Angela Rayner refuses to rule out scrapping single person council tax discount
 

y love-in with the Labour government lasted about two months.

I was down with Silver Fox Starmer and his new Downing Street kitten; club diva Angela Rayner on the decks in Ibiza made me smile. But it only lasted until this week’s Commons debate, where Tory MP Graham Stuart raised the issue of single person discount for council tax in the context of the government scrapping the winter fuel allowance for many pensioners.

Stuart said the council tax discount “is so important to pensioners, who are already losing out because of the absence of the winter fuel allowance”, and asked Rayner to guarantee that she would not scrap it. She would not.

And this is where my hackles raised, higher than the £592 a year extra that I will have to pay to my bankrupt Croydon Council if the 25 per cent discount to single households is scrapped.

Currently, anyone over 18 (and not just pensioners, Mr Stuart) living alone in a property, or with exempt people – live-in carers, students, anyone with a severe mental illness – can claim the discount, because a full council tax bill is based on at least two adults living in a home. According to ONS statistics, almost 1 in 3 households in the UK – 8.3 million – only have one person. You can see Labour’s Treasury team licking their lips as greedily as a cat who’s OD’d on Dreamies over the extra income they would gain to plug the £22bn financial black hole they were left with by the Tories.

But scrapping the discount (which isn’t much of a discount, merely a minor adjustment) would reveal the new government as steaming hypocrites, as big as their Tory predecessors.

Rayner promised Stuart that her government would not raise council tax – well, only for single people, who don’t seem to matter to her. And in his recent doom-laden speech, the prime minister said the October Budget would be painful, and that “those with the broadest shoulders should bear the heavier burden”. Presumably Mr Starmer believes that those of us who live alone are built like The Rock as he thinks we can take a massive hit if he removes the 25 per cent discount. But we can’t.

Last year, financial services company Hargreaves Lansdown calculated that singles pay an extra £860 a month for monthly bills compared to couples, adding up to just over £10,000 a year. How can the government really be looking to take money from people who already face a huge financial burden?

It’s bad enough for those who are single and without children to have to listen to Starmer talk about “hard-working families” all the time, but to ask us to pay more council tax, towards children we don’t have while there’s still no commitment to social care for those of us who don’t have families to look after us in our old age, is deeply unfair.

As a socialist, I believe that we should all contribute to society by paying our fair share towards it and supporting those in need – so I’m happy to pay towards education, health and public services for everyone. But the idea of taking even more cash from me for services I haven’t ever used is a low blow.

Single households are already a laughing stock – it’s not only JD Vance who’s doubling down on childless cat ladies, the whole world is giving us a kicking for being alone. I’ve always worked hard and paid my taxes on my never-very-fabulous salary, but I’m seen as an unkind person for wanting a little financial support by way of a council tax reduction. I can’t just make a live-in partner appear in order to halve my household bills, so all I want is some recognition from the government that my situation, and that of millions of others, deserves as much thought as those with families.

In his first speech as prime minister, Starmer said: “Your government should treat every single person in this country with respect.” But it looks like there could be no respect for those who already happily give more than their fair share.

Try a bit harder with tax evaders rather than those of us who can’t afford a holiday due to single supplements, Mr Starmer.

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices...-b2606761.html


on top of this it is alleged she will remove 'right to buy' which I think is fair enough although she benefited nicely from it herself

Surely they must mean an extra £860 a year not a month? What on earth are singles doing to spend an extra £10,000 a year on bills :umm2:.

But on thread topic... Yeah, it's depressing as fk. Literally just... some different Tories. Why does anyone bother voting at all? I was compelled to not bother. I went and voted out of a sense of duty to do so. Shouldn't have bothered.

I’ve never voted and never will

She'd better bloody not, think about us bachelors :oh:

Single people already have much higher costs of living

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I assume they have just taken an average household spend and assumed in a couple if normal household outgoings (rent, utilities, food) total say £1500 a couple will each pay £750 but a single person foots the bill for the lot therefore the difference each month will be pretty high. It's a bit crude as obviously there will be some bills that are lower for a single person....food etc but I would guess that's where they get the figure from

People are surprised that Labour want to increase taxes on everyone?

I suppose if they're including rents/mortgages then maybe, that's the only way it could be anything resembling normal outgoings surely. Although I am having flashbacks to our "energy crisis" December bill of £470 💀.

i would actually say that the tories have looked after the poorest in society better than labour, if this is the sort of stuff labour are going to do.

I can see plenty of strikes and organised protest coming in the future if they go down this path

No strikes. The union paymasters won’t allow it against Harmer Starmer.

i would have said riots in the past, but i've adjusted that outcome :laugh:

It's the complete hypocrisy that gets me, if the Tories had implemented the Winter fuel thing and apparently it was first mooted in Teresas Mays disasterous manifesto in 2017 and she was called out on it by Angela Rayner all hell would break loose, they would be accused of trying to kill off pensioners, if they do cut the single person discount which would apply in the main to lone pensioners I honestly think that is what they are trying to do, yes fine there is a black hole but did they need to give train drivers a back dated offer

train drivers deal includes a backdated 5% increase for 2019 to 2022, 4.75% for 2022 to 2024, and 4.5% for 2024 to 2025.

Ish, though it's hard to make a direct comparison because we have no idea what the Tories would have done with another term, nor what Labour would have done in the COVID era. It's looking like they'd have done roughly the exact same, IMO. And I doubt they'd have had the blanket help (e.g. the gas and electricity £66 that everyone got) I think help would lihave been entirely means-teasted.

And yet in Sunak's term the winter fuel was dished out plenty, he's actually looking better than Starmer right now.

Maybe it would have all changed if the Tories got in again,but the funny thing is we expect it from them ...but Labour were supposed to be the opposite ie helping the working class, pensioners , the poor etc .

the problem with means testing, is that it automatically excludes some from applying, either through pride, or not wanting to share private details or they may simply miss it by not knowing their entitlement. This is particularly true for the elderly. It also adds significant overhead to both the time it takes to process a claim, and the cost of actually doing the means testing

Cutting winter fuel allowance to pensioners is a bizarre decision IMO I have no idea who signed off on that - I don't believe for a second the Tories just care so much about the elderly and that's why the Tories didn't do it... they didn't do it because it saves eff all money whilst being absolutely abysmal PR. I cannot fathom why they've done it. If it was saving billions, sure. But pinching pennies from the elderly, from something like staying warm in winter...? The optics of it are shocking. That's why the Tories didn't do it. The political cost MASSIVELY outweighs any saving on the budget.

Tbf there are other ways to do it and I have heard noises from Labour about "other options" such as making the energy companies themselves more accountable. In theory, for example, you could make it that energy companies have to have a special tariff for households with only over-65's, offering rock bottom "at cost" unit prices (year round) and maybe build in a guarantee of no sudden rate hikes.

But we'll see.

The tories get a lot of votes from OAP's :laugh: Maybe labour have decided to kill them off, thus improving their election hopes and reducing the pension bill

I would have said that was a ludicrous suggestion a few years ago, but now, i'm really not so sure

Rayner, assisting in assuring Labour is a one-term government.

I think there is this thinking behind it I can't imagine why else they would implement that, that along with lowering the voting age to 16 should see them in power for at least 10 years, any pensioner earning over 12,500 has to submit a tax return so it would be pretty easy for HMRC to identify pensioners who earn say less than 30k a year, same as they did with means testing childbenefit, to tell a pensioner that they are well off because they have a small private pension that might garner them 4k a year is insane

Well that may be so, but it doesn't look like this will be implemented any time soon, and meanwhile it is getting chilly

Not if they managed to kill of a significant amount of voters during a cold snap

Are we really suggesting Labour are trying to murder old people to stay in power? :joker:

Why do you think they're targeting some of the most vulnerable? Lots of elderly people have never claimed benefits and never will, so saying those on pension credit will be exempt is just noise.