Hospital charges

Here in the UK, we have to pay a tax that goes to our local council - they are responsible for local schools, hospitals, roads, transport, waste etc; they are partly funded by money that comes from central government, and the rest comes from us in the form of council tax.

Mine is around £1900 a year for this year, although that is guaranteed to go up next year. This is on top of all the other taxes that we have to pay - the main one that really (really) grinds my gears and pertains to this thread is fuel tax. When we buy a gallon of fuel, we will pay approximately £5.30 - - of that, £2.60 is direct fuel tax; then, there is a further £0.88 for VAT, amounting to £3.48 of tax per gallon; on a tank like mine that equates to around £55 in tax every time I fill up. This is in addition to Vehicle Excise Duty (road tax), insurance premium tax, income tax and national insurance.

At a rough guess, I reckon about 65% of everyone's income goes to the government/councils in one way or another, and they then fritter it away arguing with each other.

 

Nowadays the private/commercial car parks tend to charge Blue Badge holders the same parking charges as everyone else. They say that they provide special parking places close to the entrance and those spaces are also larger. Their argument is that they have facilitated the easier use of parking but they never means test their customers to decide who can afford parking.

Hospitals should provide free parking for Blue Badge holders as they are more likely to be regular visitors. some do this and others don't but I agree with Mike that it is worth talking to either the hospital admin or the local MP.

 

Let's not forget the alcohol tax in Scotland, the sugar tax (is that UK wide?) and of course the plastic bag tax (that has apparently increased the amount of plastic being used, according to something I read the other day).

@Mike Allen - as @shiney says, quite often now blue badge holders have to pay the same as everyone else but are afforded a space nearer the entrance and that is wider than others. To be fair, I generally don't mind paying a parking charge despite having the blue badge, as in most case I have a choice - I firstly choose where I go, and then choose where I park; in many cases, I could almost certainly park for free, using the badge to allow me to do so - but, that would likely be on yellow lines which would cause congestion, whilst also seeing me park further away just to save £1.30

My objection with hospitals charging is that none of us choose to go there - in many cases we are told when to be there and where to go when we are there; and my local hospital in particular is pretty much out in the wilds - there isn't even the opportunity to park elsewhere, outside the hospital grounds, as it is right next to an industrial park and has main roads including the M25 as neighbours; it truly is a captive audience, and at a starting rate of £3.50, it is nearly 3x more than the starting rate of the main car park in the town centre. Oh, and it is poorly lit in places, poorly laid out and maintenance is the absolute bare minimum - some areas are just hardcore and not even laid to tarmac.

We are paying Rolls Royce prices for everything in this country, and getting Lada service in return.

 

Although not the one I read initially, here is an article on the plastic bags (tax!) - - 1.18 BILLION sold last year.

Bags for life are causing 'more plastic waste than ever before' | Daily Mail Online

So yeah, that tax has worked hasn't it?

 

Why tax though? So if I get a phone call to pick something up on the way home, and don't have a bag in the car or on the back of the wheelchair, I would then pay £20 just as some sort of penalty?

That is the problem with all of these so called environmental taxes/crusades - they are NOT about helping the environment in the least, but they ARE massive money making schemes. The simple solutions that would help immensely are not being adopted.

Supermarket carrier bags could be made from brown paper quite easily, or even plant starch (they sell bags specifically for composting food in, but they are actually capable of carrying things, especially if they were made a bit thicker).

Juice bottles could very easily be made from glass - they always used to be. The excuse for stopping making them out of glass was that they could be smashed and used as weapons; nowadays, our great unwashed have graduated to knives, machetes and guns, so a cola bottle is well off their radar.....

If the powers that be were truly concerned about the environment, they would simply force manufacturers to use different materials, use less materials, and they would bring in a nationwide standard for recycling - anything that can't be recycled gets incinerated and the heat used to make electricity.

As for dealing with the rubbish, you are spot on - very few of us will have put our rubbish into the sea or even just chucked it over our shoulder, but our councils ship it thousands of miles to poorer countries (are they poorer, really?) and then it makes its way into the ocean; but, once again, this is where we are paying Rolls Royce money for Lada service - - think about it, back in the 70's we had street cleaners, and we had litter bins in streets and parks that were emptied regularly, as well as things like public toilets etc; slowly but surely all of those services have been eroded - cut after cut, only now there is nothing left to cut.

Truth be told, I reckon the UK was bankrupt at the end of the 70's into the 80's, so Maggie started selling stuff off to hide the recession, and that has been happening ever since. Now, we have reached a point where there is now't left to sell, and they cannot cut any more or they would expose their own greed and failure.

Over here, the councils own very few properties nowadays - the majority of council owned housing was sold off from the 80's and never replaced, that is why there is such a cripling housing crisis in this country. People who are in council homes now are more often than not in a property that is owned by a private landlord (be that a person, a company or a housing association) - the council simply pays the landlord. These properties are often sh*tholes, with only the very basics maintained. People (like me) can also rent privately - it costs more, but you avoid a 10-year wait on a council list, and you get a lot more choice.

Regardless of whether you rent or own, you pay council tax which is based on the value of your property - this valuation was done, in a lot of cases, back in the 90's so it is quite out of date in a lot of respects. You can ask to have your property revalued, but that is only likely to see the value increase. The value of the property determines which 'band' of council tax you pay; from memory, there are six or seven bands - the higher the property value, the higher the band. Bands C and D are the average for houses with gardens here.

Back before all the housing stock was sold off, there were some pretty decent houses (with gardens etc) available for council rent - sure, some of them were terrible, but not all. Sadly, as I say, they were all sold off.

Regarding the sugar tax - I don't think it is actually applied to a bag of sugar, but it is applied to soft drinks and confectionery (yes, we have a sugar tax on sweets!). This has resulted in a couple of things - firstly, artificial sweeteners have increased massively in most drinks, so it is now extremely difficult to buy soft drinks without them (because chemicals are better for us, right?) and that is a proper pain for people like me who are allergic to some of them. Those drinks that have not gone for the artificial sweeteners have shot up in price -- Pepsi is now £2 a bottle or thereabouts. I did a calculation a wee while ago and worked out that it was actually cheaper for me to drink beer than it was to drink Pepsi (Costco prices) - how mad is that?

 

Unfortunately that's the Daily Mail doing its usual 'being economical with the truth' and playing with statistics. They start off by saying bags for life are made of stronger plastic. Further down the page they say that there are a lot of bags for life made from recyclable materials. They don't distinguish between the two.

Even if that is the case they're talking about a short term statistic for bags for life compared to long term statistics for single use. If we all went over to bags for life this year then there would be an initial enormous sale of them but if they are then used long term the sales would drop considerably.

In that article they say that a bag for life needs to be used five times to offset the extra plastic used in it. If more people did what Lori does (and what I do) then there would not be much of a problem. Most of my bags, always kept in the car, have been in use for five to ten years with only an occasional free replacement - but that's because I'm naturally stingy!

The best thing, of course, would be to use recyclable natural materials for bags for life and I think they are gradually going in that direction. The co-op has already announced that it's starting to make their own bags from compostable material.

The bigger problem is all the plastic packaging that our purchases come in!

 

I agree @shiney - and I generally always have bags in the car, and we have bags that we have had for years. But, the fact remains that taxation of anything and everything is not actually solving any of the problems - it is all about making/taking money.

We buy from a company that works with local farmers to champion local organic and free range produce - we don't solely use them, as we cannot afford to do so, but we do use them as much as we can. Their produce comes in brown paper bags, or wee trays made of a cardboard material, with cardboard covers and paper wrappings. Yes, they do use plastics, but they don't use them wholesale like shops do.

Rather than constantly bashing us with taxes for buying things, whilst also taking money off us to (allegedly) pay for disposal via council tax, why don't the government get hard (really hard) with retailers and manufacturers? Because they are bank-rolled by the fat cats that make a lot of money from selling us stuff that is double-wrapped in all sorts. Money - that is what it comes down to every single time - money, profits and keeping the shareholders happy.