Vocal Voices

The Conservatives said that they would cut £12bn from the welfare bill. Osborne has now partly announced where those cuts will be. He scares me.

First comes a clampdown on "taxpayer-funded subsidies" for "higher earners" (£30,000 or £40,000 in London) living in social housing in England. He is going to make them pay 'market rent' when in council or housing association properties - the money will got direct to the treasury, so councils and HAs wil become tax collectors. It all sounds very fair, doesn't it?

A quick check in my area throws up some telling figures. Council two bedroom family flats/homes (not student rooms or houses of multiple occupancy (HMOS)) are about £320 pcm. Similar accommodation on private rent are £600 - £650 pcm. Those figures leave families facing extra costs of between £3,400 and £3.900 per year. Not only will some families be unable to afford it, that money, remember, goes straight to the Treasury and not into the local economy.

Say the average going to the Treasury is £3,650 p.a and a council has 20,000 such properties it means £73m is lost from a local economy. If there are 100 such areas nationwide, easily reached, it will be £7.3bn from the country's economy and affect two million families - eight million or so people. The effect on the economy will be disastrous.

My figures are ultra conservative, there will be many, many more caught in this trap. How many? Just think of a number; it is what the government has done.

It makes one wonder if our politicians have the brains (or inclination) to work out
the consequences of what they propose.

I think George Osborne is right to try and get rid of tax credits. However, from what we read, he seems to be doing this back to front. He needs to take people on low incomes out of tax altogether, say £15,000 and below, and ensure a living wage is paid, before taking away tax credits. There was a father on Sky news today earning only £13,000 a year. How can anyone bring up a family on such a pitiful wage.

medsec222 wrote:There was a father on Sky news today earning only £13,000 a year. How can anyone bring up a family on such a pitiful wage.

I'm going to sound totally hard nosed here but I'm going to say it anyway. Why did he start a family if he could not afford it???

The answer, of course, is that Blair and Brown encouraged him to do so by giving him money he had not earned and that the country could not afford.

If you want to redress that, then someone is going to get hurt.

You can't keep lifting people out of the tax bracket. You can, however, give companies incentives to pay more. Incentives which can be reduced and removed over time.

Taking people out of paying tax removes people from personal responsibility just as being on benefits does. The more you remove from paying tax, the more demand that they should also be in that bracket. It's never ending.

But then I'm a Conservative with a Capital C. Albeit with a bit of a conscience.

Tax credits were brought in by Labour. They allowed employers to pay crap wages knowing that government (tax payers) would subsidise them. Once given, these things are hard to remove, and of course if it is the Tory's trying they become the even nastier party..

However, I ask this: If it is OK to make those on £30,000 pay market rate for rents isn't it also fair to not pay universal child benefits and heating allowances and other non-earnings related benefits to those same high earners, some of them in the 'rich' bracket.?

CB should only be paid fort he first child, nothing for the second, and removed completely if there is a third. If you are rich enough to have many children then you pay for them yourself.

I still think the right way to revise welfare benefits is to pay a living wage and raise the bar at which income tax kicks in. For anyone putting in a full time week's work, the very least they deserve is enough to get by on with some dignity. That then should pave the way for reduction or removal of other benefits. Housing benefit needs a drastic overhaul when landlords prosper at the expense of taxpayers. It may sound harsh, but if people cant afford to live in areas with high rents, they should think of moving to an area they can afford. Long term it may be if housing benefit is not readily available, rents could come down, its not impossible! I think child benefit should only be paid for two children and then stop. People on high incomes should not get it at all. The very worst examples to my mind of benefit claimants, are the families who have never worked and have hordes of children, thus entitling them to eye-watering amounts in benefit and sometimes even a large house built specially for them by the local council. The Daily Mail always seems to manage to get a photograph of such mothers, shopping til she drops!

It does not help that immigrants from poorer parts of Europe are willing to come here and work for low wages, have them topped them up courtesy of the taxpayer, and send child benefit back home to their families.

You see this is where I differ from the socialist and the communist.

A liveable wage is one where you can feed and clothe yourself, provide accommodation and get to and from work.

Everything else and I do mean EVERYTHING else, is above the standard of a liveable wage. TV, TV license, Radio, especially Internet, Cable TV, phones, Mobile phones are ALL luxury items of one description or another. They are not necessary to live and therefore are not required. Ditto any form of holiday.

The problem is that we've convinced ourselves that luxury items are required to live and the excuse we give for these luxuries in our lives is "Dignity".

Rewind the clock 60 years and "Dignity" was what a working class person used to Demand to pay their taxes and their way in life and ask NOTHING from anyone. Now, apparently, Dignity means something else. It means "Keeping up with the Joneses". It means hand-outs, it means getting something you did not work for.

Yes wages have hardly risen. But No they have not really stood still whilst inflation overran them, they have either stood still with inflation or lagged very slightly behind it.

The problem is this. Whilst we have a different description of liveable wage to the rest of the world, then people will want to come to the UK to take our Luxury "liveable" wage and take that money back to where basics are basics and not luxuries. Where they can live in much greater luxury than would be possible either in the UK or if they had not gone there.

We bandy dignity around the same way the Greeks are. They have convinced themselves that having spent the money they have borrowed and had a fine on time on it thank you very much, that they can now dictate the terms on which they will, or will not, pay it back. All because their elections tell them they need pride and dignity.

Whilst I do believe that the Greeks need to take much more short term pain and cut their cloth a lot closer for the future, I do not believe it has anything to do with democratic rights or "dignity". It has to do with risk and reward. Those who lent the money knew there was a risk involved. We no longer live in a society with debtors prisons, so we can no longer push all of the risk onto a country.

However, back to the issue. If we believe that the minimum acceptable standard to "Live" in the UK is considered the lap of luxury in other countries, such deprived countries as.... For instance.... France, then we have to have a minimum wage that represents that. Then the business will go elsewhere and, eventually, people will be forced to some level of reality.

No young child of French parents of my acquaintance has a mobile phone. They do not get unlimited or unsupervised internet access and they look at you like you are a child abuser if you talk about allowing them a Television in their bedrooms. Tablets? Laptops? Adult equipment for those who can afford it.

That is my take on the world. Yes, granted, I earn an executive pay and I spend a lot of money. But I also spent years bringing up a family on DSS, Student loans and poorly paid jobs. I haven't forgotten that time and I also haven't forgotten what we had or how we lived under those restrictions. For instance a week semi wild camping in the Highlands with no media, no phones or anything was a highlight of the kids lives.....

We had plenty of "Dignity". We just didn't have much money and we were paying more tax than those who earn more than twice what I did at the time.... Yes we had a car.. Because I could buy it for £45 and, using my tools and a welder, put it back on the road for another £100. Otherwise not. We cycled or walked otherwise.

Funny thing time. It erases common sense.

The living wage outside of London is £7.85 for a 37.5 hour week. After tax and NI it comes to £13,146.40 - £258 per week. Once accommodation, food, utilities, transport, clothing and personal and household hygiene are removed a person would have under £20 pw disposable income; many would have even less. Some people, and I am one, think that some "luxuries" are essential to make life bearable.

Prices will always follow the minimum wage. No matter how much we cut taxes or raise the minimum wage, prices will always rise to consume 90% or more of that income.

The only ways to get out of this situation are

Move to a cheaper area but with the same job
Share the cost
Get a job with more pay
Have more than one job
Have Councils create more housing (literally millions), for single and dual occupancy (single bedroom), at very low rent and no right to buy.
Cut council tax by 50%

Take your pick but just putting more money in people's hands is not going to fix the situation. We have a demand driven (consumer), economy, not a command one. The higher the demand, the smaller the supply, the higher the prices...

As I see it the only thing that can change is attitudes and approach to costs.

For me, leisure time and leisure equipment are important. So I have to have money for them. Today I have a good job. When I was a mature student (28), I worked a swing shift at a veg preparation plant to generate more income so the family could have more things.

I do not see any other way out of this but I'm willing to hear of an idea which might work.

Minimum wage @ £6.50/hr and Living wage @ £7.85/hr are treated differently.

Min wage earner families are likely to be able to get Working Tax Credit, Child Tax Credit as well as the universal Child Benefit(s) and possibly Housing Benefit. Those on the Living wage are likely to be removed from some of those credits or on them at a lower level, thus cutting the welfare bill.

Many companies say that they do want to pay the Living wage, but that they need incentives (tax breaks) in order to do it. Any chancellor trying to force things would have to be careful of not robbing Peter to pay Paul. The result would have to be tax neutral or, preferably, a little more beneficial to the government.