Community council meeting 19th April
Councillor for East Central ward on Coedffranc Town Council Learn more
by franklittle on 22 March, 2012
The media, including unfortunately Radio Wales this morning, have accused the coalition government of a stealth tax on old people. Much of the blame for this bad press lies with George Osborne’s presentation, when he passed over his changes to higher rate allowances as a simplification, without explaining his proposals in detail, inducing journalists to smell a rat.
The facts are these:
Moreover, as Sara Bedford points out here: “Ed Balls and colleagues must be delighted that so far everyone seems to have missed that the last Government froze the Age Allowance between 2009-11 – or as Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury Rachel Reeves would term it, Labour imposed ‘an enormous stealth tax for older people’.”
2 Comments
Nice try Frank to try to defend the indefensible. The Lib Dems are nothing more the Conservative poodles. Don’t try to fool the people. The pensioners in this area will suffer because of your governments mantra – look after the rich at the expense of the poor!
Bet you don’t add this to your website.
Not only have I added your comment, Peter, but I can counter it with an illustrative graph: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ianeiloart/6862742496/. Ian Eiloart’s comments are worth repeating here: “The green line shows what the pensioner’s income tax allowance did, and might have done, under Gordon Brown. You can see that rises under Alistair Darling, and under the coalition, mean that pensioners are doing much better from the income tax threshold than they might have expected just five years ago. This is what the press are currently -wrongly- describing as the granny tax.
“My 2014 figures are speculative – they assume that the next budget will complete the implementation of the Lib Dems £10,000 tax threshold policy, and that the pensioner’s threshold will in future be the same as the rest of the population.
“After the 10p tax debacle, when Brown doubled the income tax rate for the lowest earners, Alistair Darling bumped up the income tax threshold. He raised it a bit again in his second year, but froze all tax thresholds, including the pensioners tax thresholds, in his last budget.
“The coalition agreed to implement the Lib Dem policy of raising the threshold to £10,000, but over a period of five years. It started with a £1,000 rise, and has made two more rises since then. In that time, the pensioner’s threshold has also risen, though not so rapidly.”
Or how about the Institute for Fiscal Studies assessment? “Despite this morning’s headlines, this looks like a relatively modest tax increase on a group hitherto well sheltered from tax and benefit changes. From this Budget we calculate that pensioners will lose on average about one quarter of one per cent of their income in 2014.” (Quoted by the BBC and the Spectator.)