Swimmy, l love living here and l never want to move. I will stay here as long as l can.
Hi
You have a gorgeous house, of course you want to stay there as long as you can, I would.
Needs must in my case, loved the big house in the village, but downsizing was a necessity.
Apart from the prat next door I am enjoying it.
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Hi
What is missing from both your post and the article you quote is a simple fact.
Not that long ago, the Pension Schemes were in Profit, they were then raided by the Government to keep taxes low.
It was very subtle, LAs as Employers were given a Contributions Holiday, the Government Grants to LAs reduced by the same amount, the Government got £Billions.
Needless to say, but this scam did not apply to the Politicians.
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That’s a bit steep.
Ours is £1700 but we do have to pay £50 a year for each green garden waste bin, 10 collections a year, they don’t do December and January and you’re only allowed two
Because of driver shortage and Covid they missed three collection this year and we haven’t had a refund. That I do resent
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It seems that Council Tax is calculated based on the sale value of the property.
By that reckoning someone living & working on the fringe of a City could be paying many times the amount paid by someone way out in the countryside.
Not the best way of “levelling up”.
Downsizing is an alternative, but house moving costs money & Downsizing could mean you have to move further away from Family, friends, and facilities.
Why lose out on what you’ve paid for all your life?
It’s very difficult to find a fair way, there are always winners and losers whichever system that gets used
I suppose it could be based on income, like a local income tax
But I’m not sure about the single person reduction.
Not all single people use that much less of the services provided. And is it fair that a single person with a good income pays less than a couple on a very low one?
Paying less tax will improve nothing. But this government are constantly piling on the tax for ordinary people, things such as the hike in National Insurance. But, they do little to stop tax evasion which is at an all time high. £35 billion a year, half of which is due to fraud. And this government has done nothing to stop tax avoidance by the richest people in this country. Government figures, for example, show that HMRC employs just 522 staff to tackle tax avoidance & evasion, which costs us tens of billions of pounds per year, but 4,045 people to tackle benefit fraud which costs us just £1.5 billion. So currently, the biggest tax burden is being piled onto ordinary people, whilst the richest few pay less & less tax.
The independent think tank, the Intergenerational Foundation has said that “stealth taxes” introduced recently by this government are going to hit the under 30’s disproportionately. One example they give is a young graduate earning £27,000 a year, who will see their deductions rise by about 20% over the next four years. This with other rises will see a under 30 year old graduate on £27,000 per year, have their disposable income drop by around 30%.
So rather than reduce overall amount of tax collected. Why not simply make it a fair system where everyone pays a fair share & faces an equal chance of not getting away with depriving the state of tax income?
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Let me stop you right there, Gee. I have never earned anything approaching that amount in my entire working life, so I’m afraid I cannot muster up much sympathy for how much tax a young graduate is paying on that amount.
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Well, apart from no additional payments for our garden waste bin, I’d say that we’re in a very similar position, especially the roads and pavements.
Ah, yes, police! I’d forgotten about them, perhaps because I haven’t seen one in person for years! I do see the occaional police car, though. Yes, I’m familiar with Dudley Hill as we once lived around there. In fact, I’m trying to think of where on earth our nearest police station might be. I’m sure there must be one in the middle of Manchester… perhaps.
I do like your description of your council! Very apt.
£27,000 per year is just under £13.00 per hour & the national minimum wage is £9.50 & the average UK wage is £29,600. So £27,000 is not an unrealistic, or high salary. For example, the starting salary for a newly qualified nurse, who now has a degree qualification, is just under £26,000 & thus a student debt.
Round here they’ve been “outsourced”.
When I retired I was earning less than 20,000, and there are a hell of a lot of people earning less than I was. We still live in a very unequal society, and I will start having sympathy for the better off when those at the bottom get sorted out.
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Well you were earning a lot more than me. I’ve never begrudged people who earn more than me.
A person earning 27,000 a year only earns £396 a month more than a person who earns 20,000.
A person earning 27,000 a year pays 4,978 a year in tax and ni.
A person earning 20,000 a year pays 2,738 a year in tax an ni.
Neither have I, but neither have I had any sympathy for them when they bleat about how much tax they are paying.
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My rates used to be based on the value of the land but then the council decided to change that to protect single old ladies living in million dollar houses on the seafront. They changed the way of calculating the rates by having a fixed charge per property no matter the value and then applying a 50% charge based on land value.
Because of the State cap on rate rises they had to get the same income from the rates so if you lived in a poorer suburb your rates went up, if you lived in a richer suburb with higher land values your rates went down.
Bastards!