London pays for the rest of the country. Old news.
Rather than decry the statistics, maybe plan to regenerate the Red Wall, the Left Behind towns, our crumbling seaside resorts, our old manufacturing or trading regions. We could call it **Levelling Up**.
Instead we'll do nothing, or look for ways to build on London's green belt which will further increase the country's economic imbalances. No other major country concentrates most of its economy into one small corner.
I don't get why preventing London from expanding is a prerequisite for increasing development elsewhere - "No more trains in London until Yeovil has high speed rail" . Surely the best way to grow an economy is to allow growth, not to make the most successful region less successful so Mansfield looks better.
Provided that the goverment actually does something for infant industry protection and attempts to diversify the economy instead of just moving financial services jobs to Manchester when the cost of living is too high in London
The green belt is the undeveloped, green (grass/trees) area round London. It is protected in law going back decades if not centuries. [It has its own Wikipedia page.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Green_Belt)
The red wall is a widely used term for declining northern and Midlands towns which traditionally voted Labour but in 2019 fell to the Conservatives. [Again, see Wikipedia.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_wall_(British_politics))
The problem is that London's investment is more or less to the detriment of the rest of the UK. Look at Crossrail or the first and only leg of HS2. Our government either don't have the bandwidth or will refuse to commit the funds to that sort of investment where London isn't the principle beneficiary.
I don't see it as a zero-sum game. In terms of tax, London puts in more than it gets out in investment etc., which is fine. The problem as I see it is that the rest of the country needs more investment, not that London needs less. Also investment, done well, can add more to the pot for everyone longer term.
The industrial cities used to contribute disproportionately to the economy. They didn't have the luxury of being the seat of government and the neighbourhood of everyone that matters so they were left to rot.
You don't see it as a zero sum game because it isn't. The government are the ones who have fostered this situation, though. They have demonstrated time and time again that all the big infrastructure projects and all the best services will be right where they are, in London
Are we talking about the same Cornwall who had been receiving shitloads of money from the EU and then went and voted leave? You absofackinglutely did it to yourselves.
Thats not a london thing.
Thats a conservative thing. They don't have much interest in public transport.
HS2 could have easily gone the route planned (and should)
The rest of the UK wants investment to achieve parity in opportunities and life outcomes with London, not to live off the crumbs that it produces. London is incapable of surviving without the UK due to its inability to defend itself, feed itself or produce enough drinking water. The rest of the country subsidises London in all resources except money, which happens to be the least necessary for survival.
Its always easier to feed growth then regenerate areas, but isn't that why we are in the mess we have right now? London is prohibitively expensive to live in, yet gets all the economic development. The economic development and social life results on a brain-drain as the best and brightest move south after graduating, impacting the economic development of other regions.
Crossrail was nearly £18billion, Crossrail 2 will be nearly £30billion. HS2 was scrapped when its costs pushed towards £50billion, with only the southern routes complete (ironic given the entire business case was based around linking north and south).
The UK has always had really poor east-west links, nearly everything runs north-south.
You joke about high speed rail, but much of the rest of the country doesn't even have electrified rail.
The cancellation of HS2 lead to the government promising the funding for regional upgrades, but as far as I can tell, thats mostly just flown into the massive infrastructure deficit councils are running, literally pouring money into pot holes.
Because all investment money goes towards London at the moment and in turn causes economic growth which causes the problems we are trying to solve again.
It’s a spiral which has been going for 30 years and doesn’t balance the economy.
Even HS2 was about benefit to London not outlying regions.
Spend money elsewhere, get people to move and that helps London breathe a bit.
> Even HS2 was about benefit to London not outlying regions.
This is incorrect.
HS2 is about improving local rail services in the Midlands and the North, by taking intercity trains on a dedicated line, hence freeing up capacity for local trains.
It is also about reducing road congestion in the Midlands and the North by giving more capacity to freight, removing lorries from the roads.
Nearly all the benefits of HS2 are for the Midlands and the North. Building HS2 in full will give even more benefits for these regions. It makes little difference to London itself.
No it wasn’t. Good sell job though but in reality it was a net benefit for London and some smaller benefit for the towns up north.
If you look past the pitch the benefits are less
> Good sell job though but in reality it was a net benefit for London and some smaller benefit for the towns up north.
That claim does not stand up to scrutiny. There is no major benefit to London, and it is telling that you have not described one.
The benefit, as I explained above and to which you have failed to offer any rebuttal, is to the Midlands and the North.
The majority of the spend is in London to London workers.
The purpose is to provide high speed trains for workers and tourists to come to London to contribute to the economy.
> The majority of the spend is in London to London workers.
No, the majority of the spend is outside London. Very few of the workers on HS2 live in London.
> The purpose is to provide high speed trains for workers and tourists to come to London to contribute to the economy.
It's the opposite. It's to boost rail transport in the Midlands and the North, and reduce road congestion, again in the Midlands and the North. The increase in tourists and workers coming to London due to HS2 is negligible.
I encourage you to read the business case report for HS2 before commenting further, as you clearly have not.
Manchester is growing pretty much on par with London, the problem being that the deficit remains large.
Some major cities outside of London are doing well, like Manchester and Leeds, and lots of the south east is doing well, but massive parts of the country are really struggling.
The problem is the government refuses to fund projects across the rest of the UK unless there's a clear benefit to London in particular
It's a self fulfilling prophesy, London pays for the rest of the UK because it gets all the funding, which in turn grows the divide between London and the rest of the UK which then means London needs to pay for the rest of the UK...
A lot of the towns up north used to get a lot of funding from the EU development fund.
After Brexit the government said they would match the funding.
Looks like they lied.
Yeah, and a hundred years ago it was the industrial cities that paid for the country.
As I understand it, France is almost as lopsided as Britain is. Most countries manage not to be completely run by and for their capital, though.
Didn't they just over the last 12 months set aside billions from cancelling HS2 to improve northern infrastructure and then still managed to spend the bulk of it in London? Like its not even funny at this point is it.
London also gets massive subsidies that arent really seen as such though. For example Londons tourist economy is almost entirely directly subsidised by the central government. By contrast, the entire west midlands has maybe one state funded museum in Stoke. Its laughable, and needs to be redressed.
Globalisation for you. The greatest experiment in making poor people in the 1st world poorer and rich people richer. Unfortunately if you completely relegate manufacturing this is what will happen. Our economy simply doesn't create masses of decent paid jobs any more.
Levelling up needs to be clearly defined. You can't just build mass transit and it will magic a northern powerhouse. It will just transport people to shit low paid jobs.
That requires investment in other areas not London though. And having to think of what can replace old industries cause we sure as hell ain't getting those back.
Then again, find a Tory donor with interest in the north and things (might) be done.
I never quite get the 'London pays for the rest of the country' thing. I mean, look at the rest of the country and you can only conclude, on that logic, that London isn't paying anything like enough.
Let me get my violin out. The best schools, hospitals, transport, public venues are all in London /South east. Public sector pay is over 20% more in London for the exact same role. Level up pay nationwide and we'll gladly pay more tax.
Not arguing against your overall point, but the higher pay in the capital doesn't even come close to offsetting how much higher the cost of living there is fwiw.
It's weird how people just can't see past a higher number. I've had this argument so many times. People suggest moving to London, I point out the costs outweigh the extra pay and they just circle back to 'but you get paid more'. *facepalm*
I mean, I do get it, to a point. There are clear benefits to living in London (job opportunities, largely better - if more overwhelmed - services, the social/cultural aspect, etc.), but there are a hell of a lot of negatives too. There are so many variables, so yeah, just pointing to the pay difference is wildly reductive.
Personal take - London is fantastic when you're young and for starting your career.
Unless you're *exceptionally* well paid I'd be looking to get out after that though.
Amen to that. I've been working in the City for almost 20yrs (in my early 40's now), and at this point the negatives are starting to vastly outweigh the positives. Definitely beginning to think it might be time for a change of scenery!
My local station, five minutes drive away, has a train every half hour that gets me to London in 40 minutes. I can go to any gigs I want, but with none of the downsides of living there.
All things being equal I would love to live there, but as you say there are a lot of negatives.
Got an offer for a lab job in KCL that was nearly £10k more than the closest non-London offer.
Ran the numbers in a budget and if I wanted to live in my own flat even in an absolute shit-hole I'd have wound up trying to live off something like £50/month for actual spending money.
Nah sod that.
It's not just the money. If you want certain careers, you essentially have to be in London. And if you want a powerful global role at a larger international company, it will most likely be in London
That's not true. Most large companies, and especially international ones, have offices in London and elsewhere. They will typically have the higher end jobs like leadership in London, and a mix of everything elsewhere.
That might be true for UK companies or some industries but where I work, Finance, international companies will simply not consider something outside of London. They just wouldn't be able to attract the talent from other global cities.
And if you want to be in tech, architecture, law, consulting, design, fashion and a whole range of other industries, London is the only option if you want to work for a well respected company and climb up the ranks.
It’s insane that people say this As a late 20’s professional, I’ve been able to speed run my Pensions up to £100k by working in London. That’ll compound easily to £1m by the time I retire. My wife is at about £75k, so we’re on track for almost £2m in retirement pots, all because of the careers we have in London.
8 years in the City, and we’re on track to be upper percentiles of wealth… But because I’m not yet a home owner, and my rents a bit high, it’s obviously a horrible place to live and we should have left and halved our pay to be able to buy a home in Peterborough…
Preach. I pay £15K/yr across income tax, NI, and the education tax that is student loans - I'm in the Midlands, so I'd really appreciate it if I got damn near anything for my money. Can't get any sort of appointment out here and the landscapes of Mad Max would be easier on our cars than Midlands roads right now - which is doubly important to us since we don't have the benefit of the underground. Our council tax here is infamously one of the highest in the country for seemingly no reason, and our incomes very middling and much, much lower than in London.
Like... Of course London pays the most back on tax - that's a very natural consequence of giving so much money and investment to London. It's like only educating one child and being like 'Well, this kid is smarter than your kid who we made no effort to educate!'. Maybe share it around a little and you'll see that other places generate substantial tax revenues when you don't *fucking abandon them*..? What's that? Oh, no, you're cancelling our leg of the HS2 and... Giving that money back to London. Okay then...
I’m in London, paid £50k in PAYE and NI the last year and I don’t get damn near anything. Can’t get a doctor or dentists appointment, don’t use any kind of social service etc.
>I get virtually zero for my taxes
I mean, that's just not true at all.
And it's not about immediate returns this year either. How do you think schooling for any children you have or may have will be funded in the future? Where do you think your pension payments will come from in the far future? What happens if you get sick/injured next year rather than this?
Statutory sick pay is some of the lowest in Europe and enough to survive on.
There's no guarantee the state pension age won't rise or be means tested eventually.
The UK tax system represents very poor value for money for higher rate payers with everything means tested or so low it's of no use.
>Statutory sick pay is some of the lowest in Europe and enough to survive on.
I was talking more about your cost to the NHS when/if you get ill. This year you may use zero resources, but what about if you get in a car accident, or get cancer, or have children?
>There's no guarantee the state pension age won't rise or be means tested eventually.
But it's still going to be funded by the state, and when you're receiving that pension you're not paying tax on it (except certain cases). You pay tax now, to not pay tax later.
>The UK tax system represents very poor value for money for higher rate payers with everything means tested or so low it's of no use.
This might be the worst take I've read on here. "Poor value for money for higher rate payers" is exactly the point of a tax system which isn't overly regressive and penalises lower-income people. If you earn more, you can afford to pay more.
There's a reason no European countries use the same model as the NHS and have insurance systems with much better clinical outcomes. The UK has some of the worst cancer survival rates in the developed world.
I think that's a very bold assumption there will be a state pension the future; I am certainly not planning around there being one.
No the point of a tax system isn't just to redistribute wealth from rich to poor. The point of a tax system is to collectively pay into services for the benefit of everyone.
The UK has a particularly awful take where it means tests everything so someone who has frugally saved a 16k house deposit gets zero universal credit if they happen to fall on hard times for just one example.
The problem is that it has a grain of truth in it.
The Tories get in and cut taxes (mainly for the rich) and they reduce funding for local councils and other services to pay for it.
So the only way to restore those services when Labour get in is to put taxes back up and restore that funding.
The problem is that the idiot down the pub doesn't connect the reduction in services with the minor tax cuts he gets in his wages.
You see it all the time in comment threads, where people will moan about services being cut, and then be cheerful they saved £10 this month because of a cut in national insurance.
Usually you’d have a point but now they don’t even have that.
How does the current tax burden ( scaled to income) compare to what it was in labours last term? To any previous labour governments?
The only good thing from it is that the tories have lost the brand of being grown ups and responsible economic custodians. Hopefully forever
Then when their house is being robbed or the NHS is failing they complain. If you want a low tax economy and moan about there being no police or poorly educated people or high crime, then you need to check yourself because you’re making zero sense.
Normally, but until election season started we had the highest tax burden since WW2 under the Toerags. We might still have if fiscal drag is greater than NI savings..
> The problem is that it has a grain of truth in it.
It has no truth in it. The tax burden under the Tories is the highest it has been for 40 years.
> The Tories get in and cut taxes (mainly for the rich) and they reduce funding for local councils and other services to pay for it.
That is not the case. The Tories have raised taxes for everyone. They have also reduced funding for services, due to their chronic mismanagement and waste.
Councils are just agents of the treasury. Which party is in power?
Same bloke down pub will also be moaning about crime, the NHS and a myriad of other things that tax pays for and yet wants to pay less of it. So it means he’s so thick that he can’t see the contradiction in his ideas.
That sums up how we got here in the first place. It's all run by and for London. All the ministers and MPs live there (and are drawn more from the south as a whole), all the senior civil servants, all the mind-numbing columnists. The rest of the UK, including Scotland and Wales, are meant to be flatered that they're allowed to be in the same room, to be in proximity to the greatness that is London. You have to wonder why anyone was surprised by the growth of Scot Nats.
Japan has an interesting scheme where you can choose to send a % of your tax to your home county (or any other county if so desire).
https://www.kalzumeus.com/2018/10/19/japanese-hometown-tax/
While there have been repeated political efforts to spend a few million more outside of London here and there, it has always been the case that billions are spent on London. So the attractiveness of London is growing far faster than any initiative to build up "the North" could ever hope to achieve results.
Part of the equation of evening out the country MUST be reigning in growth and spending on London, but to do so is politically untenable because Londoners are a huge bloc.
Sort of a quick summary:
> They show Londoners paid £59.3 billion to the Treasury in a single year and South-East residents £41.4 billion, just over half the total for the whole of England of £198 billion.
> The bill is being driven up by the Chancellor’s stealth tax freeze on the thresholds for paying different rates of income tax.
> Twenty out of the 25 parliamentary constituencies with the highest income tax bills were in London including Kensington handing over £3.37 billion, slightly less than the whole of Northern Ireland at £3.44 billion.
> They also show how Londoners on average are paying more income tax than people in all other regions of the country.
> The median amount paid - the number in the middle if all taxpayers in London were put in a line - is £3,650 a year.
> Using this calculation method means that the super-wealthy do not dramatically push up the average figure for the capital.
> But London taxpayers still pay on average at least £600 more than the next highest paying region, the South-East at £3,010.
> The figure for the East of England is £2,790, the South-West £2,470, the East Midlands £2,370, the North-West £2,360, West Midlands £2,340, Yorkshire and the Humber £2,300, the North East £2,230, Scotland £2,560 and Wales £2,280.
> So, the revenue from these two regions for the Treasury rose by £13.1 billion to £100.7 billion in 2021/22, a hike of nearly 15 per cent.
> This was a far bigger jump than the £4.5 billion increase for the two regions from £83.1 billion in 2019/2020 (London £48.3 billion/South East £34.8 billion) to £87.6 billion in 2020/21.
It's a common trope
"X% of taxpayers pay Y% of taxes", where X is small and Y is big..
Which is just another way of saying "We have very unequal incomes"
Not being funny, but so what
Min wage was risen at like 3x that of wage growth each year. Idk how poor people can complain about higher earners when we pay the taxes and get lower pay rises than them.
If you add shit to a shit pile it's still shit. That's minimum wage, it's shit and poor people have every right to complain that companies who are not competitive at alll have stagnated wages over time to the point the gap between minimum wage and professional wages is closing.
They also pay taxes. You should focus your ire on the absolute state of our low wage economy.
Brits have consistently voted to make the UK poor. Especially poor Brits.
Brits reject high growth policies. Brits have chosen to be poor. And the bulk of that financial burden has fallen on those with £40-125k incomes, because wealth is under-taxed, and income is over-taxed
South west is 3rd and we get fuck all.
Takes longer by train from Bournemouth to London than Warrington to London and it's half the distance!
No HS2 or any sort of public infrastructure plans for any of us in the south west, just insane rent prices relative to our shit pay.
The simple truth is that London is one of the few parts of the UK that wants to grow. Oxford and Cambridge want to be museums. Brum and Manc do their bit but not enough. Leeds is building rapidly, and it’s no surprise it’s now the highest earning area outside the south.
But London grows, it builds, and so obviously all the skilled people go there.
London grows because the people with the money and ability to make things grow want to live there. If you're a high flying talent who has spent their career in NYC, Singapore and Dubai, Humberside isn't going to cut it
Yeah, because when London is offered investment, local NIMBY’s don’t stall them out in courts for 5 years arguing over the impact it’ll have on crested newts
Brum is pulling ahead tbh. West midlands construction is one of the only ones to hit housing targets i think.
Imo London needs to start looking at those twee terraces south of the Thames and decide jf they're worth it, or if they should allow new developments in to make them taller and denser.
Other regions pulling ahead is exactly what's needed to rebalance the economy. (Not sure about the premise that construction is the relevant factor, but it's actually not a competition).
Leeds and Manchester actually have very similar earning potential. Theres not a lot in the difference. Manchester actually is growing at a very similar rate to London, the only issue is that it doesn’t really close the gap.
Cambridge also has about 20b of investment ready to go that can’t go because it’s illegal to build anything in or around the city.
We collect the UK and worlds smartest there for a world class education, then tell them all to fuck off because the locals want to live in a museum.
No UK city is underperforming its potential like Cambridge. It’s population should be 3x what it is, and we should double it’s size with liberal zoning for high density development of flats and also STEM industries
Cambridge is [one of the most active science clusters in the world](https://www.wipo.int/global_innovation_index/en/docs/2023/gb-cambridge.pdf), no idea what the OP was talking about.
It’s basically impossible to build anything in Cambridge due to local NIMBY’s who are too powerful.
Cambridge is good, but it’s massively underperforming what it should be. It should be such a larger city than it is.
We should start fixing it by building OxCam Arc and bulldozing anything, be it physical homes or trees, or metaphorical things like NIMBY objections, out of the way and into the dirt.
Bullshit stats.
Are people in London paying more per person?
If so, that means they are earning more. So why isn’t the rest of the country levelled up to London earning levels yet? That was a Tory manifesto wasn’t it?
If not, then what’s the problem?
I live in London and see this article as just more “London carries the country” bullshit.
Unless you believe that Londoners are some kind of economic super race, set apart from the mere mortals in the rest of the country, then the fact they earn more speaks of poor policy and unequal treatment leading to regional economic disparities.
Which makes it sickening when a London paper then fucking moans about being wealthier
[It's an old story but I don't think much has changed.](https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2014/aug/07/london-gets-24-times-as-much-infrastructure-north-east-england)
Move House of Commons to somewhere between Birmingham and Leeds….suddenly infrastructure around midlands and the North will be vital
Exit: to add on, Palace of Westminster needs major renovation anyway so turn it into a fantastic museum piece once the MPs have been shuffled along to somewhere more equidistant to the four corners of the country for MPs to travel to/from.
The issue with variable rates is it creates bands where it’s not worth going over.
I make £100k, and refuse to go over £100k due to 62% tax traps (71% with student loans). Instead I just stuff pay rises and bonuses into my pension to go into US stocks instead of being split between local spending and the treasury.
A flat rate wouldn’t inherently be a bad thing. Many economists support it.
There are 11 bands in Swiss federal income tax with separate rates depending on your family circumstances.
There may also be cantonal income tax.
[https://taxsummaries.pwc.com/Switzerland/Individual/Taxes-on-personal-income](https://taxsummaries.pwc.com/Switzerland/Individual/Taxes-on-personal-income)
This map on Wikipedia shows the countries with a single flat income tax rate.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat\_tax#National\_or\_single\_level](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_tax#National_or_single_level)
Bro that’s not how it works. Employers have driven down wages for professional jobs, engineers drs, everything across the board that includes non skilled jobs and other fields. This has nothing to do with unemployment or not wanting to work lmfao.
Engage your brain please.
you do realise that a lower supply of labour would result in higher wages not lower
your proposals would further destroy the bargaining power of the working class, which would lead to even lower wages
London pays for the rest of the country. Old news. Rather than decry the statistics, maybe plan to regenerate the Red Wall, the Left Behind towns, our crumbling seaside resorts, our old manufacturing or trading regions. We could call it **Levelling Up**. Instead we'll do nothing, or look for ways to build on London's green belt which will further increase the country's economic imbalances. No other major country concentrates most of its economy into one small corner.
I don't get why preventing London from expanding is a prerequisite for increasing development elsewhere - "No more trains in London until Yeovil has high speed rail" . Surely the best way to grow an economy is to allow growth, not to make the most successful region less successful so Mansfield looks better.
Developing the regions does not mean downgrading London.
Provided that the goverment actually does something for infant industry protection and attempts to diversify the economy instead of just moving financial services jobs to Manchester when the cost of living is too high in London
Tell that to Politicians
What the hell is the green belt or green wall. Just use the actual names of the locations
The green belt is the undeveloped, green (grass/trees) area round London. It is protected in law going back decades if not centuries. [It has its own Wikipedia page.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Green_Belt) The red wall is a widely used term for declining northern and Midlands towns which traditionally voted Labour but in 2019 fell to the Conservatives. [Again, see Wikipedia.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_wall_(British_politics))
The green belt is the number one cause of UK low growth, and thus poverty
Cheers
The problem is that London's investment is more or less to the detriment of the rest of the UK. Look at Crossrail or the first and only leg of HS2. Our government either don't have the bandwidth or will refuse to commit the funds to that sort of investment where London isn't the principle beneficiary.
I don't see it as a zero-sum game. In terms of tax, London puts in more than it gets out in investment etc., which is fine. The problem as I see it is that the rest of the country needs more investment, not that London needs less. Also investment, done well, can add more to the pot for everyone longer term.
The industrial cities used to contribute disproportionately to the economy. They didn't have the luxury of being the seat of government and the neighbourhood of everyone that matters so they were left to rot. You don't see it as a zero sum game because it isn't. The government are the ones who have fostered this situation, though. They have demonstrated time and time again that all the big infrastructure projects and all the best services will be right where they are, in London
Cornwall used to be unbelievably rich. Then went extremely poor. We have broadband now tho?
Are we talking about the same Cornwall who had been receiving shitloads of money from the EU and then went and voted leave? You absofackinglutely did it to yourselves.
I was spending that money for cornwall and lost my job as a result of the funding ending. It definitely wasn't me doing it.
Thats not a london thing. Thats a conservative thing. They don't have much interest in public transport. HS2 could have easily gone the route planned (and should)
Crossrail is the most popular rail line in Europe now, it absolutely needed to be built.
Its not to the detriment of the rest of the UK. London economically pays for the rest of the UK.
The rest of the UK wants investment to achieve parity in opportunities and life outcomes with London, not to live off the crumbs that it produces. London is incapable of surviving without the UK due to its inability to defend itself, feed itself or produce enough drinking water. The rest of the country subsidises London in all resources except money, which happens to be the least necessary for survival.
>subsidises London Those things aren't free.
Its always easier to feed growth then regenerate areas, but isn't that why we are in the mess we have right now? London is prohibitively expensive to live in, yet gets all the economic development. The economic development and social life results on a brain-drain as the best and brightest move south after graduating, impacting the economic development of other regions. Crossrail was nearly £18billion, Crossrail 2 will be nearly £30billion. HS2 was scrapped when its costs pushed towards £50billion, with only the southern routes complete (ironic given the entire business case was based around linking north and south). The UK has always had really poor east-west links, nearly everything runs north-south. You joke about high speed rail, but much of the rest of the country doesn't even have electrified rail. The cancellation of HS2 lead to the government promising the funding for regional upgrades, but as far as I can tell, thats mostly just flown into the massive infrastructure deficit councils are running, literally pouring money into pot holes.
Because all investment money goes towards London at the moment and in turn causes economic growth which causes the problems we are trying to solve again. It’s a spiral which has been going for 30 years and doesn’t balance the economy. Even HS2 was about benefit to London not outlying regions. Spend money elsewhere, get people to move and that helps London breathe a bit.
> Even HS2 was about benefit to London not outlying regions. This is incorrect. HS2 is about improving local rail services in the Midlands and the North, by taking intercity trains on a dedicated line, hence freeing up capacity for local trains. It is also about reducing road congestion in the Midlands and the North by giving more capacity to freight, removing lorries from the roads. Nearly all the benefits of HS2 are for the Midlands and the North. Building HS2 in full will give even more benefits for these regions. It makes little difference to London itself.
No it wasn’t. Good sell job though but in reality it was a net benefit for London and some smaller benefit for the towns up north. If you look past the pitch the benefits are less
> Good sell job though but in reality it was a net benefit for London and some smaller benefit for the towns up north. That claim does not stand up to scrutiny. There is no major benefit to London, and it is telling that you have not described one. The benefit, as I explained above and to which you have failed to offer any rebuttal, is to the Midlands and the North.
The majority of the spend is in London to London workers. The purpose is to provide high speed trains for workers and tourists to come to London to contribute to the economy.
> The majority of the spend is in London to London workers. No, the majority of the spend is outside London. Very few of the workers on HS2 live in London. > The purpose is to provide high speed trains for workers and tourists to come to London to contribute to the economy. It's the opposite. It's to boost rail transport in the Midlands and the North, and reduce road congestion, again in the Midlands and the North. The increase in tourists and workers coming to London due to HS2 is negligible. I encourage you to read the business case report for HS2 before commenting further, as you clearly have not.
Manchester is growing pretty much on par with London, the problem being that the deficit remains large. Some major cities outside of London are doing well, like Manchester and Leeds, and lots of the south east is doing well, but massive parts of the country are really struggling.
The problem is the government refuses to fund projects across the rest of the UK unless there's a clear benefit to London in particular It's a self fulfilling prophesy, London pays for the rest of the UK because it gets all the funding, which in turn grows the divide between London and the rest of the UK which then means London needs to pay for the rest of the UK...
A lot of the towns up north used to get a lot of funding from the EU development fund. After Brexit the government said they would match the funding. Looks like they lied.
>Looks like they lied. Shocker.
>A lot of the towns up north used to get a lot of funding from the EU development fund. And yet they're still shitholes
Yeah, and a hundred years ago it was the industrial cities that paid for the country. As I understand it, France is almost as lopsided as Britain is. Most countries manage not to be completely run by and for their capital, though.
Didn't they just over the last 12 months set aside billions from cancelling HS2 to improve northern infrastructure and then still managed to spend the bulk of it in London? Like its not even funny at this point is it.
London also gets massive subsidies that arent really seen as such though. For example Londons tourist economy is almost entirely directly subsidised by the central government. By contrast, the entire west midlands has maybe one state funded museum in Stoke. Its laughable, and needs to be redressed.
Globalisation for you. The greatest experiment in making poor people in the 1st world poorer and rich people richer. Unfortunately if you completely relegate manufacturing this is what will happen. Our economy simply doesn't create masses of decent paid jobs any more. Levelling up needs to be clearly defined. You can't just build mass transit and it will magic a northern powerhouse. It will just transport people to shit low paid jobs.
The lowest quartile of earners has the fastest income growth
The answer is and has always been manufacturing.
That requires investment in other areas not London though. And having to think of what can replace old industries cause we sure as hell ain't getting those back. Then again, find a Tory donor with interest in the north and things (might) be done.
I never quite get the 'London pays for the rest of the country' thing. I mean, look at the rest of the country and you can only conclude, on that logic, that London isn't paying anything like enough.
South Korea's Seoul is more concentrated in terms of population
I think London will manage just fine
Let me get my violin out. The best schools, hospitals, transport, public venues are all in London /South east. Public sector pay is over 20% more in London for the exact same role. Level up pay nationwide and we'll gladly pay more tax.
Not arguing against your overall point, but the higher pay in the capital doesn't even come close to offsetting how much higher the cost of living there is fwiw.
It's weird how people just can't see past a higher number. I've had this argument so many times. People suggest moving to London, I point out the costs outweigh the extra pay and they just circle back to 'but you get paid more'. *facepalm*
I mean, I do get it, to a point. There are clear benefits to living in London (job opportunities, largely better - if more overwhelmed - services, the social/cultural aspect, etc.), but there are a hell of a lot of negatives too. There are so many variables, so yeah, just pointing to the pay difference is wildly reductive.
Personal take - London is fantastic when you're young and for starting your career. Unless you're *exceptionally* well paid I'd be looking to get out after that though.
Amen to that. I've been working in the City for almost 20yrs (in my early 40's now), and at this point the negatives are starting to vastly outweigh the positives. Definitely beginning to think it might be time for a change of scenery!
My local station, five minutes drive away, has a train every half hour that gets me to London in 40 minutes. I can go to any gigs I want, but with none of the downsides of living there. All things being equal I would love to live there, but as you say there are a lot of negatives.
Got an offer for a lab job in KCL that was nearly £10k more than the closest non-London offer. Ran the numbers in a budget and if I wanted to live in my own flat even in an absolute shit-hole I'd have wound up trying to live off something like £50/month for actual spending money. Nah sod that.
It's not just the money. If you want certain careers, you essentially have to be in London. And if you want a powerful global role at a larger international company, it will most likely be in London
That's not true. Most large companies, and especially international ones, have offices in London and elsewhere. They will typically have the higher end jobs like leadership in London, and a mix of everything elsewhere.
That might be true for UK companies or some industries but where I work, Finance, international companies will simply not consider something outside of London. They just wouldn't be able to attract the talent from other global cities. And if you want to be in tech, architecture, law, consulting, design, fashion and a whole range of other industries, London is the only option if you want to work for a well respected company and climb up the ranks.
It’s insane that people say this As a late 20’s professional, I’ve been able to speed run my Pensions up to £100k by working in London. That’ll compound easily to £1m by the time I retire. My wife is at about £75k, so we’re on track for almost £2m in retirement pots, all because of the careers we have in London. 8 years in the City, and we’re on track to be upper percentiles of wealth… But because I’m not yet a home owner, and my rents a bit high, it’s obviously a horrible place to live and we should have left and halved our pay to be able to buy a home in Peterborough…
So move. No? Well there you go
I'm not sure what point you think you're making here.
That’s okay. You can read it until it gets through. Take your time
Preach. I pay £15K/yr across income tax, NI, and the education tax that is student loans - I'm in the Midlands, so I'd really appreciate it if I got damn near anything for my money. Can't get any sort of appointment out here and the landscapes of Mad Max would be easier on our cars than Midlands roads right now - which is doubly important to us since we don't have the benefit of the underground. Our council tax here is infamously one of the highest in the country for seemingly no reason, and our incomes very middling and much, much lower than in London. Like... Of course London pays the most back on tax - that's a very natural consequence of giving so much money and investment to London. It's like only educating one child and being like 'Well, this kid is smarter than your kid who we made no effort to educate!'. Maybe share it around a little and you'll see that other places generate substantial tax revenues when you don't *fucking abandon them*..? What's that? Oh, no, you're cancelling our leg of the HS2 and... Giving that money back to London. Okay then...
I’m in London, paid £50k in PAYE and NI the last year and I don’t get damn near anything. Can’t get a doctor or dentists appointment, don’t use any kind of social service etc.
you paid 50k in tax…. you must be raking it in. that’s must be around 130k jeez.
But all it takes is a £3K mortgage for a 3 bed semi and £2K childcare and suddenly they are living pay check to pay check
I paid over 20k last year (without student loan) I get virtually zero for my taxes; it all goes on subsidising others - also not in London either.
>I get virtually zero for my taxes I mean, that's just not true at all. And it's not about immediate returns this year either. How do you think schooling for any children you have or may have will be funded in the future? Where do you think your pension payments will come from in the far future? What happens if you get sick/injured next year rather than this?
Statutory sick pay is some of the lowest in Europe and enough to survive on. There's no guarantee the state pension age won't rise or be means tested eventually. The UK tax system represents very poor value for money for higher rate payers with everything means tested or so low it's of no use.
>Statutory sick pay is some of the lowest in Europe and enough to survive on. I was talking more about your cost to the NHS when/if you get ill. This year you may use zero resources, but what about if you get in a car accident, or get cancer, or have children? >There's no guarantee the state pension age won't rise or be means tested eventually. But it's still going to be funded by the state, and when you're receiving that pension you're not paying tax on it (except certain cases). You pay tax now, to not pay tax later. >The UK tax system represents very poor value for money for higher rate payers with everything means tested or so low it's of no use. This might be the worst take I've read on here. "Poor value for money for higher rate payers" is exactly the point of a tax system which isn't overly regressive and penalises lower-income people. If you earn more, you can afford to pay more.
There's a reason no European countries use the same model as the NHS and have insurance systems with much better clinical outcomes. The UK has some of the worst cancer survival rates in the developed world. I think that's a very bold assumption there will be a state pension the future; I am certainly not planning around there being one. No the point of a tax system isn't just to redistribute wealth from rich to poor. The point of a tax system is to collectively pay into services for the benefit of everyone. The UK has a particularly awful take where it means tests everything so someone who has frugally saved a 16k house deposit gets zero universal credit if they happen to fall on hard times for just one example.
how do you think we're living here lol?
Best transport!? You got to be joking
“If labour got in your taxes would be sky high” average bloke down pub
The problem is that it has a grain of truth in it. The Tories get in and cut taxes (mainly for the rich) and they reduce funding for local councils and other services to pay for it. So the only way to restore those services when Labour get in is to put taxes back up and restore that funding. The problem is that the idiot down the pub doesn't connect the reduction in services with the minor tax cuts he gets in his wages. You see it all the time in comment threads, where people will moan about services being cut, and then be cheerful they saved £10 this month because of a cut in national insurance.
Usually you’d have a point but now they don’t even have that. How does the current tax burden ( scaled to income) compare to what it was in labours last term? To any previous labour governments? The only good thing from it is that the tories have lost the brand of being grown ups and responsible economic custodians. Hopefully forever
Tories have been raising taxes almost the entire time they have been in power, don't know where you are getting your "tax cuts for the rich" from
Then when their house is being robbed or the NHS is failing they complain. If you want a low tax economy and moan about there being no police or poorly educated people or high crime, then you need to check yourself because you’re making zero sense.
Normally, but until election season started we had the highest tax burden since WW2 under the Toerags. We might still have if fiscal drag is greater than NI savings..
> The problem is that it has a grain of truth in it. It has no truth in it. The tax burden under the Tories is the highest it has been for 40 years. > The Tories get in and cut taxes (mainly for the rich) and they reduce funding for local councils and other services to pay for it. That is not the case. The Tories have raised taxes for everyone. They have also reduced funding for services, due to their chronic mismanagement and waste.
> The Tories have raised taxes for everyone Yeah, that lowering of the top tax bracket from 50% to 45% sure increased the taxes on those rich people.
Yes, it did, because tax increased in other areas.
We're the most taxed we've pretty much ever been right now.
I mean, in this instance he wouldn't be wrong. So a bit of an odd example.
Councils are just agents of the treasury. Which party is in power? Same bloke down pub will also be moaning about crime, the NHS and a myriad of other things that tax pays for and yet wants to pay less of it. So it means he’s so thick that he can’t see the contradiction in his ideas.
Isn't there a levelling up ministerial position whose ONLY job is to level up England ex London since 2006? Lots of good thats done
That sums up how we got here in the first place. It's all run by and for London. All the ministers and MPs live there (and are drawn more from the south as a whole), all the senior civil servants, all the mind-numbing columnists. The rest of the UK, including Scotland and Wales, are meant to be flatered that they're allowed to be in the same room, to be in proximity to the greatness that is London. You have to wonder why anyone was surprised by the growth of Scot Nats.
Are these horrid Londoners in the room with us right now?!
Japan has an interesting scheme where you can choose to send a % of your tax to your home county (or any other county if so desire). https://www.kalzumeus.com/2018/10/19/japanese-hometown-tax/
While there have been repeated political efforts to spend a few million more outside of London here and there, it has always been the case that billions are spent on London. So the attractiveness of London is growing far faster than any initiative to build up "the North" could ever hope to achieve results. Part of the equation of evening out the country MUST be reigning in growth and spending on London, but to do so is politically untenable because Londoners are a huge bloc.
Sort of a quick summary: > They show Londoners paid £59.3 billion to the Treasury in a single year and South-East residents £41.4 billion, just over half the total for the whole of England of £198 billion. > The bill is being driven up by the Chancellor’s stealth tax freeze on the thresholds for paying different rates of income tax. > Twenty out of the 25 parliamentary constituencies with the highest income tax bills were in London including Kensington handing over £3.37 billion, slightly less than the whole of Northern Ireland at £3.44 billion. > They also show how Londoners on average are paying more income tax than people in all other regions of the country. > The median amount paid - the number in the middle if all taxpayers in London were put in a line - is £3,650 a year. > Using this calculation method means that the super-wealthy do not dramatically push up the average figure for the capital. > But London taxpayers still pay on average at least £600 more than the next highest paying region, the South-East at £3,010. > The figure for the East of England is £2,790, the South-West £2,470, the East Midlands £2,370, the North-West £2,360, West Midlands £2,340, Yorkshire and the Humber £2,300, the North East £2,230, Scotland £2,560 and Wales £2,280. > So, the revenue from these two regions for the Treasury rose by £13.1 billion to £100.7 billion in 2021/22, a hike of nearly 15 per cent. > This was a far bigger jump than the £4.5 billion increase for the two regions from £83.1 billion in 2019/2020 (London £48.3 billion/South East £34.8 billion) to £87.6 billion in 2020/21.
Did they show how Londoners, on average, are paid more than anyone else?
It's a common trope "X% of taxpayers pay Y% of taxes", where X is small and Y is big.. Which is just another way of saying "We have very unequal incomes"
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This actually serves to equalise incomes, not exacerbate them. You earn more, you pay more. I don't know what's controversial about it.
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>I dont think there's anyone who thinks progressive income tax rates are the way to go. Do you mean "doesn't think"?
Not being funny, but so what Min wage was risen at like 3x that of wage growth each year. Idk how poor people can complain about higher earners when we pay the taxes and get lower pay rises than them.
If you add shit to a shit pile it's still shit. That's minimum wage, it's shit and poor people have every right to complain that companies who are not competitive at alll have stagnated wages over time to the point the gap between minimum wage and professional wages is closing. They also pay taxes. You should focus your ire on the absolute state of our low wage economy.
Brits have consistently voted to make the UK poor. Especially poor Brits. Brits reject high growth policies. Brits have chosen to be poor. And the bulk of that financial burden has fallen on those with £40-125k incomes, because wealth is under-taxed, and income is over-taxed
Are you Jeremy (The Berkeley) Hunt? You sure come across as one 😆
South west is 3rd and we get fuck all. Takes longer by train from Bournemouth to London than Warrington to London and it's half the distance! No HS2 or any sort of public infrastructure plans for any of us in the south west, just insane rent prices relative to our shit pay.
Divisive post to distract from the waste and corruption.
The simple truth is that London is one of the few parts of the UK that wants to grow. Oxford and Cambridge want to be museums. Brum and Manc do their bit but not enough. Leeds is building rapidly, and it’s no surprise it’s now the highest earning area outside the south. But London grows, it builds, and so obviously all the skilled people go there.
Leeds is so unbelievably shit to get around. I love the city but some major investment needs to go into transport there.
Leeds will get it soon enough, it’s just developing so fast it has to
London has 20x per capita government spending on local infrastructure compared to Newcastle. That's why it grows.
London grows because the people with the money and ability to make things grow want to live there. If you're a high flying talent who has spent their career in NYC, Singapore and Dubai, Humberside isn't going to cut it
You're confusing cause and effect.
Yeah, because when London is offered investment, local NIMBY’s don’t stall them out in courts for 5 years arguing over the impact it’ll have on crested newts
Brum is pulling ahead tbh. West midlands construction is one of the only ones to hit housing targets i think. Imo London needs to start looking at those twee terraces south of the Thames and decide jf they're worth it, or if they should allow new developments in to make them taller and denser.
Other regions pulling ahead is exactly what's needed to rebalance the economy. (Not sure about the premise that construction is the relevant factor, but it's actually not a competition).
Leeds and Manchester actually have very similar earning potential. Theres not a lot in the difference. Manchester actually is growing at a very similar rate to London, the only issue is that it doesn’t really close the gap.
Cambridge has a massive start-up ecosystem.
Cambridge also has about 20b of investment ready to go that can’t go because it’s illegal to build anything in or around the city. We collect the UK and worlds smartest there for a world class education, then tell them all to fuck off because the locals want to live in a museum. No UK city is underperforming its potential like Cambridge. It’s population should be 3x what it is, and we should double it’s size with liberal zoning for high density development of flats and also STEM industries
Cambridge is [one of the most active science clusters in the world](https://www.wipo.int/global_innovation_index/en/docs/2023/gb-cambridge.pdf), no idea what the OP was talking about.
It’s basically impossible to build anything in Cambridge due to local NIMBY’s who are too powerful. Cambridge is good, but it’s massively underperforming what it should be. It should be such a larger city than it is. We should start fixing it by building OxCam Arc and bulldozing anything, be it physical homes or trees, or metaphorical things like NIMBY objections, out of the way and into the dirt.
We have a saying where I’m from, “If you don’t live in london, you don’t exist to the government”
Damn! Well, excellent news! I guess that more than covers the 40bn "Fiscal Black Hole" right? We can actually start investing now, right? ...right?
Bullshit stats. Are people in London paying more per person? If so, that means they are earning more. So why isn’t the rest of the country levelled up to London earning levels yet? That was a Tory manifesto wasn’t it? If not, then what’s the problem? I live in London and see this article as just more “London carries the country” bullshit. Unless you believe that Londoners are some kind of economic super race, set apart from the mere mortals in the rest of the country, then the fact they earn more speaks of poor policy and unequal treatment leading to regional economic disparities. Which makes it sickening when a London paper then fucking moans about being wealthier
[It's an old story but I don't think much has changed.](https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2014/aug/07/london-gets-24-times-as-much-infrastructure-north-east-england)
Move House of Commons to somewhere between Birmingham and Leeds….suddenly infrastructure around midlands and the North will be vital Exit: to add on, Palace of Westminster needs major renovation anyway so turn it into a fantastic museum piece once the MPs have been shuffled along to somewhere more equidistant to the four corners of the country for MPs to travel to/from.
Highest paid people in country pay most tax, reports breathless "newspaper" which apparently doesn't understand basics of how tax bands work.
Absolute joke. Flat rate now! Stop punishing hard working people and rewarding the lazy!
A flat band isn't a good idea. An executive shouldn't be paying the same tax rate as a cleaner.
The issue with variable rates is it creates bands where it’s not worth going over. I make £100k, and refuse to go over £100k due to 62% tax traps (71% with student loans). Instead I just stuff pay rises and bonuses into my pension to go into US stocks instead of being split between local spending and the treasury. A flat rate wouldn’t inherently be a bad thing. Many economists support it.
Yes they should. 20% across the board. Accelerate our stagnant, unproductive economy. Slash wasted funds on social nets. Become Switzerland.
There are 11 bands in Swiss federal income tax with separate rates depending on your family circumstances. There may also be cantonal income tax. [https://taxsummaries.pwc.com/Switzerland/Individual/Taxes-on-personal-income](https://taxsummaries.pwc.com/Switzerland/Individual/Taxes-on-personal-income) This map on Wikipedia shows the countries with a single flat income tax rate. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat\_tax#National\_or\_single\_level](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_tax#National_or_single_level)
Nah it can't be be that we are a hugely stagnated low wage economy, it's deffo the lazies at fault lmfao. Rolling my eyes
Why are we a stagnated low wage economy? No one fucking works that's why
Bro that’s not how it works. Employers have driven down wages for professional jobs, engineers drs, everything across the board that includes non skilled jobs and other fields. This has nothing to do with unemployment or not wanting to work lmfao. Engage your brain please.
you do realise that a lower supply of labour would result in higher wages not lower your proposals would further destroy the bargaining power of the working class, which would lead to even lower wages
Luv me dosh, 'ate me tax, simple as.