The big problem is people want Scandinavian public services on American level of taxes, and you just can’t square that. People need to be honest and be prepared to pay the levels of tax in say Sweden, and you’ll get the amazing public services you get there, you don’t on say keeping fuel duty at the same level for 10 years because you’re scared of the Daily Mail. The cost of that freeze alone is £43bn, imagine that being spent on housing, or the NHS or the education system.
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The UK already spends £174 billion a year on welfare (excluding pension or healthcare). At this stage more money isn’t the issue.
I’m interested to know why you think cutting the Welfare pot will systematically fix/cure the country? Spending has been cut in almost all other areas. Saying “cut welfare spending” seems a bit of a simplistic answer. The court system, policing, NHS, childcare have all seen cuts so these areas are having to make ends meet and I doubt that cutting the £174 billion and pushing that around will help matters materially because then the welfare pot is being cut.
The welfare pot is the largest pot of them all with arguably the worst return. Paying someone not to work is not any use in the long term.
But you are right. On its own it won’t solve anything. Government and public service incompetence needs addressing as most public spending is grossly mismanaged. However, if you solve that, having almost £200 billion extra could go a long way to fixing the UK.
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It’s not mainly used to fund people who do not work, huge amount of the Social security system is focused on helping people in work, and acts as a subsidy to companies who underpay their staff. the Joseph Roundtree Foundation estimate around 4m workers in the UK are in poverty for example. It’s a lazy assumption to think all Social Security is spent on the feckless, it’s mainly spent on keeping working peoples heads above water.
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Where does this number come from (the £174 billion, not the 15% or so extra that seems to have appeared here…)?
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and here’s how the welfare budget is split
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Alarmingly, in two years welfare (exc. pension) has surged by £20 billion. Didn’t see that mentioned on the news anywhere 
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No it hasn’t the Budget in 2016 including pensions was £263bn and it’s now £268bn, so about inflation.
You also had a baby boom in recent years, and a raise in those receiving in work benefits.
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…do the math. The chart you posted, excluding pension, adds up to £152 billion. The gov’s own 2017/18 page states that welfare spend, excluding pension again, was £174.4 billion. That’s a £22 billion increase in two years.
My point is that the spending on welfare is completely out of control and a staggering waste of money. If the UK wants to improve itself as a country, welfare reform as an absolute necessity.
I’ll take it from what DWP (the department responsible for this)
Social security spending in Great Britain
Over 55% of social security expenditure goes to pensioners.
The government is forecast to spend £121 billion on pensioners and £94 billion on working age people and children this year. In 2017 to 2018 £121 billion was spent on pensioners and £96 billion was spent on working age people and children.
The largest benefit is the State Pension at £96.7 billion in 2018 to 2019, a rise of £1.2 billion in real terms since last year. It is paid to 12.7 million people.
£69.2 billion is forecast to be spent on income-related benefits and personal tax credits, compared wth £71.8 billion in real terms since 2017 to 2018.
£52.7 billion is forecast to be spent to support disabled people and people with health conditions, compared with £53.1 billion in real terms in 2017 to 2018. The fall is partly the result of the devolution of Carer’s Allowance expenditure in Scotland to the Scottish Government in September 2018.
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Yes the maths adds up technically - but the Gov website you mentioned doesn’t split Welfare into Welfare and Pensions completely - the Welfare figure of £174 billion includes “Social Protection” exclusive of State Pensions, the Welfare figure therefore contains Public Sector Pensions. There isn’t a direct read-across. If you did, then the Pensions pot has actually been cut by £17.2 billion - very close to your £22 billion disparity - so my guess would be it has actually only grown by £4.8 billion over 2 years.
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As for Social Protections, it includes a lot of things outside the traditional welfare budget.
From the ONS and Eurostat defination
Social protection is comprised of the various benefits provided to households, usually by public bodies, to help with their needs1. Social protection benefits can either be in cash or in kind. Benefits in kind include such things as hospital stays, free school meals and home care.
Looking at this link though, we can say at least £155 billion is being spent on welfare, excluding pensions:
https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/governmentpublicsectorandtaxes/publicsectorfinance/articles/howisthewelfarebudgetspent/2016-03-16
Either way, it seems like a gross waste of money by merely handing cash out, with no end goal of making people self sufficient. Surely this is an area of public spending that should be more closely analysed, if not entirely rebuilt?
That’s the image @sachaz posted so the growth is still only circa £4.8 billion over 2 years when pensions are completely excluded.
This is a subjective assessment and clearly founded on pre-conceived determinations on what the welfare state “hands money” out for. Whilst I agree the benefits system could be reviewed I would struggle to go so far as to say it is a “gross waste of money”.
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That’s the price of not living in a 3rd world country. You could say the same about the NHS, think of the money we could save if people would sort out their own health problems.
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Are you seriously saying that a country without a welfare program like the UK is third world? I think you should do a bit of international research before making such a claim.
Basically everything in this post is wrong.
We have a lack of housing in the UK because we’ve not built enough houses for decades. The housing market was pretty functional during the 1920s and 1930s but after WWII the Town and Country Planning Act 1947 was passed which moved the rights for deciding who could build where to local Councils.
For the next 20-30 years there wasn’t a serious issue as local Councils themselves engaged in massive housebuildings schemes (some of which was very high quality but also included a lot of awfully designed monstrosities) but these ended under the Thatcher government and we started racking up a deficit that really started to bite during the early 90s with rapidly rising prices which have largely continued rising since.
Fundamentally the current Planning System is unworkable as 1) local Councils are elected on low turnouts primarily consisting of middle-aged property owners, 2) whilst everyone agrees we need more houses in the abstract no one wants them to build near them (hence the NIMBY movement) and locals hold a lot of power.
Buying multiple properties to rent is a good thing, those who buy properties swap their capital in order to make a profit selling a useful service. Students are nearly always going to want to rent, not buy, if it wasn’t for landlords then who would they rent from? The issue is constrained supply. Buying property is only hugely profitable in a market where it rapidly accumulates in value. If we suddenly built another 2-3m houses the buy-to-let market would completely collapse and a lot of large commercial landlords would go bankrupt (which itself has its negatives).
As for immigration feeding into the housing crisis, this is largely untrue. Whilst there has been heavy net immigration into Britain for 20+ years when you look at household formation it doesn’t lead to a serious increase in the housing shortage. Essentially one widowed granny moving to Spain and selling her three bedroom house can easily accommodate 6+ people largely cancelling out immigration.
The actual biggest driver of the increased demand for housing stock has been that the number of people in a property has been constantly falling. This is primarily driven by the advances in medical technology that have led to our rapidly ageing population and underoccupancy among the elderly.
Moving onto welfare… there is no “£100bn/year welfare target”. I’ve never even heard of such a thing.
As for the “welfare budget”, it currently sits at £252bn/year with almost half of it going on the state pension. The next biggest chunks are for in-work benefits, which top up the low salaries you’re complaining about, and housing benefit which is so high due to the housing crisis above.
Britain’s viewed internationally as having a tax-and-spend system broadly in-line with the rest of the developed nations. Personally I’d love to pay a bit less tax but who wouldn’t? Obviously government has rampant inefficiencies but it seems that your idea of mismanagement is more about policies you simply disagree with, not actual genuine mismanagement.
As for your initial comment about “earning the average of £27k whilst paying £800+ to live in London”. Firstly, the average UK salary is £29k and secondly the average London salary is £35k. You clearly earn a lot more than this since your personal gripe seems to be that people on £50k+ pay too much tax.
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There have been many, many attempts to “rebuild” the welfare system. What does your rebuilt system look like?
I’d say any country that doesn’t provide homes, food and support for those in need or unable to do it themselves is 3rd world. I don’t need to do research to validate that, that’s just my belief, much the same as you’re belief that having to spend money on those same people is a waste
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