The Labour Party under Andy Burnham

[Falcon1200]

But given the very limited reserves in UK waters there's an argument for leaving them be in case needed later rather than exploiting them now.

Perhaps that is the Government's cunning plan!

 

[SargeNpton]

Can we ever completely replace fossil fuels, oil in particular though, given that it is not only used to provide energy but in the manufacture of countless things? And if not, surely it is preferable to make use of our own resources rather than depend on far-away places, from which transporting the stuff has its own environmental impact?

Where are the replacement lubricants coming from. Even EVs need oil and grease for wheel bearings, etc.

 

[Nicholas Lewis]

The impact of demography is important and rarely considered. The UK economy is going to have to adapt to a smaller pool of young people that it can employ on the cheap.

Reform and Greens like to exploit that with certain socio economic groups and the traditional parties would be wise to address the underlying reasons that are driving that.

 

[JamieL]

...and here we go again. The Labour Government is unable to implement any cuts and therefore the only possible option the Chancellor can possibly conceive to fund higher defence defence spending is more taxation. My vote at the next General Election is going to be anyone but Labour.

Rachel Reeves has opened the door to raising taxes to fund higher defence spending.

The Chancellor warned that pressures to fund the sector were “only going in one direction”, as she ruled out borrowing more to pay for the Government’s multibillion-pound investment plan.

Instead, Ms Reeves signalled that raising taxes to increase defence spending was better than adding to Britain’s nearly £3tn debt pile, which she said would push up borrowing costs for households and businesses.

Source:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/06/09/reeves-opens-door-to-tax-rises-to-fund-defence/

 

[Yew]

...and here we go again. The Labour Government is unable to implement any cuts and therefore the only possible option the Chancellor can possibly conceive to fund higher defence defence spending is more taxation. My vote at the next General Election is going to be anyone but Labour.



Source:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/06/09/reeves-opens-door-to-tax-rises-to-fund-defence/

Okay, how would you fund it?

 

[JamieL]

Okay, how would you fund it?

I would have liked Labour to have stuck with what they were planning to do:
- £3billion saved from 2-Child Cap
- £1billion saved from limiting WFA to Pension Credit recipients
- £0.5billion generated from Inheritance Tax on high value Farms
- £4.5 billion saved from PiP changes

...all of which amounts to more than the delta needed to fund the Defence Investment Plan. Unfortunately the Labour Government is unable to sustain such decisions as they are straight-jacketed by their MPs. And let's face it, the fact they are having to import Burnham into Parliament is rather evidence that those MPs clearly aren't the cream of the crop. Labour just aren't up to the job of Government.

 

[AlterEgo]

I would have liked Labour to have stuck with what they were planning to do:
- £3billion saved from 2-Child Cap
- £1billion saved from limiting WFA to Pension Credit recipients
- £0.5billion generated from Inheritance Tax on high value Farms
- £4.5 billion saved from PiP changes

...all of which amounts to more than the delta needed to fund the Defence Investment Plan. Unfortunately the Labour Government is unable to sustain such decisions as they are straight-jacketed by their MPs. And let's face it, the fact they are having to import Burnham into Parliament is rather evidence that those MPs clearly aren't the cream of the crop. Labour just aren't up to the job of Government.

Essentially nothing you'll have to pay for I assume.

 

[Tetchytyke]

I would have liked Labour to have stuck with what they were planning to do:
- £3billion saved from 2-Child Cap
- £1billion saved from limiting WFA to Pension Credit recipients
- £0.5billion generated from Inheritance Tax on high value Farms
- £4.5 billion saved from PiP changes

The highlighted bits are not savings though. This is the problem.

Child poverty is estimated to cost £39 billion a year through the knock-on effects of that poverty: reduced educational attainment, and the resultant reduced employment attainment, reduced health outcomes, etc. 59% of people hit by the 2-child cap are actually in work, so the idea of it being feckless teenage mums pumping out babies is simply factually untrue.

It's similar with the changes to PIP. If you lift the qualifying threshold then you superficially "save" £4Bn, but those people still have the same needs. Taking someone's crutches away (figuratively or literally) doesn't mean they can walk again. Poverty is, again, one of the biggest drivers of mental ill-health and physical ill-health.

Poverty and health outcomes are intrinsically linked. Poor people have a much shorter life expectancy- it can be as much as 20 years between the richest areas and the poorest areas. Poor people also crucially have a reduced quality of health whilst they are alive, requiring more interventions and more extensive interventions, which is where the strain is on the NHS. Ever noticed how it's easier to get a GP appointment in a rich area? I have. They have less demand.

So yes, you can "save" £7bn by putting children and disabled people deeper into poverty. And you can then give those £7bn of "savings" to BAe to buy bombs to drop on brown people develop our essential defence capability.

But it isn't a saving, not really. It just moves the costs from one budget line to another.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 10 Jun 2026 ==

Essentially nothing you'll have to pay for I assume.

This is always the way.

Always used to make me laugh (and not in a good way) when middle class people turned up in my office having lost their job or had a serious health diagnosis. The look of horror on their faces when I told them what they were actually entitled to was something else. "How am I supposed to live on that?" Quite.

 

[Broucek]

Essentially nothing you'll have to pay for I assume.

That's a bit harsh. He's merely highlighted areas where they were going to save money and changed their minds due to pressure from back benchers

 

[AlterEgo]

That's a bit harsh. He's merely highlighted areas where they were going to save money and changed their minds due to pressure from back benchers

No, he said that's what he would prefer they do as a solution. It's true that some tough decisions have to be made but I guarantee he won't be affected by any of those cuts. It is so often the way.

 

[weeklycommuter]

I would have liked Labour to have stuck with what they were planning to do:
- £3billion saved from 2-Child Cap
- £1billion saved from limiting WFA to Pension Credit recipients
- £0.5billion generated from Inheritance Tax on high value Farms
- £4.5 billion saved from PiP changes

...all of which amounts to more than the delta needed to fund the Defence Investment Plan. Unfortunately the Labour Government is unable to sustain such decisions as they are straight-jacketed by their MPs. And let's face it, the fact they are having to import Burnham into Parliament is rather evidence that those MPs clearly aren't the cream of the crop. Labour just aren't up to the job of Government.

They have reduced overseas aid from 0.7% to 0.3% of Gross National Income in 2027 to fund the increase in defence spending.

Clearly this change will have to be permanent and I have come to the conclusion that it should be permanent.

I am no longer persuaded that spending all this money on overseas aid is helping to lift very poor countries out of poverty.

Much of the remaining 0.3% is spent on support for asylum seekers in the UK. The Government needs to clear the backlog of asylum claims so this spending is no longer necessary. It is in nobody's interest, least of all asylum seekers themselves.

I agreed with the initial decision to restrict the Winter Fuel Payment to Pension Credit recipients which saved £1.4 billion annually.

I blame those who used their votes against the Government to demand the reversal of that decision and those politicians of all parties who joined the demands to reverse that decision. I do not blame the Government for the partial reversal of that decision. In the end the Government had to bow to voters.

I agree with the Government's replacement scheme which does not pay WFP to those with more than £35,000 of taxable income in that tax year and makes it easy to opt out. I opted out online as I do not agree with the WFP and I will not accept it regardless of my taxable income.

The revised scheme still saves £450 million a year which is one billion pounds a year less saving than the original decision limiting WFP payments to those on Pension Credit. However, the blame for forcing this one billion pounds of additional spending each year is with those who used their votes to force the Government to reverse the original decision and with those politicians who supported the demands to reverse the original decision.

 

[The Ham]

I would have liked Labour to have stuck with what they were planning to do:
- £3billion saved from 2-Child Cap
- £1billion saved from limiting WFA to Pension Credit recipients
- £0.5billion generated from Inheritance Tax on high value Farms
- £4.5 billion saved from PiP changes

...all of which amounts to more than the delta needed to fund the Defence Investment Plan. Unfortunately the Labour Government is unable to sustain such decisions as they are straight-jacketed by their MPs. And let's face it, the fact they are having to import Burnham into Parliament is rather evidence that those MPs clearly aren't the cream of the crop. Labour just aren't up to the job of Government.

Even ignoring other factors (such as the cost of poverty), I'm not sure the maths works.

In 2025/26 the defence spend was £62.2bn.

That's likely to increase to £73+bn.

The sum of those are roughly £10bn vs the circa £11bn.

However, that assumes that they reach their quoted levels, it's possible (indeed quite likely probable) that those values aren't achieved in reality due to the increased costs of running them.

Fur example, it's easy to know who to send WFA to when it goes to everyone over a given age. It's much harder when it's only some.

That's before some people who are borderline to be on pension credit, think "it wasn't worth the effort for £10 a year, but £10 plus WFA it's worth doing the paperwork"

An alternative, witch could generate similar savings would be to:
- keep universal WFA and remove the 2 child cap (the latter is going to fall in value as the under 18 population falls over the next few years away)
- increase the tax free allowance by a nominal amount (say £50)
- percentage points points of NI "tax" to Income Tax

Critically the last two means that for the majority of people there is no increase on working taxes (and for those for whom that's not the case, it only applies on their income over the higher rate threshold and so only starts to impact those on over £51,000 in employment).

Where the money mostly comes from is those earning over £75,000 or those pensioners where they earn enough more that the extra that they would pay in taxes compared to what they get in Winter Fuel Allowance (so if they still get £200, they would only have this "taxed away" at around £23,000 of income and even at £33,000 the extra tax due would be around £200, meaning that compared to cutting WFA the impact would be smaller for quite a lot of people and still fairly limited for a lot of people). As it's a universal thing, the savings are more likely to be made.

In answer to the question, yes I'd be impacted by my proposal (whilst I'm working, I don't know about retirement, that's a bit too far off just yet, however could impact me indirectly through a higher tax take from the income of my retired parents and thembeing less generous towards me and my kids - for example fewer day trips paid for by them).

 

[Simon11]

Or we decide not to increase the defense budget?

The extra £10bn given is not going to make a massive swing in a war and likely end up in a 'black' hole with very little to show for it.

I'd rather we either spent it on things that will actually help the country day to day or decide not spend the money at all prevent taxes going up even higher.

As a country, we can't do everything and we have to decide what our priorities are. I don't want to end up like the USA where they don't care about their own people and spend their time/ money on sorting out other countries difficulties.

 

[ainsworth74]

Always used to make me laugh (and not in a good way) when middle class people turned up in my office having lost their job or had a serious health diagnosis. The look of horror on their faces when I told them what they were actually entitled to was something else. "How am I supposed to live on that?" Quite.

Indeed, always feels especially grim for those with a mortgage as well. They get really stuffed as the system is quite happy to pay the mortgages of landlords so they can buy property on the back of their tennant's Housing Benefit/Element but if it's your own home mortgage? Best we can do is a loan (which attracts compound interest on the amount you owe) to cover the interest part of your mortgage (only up to £200,000 and using the Bank of England interest rate not your actual interest rate) repayable when the property is sold/ownership transferred. Oh and only after three months will you be able to get this anyway so those first three months you're totally on your own.

But yes it's always illustrative to do some calculations on what people might get and then have them think if they could make that budget work...

The media, especially the tabloids, like to focus on those that do do well out of the system. But if everyone was doing that well under our creaking welfare system we'd have a lot less poverty to deal with. Which should tell you really that the system actually isn't all that generous...

 

[Tetchytyke]

Or we decide not to increase the defense budget?

Heresy.

The likes of BAe and Lockeed Martin don't generously donate to all the main political parties just for us to turn around and say we don't need more bombs to drop on more sad brown people.

We really ought to think of the shareholders in all of this.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 10 Jun 2026 ==

As a country, we can't do everything and we have to decide what our priorities are.

The priorities are the BAe shareholders, silly.

My view is that we're not the world police and we shouldn't try to be. It's very sad that Ukraine were attacked by Russia but, for me, that's a Them Problem and not an Us Problem.

The UK is spending £3bn a year with the arms dealers on bombs which we give to Ukraine, but there's no money to lift our own children out of poverty. Aye, right.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 10 Jun 2026 ==

Indeed, always feels especially grim for those with a mortgage as well. They get really stuffed as the system is quite happy to pay the mortgages of landlords so they can buy property on the back of their tennant's Housing Benefit/Element but if it's your own home mortgage?

That has always absolutely enraged me.

They won't help you pay your mortgage but, if you sell your house to one of those parasitic sale-and-leaseback companies, they'll then be happy to pay some/most of your rent for you.

Fair enough not paying the capital repayment element of the mortgage, but refusing to help with the mortgage interest is disgraceful. It's also completely stupid from a financial point of view: the mortgage interest element is nearly always less money than what they'd be paying in housing benefit/UC housing element, even taking the Local Housing Allowance into account.

But welfare benefit decisions are often made based on vibes and 'what would the Daily Mail say', rather than on cold financial calculations. Shredding the Motability scheme is one example, it was making surpluses of tens of millions of pounds a year but, no, Rachel Reeves knows best. I saw the Telegraph saying with a straight face in an opinion piece the other day that we should abolish the Motability scheme entirely and give people an extra allowance to spend on taxis instead, because disabled people don't need a BMW. Maybe they don't, but that BMW has a resale value at the end of the lease, taxi fares don't.

 

[The Ham]

Can we ever completely replace fossil fuels, oil in particular though, given that it is not only used to provide energy but in the manufacture of countless things? And if not, surely it is preferable to make use of our own resources rather than depend on far-away places, from which transporting the stuff has its own environmental impact?

I'm not sure anyone is suggesting that we 100% get away from all oil based hydrocarbons.

However, just getting to EV's due land based travel (so not even the wider benefits from reducing car use by a little) would reduce oil need to 45% of the current total.

There's then other smaller changes such could be made to reduce this a bit further.

One good example is in Poland where they have an oil return system. This is designed solely to reduce the maintenance costs from oils in the drains, however it allows a larger share of Aviation/Shipping fuel to be bio diesel. As such, whilst not significant in the grand scheme of things is a useful thing to do as it's a byproduct of something which is worth doing anyway.

That's before looking at shifting some air travel to rail (more land based travel, reducing oils for flying, either burning or lubrication) or a small reduction in private vehicles (reduced plastic demand) or improving recycling rates or reducing oil use for heating (mostly rural homes).

Yes none of that is likely to get to zero oil use, but it's likely to significantly reduce it to well below 50% of current useage.

 

[Magdalia]

Or we decide not to increase the defense budget?

The extra £10bn given is not going to make a massive swing in a war and likely end up in a 'black' hole with very little to show for it.

That depends on how the money is spent.

I have spent most of my life opposing high defence expenditure, but we are in a different world now where the UK is not equipped to fight a 21st century war. Look at what is happening in Ukraine and the Middle East, where mighty military powers are unable to quell much smaller forces relying heavily on innovative use of drones and artificial intelligence.

The UK is extremely vulnerable to sabotage of undersea power and internet cables, plus having a lot of its electricity generating capacity out at sea. The UK has to invest in the sort of defence capability that Ukraine and Iran have developed, instead of pretending that we are a smaller version of the USA or Russia. When the Defence Investment Plan is published is when we get to see whether we are going to get anything useful from the additional expenditure.

 

[oldman]

Yes none of that is likely to get to zero oil use, but it's likely to significantly reduce it to well below 50% of current useage.

Which is better supplied from British and other European waters than elsewhere, if it can be done economically and with proper environmental safeguards. And it provides a useful stimulus to our economy.

 

[edwin_m]

...and here we go again. The Labour Government is unable to implement any cuts and therefore the only possible option the Chancellor can possibly conceive to fund higher defence defence spending is more taxation. My vote at the next General Election is going to be anyone but Labour.



Source:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/06/09/reeves-opens-door-to-tax-rises-to-fund-defence/

The quote you provide doesn't support your interpretation - it just says Reeves considers extra taxes to be preferable to extra borrowing and doesn't mention spending. If you wish to make this assertion then I suggest you expand your quote accordingly, particularly for the benefit of those who don't want to pay to read the full article. The headline in the link may not actually reflect what's in the text.

The UK is spending £3bn a year with the arms dealers on bombs which we give to Ukraine, but there's no money to lift our own children out of poverty. Aye, right.

There are several less obvious benefits to this spending.

Firstly, if Russia wins in Ukraine it's quite likely they will attack a Nato country, and if all countries including the USA don't come to its defence then Nato is essentially a busted flush and we risk Russia picking off European countries one by one. Even if we aren't directly affected, this will hit the economy far worse than the Iran war and we have plenty of vulnerabilities such as undersea cables.

Ukraine is also a valuable ally to Europe, and should be admitted to Nato or some similar organisation minus the USA if they don't co-operate. They have the second biggest army in Europe, world-leading expertise in fighting Russia and a rapidly expanding production of cheap but effective weapons that can undercut BAe and Lockheed Martin. So long as they remain as a viable military power, particularly with Russia occupying part of their country, then Russia is constrained in any future adventurism by the risk of Ukraine hitting back directly or supporting the defence of whichever country is invaded.

 

[The Ham]

Fair enough not paying the capital repayment element of the mortgage, but refusing to help with the mortgage interest is disgraceful. It's also completely stupid from a financial point of view: the mortgage interest element is nearly always less money than what they'd be paying in housing benefit/UC housing element, even taking the Local Housing Allowance into account.

It could even be a shared ownership deal where the state has a percentage value of the property such they've paid the mortgage on (say 2% of home value per year of interest payments made, although the cash value of the original deposit is always repaid to the "owner").

If someone defaults in their first year of mortgage aged 25 and dies aged 75, basically the state pays the interest on a (say) £250,000 mortgage and then pays the cash value (so circa £44,000 if 85% LTV, and that payment isn't adjusted against the home value or inflation).

That's likely to be a bit more costly for the first few years, but as inflation increases (especially the cost of rents) over time it'll become a better and better deal for the state.

Obviously, an "owner" would want out of that deal as fast as possible, so it's in their interest to work at getting back into a good job/off benefits and so could mean other cost savings down the line.

To stop people over stretching and being ensured to enjoy the risk they took, there'd be a need fur rules around occupancy levels. Probably the easiest would be the percentage share is linked to occupancy, so if 2% per year is "normal" room useage values, 2.5% per year could be if there's +1 room over these values, rising to maybe even 10% per year for +4 rooms (with an ensuite and/or a dining room counting as an extra room in most circumstances).

Such a ramping up could protect a couple who brought a 2 bed flat, but penalise a couple (both couples are without children) with a large 4 bed detached home (as the latter could more easily move to downsize, even if that was via a house swap like is normal under council homes - although they may end up with a virtual house value more suited to the value of home they were in).

There's probably a load of other factors to consider, but that's a fairly reasonable start.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 10 Jun 2026 ==

Which is better supplied from British and other European waters than elsewhere, if it can be done economically and with proper environmental safeguards. And it provides a useful stimulus to our economy.

Indeed.

 

[Uncle Buck]

We’d have a damn sight less poverty in this country, and a hell of a lot more money to spend on the things we need, if we actually tried to grow the economy, as opposed to some unholy alliance of rentier landlords and layabouts milking the working people for all they are worth.

It’s not really a left-right issue IMO, it’s a vested interests vs. working people issue.

 

[Sorcerer]

I can't imagine we would be having the conversation about raising taxes to increase defence spending if it wasn't so politically toxic to reform or rollback on welfare and healthcare spending which combined account for over half the UK government spending. Unfortunately pensions and the NHS are two sacred cows that nobody is allowed to touch lest you condemn your party to opposition, because apparently there is no nuance; it's either carry on as it is now or let the old people freeze to death and turn our system towards full American-style private healthcare, no in-betweens apparently.

 

[Tetchytyke]

It could even be a shared ownership deal where the state has a percentage value of the property such they've paid the mortgage on

That's what happens now. The help, such as it is, is given as a loan and that loan is secured against the property.

But if someone rents their home then the help, such as it is, is given as a grant and doesn't have to be repaid.

The consequence of this is that it is nearly always better to sell your home and move into rented accommodation if something happens to you which is likely to permanently restrict your ability to work. Not only will you get more help, you won't have to pay this help back either.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 10 Jun 2026 ==

if it wasn't so politically toxic to reform or rollback on welfare and healthcare spending which combined account for over half the UK government spending.

Welfare spending is primarily pensions. And yes, cutting pension entitlements is politically toxic, as well it should be. I pay the same amount into the same National Insurance pot as someone in their 60s who is still working, but they will get at least two years of pension- and probably more- more than me, even though their cohort has a longer life expectancy than mine. That's roughly £30,000 I've been diddled out of. IMO that sort of thievery isn't politically toxic enough.

I don't agree that the NHS is a "sacred cow" either. But there are really only three funding models: healthcare directly funded by taxation, healthcare funded by universal mandatory public insurance, or healthcare funded by optional commercial insurance.

The fundamental issue is that healthcare is expensive. Cutting-edge medicine and cutting-edge surgery means that people will survive things that would have killed them, and killed them pretty rapidly, even ten or twenty years ago. That costs money, and lots of it. The NHS have last year approved a new drug based on gene therapy to help people with a rare form of haemophilia which would likely otherwise be fatal. It's brilliant. It is also £2,600,000 per dose.

It ultimately doesn't matter which funding model you choose, the fact is that it is expensive.

Germany has a mandatory health insurance system which has a fee of about 15% of your gross income, with the option to top up privately for additional cover/extra benefits. So yes, direct income taxation is lower in Germany than in the UK (income tax rates are about the same but they don't have NI) but you're still then paying the same 15% out for your healthcare. If you think the UK would cut taxes after bringing in a German-style funding model then I've got a bridge to sell you.

 

[ainsworth74]

Fair enough not paying the capital repayment element of the mortgage, but refusing to help with the mortgage interest is disgraceful. It's also completely stupid from a financial point of view: the mortgage interest element is nearly always less money than what they'd be paying in housing benefit/UC housing element, even taking the Local Housing Allowance into account.

But welfare benefit decisions are often made based on vibes and 'what would the Daily Mail say', rather than on cold financial calculations.

Absolutely, I get why just saying "we'll pay your mortgage off for you" is probably not good policy and certainly bad politics. But for heavens sakes at least lets cover the interest on that mortgage, it'll probably cheaper than the alternative! But as you say the "vibes" will be off so off goes our nose to spite our face.

Welfare spending is primarily pensions.

Quite, people spend a lot of time getting themselves into a lather about disability benefits, work-shy scroungers and promiscius single mothers but reality is that the single largest line item of welfare spending is the State Pension. We actually spend more on it than we do on children and working age benefits!

Social security spending in Great Britain​

In 2025 to 2026 the government is forecast to spend £322.6 billion on the social security system in Great Britain. Total GB welfare spending is forecast to be 10.6% of GDP and 23.6% of the total amount the government spends in 2025 to 2026.

Around 55% of social security expenditure goes to pensioners; in 2025-26 we will spend £177.7 billion on benefits for pensioners in GB. This includes spending on the State Pension which is forecast to be £146.1 billion in 2025 to 2026.

In 2025 to 2026 we will spend £145.0 billion on working age and children welfare. This includes spending on Universal Credit and its predecessors, and non-DWP welfare spending.

In 2025 to 2026 we will spend £77.1 billion on benefits to support disabled people and people with health conditions, and £37.3 billion on housing benefits.

Guidance and methodology: Benefit expenditure and caseload tables

www.gov.uk

That number is likely to continue going upwards as that Baby Boomers continue to retire, the triple lock remains in place and we struggle to agree even inflationary increases in working age welfare spending let alone above inflation increases!

There is now precious little fat (if ever there really was) left to cut out of the benefits that are for the disabled and working age. You try spending any length of time on Universal Credit in the all work requirements group (i.e. have to actively seek work, the people who would have been on Jobseekers Allowance in old money). It's bloody miserable, by design.

That's not to say that there aren't chancers out there, of course there, but there's far fewer of them than people like to imagine. And we're often at the point that our attempts to weed out the chancers are in fact making it hard or impossible for those that should qualify to actually get the help they need!

 

[RT4038]

We’d have a damn sight less poverty in this country, and a hell of a lot more money to spend on the things we need, if we actually tried to grow the economy, as opposed to some unholy alliance of rentier landlords and layabouts milking the working people for all they are worth.

It’s not really a left-right issue IMO, it’s a vested interests vs. working people issue.

It is really shocking how the custodians of the money of the ordinary people (pension funds, insurance, investments) try to get the best possible returns for depositors / investors / pensioners by maximising rents, demanding highest possible profits, asset stripping etc etc . It is as if the working people didn't want lower pensions, smaller investments, higher insurance premiums......

 

[david1212]

NEET's can be tricky to compare between years as the youth population can fluctuate quite significantly.

Below is the data block tracking youth worklessness over the last two decades.

AI Disclaimer & Methodology Note:
This table was AI-assisted for compilation and is intended for structural illustration. While the data aims to align with official ONS Mid-Year Population Estimates and House of Commons Library NEET datasets, I have not cross-checked every single data point; please verify them before drawing definitive conclusions.

The "Fixed %" column is my own custom calculation designed to track structural trends against a stable baseline, using the official year 2000 youth population size as a benchmark. It is not an official government metric.

Year	Youth Population	NEET Population	In-Year NEET %	Fixed % (vs 2000 Baseline: 6,500,000)
2002	6,639,344	810,000	12.2%	12.5%
2005	6,793,893	890,000	13.1%	13.7%
2008	6,739,130	930,000	13.8%	14.3%
2011	6,568,047	1,110,000	16.9%	17.1%
2014	7,014,925	940,000	13.4%	14.5%
2017	7,117,117	790,000	11.1%	12.2%
2020	6,930,435	797,000	11.5%	12.3%
2023	7,091,667	851,000	12.0%	13.1%
2025	7,476,562	957,000	12.8%	14.7%

One of the next big impacts is the shrinking cohort size. This is due to reduce the youth population from circa 7.5 million now, down to circa 6.5 million around 2035 (matching the year 2000 level), and further down to circa 5.7 million by 2041.

The risk here is a compounding structural issue. Many schools are currently struggling with finances due to falling school rolls and are cutting support staff. This means early interventions for vulnerable children are less likely to happen, which will worsen long-term outcomes. This risk remains severe, even though a shrinking youth workforce should theoretically make it easier to secure entry-level employment.

A core issue over the last 20 years is that the NEET proportion is still nominally the same rather than being reduced.

The impact of demography is important and rarely considered. The UK economy is going to have to adapt to a smaller pool of young people that it can employ on the cheap ....

Not on the cheap. First those with student loans need the income to repay them as well as start to set up their life including buying a house. Second as a smaller group just to maintain the status quo they have to generate the same income to the state. To boost the economy and hence income to the government in real terms they have to generate more split across their individual tax / NI payments and VAT from spending of higher wages (not from tax rate increases) and from increased employer/business profits (again not from tax rate increases).

So far this government has worked against businesses by both increasing their costs and reducing spending by in real terms cutting disposable income.

 

[Sorcerer]

Welfare spending is primarily pensions. And yes, cutting pension entitlements is politically toxic, as well it should be. I pay the same amount into the same National Insurance pot as someone in their 60s who is still working, but they will get at least two years of pension- and probably more- more than me, even though their cohort has a longer life expectancy than mine. That's roughly £30,000 I've been diddled out of. IMO that sort of thievery isn't politically toxic enough.

I don't agree that the NHS is a "sacred cow" either. But there are really only three funding models: healthcare directly funded by taxation, healthcare funded by universal mandatory public insurance, or healthcare funded by optional commercial insurance.

The fundamental issue is that healthcare is expensive. Cutting-edge medicine and cutting-edge surgery means that people will survive things that would have killed them, and killed them pretty rapidly, even ten or twenty years ago. That costs money, and lots of it. The NHS have last year approved a new drug based on gene therapy to help people with a rare form of haemophilia which would likely otherwise be fatal. It's brilliant. It is also £2,600,000 per dose.

It ultimately doesn't matter which funding model you choose, the fact is that it is expensive.

Germany has a mandatory health insurance system which has a fee of about 15% of your gross income, with the option to top up privately for additional cover/extra benefits. So yes, direct income taxation is lower in Germany than in the UK (income tax rates are about the same but they don't have NI) but you're still then paying the same 15% out for your healthcare. If you think the UK would cut taxes after bringing in a German-style funding model then I've got a bridge to sell you.

To be honest I don't actually have strong opinions, but rather strong questions. I understand people will have paid into the state pension their whole lives but I do think it's worth asking if we really need a triple-lock? If it matches wage growth or inflation then does it really need to increase 2.5% just because that's highest metric every April? It's not something any political party wants to touch because pensions are a massive voting bloc.

Same with the NHS; we're told it's broken and underfunded yet it's received increased spending year-on-year. If nothing else it's certainly reasonable to ask where the money goes and why it's still struggling, but many don't like the idea of potential NHS reforms because they fear it will give way to privatisation (to be fair not an unreasonable fair with a potential Reform government come 2029). It does get ripped off in a lot of areas as well to be fair.

Considering how much tax people already pay in the UK, be that income, national insurance, road, car, capital gains and VAT, I think it's absolutely fair to not want more, especially when government trust is so low. The only other tax I could endorse is a land value tax because the people that affects most won't be the worse off on society, but unfortunately that also means it won't happen because landowners are more powerful than pensioners.

To relate this back to the current subject of the thread, this is why I'm not confident with Andy Burnham's proposal for it. He might have a bit more charisma but I don't think that'll be enough to win, and at the end of the day he's not too different than Starmer in terms of what they stand for. As the joke goes - a Blairite, a Brownite and Corbynite walk into a bar. The barman says "Hello Andy".

 

[Uncle Buck]

It is really shocking how the custodians of the money of the ordinary people (pension funds, insurance, investments) try to get the best possible returns for depositors / investors / pensioners by maximising rents, demanding highest possible profits, asset stripping etc etc . It is as if the working people didn't want lower pensions, smaller investments, higher insurance premiums......

Custodians of the money of which group of ordinary people? An insane proportion of working age people don’t have any savings, can barely afford a house and are crushed by rent. Are we just to shrug and say “well, it is the result of rational allocations of capital in the past, so we must do nothing about it”? It should be in productive investments, not parasitical activities.

 

[ainsworth74]

Same with the NHS; we're told it's broken and underfunded yet it's received increased spending year-on-year. If nothing else it's certainly reasonable to ask where the money goes and why it's still struggling, but many don't like the idea of potential NHS reforms because they fear it will give way to privatisation (to be fair not an unreasonable fair with a potential Reform government come 2029). It does get ripped off in a lot of areas as well to be fair.

Of course the issues are that whilst funding is increasing the demands are also rising alongside. We're getting older as a population and older people require more medical care so just to stand still the NHS needs more funding to treat all the extra people with age related conditions. Whilst this will be more local context dependent we're often also getting sicker as well and getting sicker younger. We know that poverty tends to come with worse health outcomes and requires more treatment. So areas where poverty is comparatively higher also are likely to be calling more heavily on the NHS.

So those two things alone are going to be gobbling up any funding increases that may come...

That's before you get into more thorny questions about whether the NHS is actually under managed as an organisation at this point. You have a lot of clinicians running around doing admin work rather than actually dealing with patients because the managers and/or admin staff that would have done that have already been cut in previous rounds of reorganisations/budget cuts. So the money that is going in is now not going as far as it could have done.

Then there's the big elephant in the room that is of course social care. One of the reasons that hospitals and in particular A&E and ambulances struggle is that there isn't space in A&E for the ambulances to handover to A&E, the reason that there isn't the space for A&E to take the patients is because they can't send their patients onto a mainline ward, and the reason the mainline ward cannot take the patient from A&E is because their beds are full of people who no longer require hospital treatment but cannot just be discharged home without a care package in place.

So yeah we're spending more money on the NHS but a lot of that is because we just need more healthcare than ever before!

 

[RT4038]

Custodians of the money of which group of ordinary people? An insane proportion of working age people don’t have any savings, can barely afford a house and are crushed by rent. Are we just to shrug and say “well, it is the result of rational allocations of capital in the past, so we must do nothing about it”? It should be in productive investments, not parasitical activities.

I don't know what counts as an insane proportion, but every 'working age' person I know has got a pension of some sort they and their employer pays into, the funds of which need to keeping up with and preferably beating inflation, in order to fund their retirement. I am sure if productive investments earn more for these funds than parasitical activities (whatever they are?) then these pension funds will only be too happy to invest in them.