A national insurance hike to boost social care would be built on a misunderstanding

Published

4 years ago

July 20, 2021

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Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak have, it is reported, agreed to pay for long term reform of social care by raising national insurance by a penny in the pound for both employers and employees.

The move would raise an estimated £10bn annually.

The government is braced for unease among its backbenchers because the Conservatives promised not to raise income tax or national insurance in their election-winning 2019 manifesto.

It perhaps ought not to be too worried about that. The prime minister can always point to the crisis in social care and the need, more broadly, to repair the public finances after the COVID-19 pandemic.

The chancellor, meanwhile, can point out that one of his predecessors, Gordon Brown, did something similar in his April 2002 budget. Having pledged not to raise income taxes in Labour’s election-winning 2001 manifesto, Mr Brown broke the spirit of that promise, slapping more than 4 million workers with a 1% increase in national insurance.

The risk of breaking an election promise is the least of the problems with this proposal.

For a start, the move will perpetuate the myth that national insurance is some kind of special safety net, hypothecated to pay for pensions, unemployment benefits and other elements of the welfare state such as the NHS.

It is remarkable how many people still believe this when, for many years, national insurance has simply been income tax by another name.

Yes, there is something called the National Insurance Fund, but essentially it is a government accounting wheeze.

The money raised in national insurance contributions is insufficient to pay for the benefits and public services that many people think they do. It just disappears, effectively, into the government’s coffers and is spent in the same way that revenues from income tax, VAT and corporation tax are spent.

Because the UK state pension system is a so-called ‘pay as you go’ system, the national insurance paid by today’s workers pays the pensions of today’s pensioners, not their own.

This misunderstanding of national insurance may be precisely why the government is proposing going to go down this route.

Polling suggests people are happier paying national insurance rather than income tax because they genuinely appear to believe they are getting something, a benefit, for doing so.

It is why chancellors down the years have reached for national insurance as their favoured stealth tax. In 1979, national insurance receipts were equal to half of income tax receipts. This year, according to the Treasury, they will be equal to roughly three-quarters of income tax receipts.

There are also other problems with this proposal.

One is that it exacerbates intergenerational unfairness. Unlike income tax, workers of state pension age do not pay national insurance on their earnings, so the hike will fall entirely on younger workers.

Moreover, because national insurance – unlike income tax – is levied only on earnings, rather than other sources of income, such as interest on savings, the cost of this measure will fall disproportionately on younger people rather than older ones.

In other words, having made sacrifices throughout the pandemic to protect older people, younger people will again be paying through their earnings for a benefit that will benefit older people rather than themselves.

This move, then, may deepen the problems the Conservatives have with younger voters.

An explicit aim of reforming social care is to prevent people having to sell their homes to pay for such care. Younger people, unable to buy a home in the first place, may wonder why they are being asked to pay higher national insurance contributions so that others may keep theirs.

Others will criticise the lack of progressivity in this proposal.

All workers (other than those earning more than £100,000 annually and who do not benefit from the personal allowance) can earn up to £12,570 before they have to start paying income tax. By contrast, national insurance kicks in as soon as a worker has earned £9,568.

Accordingly, a wealthy pensioner living off a generous final salary pension or on income from their savings and dividends will not be paying this proposed hike, but a low-paid worker earning just £184 per week will be.

Another major problem with this proposal is the unwanted consequences it will have. Taxes, by their nature, reduce the activity on which they are levied. It is why chancellors tax smoking heavily.

Because this proposed national insurance will fall on employers, as well as employees, it will make the cost of hiring someone more expensive.

Higher payroll taxes mean fewer people in work and, potentially, lower growth. It is why, in response to Mr Brown’s national insurance hike in 2002, the then-Conservative leader, Iain Duncan-Smith, called the move a “tax on jobs”.

So, too, did David Cameron and George Osborne when Mr Brown ordered his chancellor, Alistair Darling, to announce a 1% rise in national insurance in March 2010 to pay for the financial crisis. Mr Darling had wanted to increase VAT instead. Mr Brown’s decision ensured Labour had barely any support from business in that year’s general election.

So, to conclude, what the PM is proposing is a tax increase that will disproportionately hit younger and low-paid workers while making it harder for employers to hire people.

Or, as Nick Macpherson, the former permanent secretary at the Treasury, put it on Twitter: “Rentiers and trustafarians won’t have to pay a penny. And the low paid young will subsidise the wealthy old. Higher spending does require higher taxes. But national insurance is a regressive tax on jobs.”

Quite.

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More Britons than ever struggling to make ends meet, report warns

Published

4 hours ago

June 25, 2025

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More Britons than ever struggling to make ends meet, report warns

More people than ever are struggling to live on their current income – while just a third say they are living comfortably, according to new research.

Rising prices and sluggish pay increases have put many people’s finances under strain in recent years.

A record 26% now say making ends meet is difficult. Before the pandemic, it was 16%.

Two-thirds also say their incomes haven’t kept up with inflation, according to the British Social Attitudes report.

That’s only marginally better than the 70% recorded during the height of the cost of living crisis in 2023.

Frozen tax thresholds also appear to be hitting home, with 61% saying taxes on low earners are too high, while 44% believe middle income earners also pay too much.

Those figures are up nine points and 13 points respectively since 2016.

However, when it comes to the highest earners, 44% believe their taxes are too low.

The report also asked people about the welfare system – a timely insight with Labour MPs currently rebelling over plans to save £5bn from the budget.

It found support for more spending on disability benefits is at a record low of 45%, down from 67% in 2017 – but only 11% think spending should be reduced.

About 29% of those polled think it’s “too easy” for people to get disability benefits – but the same percentage also feel it’s “too difficult”.

Meanwhile, long waiting times appear to have played a part in the finding that a record 59% are now dissatisfied with the NHS. In 2019, it was just 25%.

Only 21% said they were satisfied with the health service.

The report is based on a representative, random sample of more than 4,000 people in the UK and was produced by the National Centre for Social Research.

It’s the longest-running measure of public opinion in Britain, having started in 1983.

Professor Sir John Curtice, senior research fellow, said: “The public are well aware of Britain’s problems – not least those of a failing health service and an economy in which many are struggling to make ends meet.

“Yet rather than turning their back on the state, for the most part, the public are still inclined to look to government to provide solutions.”

Defence was also a key theme of the report – and researchers found about 40% of Britons support spending more money on weapons and troops.

A fifth (20%) said they would like to see a reduction.

It comes as the government revealed it was buying at least 12 stealth jets that can carry nuclear weapons, and as NATO countries, including the UK, promise to increase defence spending.

The National Security Strategy also said the UK must prepare for the potential of a “wartime scenario” in the “UK homeland” for the first time in many years.

Almost everyone surveyed (90%) considered Russia a serious threat to world peace, followed by Iran (78%), North Korea (77%), Israel (73%), and China (69%).

The percentage supporting more defence spending remains relatively unchanged since 2016, before Russia invaded Ukraine.

However, the share supporting an increase is significantly higher now than that in 2006 (28%) and in the 1990s (17%).

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Post Office scandal: Govt has not done enough to ensure compensation for victims, committee of MPs finds

Published

6 hours ago

June 25, 2025

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Post Office scandal: Govt has not done enough to ensure compensation for victims, committee of MPs finds

The government has not done enough to ensure all victims entitled to compensation from the Post Office scandal have applied for it, a report has found.

Many current and former postmasters affected by Horizon IT failings and associated miscarriages of justice are not yet receiving fair and timely compensation, according to the report by the Public Accounts Committee (PAC).

Only 21% of the 18,500 letters the Post Office sent to postmasters to make them aware of the Horizon Shortfall Scheme had been responded to, figures provided by the Department for Business and Trade (DBT) show. About 5,000 further letters are expected to be sent in 2025.

Under the scheme, current and former postmasters who were financially affected by the Horizon IT system, but who were either not convicted or did not take the Post Office to the High Court, can either settle their claim for a final fixed sum of £75,000 or have it fully assessed.

There is also the Horizon Convictions Redress Scheme (HCRS), which is for sub-postmasters who had their convictions quashed after the passing of the Post Office (Horizon System) Offences Act last year.

The 800 or so sub-postmasters who are eligible to claim under the HCRS are entitled to a £600,000 full and final settlement, or the option to pursue a full claim assessment.

By the end of March, 339 had accepted the settlement sum, the report by the PAC, which is made up of MPs from all sides of the House of Commons, found.

But the PAC report states that the government has no plans to follow up with people who are, or may be, eligible to claim but are yet to apply.

The committee recommends that the DBT should outline what more it will do to ensure every affected postmaster is fully aware of their options for claiming.

A third scheme provides compensation to sub-postmasters who were wrongly convicted of fraud, theft and false accounting.

Of the 111 sub-postmasters eligible to claim for the Overturned Convictions Scheme and who are either entitled to a £600,000 full and final settlement, or to pursue a full claim assessment, 25 have not yet submitted a claim, some of whom represent the most complex cases.

The DBT has taken over the management of the scheme from the Post Office, and the PAC report recommends that the department should outline how it plans to handle the remaining cases under the scheme.

Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown MP, chair of the PAC, said thousands of people were “deeply failed” by the system during “one of the UK’s worst ever miscarriages of justice”.

He added: “This committee would have hoped to have found government laser-focused on ensuring all those eligible were fully and fairly compensated for what happened.

“It is deeply dissatisfactory to find these schemes still moving far too slowly, with no government plans to track down the majority of potential claimants who may not yet be aware of their proper entitlements.

“It is entirely unacceptable that those affected by this scandal, some of whom have had to go through the courts to clear their names, are being forced to relitigate their cases a second time.”

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The evidence that Russia sanctions evasion has intensified

Published

13 hours ago

June 24, 2025

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The evidence that Russia sanctions evasion has intensified

For more than a year, we have been tracking the flow of sanctioned items out of the UK and towards Russia.

Electronic equipment, radar parts, components used to make aircraft and drones. These are all items that have been banned from going to Russia. For good reason: while Britain is far from a global manufacturing powerhouse, it nonetheless still makes certain prized components used to make machinery.

In some hands, these components could be used for peaceful purposes, but they could also be used to wage war. All of which is why they are among the items sanctioned by G7 nations and banned from entry to Russia.

A glance at the trade figures might lull you into thinking those sanctions have been extraordinarily successful. Look at the flows of these so-called “dual use” goods from the UK to Russia and they drop to zero shortly after the invasion of Ukraine and the imposition of those export bans. But that’s not the whole story – because over precisely the same period, exports of those same items to countries neighbouring Russia have risen sharply.

At this point, the data trail goes cold. As far as the statistics tell us, those components stay in the Caucasus and Central Asia. But there are two powerful pieces of evidence that suggest otherwise. The first is that we have travelled out to the border of Russia and filmed European-sanctioned goods (in this case cars, the hardest of all goods to disguise) passing across the border.

The second is that Ukrainian forces have repeatedly found weaponry and equipment containing European and British components inside them on the battlefield in their country. British technology has been used to kill Ukrainians – in spite of sanctions. That was one of the messages President Volodymyr Zelenskyy relayed in his interview with my colleague Mark Austin.

So, in the wake of that interview, we revisited the databases to see if those flows of goods to Russian neighbours had slowed in recent months.

But, far from slowing, they’ve accelerated. In the past nine months, the flow of dual-use goods to Russian neighbours has risen by an average of 9%, compared with the monthly average between the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and last June. Those flows are 111% higher than they were before the invasion.

Nor are the flows of British goods to Russian neighbours the only trend suggesting these components are being trans-shipped via third countries. Look at exports of sanctioned items to the United Arab Emirates and Turkey and they are up by a similar proportion.

In short: the evasion of sanctions continues much as it has done since the beginning of the war. For all the talk about the toughest sanctions regime in history, the reality on the ground is somewhat different.