People on £10,000 to £96,000 tell us what they want from the Spending Review
This week the government will set out how much it is going to spend over the next four years on the public services that millions of people use every day.That includes the NHS, schools and public transport as well as welfare benefits, armed forces, energy projects and a whole range of other government spending.We asked a handful of readers, who had contacted the BBC via Your Voice, Your BBC News, what they would like to see in Wednesday's announcement.
'I earn £850 a month. Young people need better jobs'
Lewis Eager, 26, works two shifts a week in the on-demand delivery service for a supermarket in Southend-on-Sea, earning £850 a month. He lives with his parents who he pays £120 a month.He would like the Spending Review to include a plan to help young people like him find well-paid, full-time jobs.Lewis completed a business administration apprenticeship and an Open University degree, but says he cannot find full-time work.He estimates he has applied for more than 4,000 jobs without success."Getting knocked down all the time is horrible."Even entry-level jobs seem to require experience, he says.He sees a "looming crisis" among young people unable to get on the jobs ladder, and would like to see more money go into adult education."I live with my parents which I have nothing against, but I thought I would have achieved more by now," he says.
'We earn £52,500. We need more help with childcare'
Resheka Senior, 39, is a nursery nurse and her husband Marcus, 49, a school caretaker. Between them they take home more than £50,000 a year. But the couple say they are still struggling, particularly while Resheka is on maternity leave.When she goes back to work, Resheka says she won't be much better off because she will have to pay for childcare before and after school for her five-year-old and all day for the younger children, aged two and nine-months.They have debts that they are shuffling between credit cards and no prospect of moving out of their two-bedroom council flat in Woolwich, London."I don't want to stay at home. I've been working since I was 15 years old," says Resheka. But she would like to see more support for couples who are "making an honest living".She wants the government to pay for free breakfast and afterschool clubs or more free childcare on top of the 30 hours a week currently provided."It's not as if I'm saying I want benefits," she says. "We're putting back into the economy. We just need some help."
'We earn £71,000. The UK needs more apprenticeships'
Ollie Vass works for a nutritional supplement company, where he earns £31,000. His girlfriend Grace Sangster also 19 is on an apprenticeship scheme earning £40,000.They each started saving from the age of 13, earning money mowing lawns and working in restaurants.In April, with the help of a small inheritance and their Lifetime ISAs, the couple completed on a £360,000 two-bedroomed terraced house near Slough.Ollie and Grace would like to see more support for young people starting out, especially first-time buyers, and more apprenticeships.They also think the tax-free allowance, which has been frozen since 2021 should rise so that people on low wages can keep more of their earnings.Ollie also wants to see cheaper rail fares: "At the moment it's too expensive to use."
'We live on £700 a month. Benefits don't go far enough'
Leah Daniel, 23, and her partner are entitled to £800 a month in Universal Credit and the council pays £900 a month rent for the flat in Birmingham they share with their two-year old daughter.But currently around £100 a month is being deducted from their Universal Credit to pay for advances they took while homeless for a short time.Leah says they run out of money every month and have to borrow from friends and family, sometimes having to skip meals to make sure their daughter is fed.If the government decides to cut the welfare budget in the Spending Review, that would be "absolutely heartless", she says."It's one thing to make sure the country's growing and we aren't wasting money and people aren't taking advantage of the system. "It's another thing if you aren't giving more support to help people out of poverty and help them look for work," she says.Above all she and her partner want stable jobs so they can "build up their lives"."So many times we haven't eaten and we're worried about tomorrow," she says. "I just want this situation to change."
'I earn £96,000. Fruit and veg should be affordable for all'
As a GP and practice partner earning £96,000 a year, Dr Kirsty Rogerson says she is aware she is well-off.She and her husband, a hospital consultant, own their own house, and are putting some money aside to support their sons through university.But she sees plenty of people in her surgery in Sheffield who aren't so fortunate and face what she thinks are impossible choices.If she could choose one thing for the government to take action on it would be to subsidise fresh fruit and vegetables and make processed food more expensive."What [the government] shouldn't be doing is just tackling it at the other end with weight loss drugs," she says. "That's going to bankrupt the NHS."She would also like to see more money spent on public services."As a mother, I'd rather pay more tax and know my children were being well educated and there's a good healthcare system," says Dr Kirsty Rogerson. The same goes for the police."I'd rather go to bed each night knowing those things were there," she says.
'My pension is £20,000. The government should make savings'
Sylvia Cook, 72, used to sell accounting software, then published books about Greece, before she retired.Living on a pension of £20,000 means being careful with her outgoings, so she welcomes the government's u-turn on winter fuel payments as "a good decision, if a little late". The extra £200 "obviously eases things", she says.But in general she thinks that rather than increasing spending, the government should look at where it can save money."You can spend a lot of money and achieve nothing," she says. Instead she suggests changes to the tax system, efficiency savings across government and cutting perks for MPs and civil servants."There are so many inefficient things they haven't got the common sense to sort out."The health service is a case in point she says."Throwing more money at the NHS doesn't necessarily help if they don't sort that out," she says.
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Netto. And dark moments – racist attacks, suspicion of others and modern paranoia about conspiracies in Britain's past. Above all, I wanted to trace the rise of the thing that has destroyed the confidence of our age: distrust – not just of those in power, and of 'truth', but of everything and everyone around us and, ultimately, of ourselves. It didn't start like that. Thatcher believed that if you liberated people from state control they would become better and more confident. But to do this, she turned to radical rightwing economic thinkers – some of whom were very odd. About 15 years ago, I went to see a US economist called James Buchanan. I had to drive for hours deep into the mountains of Virginia to his farm. He told me that you couldn't trust anyone in any position of power. Everyone, he insisted, is driven by self-interest. 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He photographed Hatton next to an heiress of the Baring bank family – whom he also represented – and cooked up a passionate romance between them. Then he turned to the Tories. When a government minister called David Mellor was revealed to be having an affair, his mistress – Antonia de Sancha – came to Clifford. He took her to meet the press in restaurants he represented, then told them stories about Mellor making love in a Chelsea shirt while toe-sucking and spanking. All invented. Sign up to What's On Get the best TV reviews, news and features in your inbox every Monday after newsletter promotion Clifford had opened the floodgates. In the early 90s, MP after MP was revealed to be a sleazy hypocrite who seemed far more concerned with his own weird sex life than governing the country and serving the people. The one I love is the story of David Ashby MP. He sued the Sunday Times in 1995 when they accused him of being a homosexual. He admitted he had shared a bed with another man, but said it was purely to save money on holiday. He admitted that his wife did call him 'Queenie' and 'Poofter', but said that was only because she was lonely in the marriage. He had bought her a dog to make her feel better. But it didn't work. Ashby told the court she threw plates and kitchen knives at him. She threatened to 'kick him in the bollocks to stop him having sex with anyone', and broke his glasses. Ashby lost the case, which put paid to his career. Soon, he was deselected by his local Tories as their parliamentary candidate. He later said of his ex-colleagues, on live radio: 'They're a bunch of shits, aren't they, and we know they are.' The early 90s saw an extraordinary collapse in trust in politicians. Created not just by Clifford, but also by Mohamed Al-Fayed, who said that he regularly paid MPs with cash in brown paper envelopes to ask questions for him in the Commons. It seemed to prove everything Buchanan had been saying: you couldn't trust anyone in public service. After I interviewed Buchanan in the Virginia mountains, I asked him about his life. He told me about how when he was training as an officer in the US Navy, he was constantly patronised by pompous officers from posh Ivy League universities. He was still angry about it – he knew they were all phoneys, he said, you could feel it. As I drove back I wondered if that was his real motivation. Dressed up in academic language, but beneath it was simply revenge. He was going to destroy that smug patrician class. And he succeeded. Big time. By the second half of the 90s, even the politicians came to believe they were bad. And they did the most extraordinary thing: they gave away power. They did it partly because they knew they couldn't fight against the rising tide of public doubt. But they were also persuaded by another force they felt they could no longer fight against: the markets. The first to go was Bill Clinton. His secretary of the treasury, Robert Rubin, persuaded him to pull back from public spending. Instead, he should cut the deficit and allow the markets to create a financial boom. Clinton agreed – and the US boomed throughout the 90s. But it also led directly to the global crash of 2008. ƒ And behind the markets was a whole academic industry that had taken Buchanan's ideas and run with them. They wrote articles that bluntly said the role of politicians in society should be marginalised because so much of what they did was 'sub-optimal'. Journalists picked up these ideas and put them in simpler terms. Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International wrote: 'What we need in politics today is not more democracy – but less'. In the face of this undermining of politics, New Labour also gave in. The day after their victory in 1997, the new chancellor, Gordon Brown, dramatically announced that he was giving power over the setting of interest rates to the Bank of England. It was an extraordinary move. Labour MPs were aghast. One, Bryan Gould, exclaimed: 'What then is the role of the chancellor? Or more simply, what is the role of democracy?' Brown later admitted the truth: that it was because politicians were now seen as dangerous. We did it, he said, 'not for any fundamental economic reasons', but because we weren't trusted. Born out of a weird self-hate, that single act was largely responsible for the present powerlessness of politicians. It was also helped on by a new phenomenon – because liberal culture too caught the disease. The Thick of It was a comedy series based around a government minister and their advisers. They live in a constant state of self-interested hysteria. Reacting to events and having no control over the real world outside. It was seen as liberal satire – but it can also be seen as a very powerful expression of Buchanan's idea that all politicians are completely venal, driven only by dark emotions. But that wasn't the end of it. Because a new kind of politician rose up, bred in the swamp of distrust. They saw that playing bad in an over-the-top way would give you a great deal of power. Because in a world of disenchantment, where no one believed that politicians could be good, being bad meant you must be authentic. I give you Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage and Donald Trump: pantomime villains who are locked together with us in a feedback loop of shock-outrage-badness repeating endlessly. Outside this theatre, really bad people do really bad things – but we are distracted by the pantomime. Meanwhile, the classes that once made up society fractured. The liberals turned on those who voted for Brexit, using with one voice the word Amis had spat out 30 years before: 'stupid'. It may be that Britain – and much of Europe – is in a similar moment to that described by Clark just before 1848: on the edge of a new kind of society we don't yet have the language to describe. It feels frightening because without that language it is impossible to have coherent dreams of the future. To build a better world, you need an idea of what should change and how. And one of the things preventing that may be our obsession with constantly replaying the past. In the present age, the fog of experience has been thickened by the mass of recorded data that allows the recent past to be endlessly replayed, refusing to fade away. A constant loop of nostalgia – music, images, films and dreams from the past. It is another block to the future. And it is also the way this series is made. My bad. Shifty in on BBC iPlayer from Saturday 14 June.
