Big pronouncements

What Burnham has done today imo is to “signal” the direction of travel, and in the process indicating to the struggling that help will indeed be coming - although probably in the longer rather than shorter term. But we shall see.

£45 is a lot of money to someone on benefits.

According to TRIP scrapping VAT on energy was one of the things vote leave promised if we left the EU but then never did ( I should have remembered this as Gisela Stewart did a Q&A on here and promised just that and I moaned about it for years afterwards until it was overshadowed by even more things to moan about).

I haven’t listened to trip yet - must do later this evening.

They did point out that scrapping ID cards was meaningless economically given that the money hadn’t been allocated for it anyway. I hadn’t looked at it that way and had assumed that Darren Jones was being critical of the Starmer government and, in fact, it was the opposite. Which surprised me due to his loyalty to Keir. They also said that after his last resignation speech Keir went to the pub with his mates. Good for him .

Thank you GrannyGravy, I thought it was only 3 months but knew it wasn't for a year.

Luckygirl3

£45 is a lot of money to someone on benefits.

It’s that amount over 6 months.
I think if it had been targeted to the poorest it could have been a lot more.
May well have been too difficult to be a targeted amount, so tbh I wonder if it’s worth doing at all.

Only people with enough income dismiss any extra help no matter how little.

It’s obviously just gesture politics, it’s non targeted so everyone will get it.

I prefer money to go to those who need it.

Oreo

I prefer money to go to those who need it.

I didn’t have you down as someone in support of abolishing WFA except for those on pension credit. Interesting

That’s because you know nothing about me Tuliptree and I don’t have you ‘down’ as anything at all.

WFA was too targeted as those just above the line lost out and they were poor too, like my own Mum.
It was a big political mistake by KS and RR.

Whitewavemark2

What Burnham has done today imo is to “signal” the direction of travel, and in the process indicating to the struggling that help will indeed be coming - although probably in the longer rather than shorter term. But we shall see.

I do agree with is, in other words gesture politics.

The VAT cut is a nice gesture but will end up doing little to help people because …

Martin Lewis: I’ve just got the latest energy bill predictions. The average of 3 sources show the Price Cap rising 5.1% on 1 Oct - as the last week has seen very high wholesale rates. An annualised rise of £93 on a typical bill.

Blame the warmongers for that.

Burnham and his merry band of cronies. Have still not said anything about economic growth, or rising, unemployment and tackling the ever growing welfare state costs.
Not to mention Social Care and the NHS

Never mind the ever growing problems around immigration and guaranteed job losses due to AI

Basically, because they have no ideas or policies. Just empty promises And are too weak to stand up to the real causes of these problems and sort them out.

Or they will more importantly, lose voters. Which is really the only real game in town. And always has been to stay in power.

As for his Manchesterisms. Well he kind of did take the buses back into public ownership. Spent a fortune on painting them yellow as part of the Bee Network.

Services has not improved. Some may say actually got worse.

As for regional.govrnment.Never going to happen in England.

And the Downing Street of the North? This is the best joke l have heard all week. Publicity hang over from George Osbourne's Great Northern Powerhouse.

I think decentralisation is a very good idea. It means that relevant government departments can be nearer to those they serve.
Savings can be made on estate costs in London, and a wider talent pool of employees, rather than mainly drawn from the south east.

Hear hear. It's been in the grip of London far too long.

As regards Manchester, there is a history - I lived there when years of feminist action resulted in the Equal Opportunities Committee on 16th July 1984. I remember visiting....

So I was cross checking further and came across this reminder

www.greatermanchester-ca.gov.uk/what-we-do/equalities/independent-inequalities-commission/

Burnham was amongst those who set up not just this commission but even more significantly

The Greater Manchester Race Equality Panel was formed in December 2020 as a result..

(But the national Equality and Human Rights Commission -EHRC has had its headquarters/offices in Manchester since its creation in 2007. And I suspect the Womens Equality Commission spawned these Manchester settings.

Oreo

WFA was too targeted as those just above the line lost out and they were poor too, like my own Mum.
It was a big political mistake by KS and RR.

Abolishing WFA was a major political mistake but it was and is in need of reform equitably. It’s completely unfair and ridiculous in who does and doesn’t qualify. Couples in particular do very well out of it

*Burnham and his merry band of cronies. Have still not said anything about economic growth, or rising, unemployment and tackling the ever growing welfare state costs.
Not to mention Social Care and the NHS* - they are not a merry band of cronies - they are the cabinet!

And they have not had 48 hours yet - give them a chance!!

Targeted benefits are a huge challenge - the systems for deciding the targeting can cost more than they save.

^ Couples in particular do very well out of it^

How do you work that out? Its paid per household. DH and I get half each.

www.gov.uk/winter-fuel-payment/how-much-youll-get

WFA was a disaster. I can only assume that focus groups said the same as Gransnet - that people who 'didn't need' it would be happy to give it up - but didn't take account of boasting and a reluctance to have anything 'taken away'.

My feelings on means-testing are well known, and the WFA is a perfect example of why I feel as I do about it. It should have been added to pensions and tax would have reclaimed some of it from those who pay it. Not ideal, and still means-tested really, but better than the debacle we got. I would have liked to see it added to UC for working couples, too.

I see what you mean about couples doing better, Tuliptree, but not every couple spends all day in the same room - when both of us are in we are often doing different things in different parts of the house during the day, which both need to be heated in winter. Also, not all couples share resources equally, and we pay tax and NI as individuals, so it seems to me fair that we should get all benefits as individuals too. I don't want to be dependent on someone else just because I live with them (hypothetically - Mr Dog is not remotely parsimonious 🥳).

I can't imagine AB being so far removed from the people he represents. WFA worked out at about £4 a week, and I can imagine some LP advisors thinking of that in terms of cups of coffee, forgetting that by no means everyone pays that sort of money for coffee every day, and that if you are spending all your income every week on essentials, the £200 you might have been given makes the difference between paying the bill on time and not, regardless of how many lattes it might have bought from Starbucks.

I have friends who look at life like that, and see themselves as socialists. They do want fairness, but have lost sight of what it means in reality, and measure things in terms of their own privileged lives, not those of the people they want to help. It's the 'not everyone should go to university' thing again. It's one thing if you have friends and family who can give your children a start without one (or if your own children all have have 2:1s from prestigious institutions), but another when you leave school as soon as possible and have to compete with those who have them. The only way to deal with that is to lower expectations, which the privileged never have to do, so can't imagine. 'There's money to be made doing gardens' means one thing to someone with an address book full of friends with acres that need taming, and another to someone on a council estate where hardly anyone has a job.

I think Starmer could well be in the 'privileged' group, although obviously I don't know, and could be maligning him. I don't think Burnham is (well, on a day to day basis he 100% will be, but he has his feet on the ground and has enough sense to listen to those who know what's what for 'ordinary people'), and IMO that's what we need in a leader today.

Because a single person with an income of £35,000.01 gets nothing but a couple with an income of £35,000 each £70,000 between them get £200/300 WFA between them. Also a couple where one has an income of £35,000 and the other an income of £35,000.01 and upwards ( no upper level) will get £100/£150 . It’s a real dogs dinner because it marries together a per household payment and an individual income limit. At its hypothetical most ridiculous single people with an income of £36 001 gets nothing nothing but a couple where one has £35,000 and the other £100,000 get £100/150
The reason I brought up WFA was in the context of Oreo saying the £45 should be a targeted payment But the ‘targeting’ of WFA is utterly ludicrous imo