The Summer Budget

A real living wage?

An official living wage?

A calculated living wage?

The UK Living Wage for outside of London is currently £7.85 per hour.

Obviously costs in London are higher, but you can't expect any government to apply London criteria to the rest of the UK.

The money has to be found GG, I doubt there are better ways to find it. the NHS is going to do well, amongst others.There will always be some people who grumble , public sector workers will I expect with only 1% a year pay rise .If the country as a who,e does well in the next few years then salaries will start to go up as well.

' country as a whole' I am going to throw this iPad out of the window.

Osborne said it's a national living wage, making no distinction between London and the rest of the UK.

See my earlier post, Ana, where I said it was £7.85.
So how does making it £7.20 next April make it a living wage? Of course some people will be taken in by his rhetoric, but they always are.

By the way, Jeremy Corbyn wants £10 an hour. He could be the next Labour leader.

Jeremy Corbyn can say whatever he wants, can't he? Andy Burnham will probably say he wants £12 an hour any minute now...

Easy to say anything, in opposition.

Maybe MPs should also be regarded as public sector workers.

I agree with that, Lucky. Are they going to have a 1% pay rise like the rest of the public workers? Are they .......

Yes, I'd certainly agree with that!

Good point, they are really public sector workers. however the body that sets the salaries for MP's told them that they should be earning more. A lot of MP's did not agree to that in the present economic climate.I know that people knock MP's all the time now, but if they didn't earn a reasonable salary they would leave and go into the business sector where they could all earn a fortune . this would leave only the really wealthy ones to stay in politics, like it used to be a long time ago, when it became a sort of hobby.So we need the ones that are not wealthy( inherited wealth) to stay in politics.It would be nice for all MP's however not to take the salary increase this time.That goes for MP's from all the parties.

www.politics.co.uk/blogs/2015/07/08/george-osborne-s-living-wage-is-not-enough-to-actually-live

I can hardly believe my eyes Durhamjen finding something to complain about in the budget! Who'd a thought it! ! (I'd have added an irony emoticon if there had been one)

I believe I'm not the only one, Jane10. Do you really expect socialists to go along with Osborne's manoeuvres? A "one nation" budget that penalises the poorest?

However, I agree with this as well, which is an attack on Labour.

www.politics.co.uk/blogs/2015/07/08/miliband-s-meekness-allows-osborne-to-savage-the-working-poo

I do not imagine you will read it, though.

This is a very reasonable budget. It's about time all companies paid a legally enforceable decent wage rather than being subsidised by the tax payer.

I'm saddened by the tax credits as some families will find it hard.

Why do you say it's a reasonable budget when at the same time you say it will hit families hard?

Is it reasonable that the poorest students are to be denied a £3,000+ maintenance grant?

Is it reasonable that there is to be a £4.5 billion cut in tax credits which top up the wages of low paid workers?

Is it reasonable that nothing has been done to address the massive cuts in the social care budget which has reportedly left a million elderly, frail and disabled people to fend for themselves without even their basic needs being met, or the equally massive cuts in children's and mental health services?

Is it reasonable that public sector workers, whose earnings have been held down for several years already and who continue to bear the brunt of reductions in staff numbers, will be limited to a 1% pay increase over the next four years?

At the same time as making cuts to vital support services and making poor people even more impoverished, it was deemed reasonable to increase the inheritance tax threshold for couples to £1 million. (Something that will benefit only a very small percentage of people in this country - in fact only approximately 5% of estates are liable for inheritance tax).

I don't think there's much about this budget that is reasonable.

Here are a few more specific examples, posted by Susan Lyons, SNP :

"Today if you are an ordinary couple, with three children, both working full time in ordinary jobs, in Morrisons, in the Co Op, in hairdressers, local factories, both earning the amount that the Tory Government suggests is a living wage - £7.20 - then under this budget you will be £1580 per year worse off. If you have the apparently government approved number of children - 2 - then you will STILL be £1303 worse off.

If you earn the Scottish Living wage £7.85 pr hour, and have 2 children then you will be £237 worse off, if you have 3 children then you will be £1761 worse off.

A single mum working 20 hours at the Scottish Living wage would be worse off by £1355.

Yet for those earning a significant amount of money, If both members of a couple are earning £60 000 a year then they will be £221 better off."

Not only has he announced that the minimum wage is to be renamed the living wage, they might even rename the A1 the M1 north of Leeds. Somehow I do not think that will be going ahead. The people north of Alnwick still want a dual carriageway, not new roadsigns.

Oyster card for the Northern Powerhouse? What about the trains we were promised? The updating of the railways? Much more important than an oyster card.

I'm sure people who are losing money will be really delighted to have an oyster card.

The best ideas were pinched from the Labour manifesto, and I do not think Tories voted for them.

Best idea Jen ... come on tell us what the best ideas are, if you dare.

I was quite shocked yesterday but prepared to wait and see the breakdowns and how it will affect individual families. Now I am shocked again. The message I was getting yesterday was that those working full-time would not be worse off. I assumed (never assume ) that this was to encourage people to work full time rather than feel they would be worse off if they did. Now, from FarNorth's quoted examples I can see this is not true either.

I will still wait to see more analysis but the point of this budget was to move the country to a more capitalist one. The Conservatives of old would not have stood for this attack on the poorest - don't get me wrong the system did need revising in my opinion and work should pay but that is not what this is producing.

have just done my calculation OH self employed under 10,000 pa profit working 44 hours a week ,my state pension ,and wtc/ctc for GD in full time education we are worse off by over £2,000 a year....we already struggle on a daily hand to mouth basis...

theconversationuk.cmail1.com/t/r-l-akdbdd-iudkikukhu-n/

Cuts and human rights? This is why they want to get rid of human rights.

What analysis are you waiting for, GracesGran?

The ones I have seen today say that the only section of people who do not lose at all are the pensioners. Poorer pensioners gain nothing, either.
There are a lot of groups who will lose over £100 a month, and these are all those earning the least. A single person with one child has to earn over £30,000 to gain from the budget. The same person earning £20,000 will lose £171 per month. Married couples with two children have to earn £35000 to gain. If they only earn £25,000 they will lose £200 per month. It does not matter whether it's one earner or two.

The "living wage" does no good if they are taking tax credits away from families. Barnados reckons that struggling families could end up £1200 a year worse off because of cuts announced in the budget.

Raising the minimum wage was the best idea. Calling it a living wage is wrong, but I know why he did.

It's because the Tories promised before the election that nobody working 30 hours a week on the minimum wage would pay tax. Giving them £7.20 an hour and a tax threshold of £11,000 would mean that they would pay a few pounds tax.
The only people on a minimum minimum wage would be those under 25. They would be paid less than £11000 next year for a 30 hour week.

The minimum wage was a labour idea opposed all the way by the Tories and their paymasters.