OT: Petition to double UK pensioner's tax free allowance

The government has already responded:-

"The State Pension is the foundation of support available to pensioners. The government is committed to the Triple Lock – one of the most generous State Pension uprating mechanisms in the world – for the duration of this Parliament. This will increase the basic and new State Pension by 4.8% next April, boosting pensioner incomes by up to £575 a year and strengthening retirement security.

The Personal Allowance is already the highest amongst G7 countries. Doubling this allowance for all pensioners would be costly and untargeted – disproportionately benefitting higher income pensioners.

As announced at the Budget, the government will ease the administrative burden for pensioners whose sole income is the basic or new State Pension without any increments so that they do not have to pay small amounts of tax via Simple Assessment from 2027-28, if the new or basic State Pension exceeds the Personal Allowance from that point. The government is exploring the best way to achieve this and will set out more detail next year.

HM Treasury "

The UK state pension is one if the lowest in Europe and is nowhere near enough to live on, as it doesn't make any provision for housing costs such as rent.

It's perhaps a double edge sword unless they also freeze all benefit thresholds. I have aged relatives one who receives income not much above the pension credit threshold and another who receives the pension credit and all the other associated benefits. Guess which one is financially better off?

There soon could become a point where any rise in in the pension is partially negated by having to pay tax on the rise making net income below benefit thresholds.

For the average working man or those with a second pension frozen threshold just mean more tax to pay.

I couldn't find one easily, but this is for European countries:

In 2022 it was frozen until 2028 and the most recent budget froze it until 2031:

Theo

They are having to learn that waving a magic socialist wand does not create wealth. And are busy taking it from people who are too old to complain and wouldn't vote for them anyway.

Then UK has plentiful wealth. No need to wave anything - fairly redistribute and you're done.

That's a very high risk assumption.

Bless!

Not really. Not many people are still voting for them at all.

Just the people who are affluent but think they come from the 'working class'

Median £300,000 per household, 40% property, 35% private pension.

A method used in the Soviet Union was to shoot all the kulaks (the so-called rich peasants, who might have owned a couple of hectares or two cows) and absorb their property into the collectives.

When they ran out of kulaks to shoot, they shot anyone handy.

Am 13.02.26 um 18:12 schrieb Max Demian:

But it's also one of the least taxed. If I moved back to Italy, my (future) UK pension would be taxed at 30% (although there's a proposal to tax it at 6% for people like me coming from abroad, so stay tuned).

For the last few years I have had the Marriage Tax Allowance which effectively added £252 moved from my wife's Personal Allowance into to my own Personal Allowance and my Tax Code reflected that. During the Tax Year 2025-2026 my wife died (it was expected; she had a condition she would not recover from, though the end date couldn't be accurately predicted) and although the HMRC when notified allowed me to retain the Marriage Tax Allowance for the remainder of the current Tax Year, it is not part of the 2026-2027 tax year in the Tax Code Notice I received two days ago. So for the coming Tax Year the headroom between my State Pension and my Personal Allowance is just £775 for the whole year. I do also have a pension from my employment too and it exceeds that headroom, so from April onwards I am going to pay a lot more tax.

Looking at it from a Treasury perspective, they are going to rob me at source and I will have less money to spend on other things, so that the Treasury will lose the VAT I would have paid spending money in shops, and the shops will have less money going into their tills resulting in their Corporation Tax sums being lower. Is that a nett Treasury benefit? Would somebody please send Rachel from Accounts a calculator?

The Treasury released a photograph of the Chancellor in her office in No 11 with a new portrait of Ellen Wilkinson behind her.

Ms Wilkinson, a former Labour education minister, was one of the founding members of the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1920 before becoming a Labour MP.

Photographs of Jeremy Hunt and Rishi Sunak at the same desk in Downing Street show that a photograph of Nigel Lawson was previously on the wall.

Whatever one's later / current state of affluence, the question of into which social class one was born or within which one was raised is surely not a matter requiring much in the way of empirical judgment?

And the chances are that the black economy works better in the remote village :)

Sadly it seems to be

Is Starmer working class?

I know people who cling to their 'working class backgrounds' by voting labour and being the most appalling intellectual and class snobs i know. They own their eco houses have two cars and shop at waitrose. They have (minor) university degrees and had professional jobs.

Then I know other working class people who live in council houses that they were born in. They dont have university degrees and they are not snobs. They vote Reform.

Look on the bright side. You appear to be on the New State Pension.

For us older mugs, we are not going to have to wrestle with a State Pension exceeding the Personal Allowances. My fully-funded State Pension next tax year will be close to £11k - up 65p per week as a result of my wife's death.

Agreed. Though a mere youngster of a 1949 vintage, I'm on the 'old' pension scheme and my state pension exceeds my personal allowance - despite that oh so generous £252 transfer from my wife's allowance.

Interesting. I was definitely working class, born in the upstairs part of the terraced house in East London that my parents rented from my grandparents who lived in the ground floor of their rented (privately rather than council) house. My dad was an electrician, my mum stayed at home to look after me and my slightly older sister. We moved in to a newly built wartime infill terraced house 2 streets away when I was 4 and my younger brother was born.

However, that was in the days of grammar schools and by good quality education I got to a level where I could apply for and get "middle class" jobs from which I got some professional qualifications but no university degree. I have now got an ordinary looking end terrace house that is 120 years old and I shop in Sainsbury's. I don't class myself as anything in particular and I treat people as people whether they might be junior warehouse assistants or business managers. I once met a famous actor, regularly appearing on TV, when we were in the same slow moving queue, and he relaxed completely when he discovered I didn't want his autograph or to talk about his work. He ended up by describing the school his young daughter was going to and what her favourite subjects were. Ordinary "passing the time" conversation.