The Labour Government

Mr Kobayashi said:
All good points. Which is why it's better for them to downsize. Plenty of over 55 accommodation being built. Or could go for a bungalow.

Newer buildings tend to be more efficient to heat.
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Have agreed a lot with you in this thread, but not this. It is totally wrong to expect people who have worked hard to pay for their own place to simply move. Emotional attachment for older people is high as well as knowing the area they live.

As you get older, change is more difficult to take, and they should be under no pressure at all to move

I'll be hitting 70 in three years and I cannot think of anything worse than feeling obliged to move
 
mosssideblue said:
Have agreed a lot with you in this thread, but not this. It is totally wrong to expect people who have worked hard to pay for their own place to simply move. Emotional attachment for older people is high as well as knowing the area they live.

As you get older, change is more difficult to take, and they should be under no pressure at all to move

I'll be hitting 70 in three years and I cannot think of anything worse than feeling obliged to move
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You aren't obliged to move other than by circumstances. Everybody is attached to their home, including renters who have to frequently move and have to work very hard to pay someone else 50% of their take home.

Old people knocking around houses that are too big for them, that they can't afford to heat and need alterations just to get around and into (alterations which they won't neccesarily fund themselves) isn't a good use of a finite amount of housing. Which might be better used to house a young couple starting a family.
 
Mr Kobayashi said:
Is it possible to buy one for less than the sale price of a two or three bedroom house?
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I had a 2 bedroom house when I was married. Ex hubby bought me out when I left and we got divorced.
No way I'd have wanted to stay there anyway as I got older. The maintenance/repair/fuel costs were horrible in a terraced built in 1878.
Don't even mention the stairs; they are incredibly steep in older houses. I remember my Gran having to climb them by sitting down and going up backwards on her bum! And she was a relatively mobile and healthy 80 year old.

I'd have hated staying there as I got older.
 
Chippy_boy said:
Sorry, missed the bit about the Scottish tax system. I don't have a problem with the rates generally and certain aspects I like but it does seem overly complicated to me.

Personally I would advocate a system that is as simple as possible.A huge loss to the exchequer in terms of tax revenue collection is incorrectly completed tax returns. People either deliberately, or more typically accidentally, filling it in wrong because the rules are too complex.

So I would go for something really simple like a personal allowance of about £20k. (I don't think anyone earning less than that should be paying tax, because life on those incomes is tough enough as it is. That takes millions of people out of the tax system altogether, which I think would be a great thing to do.

Then I'd have probably a 25% basic rate up to earning of around £60k. And then perhaps a 47% rate over that. And that's it.

I'd have to play with the maths to make it add up. But you could play with the maths to make it add up. Anyone earning less than £20k would win, obviously. The break even point would be around £35K with anyone below that better off and anyone above it, worse off but not by much for most people. Someone on £100k would be £2.5k worse off - and could easily afford that. And of course anyone on much more would be paying a lot of their income at 47% not 45%.
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What would you do with the £100k-£125k where people lose their tax free allowance and so are taxed at an effective marginal rate of 60% already?

I tend to agree on the £20k tax suggestion but I think NI would still need to be paid unless there is a massive change in how NI and state pansion are related, and I've already pointed out the dangers of doing that already.
 
Chippy_boy said:
.

It did got down. The 50p rate was introduced in April 2010 as reflected in the 2010-11 figures below, from the HMRC. Look what happened.

Now some of the tax in 2009-10 was due to people hurriedly paying themselves more in that year, in order to avoid the 50% in the following year**. So the effect is exaggerated. But look at 2008-09 as well, still much higher (with a max 45% rate) than 2010-11 with the 50%. Even in 2011-12, at 50% it was still bringing in less.


** which kind of proves my point: A lot of wealthy people have flexibility in their earnings and can rearrange their affairs in order to reduce their tax bills, if rates get too penal.
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I'm not sure they ever really sorted out whether this rate worked as it simply wasn't in place for long enough. As you say it has people paying extra in advance of the higher 50% rate comes in, while at the other end it had people holding out till the lower 45% rate came in.

These figures, I think, are from an analysis that was undertaken pretty quickly, and a couple of years later, Ed Balls was claiming that it actually brought in another £10bn. As far as I can see, all the figures (low and high), have been challenged at various times, and I can't see any research that comes to any real conclusion, simply because of all the caveats, in particular it's short lifespan.
 
Mr Kobayashi said:
You aren't obliged to move other than by circumstances. Everybody is attached to their home, including renters who have to frequently move and have to work very hard to pay someone else 50% of their take home.

Old people knocking around houses that are too big for them, that they can't afford to heat and need alterations just to get around and into (alterations which they won't neccesarily fund themselves) isn't a good use of a finite amount of housing. Which might be better used to house a young couple starting a family.
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And how do these young coupples afford these large houses?
 
In Poynton there are not enough bungalows to meet demand. It has one of the largest retired communities in Cheshire. On my road 2 bed bungalows are the same price as the 3 bed semis facing them.
 
mosssideblue said:
Have agreed a lot with you in this thread, but not this. It is totally wrong to expect people who have worked hard to pay for their own place to simply move. Emotional attachment for older people is high as well as knowing the area they live.

As you get older, change is more difficult to take, and they should be under no pressure at all to move

I'll be hitting 70 in three years and I cannot think of anything worse than feeling obliged to move
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Bingo
 
Mr Kobayashi said:
Is it possible to buy one for less than the sale price of a two or three bedroom house?
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A small 1.5 bed bungalow takes up a larger land footprint than that of a 3 bed semi.

The building costs whilst being part of the equation are in many areas significantly less than the cost of the land.
 
In the months leading to the General Election, Labour ran a tight but safe campaign, one light on radical policy and one lacking any bold vision, certainly compared to 1997. That was understandable, I suppose, because they had been through a rapid rebuild and didn't want to alienate voters. However, it also gave rise to the suspicion that they were keeping their powder dry and would unveil the bigger ideas once in power, with the first 100 days pivotal. Yet nothing genuinely big materialised, and instead all that's really been heard since is that things were economically worse than anticipated. Again, all understandable because that was what the Conservatives had done in 2010 and that message wormed its way into the public memory. The summer months have now passed but Starmer's Conference speech today hasn't revealed much more either; will the big ideas come with the first budget? Are there actually any?
 
According to the Daily Heil Labour are going to:

Cut pub opening hours
Tax your fags and fuel to price you out buying any as part of the green vegan woke agenda
Replace rapists and murderers with meme creators in prisons
Allow the country to be taken over by Sharia Law
Make the BBC licence fee and official tax and double the cost

Any I've missed?
 
TinFoilHat said:
According to the Daily Heil Labour are going to:

Cut pub opening hours
Tax your fags and fuel to price you out buying any as part of the green vegan woke agenda
Replace rapists and murderers with meme creators in prisons
Allow the country to be taken over by Sharia Law
Make the BBC licence fee and official tax and double the cost

Any I've missed?
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No, I think you've summed it up pretty accurately.
 
Mr Kobayashi said:
You aren't obliged to move other than by circumstances. Everybody is attached to their home, including renters who have to frequently move and have to work very hard to pay someone else 50% of their take home.

Old people knocking around houses that are too big for them, that they can't afford to heat and need alterations just to get around and into (alterations which they won't neccesarily fund themselves) isn't a good use of a finite amount of housing. Which might be better used to house a young couple starting a family.
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As others have pointed out young couples wouldn’t have the money to buy the big houses. Even two people earning 40k per year can only borrow around £320k and that’s only 40k above the median house price in the UK. In London and the SE you can add another 160k to 300k on that.
 
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