooter / bikes have eventually failed as the numbers don't add up.
Burnham may not have much to play with until his first budget, but in the meantime he's using the limited options he's got extremely well.
Today's announcement on the £2 bus fare cap is well targeted. The prime beneficiaries are going to be those who are younger or on lower incomes (because car ownership is highly correlated with income) and who are in work or studying and rely on the bus for that. Strivers who need to make work pay. But it still applies across the board if you're below pensionable age, so no-one's really going to object. There are also indirect benefits - an upturn in bus usage could bring back some services previously lost or increase the frequency of services - even pensioners relying on buses will benefit if that happens. So it's well targeted in terms of rewarding those who need to be rewarded, and well targeted in terms of likely political impact.
Who actually uses peasant wagons?
CR, your attitude is hurting mainly you here. Buses are very good at what they do. A few points:
- Firstly, more people use buses than any other form of public transport. - Secondly, if you're in a rural area, buses tend to be about as fast as driving if you can put in the modicum of effort to check a timetable in advance. I remember a stage night I went on: we were staying at a hotel in Warwick, and were going to the cricket at Stratford. I timed my arrival at the hotel to meet the bus, and got to Stratford more quickly and far more cheaply than those in the group for whom bus wasn't part of their mental landscape and insisted on using taxis. - If you live in an urban area most bus journeys are less annoying than having to park. - You can use the bus while drunk. - At the age of 51, sitting upstairs on the front seat of a bus is still as thrilling as it was at the age of 7.
Seriously, check out the bus opportunities from wherever you live and use them - it will take you new places to be drunk. Taxis are for losers and people
No-one I know uses buses.
Everybody I know uses buses.
That's because the bus service where I live (Brighton) is superb, with buses to pretty much all parts of the city every few minutes, and judicious use of bus lanes that means they're quicker than cars on most journeys. They've also introduced express buses that have limited stops so are even faster. And, of course, because the service is so good the buses are very busy.
It's also a joy to use buses for longer journeys - for example, on the coastal route from Brighton to Eastbourne, which runs every 5-10 minutes, you get stunning views from the top deck that don't exist from a car.
That's it - my paean to buses is over.
I think this chat is representative of this site and its demographic.
I never ever use them. We live in the south-east and drive or commute to London. All other times we drive, as we have kids, but even if not I'd only ever use them in very particular conditions.
Exceptions? The IoW where the service is extremely good and reliable, and London.
I suspect it is location and the quality of the bus service where you live.
Big cities (Leeds, London. Manchester. Liverpool, Edinburgh. Glasgow) the bus services are frequent and get you exactly where you want to be in the same time as driving (or even less).
Round here to get to an office I used to work out would require 2 buses both only running 3 times an hour so you could have a 20 minute gap if you are unlucky with timing. Even without it a 15 minute car journey would take 40 minutes so you could be talking an hour.
Add on waiting in the rain and you can see why people drive...
Oh, sure - the bus can't do everything. There is no public transport model which gets everyone cheaply and regularly from everywhere to everywhere outside of very high density areas. But that's not to say it can't do anything. People who refuse to consider the bus - and many do - are cutting themselves off from a service which can be as efficient and pleasant as a train or a tram for no good reason.
It really is fucking not mate.
A train is far far more pleasant than a fucking bus.
If you live in Central London, you will often find yourself getting a bus because changing tube lines is a pain, and because the traffic system prioritizes buses (and bicycles).
If you live outside London (and a few major conurbations), then buses are slow, infrequent and unreliable. There is a world of difference between knowing you might wait 5 minutes for your bus, and that it will probably be quicker than driving or an Uber, and having an unknown (but could be 45 minutes) wait, and a slower and less pleasant triop.
I suspect the future will contain a lot of things that are halfway between buses and taxis. You will choose your destination, and you will be picked up, and it will take you to your destination, but you won't be the only passenger. Technology -in busy places- will allow proper routing of passengers in real time, and massively drive down the cost of this kind of transportation.
Im curious whether Lime/Voi bikes are going to make buses redundant though (and to an extent cars). It’s difficult to think of a bus journey that I wouldn’t use a hire bike for instead - it’s only availability that limits my use of them.
All the startups that have tried these scooter / bikes have eventually failed as the numbers don't add up. Even in China, didn't work, despite the massive population density, very willing choose scooters / bikes over cars, and where the bikes are actually made so you can iterate the design and keep cost down.
When I was in China, it seemed rather than the hiring of them, huge numbers of people just owned one and used it to steam down the sidewalks avoiding the roads entirely.
Burnham may not have much to play with until his first budget, but in the meantime he's using the limited options he's got extremely well.
Today's announcement on the £2 bus fare cap is well targeted. The prime beneficiaries are going to be those who are younger or on lower incomes (because car ownership is highly correlated with income) and who are in work or studying and rely on the bus for that. Strivers who need to make work pay. But it still applies across the board if you're below pensionable age, so no-one's really going to object. There are also indirect benefits - an upturn in bus usage could bring back some services previously lost or increase the frequency of services - even pensioners relying on buses will benefit if that happens. So it's well targeted in terms of rewarding those who need to be rewarded, and well targeted in terms of likely political impact.
Who actually uses peasant wagons?
CR, your attitude is hurting mainly you here. Buses are very good at what they do. A few points:
- Firstly, more people use buses than any other form of public transport. - Secondly, if you're in a rural area, buses tend to be about as fast as driving if you can put in the modicum of effort to check a timetable in advance. I remember a stage night I went on: we were staying at a hotel in Warwick, and were going to the cricket at Stratford. I timed my arrival at the hotel to meet the bus, and got to Stratford more quickly and far more cheaply than those in the group for whom bus wasn't part of their mental landscape and insisted on using taxis. - If you live in an urban area most bus journeys are less annoying than having to park. - You can use the bus while drunk. - At the age of 51, sitting upstairs on the front seat of a bus is still as thrilling as it was at the age of 7.
Seriously, check out the bus opportunities from wherever you live and use them - it will take you new places to be drunk. Taxis are for losers and people
No-one I know uses buses.
Everybody I know uses buses.
That's because the bus service where I live (Brighton) is superb, with buses to pretty much all parts of the city every few minutes, and judicious use of bus lanes that means they're quicker than cars on most journeys. They've also introduced express buses that have limited stops so are even faster. And, of course, because the service is so good the buses are very busy.
It's also a joy to use buses for longer journeys - for example, on the coastal route from Brighton to Eastbourne, which runs every 5-10 minutes, you get stunning views from the top deck that don't exist from a car.
That's it - my paean to buses is over.
I think this chat is representative of this site and its demographic.
I never ever use them. We live in the south-east and drive or commute to London. All other times we drive, as we have kids, but even if not I'd only ever use them in very particular conditions.
Exceptions? The IoW where the service is extremely good and reliable, and London.
I suspect it is location and the quality of the bus service where you live.
Big cities (Leeds, London. Manchester. Liverpool, Edinburgh. Glasgow) the bus services are frequent and get you exactly where you want to be in the same time as driving (or even less).
Round here to get to an office I used to work out would require 2 buses both only running 3 times an hour so you could have a 20 minute gap if you are unlucky with timing. Even without it a 15 minute car journey would take 40 minutes so you could be talking an hour.
Add on waiting in the rain and you can see why people drive...
Oh, sure - the bus can't do everything. There is no public transport model which gets everyone cheaply and regularly from everywhere to everywhere outside of very high density areas. But that's not to say it can't do anything. People who refuse to consider the bus - and many do - are cutting themselves off from a service which can be as efficient and pleasant as a train or a tram for no good reason.
It really is fucking not mate.
A train is far far more pleasant than a fucking bus.
If you live in Central London, you will often find yourself getting a bus because changing tube lines is a pain, and because the traffic system prioritizes buses (and bicycles).
If you live outside London (and a few major conurbations), then buses are slow, infrequent and unreliable. There is a world of difference between knowing you might wait 5 minutes for your bus, and that it will probably be quicker than driving or an Uber, and having an unknown (but could be 45 minutes) wait, and a slower and less pleasant triop.
I suspect the future will contain a lot of things that are halfway between buses and taxis. You will choose your destination, and you will be picked up, and it will take you to your destination, but you won't be the only passenger. Technology -in busy places- will allow proper routing of passengers in real time, and massively drive down the cost of this kind of transportation.
Minibus taxis plying irregular routes with no formal timetable have been the norm in much of Africa for years. In Malaysia 35 years ago, shared taxis were often used for longer distances too, with the vehicle going when all the seats were full.
Indeed: I remember being stuffed in the back of a minibus with about 15 other people in 2003. (The minibus, it should be noted, was probably rated for 6 or7 passengers.)
It was a wild ride, but was also by far the most efficient way of getting people around.
Burnham has an aspiration to do something, he can't do anything til the Budget anyway.
They need to see what fiscal leeway they have, they would have had a fair dollop had it not been for Iran and Trump, the need about 10bn to do anyting meaningful to allowances but there could well be incremental things they could add in.
A set ladder over 3-4 years of x % to cover inflation plus 1% as an example.
A specific increase for those of pensionable age to link to State Pension standard amount so no one purely on State Pension pasy tax on it
My hunch would be to find a way of balancing the tax allowance for pensioners to the triple lock, so that you start to unlock the triple lock to a median point where you commit to ensuring it by inceasing personal allowances instead initially for pensioners with then an aim of increasing for all!
Putting aside the right wing ad hominem, I vote Labour in GE’s, I don’t see how this article is ‘right wing’ either.
why shouldn’t pensioners pay tax above the threshold ? It’s income after all. Those purely on the state oension do get other passported benefits.
I think Dan Neidle is right. Leave this and target NI, it’s a tax on employment. We need more employment and to make work pay.
We were canvassed by our MP and his aides at the weekend. One thing I told them is work doesn’t pay in this country.
The rational thing is for pensioners to pay tax on their income in the same way as everyone else. But as we saw with the WFA debacle, rationality goes out the window when it comes to pensioners.
I continue to blame Clive Dunn and St Winifred's School Choir.
I blame Reeves for simply not reversing Hunt’s uncosted employee NI cuts that removed all headroom
Which is bullshit.
Hunts freeze on threshold fully funded the Employee NI change.
It was a net tax rise.
If you are going to tax, better to do it through more honest and visible taxation rather than stealth and more stealth?
Indeed, which is why we should be abolishing NI and having a single rate of income tax that is paid by everyone the same, honestly and visibly.
Not taxing employment more than unearned incomes.
That is possible but you'd need to unravel NI from the pension system which will take at least some thought and legislation. On a wider point about differential taxation of earned and unearned income, the government is supposed to be looking at private equity, dividends and capital gains tax.
The need to unravel NI from the pensions system can be a long-term problem if you set employee NI to 1% in the short term, and change the income tax 20% rate to I think 28% renenue-neutral.
Any changes upwards of tax rates of capital gains will absolutely cost more than they raise. Arthur Laffer is waving from the door of the Treasury.
Any mad idea of taxing CG at income tax levels will drive hundreds of billions in investment vehicles offshore almost immediately. Dubai and Singapore are actively looking to recruit global PE funds.
You already get NIC "contributions" at 0% so no problem with setting a global 0% threshold rate for NICs, merge income tax, and still keep contributions based on income as it currently is.
Massive increase in income tax for pensioners though from 20% to 28%... It's why I would be doing it very slowly...
Merging income tax and NI is one of those 'easy fixes' that people who have only ever been on PAYE suggest.
It would be a massive increase in tax for pensioners and the self employed. Both groups who vote heavily....
That is precisely the point.
Pensioners and the self-employed should be liable for the same taxes as those on PAYE.
Everyone who earns the same amount should be taxed the same.
I would make it net tax revenue so cut the overall rate so those who are working for their income on PAYE get a tax cut, funded by taxing others the same as they would now be paying.
Yes but would it work politically as explained above large voting blocks would be against it.
There are large voting blocs against any change.
Taxes should be simple, low and evenly applied. Complicating it to appeal to voter blocs and dumping the burden on people in paid employment just harms everyone else and harms the economy by overtaxing employment.
But you have to get elected to effect the change.
They've already been elected.
With a manifesto promise that they are committed to not breaking
To not increase taxes on working families, yes.
What I propose would be a tax cut for them.
Its more in line with the manifesto than jacking up NI was.
Not quite what the manifesto actually says is” Labour will not increase taxes on working people. Which is why we will not increase National insurance the basic rate, higher or additional rates of income tax or VAT”. So they did specifically rule out increase in tax and NI.
Additionally in clarification they explained people had worked all there lives were included in their definition of working people.
Precisely.
Merge the two and there is no net increase, indeed it could be a combined cut and sold as such. All while not increasing, indeed reducing, the tax on working people.
Its more justifiable than the sophistry around the National Insurance increase.
No some working people according to the clarification would have their tax raised. It would be a breach of the manifesto
All working people did when NICs were increased, hence the sophistry around "ah but we didn't mean Employers NICs". It was still a very clear and unambiguous rise in tax.
A merger would simplify rates and not be a net increase. There would be winners and losers but there always are.
No a merger would just lead to welfare dependency from cradle to grave on tax funded welfare, with not even any attempt to have a contributory element for that welfare whether for unemployment benefit or the state pension
No it would not.
We already have welfare dependency. A merger would reduce it by lowering the proportion of taxes levied on those who work and would not change benefits one iota. 🤦♂️
You seem to have this delusion that a merger would increase benefits. It will not.
Yes it would. Most OECD nations fund their unemployment benefits via contributions to unemployment insurance and receipt of the full state pension also requiring sufficient social insurance contributions too.
Income tax would rise of course anyway as it would have NI merged into it and those on unemployment benefit or the state pension would not ever need to contribute a penny to claim them in full
They already don't need to contribute a penny to claim in full and you can keep the contribution link (indeed strengthen it) to the new combined rate.
All that would change is that currently those on taxable benefits don't pay NICs on their benefit income while those who work for their income do.
Why do you think those working for their income should be taxed more than those on benefits?
You can scrap NI credits and then ensure the full contribution link is kept for the state pension and JSA. Pensioners of course contributed to NIC throughout their working life anyway
You could keep the contribution link to a combined income tax rate, no need to abolish the contribution thresholds.
Pensioners of course never paid toward their own pensions, which is why we not only have no savings to pay for them but we are paying interest on debt instead.
Why should those on benefits be taxed less than those working for the same income?
They could not claim the state pension in full without a sufficient rate of NI contributions, scrap NI credits and only those who have contributed can get it, everyone else has to get pension credits
People already can get NI Credits though.
What is wrong with a package that combines abolishing NI Credits, merging Income Tax and NICs and migrating NI contributions to be Income Tax contributions?
You keep the contributory nature that you want but eliminate the distortion of taxing working people more. What is wrong with that?
As I also said, scrap NI Credits. If you haven't contributed enough you shouldn't get JSA or the full state pension, just pension credits or UC.
I agree with you on that but identifying what had been contributed for state pensions and JSA and what was to fund other areas of government spending from income tax would be administratively costly
Why would there be any administration costs since we don't do that already, so there would be no change there. The system in place is a binary "contribute or not" based on income over the threshold, we don't tally how much people have contributed - and that threshold could easily be migrated to a combined tax.
Merge it all and there would be just the one tax - and keep contribution requirements in place, not proposing abolishing those.
We should tally how much people have contributed, certainly to get the full state pension and full JSA only a certain level of contributions would enable that
Burnham has an aspiration to do something, he can't do anything til the Budget anyway.
They need to see what fiscal leeway they have, they would have had a fair dollop had it not been for Iran and Trump, the need about 10bn to do anyting meaningful to allowances but there could well be incremental things they could add in.
A set ladder over 3-4 years of x % to cover inflation plus 1% as an example.
A specific increase for those of pensionable age to link to State Pension standard amount so no one purely on State Pension pasy tax on it
My hunch would be to find a way of balancing the tax allowance for pensioners to the triple lock, so that you start to unlock the triple lock to a median point where you commit to ensuring it by inceasing personal allowances instead initially for pensioners with then an aim of increasing for all!
Putting aside the right wing ad hominem, I vote Labour in GE’s, I don’t see how this article is ‘right wing’ either.
why shouldn’t pensioners pay tax above the threshold ? It’s income after all. Those purely on the state oension do get other passported benefits.
I think Dan Neidle is right. Leave this and target NI, it’s a tax on employment. We need more employment and to make work pay.
We were canvassed by our MP and his aides at the weekend. One thing I told them is work doesn’t pay in this country.
The rational thing is for pensioners to pay tax on their income in the same way as everyone else. But as we saw with the WFA debacle, rationality goes out the window when it comes to pensioners.
I continue to blame Clive Dunn and St Winifred's School Choir.
I blame Reeves for simply not reversing Hunt’s uncosted employee NI cuts that removed all headroom
Which is bullshit.
Hunts freeze on threshold fully funded the Employee NI change.
It was a net tax rise.
If you are going to tax, better to do it through more honest and visible taxation rather than stealth and more stealth?
Indeed, which is why we should be abolishing NI and having a single rate of income tax that is paid by everyone the same, honestly and visibly.
Not taxing employment more than unearned incomes.
That is possible but you'd need to unravel NI from the pension system which will take at least some thought and legislation. On a wider point about differential taxation of earned and unearned income, the government is supposed to be looking at private equity, dividends and capital gains tax.
The need to unravel NI from the pensions system can be a long-term problem if you set employee NI to 1% in the short term, and change the income tax 20% rate to I think 28% renenue-neutral.
Any changes upwards of tax rates of capital gains will absolutely cost more than they raise. Arthur Laffer is waving from the door of the Treasury.
Any mad idea of taxing CG at income tax levels will drive hundreds of billions in investment vehicles offshore almost immediately. Dubai and Singapore are actively looking to recruit global PE funds.
You already get NIC "contributions" at 0% so no problem with setting a global 0% threshold rate for NICs, merge income tax, and still keep contributions based on income as it currently is.
Massive increase in income tax for pensioners though from 20% to 28%... It's why I would be doing it very slowly...
Merging income tax and NI is one of those 'easy fixes' that people who have only ever been on PAYE suggest.
It would be a massive increase in tax for pensioners and the self employed. Both groups who vote heavily....
That is precisely the point.
Pensioners and the self-employed should be liable for the same taxes as those on PAYE.
Everyone who earns the same amount should be taxed the same.
I would make it net tax revenue so cut the overall rate so those who are working for their income on PAYE get a tax cut, funded by taxing others the same as they would now be paying.
Yes but would it work politically as explained above large voting blocks would be against it.
There are large voting blocs against any change.
Taxes should be simple, low and evenly applied. Complicating it to appeal to voter blocs and dumping the burden on people in paid employment just harms everyone else and harms the economy by overtaxing employment.
But you have to get elected to effect the change.
They've already been elected.
With a manifesto promise that they are committed to not breaking
To not increase taxes on working families, yes.
What I propose would be a tax cut for them.
Its more in line with the manifesto than jacking up NI was.
Not quite what the manifesto actually says is” Labour will not increase taxes on working people. Which is why we will not increase National insurance the basic rate, higher or additional rates of income tax or VAT”. So they did specifically rule out increase in tax and NI.
Additionally in clarification they explained people had worked all there lives were included in their definition of working people.
Precisely.
Merge the two and there is no net increase, indeed it could be a combined cut and sold as such. All while not increasing, indeed reducing, the tax on working people.
Its more justifiable than the sophistry around the National Insurance increase.
No some working people according to the clarification would have their tax raised. It would be a breach of the manifesto
All working people did when NICs were increased, hence the sophistry around "ah but we didn't mean Employers NICs". It was still a very clear and unambiguous rise in tax.
A merger would simplify rates and not be a net increase. There would be winners and losers but there always are.
No a merger would just lead to welfare dependency from cradle to grave on tax funded welfare, with not even any attempt to have a contributory element for that welfare whether for unemployment benefit or the state pension
No it would not.
We already have welfare dependency. A merger would reduce it by lowering the proportion of taxes levied on those who work and would not change benefits one iota. 🤦♂️
You seem to have this delusion that a merger would increase benefits. It will not.
Yes it would. Most OECD nations fund their unemployment benefits via contributions to unemployment insurance and receipt of the full state pension also requiring sufficient social insurance contributions too.
Income tax would rise of course anyway as it would have NI merged into it and those on unemployment benefit or the state pension would not ever need to contribute a penny to claim them in full
They already don't need to contribute a penny to claim in full and you can keep the contribution link (indeed strengthen it) to the new combined rate.
All that would change is that currently those on taxable benefits don't pay NICs on their benefit income while those who work for their income do.
Why do you think those working for their income should be taxed more than those on benefits?
You can scrap NI credits and then ensure the full contribution link is kept for the state pension and JSA. Pensioners of course contributed to NIC throughout their working life anyway
You could keep the contribution link to a combined income tax rate, no need to abolish the contribution thresholds.
Pensioners of course never paid toward their own pensions, which is why we not only have no savings to pay for them but we are paying interest on debt instead.
Why should those on benefits be taxed less than those working for the same income?
They could not claim the state pension in full without a sufficient rate of NI contributions, scrap NI credits and only those who have contributed can get it, everyone else has to get pension credits
People already can get NI Credits though.
What is wrong with a package that combines abolishing NI Credits, merging Income Tax and NICs and migrating NI contributions to be Income Tax contributions?
You keep the contributory nature that you want but eliminate the distortion of taxing working people more. What is wrong with that?
As I also said, scrap NI Credits. If you haven't contributed enough you shouldn't get JSA or the full state pension, just pension credits or UC.
I agree with you on that but identifying what had been contributed for state pensions and JSA and what was to fund other areas of government spending from income tax would be administratively costly
Why would there be any administration costs since we don't do that already, so there would be no change there. The system in place is a binary "contribute or not" based on income over the threshold, we don't tally how much people have contributed - and that threshold could easily be migrated to a combined tax.
Merge it all and there would be just the one tax - and keep contribution requirements in place, not proposing abolishing those.
We should tally how much people have contributed, certainly to get the full state pension and full JSA only a certain level of contributions would enable that
But we don't, and there is no reason that can't be done with a merged Income Tax.
Whether we should merge tax rates, and whether we should have contributions, are two completely unrelated discussions.
It could be done but would require significantly higher administrative costs as I said, certainly than just doing it on a solely assessed NI contributions basis
No, it would require less administrative costs.
Whatever the NI income threshold is set at, just set it as an Income Tax income threshold. Job done.
You would then need to calculate the personal allowance and then the income tax minimum contributions threshold on top of that and then the basic and higher rates etc
No you would not.
Currently a threshold is set to "get NI contributions". Currently a threshold is set to actually pay contributions.
Those two are not aligned.
Merge the two and you just move the "get NI contributions" threshold to a "get IC contributions" threshold and carry on just the same.
All the various thresholds already exist today.
Currently thee is a NI threshold of 26 weeks of contributions over 2 years to get JSA and 35 qualifying years now to get the new state pension. So all those contributions would need to be calculated if you move them to income tax as well as separating out income just to be spent on other government departments not counting towards the contribution to JSA and state pension, whereas NI could just be ringfenced only for JSA and state pension contributions
Why not have 35 qualifying years of paying tax? What difference does it make?
Contributions are already calculated. You can log into HMRC online and see how much tax you've paid in past years and the current year.
Trains * Full of unpleasant people (foreign students, drunks, hen dos, junkies, the rude word that OGH doesn't like) * Longer journey times * More predictable times of departure and arrival ( https://www.realtimetrains.co.uk/ ) * Better WiFi access * Better for long distances (inter-city, long commutes) * Cleaner and nicer than they were in the old days * Train stations are sheltered but can be threatening * Train stations are more likely to be refurbished. Smoking/vaping less present * Train stations are rarely within walking distance * Train stations have shelves where you can drop off and pick up used books
Buses * Less full of unpleasant people (mostly old people) except for school runs * Shorter journey times * Less predictable times of departure and arrival ( https://bustimes.org/ ) * Poor WiFi access * Better for short distances (shopping, short commutes) * Cleaner and nicer than they were in the old days * Bus stations are sheltered but can be threatening * Bus stations and bus stops are more likely to be unrefurbished. Smoking/vaping still present * Bus stops are usually within walking distance * Bus stations do not have shelves where you can drop off and pick up used books
Burnham has an aspiration to do something, he can't do anything til the Budget anyway.
They need to see what fiscal leeway they have, they would have had a fair dollop had it not been for Iran and Trump, the need about 10bn to do anyting meaningful to allowances but there could well be incremental things they could add in.
A set ladder over 3-4 years of x % to cover inflation plus 1% as an example.
A specific increase for those of pensionable age to link to State Pension standard amount so no one purely on State Pension pasy tax on it
My hunch would be to find a way of balancing the tax allowance for pensioners to the triple lock, so that you start to unlock the triple lock to a median point where you commit to ensuring it by inceasing personal allowances instead initially for pensioners with then an aim of increasing for all!
Putting aside the right wing ad hominem, I vote Labour in GE’s, I don’t see how this article is ‘right wing’ either.
why shouldn’t pensioners pay tax above the threshold ? It’s income after all. Those purely on the state oension do get other passported benefits.
I think Dan Neidle is right. Leave this and target NI, it’s a tax on employment. We need more employment and to make work pay.
We were canvassed by our MP and his aides at the weekend. One thing I told them is work doesn’t pay in this country.
The rational thing is for pensioners to pay tax on their income in the same way as everyone else. But as we saw with the WFA debacle, rationality goes out the window when it comes to pensioners.
I continue to blame Clive Dunn and St Winifred's School Choir.
I blame Reeves for simply not reversing Hunt’s uncosted employee NI cuts that removed all headroom
Which is bullshit.
Hunts freeze on threshold fully funded the Employee NI change.
It was a net tax rise.
If you are going to tax, better to do it through more honest and visible taxation rather than stealth and more stealth?
Indeed, which is why we should be abolishing NI and having a single rate of income tax that is paid by everyone the same, honestly and visibly.
Not taxing employment more than unearned incomes.
That is possible but you'd need to unravel NI from the pension system which will take at least some thought and legislation. On a wider point about differential taxation of earned and unearned income, the government is supposed to be looking at private equity, dividends and capital gains tax.
The need to unravel NI from the pensions system can be a long-term problem if you set employee NI to 1% in the short term, and change the income tax 20% rate to I think 28% renenue-neutral.
Any changes upwards of tax rates of capital gains will absolutely cost more than they raise. Arthur Laffer is waving from the door of the Treasury.
Any mad idea of taxing CG at income tax levels will drive hundreds of billions in investment vehicles offshore almost immediately. Dubai and Singapore are actively looking to recruit global PE funds.
You already get NIC "contributions" at 0% so no problem with setting a global 0% threshold rate for NICs, merge income tax, and still keep contributions based on income as it currently is.
Massive increase in income tax for pensioners though from 20% to 28%... It's why I would be doing it very slowly...
Merging income tax and NI is one of those 'easy fixes' that people who have only ever been on PAYE suggest.
It would be a massive increase in tax for pensioners and the self employed. Both groups who vote heavily....
That is precisely the point.
Pensioners and the self-employed should be liable for the same taxes as those on PAYE.
Everyone who earns the same amount should be taxed the same.
I would make it net tax revenue so cut the overall rate so those who are working for their income on PAYE get a tax cut, funded by taxing others the same as they would now be paying.
Yes but would it work politically as explained above large voting blocks would be against it.
There are large voting blocs against any change.
Taxes should be simple, low and evenly applied. Complicating it to appeal to voter blocs and dumping the burden on people in paid employment just harms everyone else and harms the economy by overtaxing employment.
But you have to get elected to effect the change.
They've already been elected.
With a manifesto promise that they are committed to not breaking
To not increase taxes on working families, yes.
What I propose would be a tax cut for them.
Its more in line with the manifesto than jacking up NI was.
Not quite what the manifesto actually says is” Labour will not increase taxes on working people. Which is why we will not increase National insurance the basic rate, higher or additional rates of income tax or VAT”. So they did specifically rule out increase in tax and NI.
Additionally in clarification they explained people had worked all there lives were included in their definition of working people.
Precisely.
Merge the two and there is no net increase, indeed it could be a combined cut and sold as such. All while not increasing, indeed reducing, the tax on working people.
Its more justifiable than the sophistry around the National Insurance increase.
No some working people according to the clarification would have their tax raised. It would be a breach of the manifesto
All working people did when NICs were increased, hence the sophistry around "ah but we didn't mean Employers NICs". It was still a very clear and unambiguous rise in tax.
A merger would simplify rates and not be a net increase. There would be winners and losers but there always are.
No a merger would just lead to welfare dependency from cradle to grave on tax funded welfare, with not even any attempt to have a contributory element for that welfare whether for unemployment benefit or the state pension
No it would not.
We already have welfare dependency. A merger would reduce it by lowering the proportion of taxes levied on those who work and would not change benefits one iota. 🤦♂️
You seem to have this delusion that a merger would increase benefits. It will not.
Yes it would. Most OECD nations fund their unemployment benefits via contributions to unemployment insurance and receipt of the full state pension also requiring sufficient social insurance contributions too.
Income tax would rise of course anyway as it would have NI merged into it and those on unemployment benefit or the state pension would not ever need to contribute a penny to claim them in full
They already don't need to contribute a penny to claim in full and you can keep the contribution link (indeed strengthen it) to the new combined rate.
All that would change is that currently those on taxable benefits don't pay NICs on their benefit income while those who work for their income do.
Why do you think those working for their income should be taxed more than those on benefits?
You can scrap NI credits and then ensure the full contribution link is kept for the state pension and JSA. Pensioners of course contributed to NIC throughout their working life anyway
You could keep the contribution link to a combined income tax rate, no need to abolish the contribution thresholds.
Pensioners of course never paid toward their own pensions, which is why we not only have no savings to pay for them but we are paying interest on debt instead.
Why should those on benefits be taxed less than those working for the same income?
Just because pensioners contributed something does not mean that they contributed enough.
What's clear now is that the contributions that current pensioners made over the past 60+ or so years has turned out to be woefully short of what is needed to fund the benefits and services to which they now consider themselves entitled. Yet they just don't seem to get that hard truth. And it shouldn't be down just to the next two or three generations to make up the shortfall alone.
Can you prove that dumb theory. If I had invested my NI payments for 50 years I would get significantly more guaranteed than state pension
Oh hell yeah.
If you’d paid into a simple unmanaged S&P 500 tracker for the past 50 years, you’d have an average return of about 8%pa.
Burnham may not have much to play with until his first budget, but in the meantime he's using the limited options he's got extremely well.
Today's announcement on the £2 bus fare cap is well targeted. The prime beneficiaries are going to be those who are younger or on lower incomes (because car ownership is highly correlated with income) and who are in work or studying and rely on the bus for that. Strivers who need to make work pay. But it still applies across the board if you're below pensionable age, so no-one's really going to object. There are also indirect benefits - an upturn in bus usage could bring back some services previously lost or increase the frequency of services - even pensioners relying on buses will benefit if that happens. So it's well targeted in terms of rewarding those who need to be rewarded, and well targeted in terms of likely political impact.
Who actually uses peasant wagons?
CR, your attitude is hurting mainly you here. Buses are very good at what they do. A few points:
- Firstly, more people use buses than any other form of public transport. - Secondly, if you're in a rural area, buses tend to be about as fast as driving if you can put in the modicum of effort to check a timetable in advance. I remember a stage night I went on: we were staying at a hotel in Warwick, and were going to the cricket at Stratford. I timed my arrival at the hotel to meet the bus, and got to Stratford more quickly and far more cheaply than those in the group for whom bus wasn't part of their mental landscape and insisted on using taxis. - If you live in an urban area most bus journeys are less annoying than having to park. - You can use the bus while drunk. - At the age of 51, sitting upstairs on the front seat of a bus is still as thrilling as it was at the age of 7.
Seriously, check out the bus opportunities from wherever you live and use them - it will take you new places to be drunk. Taxis are for losers and people
No-one I know uses buses.
Everybody I know uses buses.
That's because the bus service where I live (Brighton) is superb, with buses to pretty much all parts of the city every few minutes, and judicious use of bus lanes that means they're quicker than cars on most journeys. They've also introduced express buses that have limited stops so are even faster. And, of course, because the service is so good the buses are very busy.
It's also a joy to use buses for longer journeys - for example, on the coastal route from Brighton to Eastbourne, which runs every 5-10 minutes, you get stunning views from the top deck that don't exist from a car.
That's it - my paean to buses is over.
I think this chat is representative of this site and its demographic.
I never ever use them. We live in the south-east and drive or commute to London. All other times we drive, as we have kids, but even if not I'd only ever use them in very particular conditions.
Exceptions? The IoW where the service is extremely good and reliable, and London.
I suspect it is location and the quality of the bus service where you live.
Big cities (Leeds, London. Manchester. Liverpool, Edinburgh. Glasgow) the bus services are frequent and get you exactly where you want to be in the same time as driving (or even less).
Round here to get to an office I used to work out would require 2 buses both only running 3 times an hour so you could have a 20 minute gap if you are unlucky with timing. Even without it a 15 minute car journey would take 40 minutes so you could be talking an hour.
Add on waiting in the rain and you can see why people drive...
Oh, sure - the bus can't do everything. There is no public transport model which gets everyone cheaply and regularly from everywhere to everywhere outside of very high density areas. But that's not to say it can't do anything. People who refuse to consider the bus - and many do - are cutting themselves off from a service which can be as efficient and pleasant as a train or a tram for no good reason.
It really is fucking not mate.
A train is far far more pleasant than a fucking bus.
If you live in Central London, you will often find yourself getting a bus because changing tube lines is a pain, and because the traffic system prioritizes buses (and bicycles).
If you live outside London (and a few major conurbations), then buses are slow, infrequent and unreliable. There is a world of difference between knowing you might wait 5 minutes for your bus, and that it will probably be quicker than driving or an Uber, and having an unknown (but could be 45 minutes) wait, and a slower and less pleasant triop.
I suspect the future will contain a lot of things that are halfway between buses and taxis. You will choose your destination, and you will be picked up, and it will take you to your destination, but you won't be the only passenger. Technology -in busy places- will allow proper routing of passengers in real time, and massively drive down the cost of this kind of transportation.
Im curious whether Lime/Voi bikes are going to make buses redundant though (and to an extent cars). It’s difficult to think of a bus journey that I wouldn’t use a hire bike for instead - it’s only availability that limits my use of them.
Well, I love Lime bikes in London.
But they can also be a pain too. You need to park them in dedicated Lime cycle bays in most London Boroughs. But here's the thing... you're traveling back from Kings Cross at 6pm, and the cycle bays are completely full.
Burnham may not have much to play with until his first budget, but in the meantime he's using the limited options he's got extremely well.
Today's announcement on the £2 bus fare cap is well targeted. The prime beneficiaries are going to be those who are younger or on lower incomes (because car ownership is highly correlated with income) and who are in work or studying and rely on the bus for that. Strivers who need to make work pay. But it still applies across the board if you're below pensionable age, so no-one's really going to object. There are also indirect benefits - an upturn in bus usage could bring back some services previously lost or increase the frequency of services - even pensioners relying on buses will benefit if that happens. So it's well targeted in terms of rewarding those who need to be rewarded, and well targeted in terms of likely political impact.
Who actually uses peasant wagons?
CR, your attitude is hurting mainly you here. Buses are very good at what they do. A few points:
- Firstly, more people use buses than any other form of public transport. - Secondly, if you're in a rural area, buses tend to be about as fast as driving if you can put in the modicum of effort to check a timetable in advance. I remember a stage night I went on: we were staying at a hotel in Warwick, and were going to the cricket at Stratford. I timed my arrival at the hotel to meet the bus, and got to Stratford more quickly and far more cheaply than those in the group for whom bus wasn't part of their mental landscape and insisted on using taxis. - If you live in an urban area most bus journeys are less annoying than having to park. - You can use the bus while drunk. - At the age of 51, sitting upstairs on the front seat of a bus is still as thrilling as it was at the age of 7.
Seriously, check out the bus opportunities from wherever you live and use them - it will take you new places to be drunk. Taxis are for losers and people
No-one I know uses buses.
Everybody I know uses buses.
That's because the bus service where I live (Brighton) is superb, with buses to pretty much all parts of the city every few minutes, and judicious use of bus lanes that means they're quicker than cars on most journeys. They've also introduced express buses that have limited stops so are even faster. And, of course, because the service is so good the buses are very busy.
It's also a joy to use buses for longer journeys - for example, on the coastal route from Brighton to Eastbourne, which runs every 5-10 minutes, you get stunning views from the top deck that don't exist from a car.
That's it - my paean to buses is over.
I think this chat is representative of this site and its demographic.
I never ever use them. We live in the south-east and drive or commute to London. All other times we drive, as we have kids, but even if not I'd only ever use them in very particular conditions.
Exceptions? The IoW where the service is extremely good and reliable, and London.
I suspect it is location and the quality of the bus service where you live.
Big cities (Leeds, London. Manchester. Liverpool, Edinburgh. Glasgow) the bus services are frequent and get you exactly where you want to be in the same time as driving (or even less).
Round here to get to an office I used to work out would require 2 buses both only running 3 times an hour so you could have a 20 minute gap if you are unlucky with timing. Even without it a 15 minute car journey would take 40 minutes so you could be talking an hour.
Add on waiting in the rain and you can see why people drive...
Oh, sure - the bus can't do everything. There is no public transport model which gets everyone cheaply and regularly from everywhere to everywhere outside of very high density areas. But that's not to say it can't do anything. People who refuse to consider the bus - and many do - are cutting themselves off from a service which can be as efficient and pleasant as a train or a tram for no good reason.
It really is fucking not mate.
A train is far far more pleasant than a fucking bus.
If you live in Central London, you will often find yourself getting a bus because changing tube lines is a pain, and because the traffic system prioritizes buses (and bicycles).
If you live outside London (and a few major conurbations), then buses are slow, infrequent and unreliable. There is a world of difference between knowing you might wait 5 minutes for your bus, and that it will probably be quicker than driving or an Uber, and having an unknown (but could be 45 minutes) wait, and a slower and less pleasant triop.
I suspect the future will contain a lot of things that are halfway between buses and taxis. You will choose your destination, and you will be picked up, and it will take you to your destination, but you won't be the only passenger. Technology -in busy places- will allow proper routing of passengers in real time, and massively drive down the cost of this kind of transportation.
Im curious whether Lime/Voi bikes are going to make buses redundant though (and to an extent cars). It’s difficult to think of a bus journey that I wouldn’t use a hire bike for instead - it’s only availability that limits my use of them.
Journeys going for many miles are probably better on a bus than a bike.
All forms of transportation serves a purpose, we shouldn't try to force everything onto one type just because we like square/round holes.
Burnham may not have much to play with until his first budget, but in the meantime he's using the limited options he's got extremely well.
Today's announcement on the £2 bus fare cap is well targeted. The prime beneficiaries are going to be those who are younger or on lower incomes (because car ownership is highly correlated with income) and who are in work or studying and rely on the bus for that. Strivers who need to make work pay. But it still applies across the board if you're below pensionable age, so no-one's really going to object. There are also indirect benefits - an upturn in bus usage could bring back some services previously lost or increase the frequency of services - even pensioners relying on buses will benefit if that happens. So it's well targeted in terms of rewarding those who need to be rewarded, and well targeted in terms of likely political impact.
Who actually uses peasant wagons?
CR, your attitude is hurting mainly you here. Buses are very good at what they do. A few points:
- Firstly, more people use buses than any other form of public transport. - Secondly, if you're in a rural area, buses tend to be about as fast as driving if you can put in the modicum of effort to check a timetable in advance. I remember a stage night I went on: we were staying at a hotel in Warwick, and were going to the cricket at Stratford. I timed my arrival at the hotel to meet the bus, and got to Stratford more quickly and far more cheaply than those in the group for whom bus wasn't part of their mental landscape and insisted on using taxis. - If you live in an urban area most bus journeys are less annoying than having to park. - You can use the bus while drunk. - At the age of 51, sitting upstairs on the front seat of a bus is still as thrilling as it was at the age of 7.
Seriously, check out the bus opportunities from wherever you live and use them - it will take you new places to be drunk. Taxis are for losers and people
No-one I know uses buses.
Everybody I know uses buses.
That's because the bus service where I live (Brighton) is superb, with buses to pretty much all parts of the city every few minutes, and judicious use of bus lanes that means they're quicker than cars on most journeys. They've also introduced express buses that have limited stops so are even faster. And, of course, because the service is so good the buses are very busy.
It's also a joy to use buses for longer journeys - for example, on the coastal route from Brighton to Eastbourne, which runs every 5-10 minutes, you get stunning views from the top deck that don't exist from a car.
That's it - my paean to buses is over.
I think this chat is representative of this site and its demographic.
I never ever use them. We live in the south-east and drive or commute to London. All other times we drive, as we have kids, but even if not I'd only ever use them in very particular conditions.
Exceptions? The IoW where the service is extremely good and reliable, and London.
I suspect it is location and the quality of the bus service where you live.
Big cities (Leeds, London. Manchester. Liverpool, Edinburgh. Glasgow) the bus services are frequent and get you exactly where you want to be in the same time as driving (or even less).
Round here to get to an office I used to work out would require 2 buses both only running 3 times an hour so you could have a 20 minute gap if you are unlucky with timing. Even without it a 15 minute car journey would take 40 minutes so you could be talking an hour.
Add on waiting in the rain and you can see why people drive...
Oh, sure - the bus can't do everything. There is no public transport model which gets everyone cheaply and regularly from everywhere to everywhere outside of very high density areas. But that's not to say it can't do anything. People who refuse to consider the bus - and many do - are cutting themselves off from a service which can be as efficient and pleasant as a train or a tram for no good reason.
It really is fucking not mate.
A train is far far more pleasant than a fucking bus.
If you live in Central London, you will often find yourself getting a bus because changing tube lines is a pain, and because the traffic system prioritizes buses (and bicycles).
If you live outside London (and a few major conurbations), then buses are slow, infrequent and unreliable. There is a world of difference between knowing you might wait 5 minutes for your bus, and that it will probably be quicker than driving or an Uber, and having an unknown (but could be 45 minutes) wait, and a slower and less pleasant triop.
I suspect the future will contain a lot of things that are halfway between buses and taxis. You will choose your destination, and you will be picked up, and it will take you to your destination, but you won't be the only passenger. Technology -in busy places- will allow proper routing of passengers in real time, and massively drive down the cost of this kind of transportation.
Im curious whether Lime/Voi bikes are going to make buses redundant though (and to an extent cars). It’s difficult to think of a bus journey that I wouldn’t use a hire bike for instead - it’s only availability that limits my use of them.
All the startups that have tried these scooter / bikes have eventually failed as the numbers don't add up.
Lime bikes in London is almost at breakeven, but it's taken them a *long* time to drive costs down enough to make the math work.
The fundamental problem is that maintenance is really expensive. A Lime bike lasts maybe four or five months, so it needs to have earned at least a thousand quid in rides over that time. (And it needs to be charged, and moved around if it's in the wrong location, etc.)
Burnham may not have much to play with until his first budget, but in the meantime he's using the limited options he's got extremely well.
Today's announcement on the £2 bus fare cap is well targeted. The prime beneficiaries are going to be those who are younger or on lower incomes (because car ownership is highly correlated with income) and who are in work or studying and rely on the bus for that. Strivers who need to make work pay. But it still applies across the board if you're below pensionable age, so no-one's really going to object. There are also indirect benefits - an upturn in bus usage could bring back some services previously lost or increase the frequency of services - even pensioners relying on buses will benefit if that happens. So it's well targeted in terms of rewarding those who need to be rewarded, and well targeted in terms of likely political impact.
Who actually uses peasant wagons?
CR, your attitude is hurting mainly you here. Buses are very good at what they do. A few points:
- Firstly, more people use buses than any other form of public transport. - Secondly, if you're in a rural area, buses tend to be about as fast as driving if you can put in the modicum of effort to check a timetable in advance. I remember a stage night I went on: we were staying at a hotel in Warwick, and were going to the cricket at Stratford. I timed my arrival at the hotel to meet the bus, and got to Stratford more quickly and far more cheaply than those in the group for whom bus wasn't part of their mental landscape and insisted on using taxis. - If you live in an urban area most bus journeys are less annoying than having to park. - You can use the bus while drunk. - At the age of 51, sitting upstairs on the front seat of a bus is still as thrilling as it was at the age of 7.
Seriously, check out the bus opportunities from wherever you live and use them - it will take you new places to be drunk. Taxis are for losers and people
No-one I know uses buses.
Everybody I know uses buses.
That's because the bus service where I live (Brighton) is superb, with buses to pretty much all parts of the city every few minutes, and judicious use of bus lanes that means they're quicker than cars on most journeys. They've also introduced express buses that have limited stops so are even faster. And, of course, because the service is so good the buses are very busy.
It's also a joy to use buses for longer journeys - for example, on the coastal route from Brighton to Eastbourne, which runs every 5-10 minutes, you get stunning views from the top deck that don't exist from a car.
That's it - my paean to buses is over.
I think this chat is representative of this site and its demographic.
I never ever use them. We live in the south-east and drive or commute to London. All other times we drive, as we have kids, but even if not I'd only ever use them in very particular conditions.
Exceptions? The IoW where the service is extremely good and reliable, and London.
I suspect it is location and the quality of the bus service where you live.
Big cities (Leeds, London. Manchester. Liverpool, Edinburgh. Glasgow) the bus services are frequent and get you exactly where you want to be in the same time as driving (or even less).
Round here to get to an office I used to work out would require 2 buses both only running 3 times an hour so you could have a 20 minute gap if you are unlucky with timing. Even without it a 15 minute car journey would take 40 minutes so you could be talking an hour.
Add on waiting in the rain and you can see why people drive...
Oh, sure - the bus can't do everything. There is no public transport model which gets everyone cheaply and regularly from everywhere to everywhere outside of very high density areas. But that's not to say it can't do anything. People who refuse to consider the bus - and many do - are cutting themselves off from a service which can be as efficient and pleasant as a train or a tram for no good reason.
It really is fucking not mate.
A train is far far more pleasant than a fucking bus.
If you live in Central London, you will often find yourself getting a bus because changing tube lines is a pain, and because the traffic system prioritizes buses (and bicycles).
If you live outside London (and a few major conurbations), then buses are slow, infrequent and unreliable. There is a world of difference between knowing you might wait 5 minutes for your bus, and that it will probably be quicker than driving or an Uber, and having an unknown (but could be 45 minutes) wait, and a slower and less pleasant triop.
I suspect the future will contain a lot of things that are halfway between buses and taxis. You will choose your destination, and you will be picked up, and it will take you to your destination, but you won't be the only passenger. Technology -in busy places- will allow proper routing of passengers in real time, and massively drive down the cost of this kind of transportation.
Im curious whether Lime/Voi bikes are going to make buses redundant though (and to an extent cars). It’s difficult to think of a bus journey that I wouldn’t use a hire bike for instead - it’s only availability that limits my use of them.
Journeys going for many miles are probably better on a bus than a bike.
All forms of transportation serves a purpose, we shouldn't try to force everything onto one type just because we like square/round holes.
Burnham may not have much to play with until his first budget, but in the meantime he's using the limited options he's got extremely well.
Today's announcement on the £2 bus fare cap is well targeted. The prime beneficiaries are going to be those who are younger or on lower incomes (because car ownership is highly correlated with income) and who are in work or studying and rely on the bus for that. Strivers who need to make work pay. But it still applies across the board if you're below pensionable age, so no-one's really going to object. There are also indirect benefits - an upturn in bus usage could bring back some services previously lost or increase the frequency of services - even pensioners relying on buses will benefit if that happens. So it's well targeted in terms of rewarding those who need to be rewarded, and well targeted in terms of likely political impact.
Who actually uses peasant wagons?
CR, your attitude is hurting mainly you here. Buses are very good at what they do. A few points:
- Firstly, more people use buses than any other form of public transport. - Secondly, if you're in a rural area, buses tend to be about as fast as driving if you can put in the modicum of effort to check a timetable in advance. I remember a stage night I went on: we were staying at a hotel in Warwick, and were going to the cricket at Stratford. I timed my arrival at the hotel to meet the bus, and got to Stratford more quickly and far more cheaply than those in the group for whom bus wasn't part of their mental landscape and insisted on using taxis. - If you live in an urban area most bus journeys are less annoying than having to park. - You can use the bus while drunk. - At the age of 51, sitting upstairs on the front seat of a bus is still as thrilling as it was at the age of 7.
Seriously, check out the bus opportunities from wherever you live and use them - it will take you new places to be drunk. Taxis are for losers and people
No-one I know uses buses.
Everybody I know uses buses.
That's because the bus service where I live (Brighton) is superb, with buses to pretty much all parts of the city every few minutes, and judicious use of bus lanes that means they're quicker than cars on most journeys. They've also introduced express buses that have limited stops so are even faster. And, of course, because the service is so good the buses are very busy.
It's also a joy to use buses for longer journeys - for example, on the coastal route from Brighton to Eastbourne, which runs every 5-10 minutes, you get stunning views from the top deck that don't exist from a car.
That's it - my paean to buses is over.
I think this chat is representative of this site and its demographic.
I never ever use them. We live in the south-east and drive or commute to London. All other times we drive, as we have kids, but even if not I'd only ever use them in very particular conditions.
Exceptions? The IoW where the service is extremely good and reliable, and London.
I suspect it is location and the quality of the bus service where you live.
Big cities (Leeds, London. Manchester. Liverpool, Edinburgh. Glasgow) the bus services are frequent and get you exactly where you want to be in the same time as driving (or even less).
Round here to get to an office I used to work out would require 2 buses both only running 3 times an hour so you could have a 20 minute gap if you are unlucky with timing. Even without it a 15 minute car journey would take 40 minutes so you could be talking an hour.
Add on waiting in the rain and you can see why people drive...
Oh, sure - the bus can't do everything. There is no public transport model which gets everyone cheaply and regularly from everywhere to everywhere outside of very high density areas. But that's not to say it can't do anything. People who refuse to consider the bus - and many do - are cutting themselves off from a service which can be as efficient and pleasant as a train or a tram for no good reason.
It really is fucking not mate.
A train is far far more pleasant than a fucking bus.
If you live in Central London, you will often find yourself getting a bus because changing tube lines is a pain, and because the traffic system prioritizes buses (and bicycles).
If you live outside London (and a few major conurbations), then buses are slow, infrequent and unreliable. There is a world of difference between knowing you might wait 5 minutes for your bus, and that it will probably be quicker than driving or an Uber, and having an unknown (but could be 45 minutes) wait, and a slower and less pleasant triop.
I suspect the future will contain a lot of things that are halfway between buses and taxis. You will choose your destination, and you will be picked up, and it will take you to your destination, but you won't be the only passenger. Technology -in busy places- will allow proper routing of passengers in real time, and massively drive down the cost of this kind of transportation.
Minibus taxis plying irregular routes with no formal timetable have been the norm in much of Africa for years. In Malaysia 35 years ago, shared taxis were often used for longer distances too, with the vehicle going when all the seats were full.
Indeed: I remember being stuffed in the back of a minibus with about 15 other people in 2003. (The minibus, it should be noted, was probably rated for 6 or7 passengers.)
It was a wild ride, but was also by far the most efficient way of getting people around.
Very much my experience of matutus. Often vehicles would race to the next stop, so as to beat rivals to the customers.
Burnham may not have much to play with until his first budget, but in the meantime he's using the limited options he's got extremely well.
Today's announcement on the £2 bus fare cap is well targeted. The prime beneficiaries are going to be those who are younger or on lower incomes (because car ownership is highly correlated with income) and who are in work or studying and rely on the bus for that. Strivers who need to make work pay. But it still applies across the board if you're below pensionable age, so no-one's really going to object. There are also indirect benefits - an upturn in bus usage could bring back some services previously lost or increase the frequency of services - even pensioners relying on buses will benefit if that happens. So it's well targeted in terms of rewarding those who need to be rewarded, and well targeted in terms of likely political impact.
Who actually uses peasant wagons?
CR, your attitude is hurting mainly you here. Buses are very good at what they do. A few points:
- Firstly, more people use buses than any other form of public transport. - Secondly, if you're in a rural area, buses tend to be about as fast as driving if you can put in the modicum of effort to check a timetable in advance. I remember a stage night I went on: we were staying at a hotel in Warwick, and were going to the cricket at Stratford. I timed my arrival at the hotel to meet the bus, and got to Stratford more quickly and far more cheaply than those in the group for whom bus wasn't part of their mental landscape and insisted on using taxis. - If you live in an urban area most bus journeys are less annoying than having to park. - You can use the bus while drunk. - At the age of 51, sitting upstairs on the front seat of a bus is still as thrilling as it was at the age of 7.
Seriously, check out the bus opportunities from wherever you live and use them - it will take you new places to be drunk. Taxis are for losers and people
No-one I know uses buses.
Everybody I know uses buses.
That's because the bus service where I live (Brighton) is superb, with buses to pretty much all parts of the city every few minutes, and judicious use of bus lanes that means they're quicker than cars on most journeys. They've also introduced express buses that have limited stops so are even faster. And, of course, because the service is so good the buses are very busy.
It's also a joy to use buses for longer journeys - for example, on the coastal route from Brighton to Eastbourne, which runs every 5-10 minutes, you get stunning views from the top deck that don't exist from a car.
That's it - my paean to buses is over.
I think this chat is representative of this site and its demographic.
I never ever use them. We live in the south-east and drive or commute to London. All other times we drive, as we have kids, but even if not I'd only ever use them in very particular conditions.
Exceptions? The IoW where the service is extremely good and reliable, and London.
I suspect it is location and the quality of the bus service where you live.
Big cities (Leeds, London. Manchester. Liverpool, Edinburgh. Glasgow) the bus services are frequent and get you exactly where you want to be in the same time as driving (or even less).
Round here to get to an office I used to work out would require 2 buses both only running 3 times an hour so you could have a 20 minute gap if you are unlucky with timing. Even without it a 15 minute car journey would take 40 minutes so you could be talking an hour.
Add on waiting in the rain and you can see why people drive...
Oh, sure - the bus can't do everything. There is no public transport model which gets everyone cheaply and regularly from everywhere to everywhere outside of very high density areas. But that's not to say it can't do anything. People who refuse to consider the bus - and many do - are cutting themselves off from a service which can be as efficient and pleasant as a train or a tram for no good reason.
It really is fucking not mate.
A train is far far more pleasant than a fucking bus.
If you live in Central London, you will often find yourself getting a bus because changing tube lines is a pain, and because the traffic system prioritizes buses (and bicycles).
If you live outside London (and a few major conurbations), then buses are slow, infrequent and unreliable. There is a world of difference between knowing you might wait 5 minutes for your bus, and that it will probably be quicker than driving or an Uber, and having an unknown (but could be 45 minutes) wait, and a slower and less pleasant triop.
I suspect the future will contain a lot of things that are halfway between buses and taxis. You will choose your destination, and you will be picked up, and it will take you to your destination, but you won't be the only passenger. Technology -in busy places- will allow proper routing of passengers in real time, and massively drive down the cost of this kind of transportation.
Im curious whether Lime/Voi bikes are going to make buses redundant though (and to an extent cars). It’s difficult to think of a bus journey that I wouldn’t use a hire bike for instead - it’s only availability that limits my use of them.
All the startups that have tried these scooter / bikes have eventually failed as the numbers don't add up.
Lime bikes in London is almost at breakeven, but it's taken them a *long* time to drive costs down enough to make the math work.
The fundamental problem is that maintenance is really expensive. A Lime bike lasts maybe four or five months, so it needs to have earned at least a thousand quid in rides over that time. (And it needs to be charged, and moved around if it's in the wrong location, etc.)
Yeap, really good video here on the economics of the model.
Huzzah. We don't want the NHS wasting legal fees on treating patients.
I am afraid as a parent I am with Barnaby's mum. Three people died because of a dereliction of duty. The Health Secretary of the day, Streeting should be in the dock with the others who failed Calocane and his victims.
Same here. People need to be held accountable
The NHS shouldn’t get a free pass just because it’s a national religion
There are about 14 000 clinical negligence claims made against the NHS each year.
Out of interest do you know how many are upheld?
About half.
Medicine is very hard and very dangerous and often gets it wrong. Iatrogenic injuries are a major cause of morbidity.
The cost of settling NHS maternity legal cases exceeds the cost of providing maternity services.
It is a prime area that "spend to save" may well actually be true.
But that would result in cuts to the legal departments in the NHS! That would be Fascism!
There currently are swingeing cuts being made to the legal departments in the NHS. NHS England and ICBs are making 50% staff cuts, including of legal departments.
Burnham may not have much to play with until his first budget, but in the meantime he's using the limited options he's got extremely well.
Today's announcement on the £2 bus fare cap is well targeted. The prime beneficiaries are going to be those who are younger or on lower incomes (because car ownership is highly correlated with income) and who are in work or studying and rely on the bus for that. Strivers who need to make work pay. But it still applies across the board if you're below pensionable age, so no-one's really going to object. There are also indirect benefits - an upturn in bus usage could bring back some services previously lost or increase the frequency of services - even pensioners relying on buses will benefit if that happens. So it's well targeted in terms of rewarding those who need to be rewarded, and well targeted in terms of likely political impact.
Who actually uses peasant wagons?
CR, your attitude is hurting mainly you here. Buses are very good at what they do. A few points:
- Firstly, more people use buses than any other form of public transport. - Secondly, if you're in a rural area, buses tend to be about as fast as driving if you can put in the modicum of effort to check a timetable in advance. I remember a stage night I went on: we were staying at a hotel in Warwick, and were going to the cricket at Stratford. I timed my arrival at the hotel to meet the bus, and got to Stratford more quickly and far more cheaply than those in the group for whom bus wasn't part of their mental landscape and insisted on using taxis. - If you live in an urban area most bus journeys are less annoying than having to park. - You can use the bus while drunk. - At the age of 51, sitting upstairs on the front seat of a bus is still as thrilling as it was at the age of 7.
Seriously, check out the bus opportunities from wherever you live and use them - it will take you new places to be drunk. Taxis are for losers and people
No-one I know uses buses.
Everybody I know uses buses.
That's because the bus service where I live (Brighton) is superb, with buses to pretty much all parts of the city every few minutes, and judicious use of bus lanes that means they're quicker than cars on most journeys. They've also introduced express buses that have limited stops so are even faster. And, of course, because the service is so good the buses are very busy.
It's also a joy to use buses for longer journeys - for example, on the coastal route from Brighton to Eastbourne, which runs every 5-10 minutes, you get stunning views from the top deck that don't exist from a car.
That's it - my paean to buses is over.
I think this chat is representative of this site and its demographic.
I never ever use them. We live in the south-east and drive or commute to London. All other times we drive, as we have kids, but even if not I'd only ever use them in very particular conditions.
Exceptions? The IoW where the service is extremely good and reliable, and London.
I suspect it is location and the quality of the bus service where you live.
Big cities (Leeds, London. Manchester. Liverpool, Edinburgh. Glasgow) the bus services are frequent and get you exactly where you want to be in the same time as driving (or even less).
Round here to get to an office I used to work out would require 2 buses both only running 3 times an hour so you could have a 20 minute gap if you are unlucky with timing. Even without it a 15 minute car journey would take 40 minutes so you could be talking an hour.
Add on waiting in the rain and you can see why people drive...
Oh, sure - the bus can't do everything. There is no public transport model which gets everyone cheaply and regularly from everywhere to everywhere outside of very high density areas. But that's not to say it can't do anything. People who refuse to consider the bus - and many do - are cutting themselves off from a service which can be as efficient and pleasant as a train or a tram for no good reason.
It really is fucking not mate.
A train is far far more pleasant than a fucking bus.
If you live in Central London, you will often find yourself getting a bus because changing tube lines is a pain, and because the traffic system prioritizes buses (and bicycles).
If you live outside London (and a few major conurbations), then buses are slow, infrequent and unreliable. There is a world of difference between knowing you might wait 5 minutes for your bus, and that it will probably be quicker than driving or an Uber, and having an unknown (but could be 45 minutes) wait, and a slower and less pleasant triop.
I suspect the future will contain a lot of things that are halfway between buses and taxis. You will choose your destination, and you will be picked up, and it will take you to your destination, but you won't be the only passenger. Technology -in busy places- will allow proper routing of passengers in real time, and massively drive down the cost of this kind of transportation.
Im curious whether Lime/Voi bikes are going to make buses redundant though (and to an extent cars). It’s difficult to think of a bus journey that I wouldn’t use a hire bike for instead - it’s only availability that limits my use of them.
Journeys going for many miles are probably better on a bus than a bike.
All forms of transportation serves a purpose, we shouldn't try to force everything onto one type just because we like square/round holes.
Where’d you get “force” from? Been on the 5G forum again?
60 million+ hire bike journeys a year in London suggests people are pretty keen on them. And the median cycle commute is roughly the same length as a bus commute.
Shocked to here this...so out of character for one of he nicest blokes in cricket.
Former Australia batter David Warner has pleaded guilty to drink driving, after being charged following a random breath test in Sydney in April. The plea had been expected after his lawyer, Bobby Hill, said after a court hearing in May that the cricketer accepted responsibility and knew his behaviour had been "foolish" and "reckless".
Sentencing has been set for 18 August, when Warner faces a minimum disqualification from driving of six months, a potential fine of up to A$2,200 ($1,500; £1,150) and a potential prison sentence of up to nine months.
So, a six month disqualification from driving while he's in prison? Convenient.
I find it utterly amazing every time I hear of someone wealthy getting done for drinking and driving. Get a taxi you idiot, or have your sober PA get a taxi to you, to drive you and your car home.
Burnham may not have much to play with until his first budget, but in the meantime he's using the limited options he's got extremely well.
Today's announcement on the £2 bus fare cap is well targeted. The prime beneficiaries are going to be those who are younger or on lower incomes (because car ownership is highly correlated with income) and who are in work or studying and rely on the bus for that. Strivers who need to make work pay. But it still applies across the board if you're below pensionable age, so no-one's really going to object. There are also indirect benefits - an upturn in bus usage could bring back some services previously lost or increase the frequency of services - even pensioners relying on buses will benefit if that happens. So it's well targeted in terms of rewarding those who need to be rewarded, and well targeted in terms of likely political impact.
Who actually uses peasant wagons?
CR, your attitude is hurting mainly you here. Buses are very good at what they do. A few points:
- Firstly, more people use buses than any other form of public transport. - Secondly, if you're in a rural area, buses tend to be about as fast as driving if you can put in the modicum of effort to check a timetable in advance. I remember a stage night I went on: we were staying at a hotel in Warwick, and were going to the cricket at Stratford. I timed my arrival at the hotel to meet the bus, and got to Stratford more quickly and far more cheaply than those in the group for whom bus wasn't part of their mental landscape and insisted on using taxis. - If you live in an urban area most bus journeys are less annoying than having to park. - You can use the bus while drunk. - At the age of 51, sitting upstairs on the front seat of a bus is still as thrilling as it was at the age of 7.
Seriously, check out the bus opportunities from wherever you live and use them - it will take you new places to be drunk. Taxis are for losers and people
No-one I know uses buses.
Everybody I know uses buses.
That's because the bus service where I live (Brighton) is superb, with buses to pretty much all parts of the city every few minutes, and judicious use of bus lanes that means they're quicker than cars on most journeys. They've also introduced express buses that have limited stops so are even faster. And, of course, because the service is so good the buses are very busy.
It's also a joy to use buses for longer journeys - for example, on the coastal route from Brighton to Eastbourne, which runs every 5-10 minutes, you get stunning views from the top deck that don't exist from a car.
That's it - my paean to buses is over.
I think this chat is representative of this site and its demographic.
I never ever use them. We live in the south-east and drive or commute to London. All other times we drive, as we have kids, but even if not I'd only ever use them in very particular conditions.
Exceptions? The IoW where the service is extremely good and reliable, and London.
I suspect it is location and the quality of the bus service where you live.
Big cities (Leeds, London. Manchester. Liverpool, Edinburgh. Glasgow) the bus services are frequent and get you exactly where you want to be in the same time as driving (or even less).
Round here to get to an office I used to work out would require 2 buses both only running 3 times an hour so you could have a 20 minute gap if you are unlucky with timing. Even without it a 15 minute car journey would take 40 minutes so you could be talking an hour.
Add on waiting in the rain and you can see why people drive...
Oh, sure - the bus can't do everything. There is no public transport model which gets everyone cheaply and regularly from everywhere to everywhere outside of very high density areas. But that's not to say it can't do anything. People who refuse to consider the bus - and many do - are cutting themselves off from a service which can be as efficient and pleasant as a train or a tram for no good reason.
It really is fucking not mate.
A train is far far more pleasant than a fucking bus.
If you live in Central London, you will often find yourself getting a bus because changing tube lines is a pain, and because the traffic system prioritizes buses (and bicycles).
If you live outside London (and a few major conurbations), then buses are slow, infrequent and unreliable. There is a world of difference between knowing you might wait 5 minutes for your bus, and that it will probably be quicker than driving or an Uber, and having an unknown (but could be 45 minutes) wait, and a slower and less pleasant triop.
I suspect the future will contain a lot of things that are halfway between buses and taxis. You will choose your destination, and you will be picked up, and it will take you to your destination, but you won't be the only passenger. Technology -in busy places- will allow proper routing of passengers in real time, and massively drive down the cost of this kind of transportation.
Maybe.
I think there's a reassurance when taking public transport in knowing that there's a responsible person (the driver on a bus, or the guard on a train) there as well as a bunch of strangers. And in a train of several carriages there's also a protection that comes from being in a larger group, with potential witnesses.
If I imagine being in a self-driving people carrier, possibly with just a single stranger for a long period of time, I'm not sure about how comfortable I'd feel about that. There's a rush of finding yourself in a bad situation it's hard to get out of and being mugged (or worse if you're a woman).
Shocked to here this...so out of character for one of he nicest blokes in cricket.
Former Australia batter David Warner has pleaded guilty to drink driving, after being charged following a random breath test in Sydney in April. The plea had been expected after his lawyer, Bobby Hill, said after a court hearing in May that the cricketer accepted responsibility and knew his behaviour had been "foolish" and "reckless".
Sentencing has been set for 18 August, when Warner faces a minimum disqualification from driving of six months, a potential fine of up to A$2,200 ($1,500; £1,150) and a potential prison sentence of up to nine months.
So, a six month disqualification from driving while he's in prison? Convenient.
I find it utterly amazing every time I hear of someone wealthy getting done for drinking and driving. Get a taxi you idiot, or have your sober PA get a taxi to you, to drive you and your car home.
Or have a driver. At least on retainer to come and get you / your car if you don't want to leave your expensive motor somewhere.
I am always amazed how many footballers drive themselves everywhere. The last thing i want to do if I have run to exhaustion is drive my high powered difficult to control car bumping along at 20-30mph. Get a roller or bentley, sit in luxury in the back with my feet up and get driven seems way more preferable.
Trains * Full of unpleasant people (foreign students, drunks, hen dos, junkies, the rude word that OGH doesn't like) * Longer journey times * More predictable times of departure and arrival ( https://www.realtimetrains.co.uk/ ) * Better WiFi access * Better for long distances (inter-city, long commutes) * Cleaner and nicer than they were in the old days * Train stations are sheltered but can be threatening * Train stations are more likely to be refurbished. Smoking/vaping less present * Train stations are rarely within walking distance * Train stations have shelves where you can drop off and pick up used books
Buses * Less full of unpleasant people (mostly old people) except for school runs * Shorter journey times * Less predictable times of departure and arrival ( https://bustimes.org/ ) * Poor WiFi access * Better for short distances (shopping, short commutes) * Cleaner and nicer than they were in the old days * Bus stations are sheltered but can be threatening * Bus stations and bus stops are more likely to be unrefurbished. Smoking/vaping still present * Bus stops are usually within walking distance * Bus stations do not have shelves where you can drop off and pick up used books
Burnham may not have much to play with until his first budget, but in the meantime he's using the limited options he's got extremely well.
Today's announcement on the £2 bus fare cap is well targeted. The prime beneficiaries are going to be those who are younger or on lower incomes (because car ownership is highly correlated with income) and who are in work or studying and rely on the bus for that. Strivers who need to make work pay. But it still applies across the board if you're below pensionable age, so no-one's really going to object. There are also indirect benefits - an upturn in bus usage could bring back some services previously lost or increase the frequency of services - even pensioners relying on buses will benefit if that happens. So it's well targeted in terms of rewarding those who need to be rewarded, and well targeted in terms of likely political impact.
Who actually uses peasant wagons?
CR, your attitude is hurting mainly you here. Buses are very good at what they do. A few points:
- Firstly, more people use buses than any other form of public transport. - Secondly, if you're in a rural area, buses tend to be about as fast as driving if you can put in the modicum of effort to check a timetable in advance. I remember a stage night I went on: we were staying at a hotel in Warwick, and were going to the cricket at Stratford. I timed my arrival at the hotel to meet the bus, and got to Stratford more quickly and far more cheaply than those in the group for whom bus wasn't part of their mental landscape and insisted on using taxis. - If you live in an urban area most bus journeys are less annoying than having to park. - You can use the bus while drunk. - At the age of 51, sitting upstairs on the front seat of a bus is still as thrilling as it was at the age of 7.
Seriously, check out the bus opportunities from wherever you live and use them - it will take you new places to be drunk. Taxis are for losers and people
No-one I know uses buses.
Everybody I know uses buses.
That's because the bus service where I live (Brighton) is superb, with buses to pretty much all parts of the city every few minutes, and judicious use of bus lanes that means they're quicker than cars on most journeys. They've also introduced express buses that have limited stops so are even faster. And, of course, because the service is so good the buses are very busy.
It's also a joy to use buses for longer journeys - for example, on the coastal route from Brighton to Eastbourne, which runs every 5-10 minutes, you get stunning views from the top deck that don't exist from a car.
That's it - my paean to buses is over.
I think this chat is representative of this site and its demographic.
I never ever use them. We live in the south-east and drive or commute to London. All other times we drive, as we have kids, but even if not I'd only ever use them in very particular conditions.
Exceptions? The IoW where the service is extremely good and reliable, and London.
I suspect it is location and the quality of the bus service where you live.
Big cities (Leeds, London. Manchester. Liverpool, Edinburgh. Glasgow) the bus services are frequent and get you exactly where you want to be in the same time as driving (or even less).
Round here to get to an office I used to work out would require 2 buses both only running 3 times an hour so you could have a 20 minute gap if you are unlucky with timing. Even without it a 15 minute car journey would take 40 minutes so you could be talking an hour.
Add on waiting in the rain and you can see why people drive...
Oh, sure - the bus can't do everything. There is no public transport model which gets everyone cheaply and regularly from everywhere to everywhere outside of very high density areas. But that's not to say it can't do anything. People who refuse to consider the bus - and many do - are cutting themselves off from a service which can be as efficient and pleasant as a train or a tram for no good reason.
It really is fucking not mate.
A train is far far more pleasant than a fucking bus.
If you live in Central London, you will often find yourself getting a bus because changing tube lines is a pain, and because the traffic system prioritizes buses (and bicycles).
If you live outside London (and a few major conurbations), then buses are slow, infrequent and unreliable. There is a world of difference between knowing you might wait 5 minutes for your bus, and that it will probably be quicker than driving or an Uber, and having an unknown (but could be 45 minutes) wait, and a slower and less pleasant triop.
I suspect the future will contain a lot of things that are halfway between buses and taxis. You will choose your destination, and you will be picked up, and it will take you to your destination, but you won't be the only passenger. Technology -in busy places- will allow proper routing of passengers in real time, and massively drive down the cost of this kind of transportation.
Maybe.
I think there's a reassurance when taking public transport in knowing that there's a responsible person (the driver on a bus, or the guard on a train) there as well as a bunch of strangers. And in a train of several carriages there's also a protection that comes from being in a larger group, with potential witnesses.
If I imagine being in a self-driving people carrier, possibly with just a single stranger for a long period of time, I'm not sure about how comfortable I'd feel about that. There's a rush of finding yourself in a bad situation it's hard to get out of and being mugged (or worse if you're a woman).
Sure: but don't forget that systems like Uber would allow one to rate one's fellow passengers too. Bad actors would find themselves unable to access the service.
Trains * Full of unpleasant people (foreign students, drunks, hen dos, junkies, the rude word that OGH doesn't like) * Longer journey times * More predictable times of departure and arrival ( https://www.realtimetrains.co.uk/ ) * Better WiFi access * Better for long distances (inter-city, long commutes) * Cleaner and nicer than they were in the old days * Train stations are sheltered but can be threatening * Train stations are more likely to be refurbished. Smoking/vaping less present * Train stations are rarely within walking distance * Train stations have shelves where you can drop off and pick up used books
Buses * Less full of unpleasant people (mostly old people) except for school runs * Shorter journey times * Less predictable times of departure and arrival ( https://bustimes.org/ ) * Poor WiFi access * Better for short distances (shopping, short commutes) * Cleaner and nicer than they were in the old days * Bus stations are sheltered but can be threatening * Bus stations and bus stops are more likely to be unrefurbished. Smoking/vaping still present * Bus stops are usually within walking distance * Bus stations do not have shelves where you can drop off and pick up used books
I won't digress into taxis
All the buses in Copenhagen have wifi.
In Leicester too.
My problem is that the last one that I can catch leaves the city at 1830, so not good for an evening out.
I think most buses I have been on recently have had wifi, but like trains, the quality is often very poor. I often just end up using my own 5g data.
Much that lots of people don't like Musk, Starlink is awesome for internet on the move. I would have them fitted to all the trains. Flying Qatar with it is just revolutionary, the speed and relability even when packed on a plane with 100s of other people all hammering the bandwidth was amazing.
When the new London Superloop buses started operating about 12 months ago, I had a great time riding all the way round as quickly as possible. Took about 7 hours IIRC.
Burnham may not have much to play with until his first budget, but in the meantime he's using the limited options he's got extremely well.
Today's announcement on the £2 bus fare cap is well targeted. The prime beneficiaries are going to be those who are younger or on lower incomes (because car ownership is highly correlated with income) and who are in work or studying and rely on the bus for that. Strivers who need to make work pay. But it still applies across the board if you're below pensionable age, so no-one's really going to object. There are also indirect benefits - an upturn in bus usage could bring back some services previously lost or increase the frequency of services - even pensioners relying on buses will benefit if that happens. So it's well targeted in terms of rewarding those who need to be rewarded, and well targeted in terms of likely political impact.
Who actually uses peasant wagons?
CR, your attitude is hurting mainly you here. Buses are very good at what they do. A few points:
- Firstly, more people use buses than any other form of public transport. - Secondly, if you're in a rural area, buses tend to be about as fast as driving if you can put in the modicum of effort to check a timetable in advance. I remember a stage night I went on: we were staying at a hotel in Warwick, and were going to the cricket at Stratford. I timed my arrival at the hotel to meet the bus, and got to Stratford more quickly and far more cheaply than those in the group for whom bus wasn't part of their mental landscape and insisted on using taxis. - If you live in an urban area most bus journeys are less annoying than having to park. - You can use the bus while drunk. - At the age of 51, sitting upstairs on the front seat of a bus is still as thrilling as it was at the age of 7.
Seriously, check out the bus opportunities from wherever you live and use them - it will take you new places to be drunk. Taxis are for losers and people
No-one I know uses buses.
Everybody I know uses buses.
That's because the bus service where I live (Brighton) is superb, with buses to pretty much all parts of the city every few minutes, and judicious use of bus lanes that means they're quicker than cars on most journeys. They've also introduced express buses that have limited stops so are even faster. And, of course, because the service is so good the buses are very busy.
It's also a joy to use buses for longer journeys - for example, on the coastal route from Brighton to Eastbourne, which runs every 5-10 minutes, you get stunning views from the top deck that don't exist from a car.
That's it - my paean to buses is over.
I think this chat is representative of this site and its demographic.
I never ever use them. We live in the south-east and drive or commute to London. All other times we drive, as we have kids, but even if not I'd only ever use them in very particular conditions.
Exceptions? The IoW where the service is extremely good and reliable, and London.
I suspect it is location and the quality of the bus service where you live.
Big cities (Leeds, London. Manchester. Liverpool, Edinburgh. Glasgow) the bus services are frequent and get you exactly where you want to be in the same time as driving (or even less).
Round here to get to an office I used to work out would require 2 buses both only running 3 times an hour so you could have a 20 minute gap if you are unlucky with timing. Even without it a 15 minute car journey would take 40 minutes so you could be talking an hour.
Add on waiting in the rain and you can see why people drive...
Oh, sure - the bus can't do everything. There is no public transport model which gets everyone cheaply and regularly from everywhere to everywhere outside of very high density areas. But that's not to say it can't do anything. People who refuse to consider the bus - and many do - are cutting themselves off from a service which can be as efficient and pleasant as a train or a tram for no good reason.
One real problem with buses is large shopping trips. Carrying heavy shopping to the bus stop is hard, and there's often nowhere to stow it inside. Of course, some will welcome the boost to small local shops but the impact is largely felt by those too poor for cars.
Round my way, people rich enough to have cars - often big, expensive ones - whine about having to pay a pound or two for parking and/or can't be arsed to use a free on-road parking space and walk a couple of hundred yards.
My pet hate are the ones who drive miles to their favourite city gym to get fit.
Burnham may not have much to play with until his first budget, but in the meantime he's using the limited options he's got extremely well.
Today's announcement on the £2 bus fare cap is well targeted. The prime beneficiaries are going to be those who are younger or on lower incomes (because car ownership is highly correlated with income) and who are in work or studying and rely on the bus for that. Strivers who need to make work pay. But it still applies across the board if you're below pensionable age, so no-one's really going to object. There are also indirect benefits - an upturn in bus usage could bring back some services previously lost or increase the frequency of services - even pensioners relying on buses will benefit if that happens. So it's well targeted in terms of rewarding those who need to be rewarded, and well targeted in terms of likely political impact.
Who actually uses peasant wagons?
CR, your attitude is hurting mainly you here. Buses are very good at what they do. A few points:
- Firstly, more people use buses than any other form of public transport. - Secondly, if you're in a rural area, buses tend to be about as fast as driving if you can put in the modicum of effort to check a timetable in advance. I remember a stage night I went on: we were staying at a hotel in Warwick, and were going to the cricket at Stratford. I timed my arrival at the hotel to meet the bus, and got to Stratford more quickly and far more cheaply than those in the group for whom bus wasn't part of their mental landscape and insisted on using taxis. - If you live in an urban area most bus journeys are less annoying than having to park. - You can use the bus while drunk. - At the age of 51, sitting upstairs on the front seat of a bus is still as thrilling as it was at the age of 7.
Seriously, check out the bus opportunities from wherever you live and use them - it will take you new places to be drunk. Taxis are for losers and people
No-one I know uses buses.
Everybody I know uses buses.
That's because the bus service where I live (Brighton) is superb, with buses to pretty much all parts of the city every few minutes, and judicious use of bus lanes that means they're quicker than cars on most journeys. They've also introduced express buses that have limited stops so are even faster. And, of course, because the service is so good the buses are very busy.
It's also a joy to use buses for longer journeys - for example, on the coastal route from Brighton to Eastbourne, which runs every 5-10 minutes, you get stunning views from the top deck that don't exist from a car.
That's it - my paean to buses is over.
I think this chat is representative of this site and its demographic.
I never ever use them. We live in the south-east and drive or commute to London. All other times we drive, as we have kids, but even if not I'd only ever use them in very particular conditions.
Exceptions? The IoW where the service is extremely good and reliable, and London.
I suspect it is location and the quality of the bus service where you live.
Big cities (Leeds, London. Manchester. Liverpool, Edinburgh. Glasgow) the bus services are frequent and get you exactly where you want to be in the same time as driving (or even less).
Round here to get to an office I used to work out would require 2 buses both only running 3 times an hour so you could have a 20 minute gap if you are unlucky with timing. Even without it a 15 minute car journey would take 40 minutes so you could be talking an hour.
Add on waiting in the rain and you can see why people drive...
Oh, sure - the bus can't do everything. There is no public transport model which gets everyone cheaply and regularly from everywhere to everywhere outside of very high density areas. But that's not to say it can't do anything. People who refuse to consider the bus - and many do - are cutting themselves off from a service which can be as efficient and pleasant as a train or a tram for no good reason.
It really is fucking not mate.
A train is far far more pleasant than a fucking bus.
If you live in Central London, you will often find yourself getting a bus because changing tube lines is a pain, and because the traffic system prioritizes buses (and bicycles).
If you live outside London (and a few major conurbations), then buses are slow, infrequent and unreliable. There is a world of difference between knowing you might wait 5 minutes for your bus, and that it will probably be quicker than driving or an Uber, and having an unknown (but could be 45 minutes) wait, and a slower and less pleasant triop.
I suspect the future will contain a lot of things that are halfway between buses and taxis. You will choose your destination, and you will be picked up, and it will take you to your destination, but you won't be the only passenger. Technology -in busy places- will allow proper routing of passengers in real time, and massively drive down the cost of this kind of transportation.
Im curious whether Lime/Voi bikes are going to make buses redundant though (and to an extent cars). It’s difficult to think of a bus journey that I wouldn’t use a hire bike for instead - it’s only availability that limits my use of them.
All the startups that have tried these scooter / bikes have eventually failed as the numbers don't add up.
Lime bikes in London is almost at breakeven, but it's taken them a *long* time to drive costs down enough to make the math work.
The fundamental problem is that maintenance is really expensive. A Lime bike lasts maybe four or five months, so it needs to have earned at least a thousand quid in rides over that time. (And it needs to be charged, and moved around if it's in the wrong location, etc.)
Just wait until they got sued for back injuries by the people who move them around and charge them. Apparently the Santander ebikes are 23kg rather than the 35-40kg of a Lime bike.
I think most buses I have been on recently have had wifi, but like trains, the quality is often very poor. I often just end up using my own 5g data.
Much that lots of people don't like Musk, Starlink is awesome for internet on the move. I would have them fitted to all the trains. Flying Qatar with it is just revolutionary, the speed and relability even when packed on a plane with 100s of other people all hammering the bandwidth was amazing.
Worst life decision that Musk took was creating a twitter account. Think what he might be doing with Tesla and Spacex if he wasn't wasting his time there.
Burnham may not have much to play with until his first budget, but in the meantime he's using the limited options he's got extremely well.
Today's announcement on the £2 bus fare cap is well targeted. The prime beneficiaries are going to be those who are younger or on lower incomes (because car ownership is highly correlated with income) and who are in work or studying and rely on the bus for that. Strivers who need to make work pay. But it still applies across the board if you're below pensionable age, so no-one's really going to object. There are also indirect benefits - an upturn in bus usage could bring back some services previously lost or increase the frequency of services - even pensioners relying on buses will benefit if that happens. So it's well targeted in terms of rewarding those who need to be rewarded, and well targeted in terms of likely political impact.
Who actually uses peasant wagons?
CR, your attitude is hurting mainly you here. Buses are very good at what they do. A few points:
- Firstly, more people use buses than any other form of public transport. - Secondly, if you're in a rural area, buses tend to be about as fast as driving if you can put in the modicum of effort to check a timetable in advance. I remember a stage night I went on: we were staying at a hotel in Warwick, and were going to the cricket at Stratford. I timed my arrival at the hotel to meet the bus, and got to Stratford more quickly and far more cheaply than those in the group for whom bus wasn't part of their mental landscape and insisted on using taxis. - If you live in an urban area most bus journeys are less annoying than having to park. - You can use the bus while drunk. - At the age of 51, sitting upstairs on the front seat of a bus is still as thrilling as it was at the age of 7.
Seriously, check out the bus opportunities from wherever you live and use them - it will take you new places to be drunk. Taxis are for losers and people
No-one I know uses buses.
Everybody I know uses buses.
That's because the bus service where I live (Brighton) is superb, with buses to pretty much all parts of the city every few minutes, and judicious use of bus lanes that means they're quicker than cars on most journeys. They've also introduced express buses that have limited stops so are even faster. And, of course, because the service is so good the buses are very busy.
It's also a joy to use buses for longer journeys - for example, on the coastal route from Brighton to Eastbourne, which runs every 5-10 minutes, you get stunning views from the top deck that don't exist from a car.
That's it - my paean to buses is over.
I think this chat is representative of this site and its demographic.
I never ever use them. We live in the south-east and drive or commute to London. All other times we drive, as we have kids, but even if not I'd only ever use them in very particular conditions.
Exceptions? The IoW where the service is extremely good and reliable, and London.
I suspect it is location and the quality of the bus service where you live.
Big cities (Leeds, London. Manchester. Liverpool, Edinburgh. Glasgow) the bus services are frequent and get you exactly where you want to be in the same time as driving (or even less).
Round here to get to an office I used to work out would require 2 buses both only running 3 times an hour so you could have a 20 minute gap if you are unlucky with timing. Even without it a 15 minute car journey would take 40 minutes so you could be talking an hour.
Add on waiting in the rain and you can see why people drive...
Oh, sure - the bus can't do everything. There is no public transport model which gets everyone cheaply and regularly from everywhere to everywhere outside of very high density areas. But that's not to say it can't do anything. People who refuse to consider the bus - and many do - are cutting themselves off from a service which can be as efficient and pleasant as a train or a tram for no good reason.
One real problem with buses is large shopping trips. Carrying heavy shopping to the bus stop is hard, and there's often nowhere to stow it inside. Of course, some will welcome the boost to small local shops but the impact is largely felt by those too poor for cars.
Round my way, people rich enough to have cars - often big, expensive ones - whine about having to pay a pound or two for parking and/or can't be arsed to use a free on-road parking space and walk a couple of hundred yards.
My pet hate are the ones who drive miles to their favourite city gym to get fit.
I was sent to a gym by a physio to help with knee pain. At the time I was lucky enough to live less than five minutes walk away.
I saw lots of people who were there to use the specialist equipment to help with recovery from injury or surgery to one body part or another. The experience changed my previously somewhat jaundiced view of gyms.
Burnham may not have much to play with until his first budget, but in the meantime he's using the limited options he's got extremely well.
Today's announcement on the £2 bus fare cap is well targeted. The prime beneficiaries are going to be those who are younger or on lower incomes (because car ownership is highly correlated with income) and who are in work or studying and rely on the bus for that. Strivers who need to make work pay. But it still applies across the board if you're below pensionable age, so no-one's really going to object. There are also indirect benefits - an upturn in bus usage could bring back some services previously lost or increase the frequency of services - even pensioners relying on buses will benefit if that happens. So it's well targeted in terms of rewarding those who need to be rewarded, and well targeted in terms of likely political impact.
Who actually uses peasant wagons?
A third of commuters in Edinburgh, one of the few parts of the country that make a net fiscal contribution.
Perhaps if other cities and towns followed our example then the UK would be a richer country.
This site is full of bus wankers.
Oi! I’m a bus and long distance train wanker I’ll have you know.
Comments
In MAGA world countries are expected to suck it up when Trump's officials insult and attack them but only choose officials themselves that have Trump's stamp of approval. They don't inhabit the real world but I doubt many really get out much.
In the last month or so I've used both. Round trip to Glasgow from Inverness to see my son and he came back with me.
Inverness to Glasgow on the Ember bus from Inverness to Buchanan street;
Bit busy but fine, nice Journey, new coach, cumfy seats...cost £0 as I have a Scotcard for oldies!..Oh wait I think I paid £1 to book my seat.
Return train from Queenstreet £14.00 each one way special offer as it was Sunday.
Quiet train okay seats, but a table. Not as nice views as the bus but okay.
Lesson: When discussing Train v Bus it depends on why, where and when you are travelling,as much as anything else!
Peter.
Its not, its a tax, and one that was spent in full as we have ran a deficit due to overspending almost every year.
And the people who they recruited were not of the same calibre of those who left - simply because Newport doesn't have the number of statisticians in the surrounding area to choice from that London offered.
Certainly more politically fleet footed than Starmer I think.
Sometimes things should be really simple. The existing Leicester-Coalville-Burton line should be reopened to passenger trains. Wantage & Grove (22,000 residents, right on the Great Western Main Line) should get a station. None of these are cheap but nor are they hard decisions. Any commitment to public transport that does not include "we are reopening Leicester-Coalville-Burton" in the first announcement has failed.
Former Australia batter David Warner has pleaded guilty to drink driving, after being charged following a random breath test in Sydney in April. The plea had been expected after his lawyer, Bobby Hill, said after a court hearing in May that the cricketer accepted responsibility and knew his behaviour had been "foolish" and "reckless".
Sentencing has been set for 18 August, when Warner faces a minimum disqualification from driving of six months, a potential fine of up to A$2,200 ($1,500; £1,150) and a potential prison sentence of up to nine months.
Both sides of rivers typically are well-settled but can be very difficult to get from one side to the other, and often entails going through a town or city centre.
Build bridges that cars/buses/bikes/pedestrians can use and you enable connections across almost all modes of transport and also alleviate the need to travel needlessly through a congested town or city centre just to cross the water.
It is a tax.
It always has been a tax.
It is defined in law as a tax.
It is defined in international treaties as a tax.
A tax by any other name is still a tax.
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/07/22/europe/model-recruiter-epstein-dead-france-intl
But in the long term you've still spent a pile of money and have nothing to show for it. Wikipedia has this delightful sentence on Heathrow expansion.
"In early December 2006, the Department for Transport published a progress report on the strategy which confirmed the original vision of expanding the runways."
Twenty years ago they were already multiple layers deep on the reports and strategy for Heathrow expansion, and it still hasn't started.
Currently a threshold is set to "get NI contributions".
Currently a threshold is set to actually pay contributions.
Those two are not aligned.
Merge the two and you just move the "get NI contributions" threshold to a "get IC contributions" threshold and carry on just the same.
All the various thresholds already exist today.
Ideally that would be at a lower rate than salaried income currently pays.
And put the rates of Income Tax up to 27%, 42% and 50%. Should be a net income raiser whilst benefitting earners.
It works both ways for those on the left and right. It simplifies things while I think it raises more taxes, but also make tax you pay much clearer i.e. all this messing around with fiscially dragging the different thresholds is harder to get away with by the government. The objection is always the oldies, but you could just do something like apply a higher tax free threshold to them.
There will be winners and losers, is what all modern politicians seemed so scared of and run away from policies that might have lots of visible / vocal "losers" e.g. see the backing down by Hammond of very minor changes to NI for self employed because the media (who make a lot of money out of self employment limited company vechicles) got super shouty about it.
(Ducks from incoming wall of turnips....)
Medicine is very hard and very dangerous and often gets it wrong. Iatrogenic injuries are a major cause of morbidity.
By contrast any new or restored fixed rail route including trams requires the best part of a decade to get the infrastructure in place. For example, the intention to restore rail services between Walsall and Wolverhampton was announced in 2017, but it took until 2026 to get the line fully open with modernised extra stations.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3ek3gvdnj3o
It was just sold appallingly (actually not sold at all, really).
What we see from Burnham is political confidence that Starmer lacked completely. You can quibble about the bus fare cap etc, but they are doing exactly what they are supposed to do: send a *political* message that the government cares about the cost of living.
Starmer didn’t really “do” politics.
Which is why he was ousted just 2 years after one of the biggest electoral landslides in history.
"So you figure we can't get on to its motive?"
"It own itself?"
"Swiss citizen, but T-A own the basic software and the
mainframe."
"That's a good one," the construct said. "Like, I own your
brain and what you know, but your thoughts have Swiss citi-
zenship. Sure. Lotsa luck, AI."
However I don’t expect the new government to address that because it’s slow, technocratic, and a potential waste of political capital given they have less than 3 years to beat Reform.
shall we had 'buses' onto the unmentionables sections along with the appropriate way to slow down when approaching roundabouts?
Unfortunately, one of the biggest operators in the area is McGills, which is owned by the notorious 'billionaire' Easdale brothers. They are fighting the proposal tooth and nail and, trying to delay the process and cost the SPT so much in legal bills they have to drop the idea. McGills has a virtual monopoly in large parts of the west of Scotland (mostly because their competition had unfortunate events happen to them - won't go into detail, for legal reasons) and I don't see its owners giving that up profitable situation without exhausting every option.
But, sure, lots of things are downstream of dysfunctional planning law.
How many CS v Contractor golf days and lunches for Civil Servants and Ministers did it take to achieve that?
By the 2040s we might be at war with the Italian Japanese Fascist Alliance hell bent on world domination? Is that why the projects named after a storm?
If you live outside London (and a few major conurbations), then buses are slow, infrequent and unreliable. There is a world of difference between knowing you might wait 5 minutes for your bus, and that it will probably be quicker than driving or an Uber, and having an unknown (but could be 45 minutes) wait, and a slower and less pleasant triop.
I suspect the future will contain a lot of things that are halfway between buses and taxis. You will choose your destination, and you will be picked up, and it will take you to your destination, but you won't be the only passenger. Technology -in busy places- will allow proper routing of passengers in real time, and massively drive down the cost of this kind of transportation.
Which you dont really understand until you live here.
Britain has something similar in the intersection of greenspace and the threat posed by the presence of “other people” (ie the lower classes).
It's remarkable how little (none at all) of a moat these AI firms have to protect themselves...
"I've got a motorway in my garden - it's my shelter in hot weather"
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c99l28kndr8o
More seriously, isn't that what Zoox approach is? Its a bit like an old fashioned stage coach but self driving and you share it with different people who get in / out at different stops.
It is a prime area that "spend to save" may well actually be true.
The key thing for me is that I don’t have to check my phone before I leave home because they are so frequent. Bus lanes and bus gates mean they don’t get stuck in private vehicle traffic. It’s insane that this is something special and not the norm.
Still: I remember catching it at 4am from a friend's house, and sharing the ride with two construction workers who told me that it changed their life. Previously, they'd need to wait for a bus, and then get the BART train, before walking at the other end. In the morning, it was an hour and twenty minutes, and cost them $15. UberPool was the same price and took then under 30 minutes.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomsanderson/2020/03/14/ronaldinhos-prison-team-win-futsal-tournament-and-suckling-pig/
This had to be the “tidy up government finances and economy mess” Parliament, did it not? after everything thrown at it during the Populist Boris years.
Wot? No Welfare Reform?
Nothing undermined the Starmerites more and led to their replacement, than their failure to get some Welfare Reform proposal through their enormous back bench majority. And guess who won that for the crazy left?
Loopy Lou was on a roll when she organised, led, and achieved that defeat of the enemy faction, ushering in the archaic thinking, and very wrong for this moment ideology of the Burnham Faction.
Rather than surrendering to populism, Labour should have stood firm against populism, with fiscal prudence and incremental economic rebuilding, and gone to the country on that record in 2029.
That options blown now. It’s gone.
These facts haven’t dropped for the PB herd yet, but within a year everyone will have to concede what actually happened this week ☺️
Loving it loving it loving it 😁
When I was in China, it seemed rather than the hiring of them, huge numbers of people just owned one and used it to steam down the sidewalks avoiding the roads entirely.
It was a wild ride, but was also by far the most efficient way of getting people around.
Contributions are already calculated. You can log into HMRC online and see how much tax you've paid in past years and the current year.
Trains
* Full of unpleasant people (foreign students, drunks, hen dos, junkies, the rude word that OGH doesn't like)
* Longer journey times
* More predictable times of departure and arrival ( https://www.realtimetrains.co.uk/ )
* Better WiFi access
* Better for long distances (inter-city, long commutes)
* Cleaner and nicer than they were in the old days
* Train stations are sheltered but can be threatening
* Train stations are more likely to be refurbished. Smoking/vaping less present
* Train stations are rarely within walking distance
* Train stations have shelves where you can drop off and pick up used books
Buses
* Less full of unpleasant people (mostly old people) except for school runs
* Shorter journey times
* Less predictable times of departure and arrival ( https://bustimes.org/ )
* Poor WiFi access
* Better for short distances (shopping, short commutes)
* Cleaner and nicer than they were in the old days
* Bus stations are sheltered but can be threatening
* Bus stations and bus stops are more likely to be unrefurbished. Smoking/vaping still present
* Bus stops are usually within walking distance
* Bus stations do not have shelves where you can drop off and pick up used books
I won't digress into taxis
If you’d paid into a simple unmanaged S&P 500 tracker for the past 50 years, you’d have an average return of about 8%pa.
But they can also be a pain too. You need to park them in dedicated Lime cycle bays in most London Boroughs. But here's the thing... you're traveling back from Kings Cross at 6pm, and the cycle bays are completely full.
All forms of transportation serves a purpose, we shouldn't try to force everything onto one type just because we like square/round holes.
The fundamental problem is that maintenance is really expensive. A Lime bike lasts maybe four or five months, so it needs to have earned at least a thousand quid in rides over that time. (And it needs to be charged, and moved around if it's in the wrong location, etc.)
“Buses are woke”, do I have that right?
Africans are very competitive entrepeneurs!
Why Tech Failed to Disrupt Walking
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91Oyd7zK1bk
The overall channel is really good at breaking down business models of different sectors.
60 million+ hire bike journeys a year in London suggests people are pretty keen on them. And the median cycle commute is roughly the same length as a bus commute.
I think there's a reassurance when taking public transport in knowing that there's a responsible person (the driver on a bus, or the guard on a train) there as well as a bunch of strangers. And in a train of several carriages there's also a protection that comes from being in a larger group, with potential witnesses.
If I imagine being in a self-driving people carrier, possibly with just a single stranger for a long period of time, I'm not sure about how comfortable I'd feel about that. There's a rush of finding yourself in a bad situation it's hard to get out of and being mugged (or worse if you're a woman).
I am always amazed how many footballers drive themselves everywhere. The last thing i want to do if I have run to exhaustion is drive my high powered difficult to control car bumping along at 20-30mph. Get a roller or bentley, sit in luxury in the back with my feet up and get driven seems way more preferable.
These b***ards are dropping like flies.
My problem is that the last one that I can catch leaves the city at 1830, so not good for an evening out.
Much that lots of people don't like Musk, Starlink is awesome for internet on the move. I would have them fitted to all the trains. Flying Qatar with it is just revolutionary, the speed and relability even when packed on a plane with 100s of other people all hammering the bandwidth was amazing.
Apparently the Santander ebikes are 23kg rather than the 35-40kg of a Lime bike.
I saw lots of people who were there to use the specialist equipment to help with recovery from injury or surgery to one body part or another. The experience changed my previously somewhat jaundiced view of gyms.