Doodledog
Germanshepherdsmum
You don’t have to be ‘very rich’ to be treated as an individual for tax purposes. Every person liable to pay UK tax is treated as an individual.
As regards household income being considered for benefits purposes, wouldn’t there be an outcry if the spouse of a high earner were paid UC? That could easily happen if household income were not taken into account.
As regards the so-called cut in UC, GrannyGravy says it all. How many ordinary working people received a permanent £20 pw wage increase during the pandemic?I don't understand why we are taxed as individuals but benefit and other entitlements are paid as households, other than as social engineering to encourage marriage.
My views on means-testing are well-documented on here (I hate it), but I also think that adults who are able to contribute to the coffers should do so in their own right, and that couples shouldn't be given an unfair advantage over single people. The state shouldn't give financial advantage to one way of living over another, IMO.
If someone has contributed via tax/NI they should be able to claim benefits (and by this I mean pension, unemployment benefit, maternity pay etc, whether or not I would view them as 'benefits' ordinarily) as an individual, and their spouse's income should be irrelevant. Equally, I don't think that couples where only one person has paid in should expect to get two lots out when it comes to claims, so I would more clearly restore the link between contributions and entitlements, and remove any tax benefits to belonging to a couple, too.
Wrt the Sunaks, I agree with Coastpath:
^To use or condone the use by family members of these methods of absolving the duty to pay our way fairly (not legally, but fairly and with charitable intent) says something about a person which does not sit right with my idea of someone who becomes an MP in order to serve their country and make society a better place for all.^
I agree. Problem is that successive governments have tinkered with individual benefits (notably disability benefits) over the last few years, so that means testing of some and not all makes very little sense. Child benefit for example combines couples income and caps for means testing at £60,000, but doesn’t differentiate when dealing with single parents - so effectively the cap is £30,000 per parent when treated as a couple.
Problem is, that left in the hands of this and other Tory governments eventually the goal is ‘small state’ and consequentially, a massively shrunken welfare state. The ordinary working man and woman see it as a safety net - you pay in when you can and it’s there if you need it. But imho the Tories see it as a gravy train and they want it gone. They can’t do it overnight so a slow erosion is taking place under our noses. An example of this was the change from Disability Living Allowance to Personal Independence Payment in 2013.. The theory was that DLA was far too easy to claim and open to fraud (the instance of which was later proved to be around 0.5%) and that PIP would deliver massive savings because it would be much harder to claim. The savings never happened because after PIP was introduced, the government realised that the vast majority of DLA claims had been genuine and the successful appeal rates against frankly ridiculous cases of denial of PIP, soared. The plan now, is that by 2027, PIP will no longer be a universal benefit. It will be absorbed into the Universal Credit system, means tested and will not be available for anyone who doesn’t qualify for UC. Millions of disabled people will lose vital support and the Motability scheme that gave disabled people their independence, will collapse. If you can’t get what you want first time round, move the goal posts until you do.
Sunak is just the latest example of hypocrisy and double standards, and despite the headline this morning that his wife has decided to pay tax in the UK to ‘save her husbands’ career’, I’ve no doubt that he’s in a better position than most to advise on how to pay as little as possible. A government of billionaires can’t/won’t represent ordinary people and will have little idea of the pressures they face - how can they when they’re massively cushioned from the policies they enact on the rest of us ? Until the British public wake up and realise this, I’m afraid we’re stuck with it.
