Raising NI for social care is not progressive

GOOD to hear that Laura Farris means to ask questions about health and social care.

The day Boris Johnson walked into Number 10, he said he had a plan for social care.

Two years later he may have finished the expensive wallpapering, but we still haven’t seen any plan.

Just an invoice.

Mrs Farris thinks it’s progressive to pay for social care out of

National Insurance. A tax that hits young workers and the low-paid particularly hard.

They pay at the full 12 per cent rate on pay above £184 a week – that’s on earnings below £5 per hour for a normal working week, way below the minimum adult wage. And they pay from age 16, when they can’t even claim the minimum adult wage. And at salary of just over £50,000 a year, the National Insurance charge is cut to just two per cent.

So Laura Farris as an MP on £81,932 pays, on her excess earnings, less than half of the National Insurance charges paid by a care worker on average £17,200. If you call that progressive you must be looking through the wrong end of the telescope.

National Insurance is evil in the way it works, it is targeted at the low-paid and it needs major reform. There are, of course, plenty of other ways to raise tax.

We should tax unused land, and the trillions of speculative financial transactions made every day on the online exchanges, which are unproductive and would be simple to tax.

Instead the Tories choose a tax they promised not to touch. A tax on jobs and businesses that we depend on to see us out of crisis.

For employers it comes on top of penal business rates which have helped to kill businesses big and small on the high street while online traders take the profit without tax. And the Tories still have no plan. Most of the money won’t go to social care, it goes first to bail out the huge crisis that’s built up in the NHS. We must have a plan to give fair pay for the huge demands that care workers have to meet.

Many are not paid for travelling between home visits, so they don’t earn the minimum wage.

And those on site and on call well over 24 hours, who are expected to cope with dementia, derangement and dirt, aren’t paid a penny for sleepovers.

Thanks to our supreme court, who came to judgment after finding some excuse in the small print of a civil service document.

Yes, slavery lives on here in one of the richest countries in the world. Can we hope that Laura Farris will be asking any of these questions?

Try PM’s questions, when Mr Johnson is looking forward to a good lunch.

ANDY WALLACE

Chandos Road

Newbury