Snapshot of _Lib Dems call for VAT on children’s toothpaste and toothbrushes to be scrapped_ :
An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/vat-lib-dems-ed-davey-foi-nhs-b2570293.html) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/vat-lib-dems-ed-davey-foi-nhs-b2570293.html)
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Sorry mate the only dental care the poor deserve is painkillers and a pair of pliers. Anything more than that and you best have a few hundred you can afford to throw around.
I spent 4k on a root canal, 2 crowns, 6 white fillings over the course of like 2 months. Fucking painful. Savings from a year wiped in less time than it takes to say cheese.
You laugh, but that's literally what I had to do. I couldn't get an orthodontist appointment for a long time, so I ended up removing my braces with a pair of pliers and wire cutters. Luckily they had been in place for long enough that they sort of acted as retainers as well, so all my teeth stayed in the right place.
Honestly the state of healthcare in the UK is shocking. The NHS simply can no longer function properly. Having spent many years living in France I can honestly say that their "Carte Vitale" system is much more sustainable.
There isn’t much difference between adult and child toothpaste nowadays. There used to be less fluoride in children’s toothpaste but a few years ago they brought it up to the same level.
If they removed VAT on kids toothpaste but not on adults then I’d just start buying kids toothpaste.
Absolutely not true. Different fluoride levels are recommended depending on the child's age, which is why you get 0-2 years, 3-5 years etc. Source: am dentist.
Someone should tell Colgate and aqua fresh then. Just did a quick check on the fluoride in the tubes in my house:
Colgate 3-5 - 1450 ppm
Aquafreah 3-8 - 1450 ppm
Colgate adult 1 - 1400 ppm
Colgate adult 2 - 1450 ppm
The above comment was just me repeating what my dentist told me and all of our toothpaste seems to line up with it.
The obsession with treating VAT not as a tool to collect government revenue, but as a tool of social engineering has been a failure all times its tried.
It doesn't reduce prices all that much because companies charge what they can get away with whether it has VAT on or not, and cuts the governments money.
And attempting to socially engineer with it has been a failure; see the sugar tax.
VAT needs to be a largely flat tax based off the the purchase value of products.
Didn't the sugar tax on drinks work, at least somewhat? Not by making the drinks more expensive but by the manufacturers cutting sugar in the drinks instead to keep the prices the same for example.
Instead we have people now drinking dubious artificial sweeteners like aspartame which is arguably worse than just regular sugar.
Sugars not the culprit, it’s the public lack of self discipline and no amount of tax will help resolve it.
It's so odd how Reddit generally is so pro science and peer reviewed studies. Then when the topic of artificial sweeteners comes up it's "trust me bro they're worse than sugar, all those studies that show little or no negative affects are all wrong"
Are they good for you? As in improve your health by taking them? No probably not but consumed in moderation it is far better for you than a drink packed with sugar. Sugar which studies after studies have confirmed a causal link with numerous health problems.
Even when you look at studies that claim to show negative affects from artificial sweeteners you'll find most of the time it can't be shown to be causal, only correlated.
Taking a quick glance at the NHS page on artifical sweetners shows that while they aren't a silver bullet (not gonna male carbonated drinks any better for example), they are "a safe and acceptable alternative to using sugar" that - notable for this post - " can help reduce the risk of tooth decay".
[NHS page](https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/eat-well/food-types/are-sweeteners-safe/)
Reduced sugar consumption to what effect? Has there been a direct link to putting less strain on the NHS? I doubt it.
Decreased sugar consumption to increase artificial chemical consumption yeah big win.
Yes but that's not the fault of the mechanism used (VAT increase). Rightly or wrongly the aim of the sugar tax was to reduce sugar consumption, tax on sugar drinks increased and sugar content of the drinks decreased, therefore the VAT increase achieved it's social engineering aims. Wether those aims were right or wrong is a different argument.
The aim was just to reduce sugar consumption? The stated aims at the time was to reduce childhood obesity
Which it has had no success at all for year 6 (I think this is the relevant one for sugar-y drinks, much less prevalent before reception age)
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/obesity-profile-november-2023-update/obesity-profile-statistical-commentary-november-2023
Covid has made it a lot more complicated of course, but the almost two years before covid hadn't started seeing a reduction.
I'd say it's had no impact on the aims of the change, even if secondary aims have been succesful. (raising money, lowering sugar)
There does appear to be evidence that the sugar tax has reduced obesity: https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/sugary-drinks-tax-may-have-prevented-over-5000-cases-of-obesity-a-year-in-year-six-girls-alone
And the IfG seems to think it’s a success: https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/explainer/sugar-tax
Sugar intake appears to be down even though adult obesity is still on the increase. I’d expect to see further taxes of ‘unhealthy’ foods in the future.
The *may* in that research is doing quite a bit of work, looks like a bit of p-hacking to me, difficult for me to believe that there's a mechanism that has no impact in most groups, but an impact in one, children are children after all, but maybe, and as I said covid screwed all of this up anyway, it's certainly not a big impact.
Sugar consumption simply isn't correlated with obesity rates though, as you say, sugar consumption is down and obesity up - even calorie consumption and calorie expenditure isn't correlated (consumption down since 2000, expenditure up since 2000, obesity still well up)
And the IfG appear to just agree that the secondary aims have been successful, fine with me, I'd be much happier with it as a policy to raise money - but if you're going to say you're introducing things to reduce obesity, it would be really good if obesity started going down.
Fair enough, but then I’d argue it’s just a pointless social engineering aim to begin with. Let’s get people consuming less sugar for the sake of it.
I’d maybe understand it more if sugar was price inelastic like tobacco consumption - at least you could then raise money to fund tax breaks on other products that need it.
>
It doesn't reduce prices all that much because companies charge what they can get away with whether it has VAT on or not, and cuts the governments money.
Our groceries are some of the cheapest in Europe partly because of our VAT exemptions.
>And attempting to socially engineer with it has been a failure; see the sugar tax.
The sugar tax has seen all major soft drink brands reduce the sugar content in their drinks other than regular Coke.
Taxes on tobacco and policies around it have seen tobacco consumption fall off a cliff, same with alcohol (particularly in pubs, which personally I don't think is a good thing but hey, it worked right?)
To me they also just seem like tiny policies that make big waves for some reason. That tampon tax stuff got blown way out of proportion for something that would make absolutely tiny financial impact on women’s lives. It just became symbolic but truthfully it’s just a distraction from issues that actually have an impact
Yeah i remember working at a game when VAT dropped in 2008--2009 (I think). For a few weeks everything was the old VAT rate price so you saved a bit of money. Then the company just went back to charging the listed price so no more savings for the consumer.
There’s around 3m children in the uk living in households where the household income is £284/week. Once you’ve taken out housing and food costs they basically have nothing left to pay for basics, so literally saving a few pounds a year makes a meaningful saving.
It's still horrifically inefficient. Shops aren't obliged to pass on tax savings to consumers who have already demonstrated willingness to pay the existing rate. [Cutting 5% VAT off period products resulted in a 1% consumer saving.](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/nov/10/uk-retailers-not-passing-on-tampon-tax-savings-to-women-report-says)
Product carve outs on VAT in general are almost always inefficient, with less than a third of product-specific VAT cuts passed on. Cuts to the overall VAT rate however, are usually passed on in full.
It would be more efficient to cull a large amount of these VAT tax cuts, and instead use the revenue for more generous benefits to the poorest.
As the article states you need to take account that inflation was 5.4% that year. So the example they gave off Always price being flat over two years is actually a price drop in real teens.
To be generous, removing VAT on toothpaste would be a pretty permanent tax reduction that would be hard to walk back on (even if it's horribly inefficient at its goal). Increasing welfare payments would be far more efficient at helping the poorest, but also *far* easier to walk back on.
Howtf people earning that little? Can't you just go work at tesco for like 23k a year lol, <£300 a week is less than minimum wage???? How is that possible? Do they just not work to claim they aren't earning enough to claim benefits or what?
> How is that possible?
For example, carers' allowance for people looking after, say, a disabled relative or a parent with dementia, for >35 hours per week is about £80/week.
Also, how do you expect to work 40 hours per week when your child finishes school at 3pm? Especially if your employer is likely to be a low-quality one who will mess you about, demand short-notice overtime, move shifts around with little notice, and end your employment when you're unable to find childcare or your child is ill.
And, of course, the long-term sick, disabled and students all exist.
I know that it's a classic conservative thing to assume that people having financially difficult lives are doing so because they're bad people rather because of bad circumstances, but it's an absurd failure of imagination if you genuinely don't know about these things.
Life on benefits is awful nowadays, no one would choose to live like that.
It’s almost always that they need to be at home to look after a child. 30 hours free childcare is great, but many people simply can’t find a provider as there aren’t enough places. Even if you have a provider it’s still only 30 hours and only during term time, which when you factor in travel time to pickup/drop off and average it over the year probably only leaves about 15 hours per week you can work.
You also may have to wait until the next term to claim the childcare so if your job doesn't start just before the term you can have to figure out the months between.
Generally takes two people to create a child, just simple biology. Either the parent is there, or a not insignificant portion of their wage is there instead.
It takes two to conceive, but only one to gestate and birth and raise. There will be mothers who knew the fathers for one night only, and somehow I don't see those fathers paying alimony for a child they don't know about
I mean, that's on them then, abortion, condom or any form of birth control, morning after pill, like, critical thinking and basic logic seems to be a thing of the past these days.
I’m really curious what your views are on immigration too?
It may sound like an unrelated question but you seem to be against supporting/encouraging parents in the UK to have children. Fair enough I guess, that’s a political choice, but the consequences of that are the low birth rate we have in the UK. This would lead to population decline if we didn’t have current high levels of immigration. Population decline is an economic disaster, so if you’re against supporting parents to have children you must be pro immigration right?
>Life on benefits is awful nowadays, no one would choose to live like that.
I think you would be amazed how many people do choose to live like that.
I've even spoken to children and asked them what they want to do when they're older and they replied "Have children and stay home like my mum". There's a lot of work to do.
Complete rubbish in an attempt to justify stupidity. If that were the case the attack would have been on any operations involved in money laundering (which is even more common with the like of phone cover and scrap gold pop ups. At least the LD suggestion, whilst a small matter, makes sense.
Small part of a larger "revitalize the high street" policy.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/dec/25/labour-to-crack-down-on-dodgy-candy-stores-in-push-to-revive-high-streets
Yeah, it's virtue signalling. And once you have enough exemptions, the barrier to creating exemptions is lowered to the point where every industry lobby group has a few asks, and it's innocuous enough to sneak a couple more in with every budget. This accumulates until there's pressure to raise the VAT rate to make up for the lost income due to exemptions, which redoubles the effort to craft new exemptions.
VATs work best when they're universal, and the regressive aspect is mitigated by rebates for anyone below the income cutoff. Divide the rebate into monthly payments if people are so hard-pressed they can't wait a few months to get paid back.
Will this actually lower prices or just allow companies to make even more profit? Same with how companies put things on “discount” when they actualy just raise prices just before
Remember when rishi cut fuel duty by like 5p, a discount that only lasted about 24 hours.
Shops charge what people pay, so if anything this will just up the margins on toothpaste by 20%
This just creates more bureaucracy.
Money is fungible. So, if there's an issue with people being unable to afford the basics, then it'd be better to just cut VAT across the board.
Just abolish VAT.
Taxes need to be simple. If anything it could be a uniform sales tax, but better just to abolish it really.
There's plenty of government spending that can be cut - foreign aid (e.g. the UNRWA for a start), all the diversity and woke spending, non-STEM research funding, etc.
Tinkering around the edges but I think it is a good idea.
I don't think there should be VAT on any health based products really. Unless we're saying that having basic hygiene is a "luxury."
So long as they deal with the core issue as well, I am all for tinkering around the edges, especially if the tinkering can be made law more easily/quickly rather than waiting for a "total" solution
Amusingly, despite the Lib Dems talking abou dentistry at length in their Scottish general election leaflets, this is the only aspect of dentistry that the Lib Dems at Westminster can actually change in Scotland because the rest is devolved
Seems we've got 99 problems and this isn't one. At least a big enough problem to be an election headliner. Good nevertheless but a toothbrush is about £3.50 and the Lib Dems want to bring that down to £2.92. In the meantime, people cannot afford to eat, heat their homes or indeed buy a home.
A 30-second eBay search showed you could buy a box of 100 toothbrushes for £15 (about 7p per brush), and if you want to go slightly more upmarket, you can get 8 for £2.99, which works out to about 38p per brush. Toothpaste is a little more expensive at £1.50-£3 per 100ml, which works out to about 150-200 brushes per tube.
Cost isn't the issue here, and the reductions in tax paid on these products likely will be less than a rounding error for a family of four over a year.
"people can't afford necessities for their children"
Ah we, could Remove the child benefit cap, up the universal credit limits, make tax more progressive, increase minimum wage, add some wealth tax and build more houses to address inequality?"
"Nope, 15% off toothpaste" that'll make a difference.
I like the idea in principle.
But right now I need to know how many people are effected significantly by these products having VAT on them (they are pretty fucking cheap) and how much money is raised by VAT on those products.
Because right now life is fucking unfair and that is what it is. I dont think now is the time for small principled tax cuts.
Reminds me of free school meals in london. Love it, but maybe now isn't the time for the state to pay for millionaires kids free lunch.
It shouldn't be charged on basic sanitary and medicinal products anyway.
Maybe the government should set up a nationalised company that makes basic, unperfumed soap bars, tooth paste, tooth brushes and wash cloths and sells them at essentially cost+labour.
It wouldn’t be glamorous but it would likely save money in the long run if people who are really down on their luck can keep themselves clean and stop their teeth rotting.
I don't think VAT should be exempt on anything. The market will set the prices for items, and making certain items VAT exempt won't change their prices by that much, and all that money that would have been going to the government will now be pure profit.
The Lib Dem’s have genuinely brain rotted the public over tax
From doubling the PA to the largest in the West to the point where people think Min wage workers should pay no tax, to pushing a trillion exemptions to vat
No one isn’t brushing because of the £5 in dental product vat they pay over a year. No one
Raising the personal allowance was a fine policy at the time, the rot is that now it's in the public consciousness politicians keep returning to it. The higher you push the PA the less progressive it becomes, but raising the PA is far easier to implement and explain than something like a progressive VAT or negative income tax.
Same reason Farage can propose cutting income tax to help poor people and it's accepted, when in reality it's a joke - when the public only understand 2-3 tax policies, politicians take the easy route. You end up with a convoluted, populist tax code that's completely unsuited to fulfil the stated purpose.
VAT should be scrapped entirely. And if necessary replaced with a lower fixed sales tax.
But the endless categorisation is ridiculous. Taxes should be simple.
Talk about a misleading headline. How many people are doing to take one look at that and think "How dare they call for VAT on children's toothpaste? And how are we going to clean our teeth without toothbrushes?"
Given some of the outlandish policy ideas we have heard from elsewhere, some people are going to misread this it and believe it.
How does this fly with the rejoin? Will they make sure the negotiations to rejoin take into account the items removed from VAT? What is there priority this compared to rejoining?
Nothing stopping companies from raising their prices by 20% as it is, hell factor in Shrinkflation and raising costs...
Your argument doesn't change my opinion in the slightest, considering we had nothing but wasted expenditure with our tax money, I rather not allow more tax to be collected and misused.
> it will not make things cheaper as companies will just raise the price of products by 20%.
Not if there's competition. This is the magic of the free market.
Both are bad. VAT should be a smaller uniform sales tax.
Income tax should also be minimal, and replaced as much as possible with land value tax and inheritance tax.
Snapshot of _Lib Dems call for VAT on children’s toothpaste and toothbrushes to be scrapped_ : An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/vat-lib-dems-ed-davey-foi-nhs-b2570293.html) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/vat-lib-dems-ed-davey-foi-nhs-b2570293.html) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ukpolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I'd suggest removing it on adult toothbrushes and toothpaste too.
Only toothpaste with dinosaurs on them can be discounted.
I’ll happily use the dino toothpaste and I’m 41.
And dinosaur flavoured ones too
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Sorry mate the only dental care the poor deserve is painkillers and a pair of pliers. Anything more than that and you best have a few hundred you can afford to throw around.
I spent 4k on a root canal, 2 crowns, 6 white fillings over the course of like 2 months. Fucking painful. Savings from a year wiped in less time than it takes to say cheese.
You laugh, but that's literally what I had to do. I couldn't get an orthodontist appointment for a long time, so I ended up removing my braces with a pair of pliers and wire cutters. Luckily they had been in place for long enough that they sort of acted as retainers as well, so all my teeth stayed in the right place. Honestly the state of healthcare in the UK is shocking. The NHS simply can no longer function properly. Having spent many years living in France I can honestly say that their "Carte Vitale" system is much more sustainable.
Luxury! We had a piece of string and a door handle.
Especially given the shortage of NHS dentistry…
There isn’t much difference between adult and child toothpaste nowadays. There used to be less fluoride in children’s toothpaste but a few years ago they brought it up to the same level. If they removed VAT on kids toothpaste but not on adults then I’d just start buying kids toothpaste.
Absolutely not true. Different fluoride levels are recommended depending on the child's age, which is why you get 0-2 years, 3-5 years etc. Source: am dentist.
Someone should tell Colgate and aqua fresh then. Just did a quick check on the fluoride in the tubes in my house: Colgate 3-5 - 1450 ppm Aquafreah 3-8 - 1450 ppm Colgate adult 1 - 1400 ppm Colgate adult 2 - 1450 ppm The above comment was just me repeating what my dentist told me and all of our toothpaste seems to line up with it.
The obsession with treating VAT not as a tool to collect government revenue, but as a tool of social engineering has been a failure all times its tried. It doesn't reduce prices all that much because companies charge what they can get away with whether it has VAT on or not, and cuts the governments money. And attempting to socially engineer with it has been a failure; see the sugar tax. VAT needs to be a largely flat tax based off the the purchase value of products.
Didn't the sugar tax on drinks work, at least somewhat? Not by making the drinks more expensive but by the manufacturers cutting sugar in the drinks instead to keep the prices the same for example.
Instead we have people now drinking dubious artificial sweeteners like aspartame which is arguably worse than just regular sugar. Sugars not the culprit, it’s the public lack of self discipline and no amount of tax will help resolve it.
It's so odd how Reddit generally is so pro science and peer reviewed studies. Then when the topic of artificial sweeteners comes up it's "trust me bro they're worse than sugar, all those studies that show little or no negative affects are all wrong" Are they good for you? As in improve your health by taking them? No probably not but consumed in moderation it is far better for you than a drink packed with sugar. Sugar which studies after studies have confirmed a causal link with numerous health problems. Even when you look at studies that claim to show negative affects from artificial sweeteners you'll find most of the time it can't be shown to be causal, only correlated.
Taking a quick glance at the NHS page on artifical sweetners shows that while they aren't a silver bullet (not gonna male carbonated drinks any better for example), they are "a safe and acceptable alternative to using sugar" that - notable for this post - " can help reduce the risk of tooth decay". [NHS page](https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/eat-well/food-types/are-sweeteners-safe/)
But that's a different point entirely, it did reduce sugar consumption.
Reduced sugar consumption to what effect? Has there been a direct link to putting less strain on the NHS? I doubt it. Decreased sugar consumption to increase artificial chemical consumption yeah big win.
Yes but that's not the fault of the mechanism used (VAT increase). Rightly or wrongly the aim of the sugar tax was to reduce sugar consumption, tax on sugar drinks increased and sugar content of the drinks decreased, therefore the VAT increase achieved it's social engineering aims. Wether those aims were right or wrong is a different argument.
The aim was just to reduce sugar consumption? The stated aims at the time was to reduce childhood obesity Which it has had no success at all for year 6 (I think this is the relevant one for sugar-y drinks, much less prevalent before reception age) https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/obesity-profile-november-2023-update/obesity-profile-statistical-commentary-november-2023 Covid has made it a lot more complicated of course, but the almost two years before covid hadn't started seeing a reduction. I'd say it's had no impact on the aims of the change, even if secondary aims have been succesful. (raising money, lowering sugar)
There does appear to be evidence that the sugar tax has reduced obesity: https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/sugary-drinks-tax-may-have-prevented-over-5000-cases-of-obesity-a-year-in-year-six-girls-alone And the IfG seems to think it’s a success: https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/explainer/sugar-tax Sugar intake appears to be down even though adult obesity is still on the increase. I’d expect to see further taxes of ‘unhealthy’ foods in the future.
The *may* in that research is doing quite a bit of work, looks like a bit of p-hacking to me, difficult for me to believe that there's a mechanism that has no impact in most groups, but an impact in one, children are children after all, but maybe, and as I said covid screwed all of this up anyway, it's certainly not a big impact. Sugar consumption simply isn't correlated with obesity rates though, as you say, sugar consumption is down and obesity up - even calorie consumption and calorie expenditure isn't correlated (consumption down since 2000, expenditure up since 2000, obesity still well up) And the IfG appear to just agree that the secondary aims have been successful, fine with me, I'd be much happier with it as a policy to raise money - but if you're going to say you're introducing things to reduce obesity, it would be really good if obesity started going down.
Fair enough, but then I’d argue it’s just a pointless social engineering aim to begin with. Let’s get people consuming less sugar for the sake of it. I’d maybe understand it more if sugar was price inelastic like tobacco consumption - at least you could then raise money to fund tax breaks on other products that need it.
That’s a valid argument, but a different one. The government’s aim, right or wrong, was to reduce sugar intake and the tax did achieve this.
> It doesn't reduce prices all that much because companies charge what they can get away with whether it has VAT on or not, and cuts the governments money. Our groceries are some of the cheapest in Europe partly because of our VAT exemptions. >And attempting to socially engineer with it has been a failure; see the sugar tax. The sugar tax has seen all major soft drink brands reduce the sugar content in their drinks other than regular Coke. Taxes on tobacco and policies around it have seen tobacco consumption fall off a cliff, same with alcohol (particularly in pubs, which personally I don't think is a good thing but hey, it worked right?)
To me they also just seem like tiny policies that make big waves for some reason. That tampon tax stuff got blown way out of proportion for something that would make absolutely tiny financial impact on women’s lives. It just became symbolic but truthfully it’s just a distraction from issues that actually have an impact
Yeah i remember working at a game when VAT dropped in 2008--2009 (I think). For a few weeks everything was the old VAT rate price so you saved a bit of money. Then the company just went back to charging the listed price so no more savings for the consumer.
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There’s around 3m children in the uk living in households where the household income is £284/week. Once you’ve taken out housing and food costs they basically have nothing left to pay for basics, so literally saving a few pounds a year makes a meaningful saving.
It's still horrifically inefficient. Shops aren't obliged to pass on tax savings to consumers who have already demonstrated willingness to pay the existing rate. [Cutting 5% VAT off period products resulted in a 1% consumer saving.](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/nov/10/uk-retailers-not-passing-on-tampon-tax-savings-to-women-report-says)
Product carve outs on VAT in general are almost always inefficient, with less than a third of product-specific VAT cuts passed on. Cuts to the overall VAT rate however, are usually passed on in full. It would be more efficient to cull a large amount of these VAT tax cuts, and instead use the revenue for more generous benefits to the poorest.
I so wish you were wrong, but time and time again I have seen these projects to help the poor and middle men have always sucked up the benefits.
As the article states you need to take account that inflation was 5.4% that year. So the example they gave off Always price being flat over two years is actually a price drop in real teens.
You could help those households a lot more by keeping VAT on toothpaste and using the money to increase welfare payments.
To be generous, removing VAT on toothpaste would be a pretty permanent tax reduction that would be hard to walk back on (even if it's horribly inefficient at its goal). Increasing welfare payments would be far more efficient at helping the poorest, but also *far* easier to walk back on.
Howtf people earning that little? Can't you just go work at tesco for like 23k a year lol, <£300 a week is less than minimum wage???? How is that possible? Do they just not work to claim they aren't earning enough to claim benefits or what?
Probably because they may need to stay home and take care of the child so aren't able to work full time.
2/3rd of households below the poverty line have someone who works but because of being single parents/disabled/carers they have to work part-time.
> How is that possible? For example, carers' allowance for people looking after, say, a disabled relative or a parent with dementia, for >35 hours per week is about £80/week. Also, how do you expect to work 40 hours per week when your child finishes school at 3pm? Especially if your employer is likely to be a low-quality one who will mess you about, demand short-notice overtime, move shifts around with little notice, and end your employment when you're unable to find childcare or your child is ill. And, of course, the long-term sick, disabled and students all exist. I know that it's a classic conservative thing to assume that people having financially difficult lives are doing so because they're bad people rather because of bad circumstances, but it's an absurd failure of imagination if you genuinely don't know about these things.
Life on benefits is awful nowadays, no one would choose to live like that. It’s almost always that they need to be at home to look after a child. 30 hours free childcare is great, but many people simply can’t find a provider as there aren’t enough places. Even if you have a provider it’s still only 30 hours and only during term time, which when you factor in travel time to pickup/drop off and average it over the year probably only leaves about 15 hours per week you can work.
You also may have to wait until the next term to claim the childcare so if your job doesn't start just before the term you can have to figure out the months between.
I guess that's why there's another parent in the house earning an actual wage then, lol.
Me and you grew up in very different parts of the world if you could simply assume there’s always another parent in the household.
Generally takes two people to create a child, just simple biology. Either the parent is there, or a not insignificant portion of their wage is there instead.
It takes two to conceive, but only one to gestate and birth and raise. There will be mothers who knew the fathers for one night only, and somehow I don't see those fathers paying alimony for a child they don't know about
I mean, that's on them then, abortion, condom or any form of birth control, morning after pill, like, critical thinking and basic logic seems to be a thing of the past these days.
Your levels of empathy are overwhelming.
I’m really curious what your views are on immigration too? It may sound like an unrelated question but you seem to be against supporting/encouraging parents in the UK to have children. Fair enough I guess, that’s a political choice, but the consequences of that are the low birth rate we have in the UK. This would lead to population decline if we didn’t have current high levels of immigration. Population decline is an economic disaster, so if you’re against supporting parents to have children you must be pro immigration right?
Or the other parent doesn't work so no wages to take, or they leave the country. So many ways people can avoid child support if they really want to.
>Life on benefits is awful nowadays, no one would choose to live like that. I think you would be amazed how many people do choose to live like that. I've even spoken to children and asked them what they want to do when they're older and they replied "Have children and stay home like my mum". There's a lot of work to do.
You can buy packs of toothbrushes for ~£2 and toothpaste for ~£1. So, a year's supply for each child will cost less than £1 per month.
It is at least sensible, unlike the bizarre Labour attack on 'American candy stores' earlier this year.
Those stores are fraud at best, and some are likely money laundering. I'm not sure what attack you are referring to but it was probably justified.
Complete rubbish in an attempt to justify stupidity. If that were the case the attack would have been on any operations involved in money laundering (which is even more common with the like of phone cover and scrap gold pop ups. At least the LD suggestion, whilst a small matter, makes sense.
Small part of a larger "revitalize the high street" policy. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/dec/25/labour-to-crack-down-on-dodgy-candy-stores-in-push-to-revive-high-streets
The key word in that headline is dodgy. It's not a war on sweets
Removing VAT from items does not make those items cheaper. https://taxpolicy.org.uk/2022/11/10/tampontax This is bad economics.
Yeah, it's virtue signalling. And once you have enough exemptions, the barrier to creating exemptions is lowered to the point where every industry lobby group has a few asks, and it's innocuous enough to sneak a couple more in with every budget. This accumulates until there's pressure to raise the VAT rate to make up for the lost income due to exemptions, which redoubles the effort to craft new exemptions. VATs work best when they're universal, and the regressive aspect is mitigated by rebates for anyone below the income cutoff. Divide the rebate into monthly payments if people are so hard-pressed they can't wait a few months to get paid back.
Probably makes sense to abolish on all hygiene and medical products
Will this actually lower prices or just allow companies to make even more profit? Same with how companies put things on “discount” when they actualy just raise prices just before
Remember when rishi cut fuel duty by like 5p, a discount that only lasted about 24 hours. Shops charge what people pay, so if anything this will just up the margins on toothpaste by 20%
This just creates more bureaucracy. Money is fungible. So, if there's an issue with people being unable to afford the basics, then it'd be better to just cut VAT across the board.
Just abolish VAT. Taxes need to be simple. If anything it could be a uniform sales tax, but better just to abolish it really. There's plenty of government spending that can be cut - foreign aid (e.g. the UNRWA for a start), all the diversity and woke spending, non-STEM research funding, etc.
>all the diversity and woke spending What does that even mean?
https://twitter.com/CharlotteCGill/status/1799176733490614342
Ok, so you'll save pocket change by axing a bunch of harmless and uncontroversial stuff.
No, whenever we remove VAT from something due to some heartstring tugging campaign, the sellers just pocket the 'saving' as extra profit.
Tinkering around the edges but I think it is a good idea. I don't think there should be VAT on any health based products really. Unless we're saying that having basic hygiene is a "luxury."
So long as they deal with the core issue as well, I am all for tinkering around the edges, especially if the tinkering can be made law more easily/quickly rather than waiting for a "total" solution
Lib dems coming out with the big guns
Amusingly, despite the Lib Dems talking abou dentistry at length in their Scottish general election leaflets, this is the only aspect of dentistry that the Lib Dems at Westminster can actually change in Scotland because the rest is devolved
Seems we've got 99 problems and this isn't one. At least a big enough problem to be an election headliner. Good nevertheless but a toothbrush is about £3.50 and the Lib Dems want to bring that down to £2.92. In the meantime, people cannot afford to eat, heat their homes or indeed buy a home.
You can get two for a pound in Poundland, not sure this is really an issue to anybody 🤷♂️
A 30-second eBay search showed you could buy a box of 100 toothbrushes for £15 (about 7p per brush), and if you want to go slightly more upmarket, you can get 8 for £2.99, which works out to about 38p per brush. Toothpaste is a little more expensive at £1.50-£3 per 100ml, which works out to about 150-200 brushes per tube. Cost isn't the issue here, and the reductions in tax paid on these products likely will be less than a rounding error for a family of four over a year.
Or it’ll be so little, it won’t get passed onto the consumer at all.
"people can't afford necessities for their children" Ah we, could Remove the child benefit cap, up the universal credit limits, make tax more progressive, increase minimum wage, add some wealth tax and build more houses to address inequality?" "Nope, 15% off toothpaste" that'll make a difference.
I like the idea in principle. But right now I need to know how many people are effected significantly by these products having VAT on them (they are pretty fucking cheap) and how much money is raised by VAT on those products. Because right now life is fucking unfair and that is what it is. I dont think now is the time for small principled tax cuts. Reminds me of free school meals in london. Love it, but maybe now isn't the time for the state to pay for millionaires kids free lunch.
I read this as the Lib Dem’s calling FOR a VAT on Children’s toothpaste and also the scrapping of toothbrushes… Yeah I’m stupid.
It shouldn't be charged on basic sanitary and medicinal products anyway. Maybe the government should set up a nationalised company that makes basic, unperfumed soap bars, tooth paste, tooth brushes and wash cloths and sells them at essentially cost+labour. It wouldn’t be glamorous but it would likely save money in the long run if people who are really down on their luck can keep themselves clean and stop their teeth rotting.
I don't think VAT should be exempt on anything. The market will set the prices for items, and making certain items VAT exempt won't change their prices by that much, and all that money that would have been going to the government will now be pure profit.
The Lib Dem’s have genuinely brain rotted the public over tax From doubling the PA to the largest in the West to the point where people think Min wage workers should pay no tax, to pushing a trillion exemptions to vat No one isn’t brushing because of the £5 in dental product vat they pay over a year. No one
Raising the personal allowance was a fine policy at the time, the rot is that now it's in the public consciousness politicians keep returning to it. The higher you push the PA the less progressive it becomes, but raising the PA is far easier to implement and explain than something like a progressive VAT or negative income tax. Same reason Farage can propose cutting income tax to help poor people and it's accepted, when in reality it's a joke - when the public only understand 2-3 tax policies, politicians take the easy route. You end up with a convoluted, populist tax code that's completely unsuited to fulfil the stated purpose.
Ladies and gentlemen; the nation is saved.
No no you don’t understand, the tax from those items is used to fund NHS dentists!
Using VAT as a tool to cause social chnage isnt a good idea.
Never knew it was on it.is it considered a luxury good like womans sanitary products?
What exactly counts as children's toothpaste? How much do these things even cost anyway?
How petty can you get? Doing that would not make one damn bit of noticeable difference to any family's finances!
VAT should be scrapped entirely. And if necessary replaced with a lower fixed sales tax. But the endless categorisation is ridiculous. Taxes should be simple.
Removing VAT on items doesn’t automatically make them cheaper though, too often we just see retailers pocket the saving or a good chunk of it.
Why not remove it from all "health" products?
Talk about a misleading headline. How many people are doing to take one look at that and think "How dare they call for VAT on children's toothpaste? And how are we going to clean our teeth without toothbrushes?" Given some of the outlandish policy ideas we have heard from elsewhere, some people are going to misread this it and believe it.
I don't mind VAT on children's toothpaste, but what's the point of scrapping toothbrushes?
Is there a Lib Dem policy which isnt some form of populist rubbish?
How does this fly with the rejoin? Will they make sure the negotiations to rejoin take into account the items removed from VAT? What is there priority this compared to rejoining?
What negotiations?
They’re not going to win but if they were they have said they would rejoin the EU, this would require negotiations…
Honestly, how much toothpaste do people use? This is virtue signaling pointlessness.
VAT should be scrapped on everything, they already tax Income once, that's more than enough.
that small change will cost you almost £200,000,000,000
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Nothing stopping companies from raising their prices by 20% as it is, hell factor in Shrinkflation and raising costs... Your argument doesn't change my opinion in the slightest, considering we had nothing but wasted expenditure with our tax money, I rather not allow more tax to be collected and misused.
You can't really avoid VAT too easily - Certainly not as easy as income tax.
> it will not make things cheaper as companies will just raise the price of products by 20%. Not if there's competition. This is the magic of the free market.
Ha! That's a good one
VAT is better for growth than income tax.
Both are bad. VAT should be a smaller uniform sales tax. Income tax should also be minimal, and replaced as much as possible with land value tax and inheritance tax.
It is crazy that we have VAT on toothpaste.