The Tories Will Aim To Cut Inheritance Tax
According to this article on the BBC, a future Tory government would end Inheritance Tax on family homes up to a million pounds.
I have form in opinions in this area and had a letter published in the Financial Times in 2006 about this tax, after an article in the paper on March 31st 2006 advocated the killing off of the tax. This is the first two paragraphs of the letter.
I have been against inheritance tax for years, not because I would benefit from its abolition or because I am getting to that age, when I should start to do something about it (“Inheritance tax should be killed off”, March 31). It is just that as a control engineer by training, I think it does untold secondary damage.
Consider: how many bright minds are employed on both sides of the inheritance tax war in avoiding and collecting the tax? Abolish it and they would have to do a proper wealth-creating job.
I still believe that the Inheritance Tax should be abolished, if not totally, but substantially! I don’t have current figures but in 2006, it only raised half as much as Air Passenger Duty in that year. I’m not alone on thinking this way as this article from the Telegraph in 2013 shows. This paragraph is from the article.
Yet the tax raises just £2.9bn a year, a mere 0.18pc of GDP, a tiny sum given all of the collateral damage caused and one which could easily be recouped by accelerating the Government’s savings programme.
David Cameron’s proposals are welcome, but pretty timid and will only have a limited positive effect on the economy compared to what full abolition will have.
The tax revenue would have to be replaced and as a BBC survey showed in 2006, that people would prefer a couple of pence on Income Tax. These days other and better options exist. The problems with abolishing Inheritance Tax are all political rather than economic, as if the Tories went for full abolition, the Labour Party would have a field day, saying they were looking after their friends.
They’ll probably do that with David Cameron’s announcement, even though probably nearly half of the beneficiaries of the tax reduction will be Labour voters.
The Future Of Pay As You Go (PAYG) Energy
Before I bought this house, it had been tenanted and because of the letters I’ve received since, I reckon that quite a few tenants skipped owing money to energy suppliers. Because of this, the house had a PAYG gas meter that used a key. I never used it for more than aa day or so, as the energy company I chose, replaced it with a normal one.
Using PAYG must be a nightmare for a family with problems, either monetary or organisational. So when I saw OVO Energy had brought in a PAYG system that worked on-line, I started following reports of the system.
Today I’ve picked up this comprehensive article from the Yorkshire Post. This is the first couple of paragraphs.
Thousands of Yorkshire customers who have been paying over the odds for their gas and electricity may be in for some relief – so long as they have a computer, email address and bank account.
British company Ovo Energy has just launched the UK’s first full-service, smart, pay-as-you-go (PAYG) energy platform, Smart PAYG+, which offers the cheapest pre-payment tariff in the country.
Eventually, this is how people with a computer, e-mail address and bank account will pay for PAYG energy.
OVO’s Smart PAYG+ system seems to be a very good design and will have applications outside of where the current key meters are used. OVO says this.
If you’re a prepayment energy customer, or even if you’re not, why not switch to OVO Smart PAYG energy? It takes away the hassle of paying for your gas and electricity. OVO gives you a choice of two ways to Pay As You Go.
I think that this technology will be used in some surprising places. I doubt I’ll be changing, but my energy use is rather erratic and sometimes I’m deep in credit with my energy supplier, who is OVO. PAYG would allow me to have a minimum credit at all times.
Avoiding The Real Issues In The NHS
All the political parties seem to be promising more and more to the NHS in this election, be it money, drugs, doctors, nurses or midwives.
Money could be the least of the problems, as it will probably come from improvements to the economy or some tax-the-rich measure, depending on your political point of view.
As drugs are not really a drug problem, but usually a money one, we are left with where to we get the tens of thousands of staff we need to provide health-care.
The trouble is that being a health professional, is a skill you can use anywhere in the world, as all human beings are the same under the skin, even if they come in various colours, speak different languages and have certain different diseases governed by genetics or environment. So just as we can recruit paramedics from the Antipodes, nurses from the Philippines and doctors from virtually everywhere, other countries can entice our health professionals away.
We live in an increasingly global society, and working abroad for a few years is often in many peoples desired career profile, be it in health care or not. Healthcare like certain other professions is one of those that gives you a passport to a lot of interesting places.
All manpower planning in the NHS seems to believe that those trained here, will stay here. But all good training does is hand everybody that passport to travel.
To make matters worse, good training for some professions, is an excellent grounding to starting a business or working in the private sector.
So the first issue we must face, is this one of where do we get the staff. The NHS has shown itself to be not very innovative in this area.
Some have suggested in the past, that anybody trained in the NHS must contract to work for the service for so many years. This is just cloud-cuckoo thinking.
The one positive thing that can be done to help staff is to provide better working conditions and rewards for those working in the NHS. Most of the NHS buildings, I’ve seen in the last ten years have been pretty sound, with perhaps the odd exception, so we must look at the problems of staff with respect to organisation, management, pay and pensions.
What I do find interesting is that all of the Practice Nurses I’ve met in GPs surgeries seem to be so much happier in their work than those in hospitals. It’s only a small survey, but it does say something about the difference between GP’s surgeries and hospitals.
When I’ve spent time in hospital in the past few years, it has been been twice in good NHS hospitals and once in an expensive private one in Hong Kong. There was little difference in the equipment or methods used, but as an IT professional of some years experience, I don’t believe that hospital systems are what an engineer or manager would accept if they worked in say a modern car factory in the UK.
So we must get hospital and GP health systems to the levels that patients and staff expect in their personal life.
Where is an on-line copy of my health record, that I can read to get to the bottom of my problems, that seem to occur seasonally in the Spring?
But things are changing and we must create a health communication and information system, that is an order of magnitude better than what we have today.
No political party is saying they’ll fix this important gap in the NHS.
Everything in our lives is going on to our computers or phones, but healthcare in the NHS hasn’t changed that much since I was born in 1947.
Some people rightly worry about such a computer system. But at its best it would only be like an on-line shopping system, where if you don’t see what you need on-line at your favourite store, you go and look at a physical one.
In all the politicians posturing on health, they very much ignore the users of the NHS and what they can do to improve the service and its efficiency.
I would be interested to see an analysis of how much the average patient costs the NHS. I suspect that because of the lack of a fully joined-up computer system, if I had complete access and wanted to find out how much I cost the NHS last year, no accurate value could be calculated.
Many people calculate their motoring costs to the last penny, but even if they wanted to, it’s probably impossible with healthcare, even though all the data is there.
Eventually, everybody will have this figure, as it could be a powerful tool for a GP to classify and better treat their patients and as a motivator to patients to improve their lifestyle. You’ll never change some patients, but many could be nudged in the right direction.
We must also do more to ease our load on the NHS. On a personal level, I look after my INR, by doing my own tests. A Committee of MPs has stated that all NHS patients who can, should do their own testing to save the NHS a lot of money.
How many other measurements can be taken by patients to ease the load? And are we doing enough to encourage more and better devices?
In no political party’s pontifications on the NHS, can I find anything about bringing the patient more into his or her own healthcare. But many doctors and nurses have said to me that we should take more responsibility for our own health.
After all, many of us now carry a tablet or phone, that has more computing and information accessing capability than existed anywhere ten years ago. Is this being used to give us better healthcare? Not really!
Political parties are not tackling the problems caused by our poor diet, lifestyle and environment.
Where I live, there are more unhealthy takeaways than you need to try a new one every week of the year. Not one sells any gluten-free food, so their chances of seducing me with their crap is non-existent.
Even the Sainsburys Local that I use is not a store,where you can always get the staples you need to create a healthy meal. Yesterday, I needed a couple of haddock fillets for supper, but except for some very bedraggled and unappetising cod, there was no uncoated fish. So I had to take a bus to the Angel to get some from Waitrose. Does a lack of healthy food locally mean that many don’t eat as healthily as I do? I am out and about in London most days using my Freedom Pass, so it is not difficult for me to pick up what I need on the go. But a young mother with an infant in a buggy doesn’t have that luxury. It’s not the shops’ fault, as they only stock what the shop sells!
The only positive thing government can do in this area, is to give local authorities more power to decide what shops they allow in their area.
I haven’t seen anything like this in any manifesto.
We should also do things to curb air pollution, which can get bad at times. All city centre transport, should either be electric or very low emission vehicles.
But again, no-one wants to annoy people, except the Greens, who won’t win anyway.
I suppose smoking comes into this area. Any candidate for London Mayor, who decides to ban it in public parks, squares and in the vicinity of bus stops gets my vote next time.
Perhaps candidates for the election, should have to declare if they smoke or not and what car they drive on the ballot paper!
Do we also give our children an education that will help them get through the minefield that is health? We give sex education in schools, but surely health education is just as, if not more important!
We need to think radically, about how we deliver healthcare and before we throw money at it, we should sort out the details on how it is delivered, how it interacts with patients and the fasctors that affect it.
Conservative 1940s thinking has failed and we must bring the NHS into the twenty-first century.
The Anonymous Widower 