Thankfully our tax team now do my return for me as a partner, so I try not to concentrate on the vast quantity of tax that I pay.
I should also point out that for all the squeaking about the lowering of the 45% band to £125k, this is offset by the reversal of the NI rise, so someone in my fortunate position or that of John’s OP is actually not in a materially different position from before the latest round of Tory economic mismanagement (sorry Michael but they’ve been awful).
The real damage is in the fiscal drag created lower down the earnings scale by the freezing of the thresholds, and particularly how this interfaces with child credit.
I don’t know the answer with the NHS and I staunchly support the notion of it, but it must need a comprehensive and proper efficiency review.
Italy also has an equivalent of the NHS and I’ll compare and contrast the experiences of my mother and my mother-in-law.
My mother had a knee replacement done in August 2021, having waited over two years in increasing pain, went into Ipswich hospital (about half an hour away) on the day of the op, and was discharged on crutches into my car two days later and largely left to recover on her own.
My mother-in-law was diagnosed as needing a replacement knee earlier this year. She’s being operated on Friday, she goes into the hospital the night before and she is then in for a week after the op until being discharged once they are satisfied with her progress. This is being done on the Italian NHS at no cost to her, but in a private hospital in Rimini (about 40 mins away) to whom the Italian health service has outsourced the operation. Now it hasn’t happened yet and let’s see how it goes, but it sounds a better service on paper at least.
I have to assume that the cost of outsourcing this presumably makes financial sense versus the cost of providing it within the Italian NHS. Yet this sort of public/private partnership seems unnecessarily controversial in this country.
