Cost of living!

[Bibs]

Petrol is up 27%, energy bills up £700 pa, NI up, interest rates up, Council Tax up, household inflation at 8%. 

The average household will be around £3k worse off. Just guessing but a great deal of people, can they afford these extra costs? Are we going to have a big bust up and lots of repossessions again? And how does the BoE raising interest rates help? 

At least my car insurance came down this year!

In the meantime, the govt have written of £5bn in covid loan fraud (which seems pretty easy to recover, surely £500m spent on getting it back would be a good investment?) and £8.7bn on shit PPE including overpaying to the tune of £4.7bn and £2.6bn's worth which was useless and couldn't even be used. 

[LotusLeftLotusRight]

As for interest rates, I caught a few minutes of Martin Lewis on the telly this morning. An excited woman phoned in to ask him where she should deposit a £5000 gift she had received in a high interest account return. She said she could leave it there for a year, but would also like access. The best he could come up with (pre rate increase) was 0.7% with a 3 month notice of withdrawals. That would earn her the princely sum of £35 if she didn’t touch it after 12 months. I think she was a lit bit crestfallen!

[exeterjeep]

30 minutes ago, LotusLeftLotusRight said:

The best he could come up with (pre rate increase) was 0.7% with a 3 month notice of withdrawals.

Easily found one a bit higher at 95 Day Notice Account : 0.82% AER gross variable

[march]

The percentage petrol price increase is a bit disingenuous. From the start of the pandemic (Nov 2019) until now the petrol price had risen by about 14%. So 14% in over 2 years is quite a lot but not the 27% I assume in one year stated.

https://www.racfoundation.org/data/uk-pump-prices-over-time

[LotusFella]

I’m with Ovo Energy for leccy only.  My contract was  100% renewable.  When I quizzed them about the 3 fold increase when on 100% renewable they told me it was the large corporates just force profiteering on the population for being susceptible to covid and hitting their profits last year.  #paybacktime

[Frickin_idiot]

2 hours ago, Bibs said:

Petrol is up 27%, energy bills up £700 pa, NI up, interest rates up, Council Tax up, household inflation at 8%. 

The average household will be around £3k worse off. Just guessing but a great deal of people, can they afford these extra costs? Are we going to have a big bust up and lots of repossessions again? And how does the BoE raising interest rates help? 

At least my car insurance came down this year!

In the meantime, the govt have written of £5bn in covid loan fraud (which seems pretty easy to recover, surely £500m spent on getting it back would be a good investment?) and £8.7bn on shit PPE including overpaying to the tune of £4.7bn and £2.6bn's worth which was useless and couldn't even be used. 

The inflation figure are laughably low. It’s nowhere near representative.

[Bibs]

Didn't Shell just announce £12bn in profit for the year? 

[PaulCP]

I do think the govt should be looking at windfall taxes, not just on energy companies who may have profiteered on gas, electric and petrol/oil, but banks must surely be a prime target, particularly bearing in mind the pretty “offensive” gap between savings and borrowing rates which has materialise over the past 5-6 years.

[Cdm2018]

Tell me about s*** PPE the government contracts that bought a ship full of masks kn95 which weren’t from China then someone made a pretty packet in their bank account 

in the end care homes had to buy hugely inflated prices on the open market to compensate 

personally I think my Evora uses will be carefully considered as at 162 a litre it’s 25% more to run the car this year and I am not going to get a pay rise for 9 year running 

[windymiller]

sad thing is, as ive said before, fuel poverty hits the elderly and needy / vunerable first and hardest, even this £200 off isnt off its a long term loan that has to be  paid back i believe, our energy policy has been non existant for decades !!! apart from poxy renewables 😔

[Frickin_idiot]

15 minutes ago, windymiller said:

sad thing is, as ive said before, fuel poverty hits the elderly and needy / vunerable first and hardest, even this £200 off isnt off its a long term loan that has to be  paid back i believe, our energy policy has been non existant for decades !!! apart from poxy renewables 😔

Spot on. Our energy policy has been incredibly short sighted and it was inevitable that we would be led to this position.

I am surprised that business haven’t been more vocal in relation to energy. A previous company that I worked for had a 250,000 per month electricity bill.

[PaulCP]

27 minutes ago, windymiller said:

sad thing is, as ive said before, fuel poverty hits the elderly and needy / vunerable first and hardest, even this £200 off isnt off its a long term loan that has to be  paid back i believe, our energy policy has been non existant for decades !!! apart from poxy renewables 😔

The details re this £200 per household have yet to be revealed.

We have a 2 year fixed deal until July 2023 and I don’t see how such a reduction can be applied to those on fixed deals like we have.

Our poxy media could have asked such relevant questions at the end of Sunak’s news conference but no, in reminding people what a shower of sh!t they really are, they took the news conference completely off topic by asking numerous questions about what Sunak thinks of Boris’ remarks to Starmer on the Jimmy Saville saga.

[Barrykearley]

Here comes the property market crash.

not much doubt about it. There’s a storm coming with pressures never seen before. Prices have been pushed up massively in the last 12 months or so - and that is indeed typical of boom bust property trends. 
 

It’s gonna be carnage by the end of the year.

 

[MPx]

5 hours ago, Bibs said:

 And how does the BoE raising interest rates help? 

 

Its another of those rock and a hard place things.  One of the flagship responsibilities of the BoE is to keep inflation at or approaching a government set target (currently 2%) within a normal forecast period.  They have one lever to achieve that - put interest rates up when its too high, and reduce when its too low.  In EAJG's and then MAK's early tenure they did pretty well and it got to the point that the expectation as much as the threat of the change would temper behaviour and have the desired effect.  Sadly since the financial crisis and the subsequent increasing addiction to QE to get through that and now the pandemic, normal economics have been thrown out of the window as its all been just armageddon avoidance.  With interest rates at or near 0% there is no lever to provide extra stimulous. To tackle the threat of >5% inflation would historically have seen a sustained rate increase MPC meeting after MPC meeting and typically jumps of 1% or more given an inflation spike.  To do that would flat line the economy at a time when growth is only just recovering and we're otherwise bankrupt.  But without it inflation is likely to get out of control.   Result - a half hearted rise to show intent without it being big enough to actually cause harm.   Sadly I suspect also without having the desired effect. 

IMO AJB is an extraordinarily clever man and very safe pair of hands (and also a great bloke)....but he hasn't yet showed the brilliant (and at the time risky)  innovation that MAK brought to the role.   The application of more sophisticated versions of what has been done before is going to struggle to deal with where we are.  Someone cleverer than the rest of us needs to think of something new (that works in practice)....and there will be pain to be shared around so not a popular role.

 

[Mysterae]

Don't forget the £37 Billion the government spunked on a failed Test & Trace system. I'm no software or app developer but £37,000,000,000 is a lot of money, ironically more for naughts than ones.

I'm expecting council tax to also increase by about 10% as well as them to start charging us for breathing.

[pete]

Shell have announced £12 billion profit.Windfall tax?

[Bibs]

If they just paid normal tax, that would be a result! 

[PaulCP]

@MysteraeIn my experience after witnessing how supposedly high level ex NHS IT ‘professionals’ struggle & fail miserably outside of their little “cushion” Test & Trace was doomed to failure once the NHS IT ‘professionals’  got their hands on it (& the money).

 

[Kimbers]

You ain't seen nuthing yet!!!

Wait till this cuts in! (I did warn everyone taxes were on the way on Electric cars!).

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-60251046

 

[PaulCP]

Yep, then once they realise the effect on the Treasury coffers after having pushed enough people out of cars to increase the number of cycling warriors we will then see pedal power taxed.

[windymiller]

7.2% inflation by april thats already up 1 % on prediction and 7.2 probably means 10 in the real world !!! 😔

[Barrykearley]

2 hours ago, Kimbers said:

I did warn everyone taxes were on the way on Electric cars!).

And I’ve warned everyone about smart meters. Folks ain’t gonna listen till it hits chap.

[Kimbers]

So Banks make record Profits, and Inflation is going up and up yet I am still getting 0.01% interest on my savings. Anyone else smell a rat? Or several Rats.

[Colin P]

For sure, the gap between the interest rates charged and given is a disgrace. So long as I have a mortgage my savings go into the offset account.

Credit cards the same - ramping up the charges to retailers and at the same time removing cashback/rewards from the consumers. 

[Colin P]

The elephant in the room (mass generalisation coming - based upon our being able to afford "toys" but plastic ones rather than carbon fibre ones) is that I suspect that most of us are going to get hit extremely hard in the pocket with tax rises to pay for all of this, which will dwarf inflation. I suspect many of us are in the "well off enough that everyone thinks we are rich" bucket, but not in the "Rich enough to find ways to avoid paying what the government decides is our fair share" bucket.

What especially pisses me off is that in our household 90%+ of the income is from me. So we have a lot of friends whose incomes are split more evenly and earn a lot more than the 2 of us combined, but also pay a lot less tax.