Anna K

@prestonjbyrne Government support for those in the private rented sector has been frozen most of the last decade - private rents have soared. I’m not convinced gov support is what pushes up rent …

@Ferdinand641 @linmeitalks The public sector has also had a push to diversify locations, etc. so even if everyone is in a physical office, it’s often not the same one. So managers need to be able to actually manage without standing over someone daily anyway.

@linmeitalks The problem is that the system is abused, especially in the public sector, staff are less productive and we need to socialise for our sanity.

WORKING FROM HOME ARGUMENT I honestly can’t see the justification for making people return to the office if you are not customer facing/ front line staff You want people to pay excessive amounts on travel, waste hours travelling for what ? To sit next to you while you say 4 words all day. For those who don’t do their work, monitor them and tell them they have to attend the office 4 days a week for a PIP and you’ll see how quickly they’ll improve…. but if someone’s is hitting targets and doing their work, while making it easier to be a better mother or father or carer to elderly parents, by being present doing the school run, attending after school activities on time and getting a home cooked meal prepared for their family why stop that ??

@KateWilton1 I don’t think he’s the worst PM ever, but I’m not convinced he’s getting on with the job well. He’s not decisive and doesn’t have a clear vision for his team to follow. Getting to a decision point is painful with this gov and they also seem to be allergic to politics.

Starmer is far from perfect, he’s not a natural communicator, his communications team is terrible, he’s made some strange and disastrous appointment ie Mandelson. But someone explain to me how he’s a terrible PM. He’s serious, statesmanlike, gets on with the job well.

@BillWiIdin If it takes you that much time to load your laundry then you may have a bigger problem …

If you work from home, you shouldn't get a full salary since you're basically Babysitting your own life on company time. If you have time to start a load of laundry between meetings, you’re technically a part-time employee.

@Quiet_Snooper @Baddiel Is stabbing Jewish people on the streets of Britain just criticism of a genocide now?

@Baddiel Or maybe you should stop shouting from the rooftops supporting genocide and allowing your Jewish identity to be conflated with Israel and then you would feel so vulnerable? If criticising a genocide makes you scared then you're in the wrong you idiot.

Really, I'd love to know how to activate some of that *Jewish supremacy* I hear so much about on here to stop all this. Not sure what the fucking Elders of Zion are thinking about. It's almost as if British Jews are just a tiny vulnerable minority community living in terror.

@RobNoLastName Rent biggest cost for most people who rent, they pay it first before other costs. can see attraction of keeping the biggest cost stable to give folk shot of dealing with other price shocks from war. Wouldn’t go for blunt rent controls myself, but understand considering it

Can anyone explain the correlation?

@Sam_Dumitriu Wonder how much of this is really about local elections. There’s also the chance that they’re seeing risks of rising costs with Iran, housing is the most significant cost for many people and they tend to pay it first before other things, and trying to test what public may accept

This is bleak. I don’t think Reeves is thick. I think she understands that this will force landlords to sell up. (And push up rents between tenancies) Her civil servants will have told her this at least. If this is on the table then it suggests her authority has gone and she’s unable to push back against the Labour left. Not just bad policy, but a sign things will get worse from here. theguardian.com/politics/2026/…

@higgyboson @ToniHargis @UKLabour The owner occupiers are no longer part of the renting demand? Tbh, so much is dependent on location, size, type of property that it’s driving me nuts that so many people are being so binary about good or bad impacts of housing policies.

And what happens to rental prices when tens of thousands of rental properties are bought up by owner occupiers? Here's a clue - They go through the roof as supply is reduced. A £1,000 rental is £1,500 in 10 years at a 5% per year increase. If millions of renters can barely afford their rents now, just wait a few years. It will be carnage. But you obviously don't understand this from your opening sentence.

I'm currently in my kitchen having a chat with a friend who's selling both her rental properties, (a 3 bed semi detached in Torquay and a 3 bed detached bungalow in Paignton), as a DIRECT result of the new Renters legislation imposed by @UKLabour Yes, it's possible that someone may buy either or both properties in order to rent them out but it's rather unlikely. So 2 more good family homes will disappear from the rental market. Multiply by several thousand across the country and you have a MASSIVE problem - Thousands more homeless families. All caused by @UKLabour meddling in stuff they simply do not understand. Anyone with the slightest bit of knowledge about the housing market could have told them this would happen.

@mr_james_c Rents have increased everywhere. When younger I shared some questionable flats in non-vibey parts of London. The people I manage now can’t afford what I could at their age and salary. The ones I know aren’t making stupid decisions - get why they find rents tough.

Whenever I read complaints about expensive rent it's inevitably: - university educated - working in media, policy, civil service, "activism" (ie. high status but low paying jobs) - living in an expensive city (NY, London, San Francisco) - renting in a vibey, exciting part of the city, close to social groups - refuses to countenance moving to somewhere less vibey but more affordable "Rent is so expensive we need rent controls". Yes you clown because you want everything, just like everyone else around you.

@_Unknown_D_ It’s interesting that S has had lower rental increases than E and W over recent years though and curious to see how their rental zones end up working. I think the supply impacts would be even worse in E, but simplistic x arguments on this are wild.

With current prices, there are many areas in the UK where, when a home is put on the market to be rented, it is oversubscribed with loads of people wanting to rent it. This is a supply problem. What do you think happens if the rent for those homes is artificially controlled? Do you think this might further increase demand, thus worsening the supply? Or is my analysis too radical? Look at what happened in Scotland, I'm yet to see an example of rent controls achieving their intended purpose.

@JacobEdwardInc @CoffeeBlackMD I’m sure there are plenty of people who present with physical issues but it’s got a psychological cause. But it does damage your faith a bit when drs getting that wrong has impacted on your life. Would also be good if the psychological wasn’t dismissed too

The overlap in “long covid” and significant hypochondriac mental illness is very real. And you all know this based in the people you personal know with long covid. It’s like a personality trait. Always a victim. And boom. They get the Lon’vid too? What are those miserable chances? The odds that someone so screwed by everyone already also now had the Lon’vid. They already have constant pain. Chronic fatigue and there isn’t anything they can eat that won’t kill them via allergy or give them the looseiest of stools. Everything often neatly and meticulously recorded in a stack of notebooks that you can review. These people don’t have anything real going on other than a psychiatric disorder and this is why nothing works for them. And then there are the real cases. Which are also difficult with very little evidence that anything benefits (though every weird drug has been tossed at it). I think it’s often a relative mitochondrial dysfunction and will get better over time but is best fixed by exercise and sleep. I’ve read some promising experience with SS-31 and MOTS-c. And these people tend to be motivated to actually get better. The thing is to try to find a real case you have to wade through so much mentally ill bullsh*t brought by those that glom onto the diagnosis but don’t have it and they are exhausting.

@exRAF_Al No, it’s the equivalent of questioning whether or not those are increased above inflation. And those questions are asked, regularly. Universal credit was capped at 1% for 3 years and frozen for 4 - 7 years of under inflation increases.

Saying the triple lock should go is like saying universal credit or child benefit should go. I don’t think any of us would complain if a retired civil servant, on £50k a year pension, were treated *slightly* differently to a retired lady, silently living out her years in what I would refer to as traditional poverty, but the fact our politicians are corrupt scum should not penalise those who contributed to a system which promised to provide fair state retirement income benefits package.

@grok @AccrueReturns @BenGrahamUK How much of the welfare spend is on pensions? And doesn’t that come from national insurance, rather than income tax?

Yes, the figures check out per the Office for Budget Responsibility's March 2026 Economic and Fiscal Outlook and Spring Statement data: welfare spending (social protection benefits) is forecast at £333bn for 2025-26, while income tax receipts came in at £331bn in the latest full year. This is the first time welfare has edged ahead of income tax alone.

The UK has crossed a line. Welfare spending: £333 billion Income tax revenue: £331 billion We’re now paying out more than we bring in from workers. This is unsustainable.

@BenGrahamUK The spend includes pensions, so the NICs part of the ‘money in’ should also be added for this to be an accurate reflection of tax vs spend on welfare.

@ChiefPieEater @CENSORED_BY_UK It was only ever meant to be a temporary measure - triple lock isn’t even in legislation. Would personally rather get rid of the lock rather than up pension age and force people to work until they drop.

@CENSORED_BY_UK The UK pension is one of the lowest in the G20. The whole point of the triple lock was to slowly increase it over time. The 2% minimum growth was aligned to GDP norms. So who's failed to grow the economy? Boomers?

What gets me about the pension debate is the sheer middle-class ignorance of it. There are millions with little to no savings, they might (most likely don't) own their own home. Some might have bought their council house (and showed it more TLC than the council did). They grafted in shitty jobs and made the best of it, and came out of the end, still standing with pride. Ah! But they are asset rich, and took more out that they put in. They don't deserve a pension because some centrist and left-wing twats and their entitled spawn are having a tough time of it. One word: cunts. Plenty of money to sit on your backside all day and not earn £1 of tax to pay in. As if not giving people who worked 40+ years a pension is going to help them. It won't because guess what, they ain't getting a State Pension either. Once it's gone or means-tested, it's gone for good. Governments of any hue are brilliant at that. It's sheer spite from a loud minority that they made poor life choices or got sucker punched by moronic Governments that promised them a moon on a stick and prizes for all. So as the Civil Service love giving out punishment beatings, here's one. Your pension is unfunded, too. You go first and a 30% haircut. Definitely cap the £1m+ MPs? 30% haircut, too. Because if there is such a funding crisis, YOU, got us in this mess. YOU are going to get us out of it.

@Jenny_1884 I think we should take care of our pensioners and very much want pensions to continue to exist - that’s why I worry about the sustainability of the triple lock. It was meant to be a temporary measure and the working age to pensioner ratio just continues to get worse.

These people complaining about the triple lock on pensions for people who paid into the system all their working lives should vent their anger on the amount this government pays out housing illegal migrants that have not paid a single penny into the system. It’s insane these people blame the elderly for working hard all their lives. If you want to blame anyone it should be the government not the elderly.

@ScottGoetz_ It was a grand achievement for some of them, they did work hard and I’m fine with them being proud of that. I don’t get why recognising that the same effort doesn’t equal the same reward now is so impossible to understand - I worry a lot for those younger than me

Never will understand why old people get so viciously angry when it is explained to them they bought houses at a good time and it would be nice if similar conditions existed now. I suppose it is just insecurity at the idea owning a home really wasn’t a grand achievement for them.

@marydejevsky Odd comparing the total cost of one, but only the above inflation/earnings cost of the other. Are you suggesting canning the total amount of pensions that public sector workers contributed to?

as per basic internet search: annual cost to taxpayers of triple lock by 2030 - £15.5bn cost 2025-6 of gold-plated public sector pensions - £37bn which is bigger, more urgent cost to curb?

@G1959Gary @Tinebobagain Personally think it’s a good thing that people are able to do this - I’m very pro people being able to max their pensions. Some people will pay in more than they get back; others less. Like all tax and benefits.

@AnnaKuklaWrites @Tinebobagain You can top it up, which other benefit do you have to pay actual money to top it up?

If people didn’t ’pay in’ why do they need 35 years of statutory contributions to get a state pension?

@Tinebobagain Why is describing the situation muddying the waters, I wasn’t giving my opinion at all? And I’m pretty sure benefits have counted towards state pension entitlement the entire time I’ve been alive, and therefore for the majority of my (pensioner) parents working life

@AnnaKuklaWrites The ‘qualifying benefit’ is a relatively recent thing. Stop trying to muddy the waters because progressive govts have changed the criteria.