Hacker News Reader

Comment by monkeydust | Hacker News Reader

I think ...or hope...he ends more right than left and manages to do what Starmer failed to do a year ago which is to make major reforms to the Welfare system. Its just not sustainable.

View on HN

There really isn't a lot of slack in the welfare system unless you're prepared to be very short sighted and go back to "tent city" levels of homelessness. Which is partly why all previous attempts to cut it have failed. Maybe declaring certain areas of high rent off-limits for housing benefit, but then you have to raise the salaries of NHS staff and teachers living in London so they can afford to work there.

Maybe if the Miliband reforms pay off and certain critical things get built and gas prices return to normal, Labour will be able to take credit for lower electricity prices? Unless it's all spent on datacenters, which would be even worse political doom.

Personally I'd go with the "mansion tax" but that requires ignoring the well-connected screaming. They did manage that with VAT on private school fees.

Yeah but the VAT on school fees meant a load of those children had to go to state schools so we ended up paying for it anyway.

Wasn't it something like a 3-4% reduction in private school pupil numbers? And some of those would have ended up homeschooled rather than state.

A rough calculation: £8,580 funding per child at state school, ~90,000 less in private schools and in state schools so about £770 million more required for state school funding and this measure is supposed to bring in about £1.7 billion a year...

So it looks like it would pay for itself?

Edit: We don't charge VAT on private healthcare - so charging it on private education looks a bit inconsistent to me.

As someone who has lived in a 'mixed block' in zone 1, I think it's delusional to characterise social housing tenants as 'teachers and nurses'. I suspect most teachers and nurses are already in private sector housing in London.

I think it could be OK to sell all social hosing in Zone 1/2 and use that money to pay higher wages for teachers and nurses plus state built replacement social housing in zone 4-6. There's probably some other space in the welfare system, look at the motability scandal or the increase in PIP claims.

What would happen to the people who live in the houses?

I assume you would build the new social hosing, move folks over then you'll be able to sell the zone 1 houses they came out of and so on and so forth.

A lot of social housing in the UK (about 45%) isn't owned by councils so can't really be sold off by the state?

That's fine that should stay as social housing then. It's probably even better this way as it's still possible to place people who for example absolutely have to be in kensington or islington there.

Social housing is the council budget - I was referring to Housing Benefit.

Isn't it part of the problem that these are two sides of the same coin, yet owned by different people.

Dame Shirley is that you? I thought you died last month.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/may/05/dame-shirley...

ETA: there are possibly five hundred schools in Zone 2 alone. That is maybe 35,000 school staff you're saying should not be socially housed in about 35 square miles. They all have to commute in because, why?

Seriously social housing is not teachers and nurses, you'd know this if you'd lived in or amongst it.

Let's assume for a moment it is teachers and nurses. You think that they shouldn't be allowed a sallery that enables them to live in private accommodation? To choose from the whole market, get a mortgage with their partner wherever they chose? I think that's such a problematic view and builds a horrible society. I'd like teaching to be a well paid profession, why's that such a bad thing?

You're putting a whole lot of words into my mouth that I didn't say. Offensively so, frankly. So I am not otherwise going to reply to this.

Massive handouts via welfare programs is the only thing that keeps left leaning parties in power anywhere in the west. They've failed at bringing prosperity so they just court retirees, the unemployed and hire more government workers. And unfortunately those who rely on welfare outnumber those who work and pay taxes in a lot of western countries, because of the lack of prosperity... Need to hit rock bottom à la Argentina for people to wake up.

At least in the UK we’ve recently had 14 years of right leaning party and they might have different rhetoric around it but clearly no one has the stomach to do anything meaningful. Most right leaning voters are old people who love drinking up that welfare.

> old people who love drinking up that welfare

while complaining about welfare

Reply on news.ycombinator.com