Attack on Pensioners

It was Sir Winston Churchill who decided that as most people's income went down after they retired from work, and in recognition of the years they had spent paying tax and National Insurance, he'd introduce additional tax relief for people over the age of 65.

In the last budget George Osborne, the Chancellor, announced he would axe a special tax break that pensioners have enjoyed since 1925. Currently this gives pensioners a higher tax allowance than the general population. So they can earn an extra £3,000 from pensions or savings, before paying income tax.

Baroness Joan Bakewell, campaigner for older people, called the changes "fundamentally unfair". "The claim that it makes things simpler for pensioners to understand adds insult to injury," she said.

The National Pensioners Convention has launched an 11th-hour bid to stop the Government raising £3.5bn from older taxpayers over the next  five years, and in doing so bringing 230,000 retirees back into the tax net. Its online petition has attracted 85,711 signatures. It is just 14,289  short of the 100,000 required for a debate in the House of Commons.

Neil Duncan-Jordan, a spokesman for the convention, said: "We want as many people as possible to sign the petition as we need to get the  plight of pensioners higher up the political agenda. We do not object to harmonising the tax regimes of those in work and people who are  retired. But it should not be done by penalising pensioners."

You can read more at http://tinyurl.com/d743kgs and/or you can sign the petition at http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/31778

I've signed it, but the decision is yours whether you sign the petition or not, I'm just bringing it to your attention.

Blackpool top earners

Reacting to the report, Matthew Sinclair, Chief Executive of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said:

“Taxpayers are still paying far too much for bloated bureaucracies that have been established in too many town halls over the last decade. It is incredible that some councils have even increased spending on high earning staff this year after a decade in which council tax doubled across the country and when every local authority needs to find savings and ease the burden. In those cases where it is the result of redundancy payments then we need to see the savings soon. Councillors need to insist that their local authority does more to find savings and cut back on staff costs that residents cannot afford.”

 Councils must cut spending and should look at pay – one of the biggest items of expenditure – as an area for savings. Previous TaxPayers’ Alliance research showed that over the 10 years before the financial crisis, the number of local authority staff with remuneration of more than £50,000 had increased more than three times as quickly as in the private sector. In 1996-97, the average local authority employed 7 people earning more than £50,000. This number rose to 20 by 2001-02 and again to 66 in 2006-07. In 2011-12, the number of people earning more than £50,000 was 71 – more than before the financial crisis.This research note looks at the progress being made by every local authority in the UK in slimming down bureaucracy. Overall, the total salary bill for officers earning £50,000 or more at local authorities fell by £270 million last year – a reduction of just over 12 per cent. But some of that reduction is accounted for by the large number of redundancy