He was also previously Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, the Home Secretary, the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills and the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport. [...] With no change in the distribution of either, the overall effect is to make our country feel less equitable ” The number of people reaching the age of entitlement ranges between 700,000-800,000 per year, setting the cost to the Treasury between £7 billion and £8 billion per annum.15 This is a significant sum of money but less than 1% of public spending.16 Nevertheless, there are equitable ways of. [...] Gifts from parents to children made up 83% of the value of intergenerational wealth transfers, compared to just 3% from (great-)grandparents to grandchildren.24 Moreover, half of the older generation’s wealth is in the form of pension rights and most of these are not heritable: the younger generation is unlikely ever to build up a pension asset like the defined benefit pension scheme. [...] “ I t should be a priority to remove hurdles that inhibit the ability of borrowers to access finance and allow the market to provide the greater flexibility that is needed by borrowers ” If one views a property price of four times earnings as the threshold for affordability, the January 2023 Nationwide Affordability Report shows there are only 10% of local authorities where the average first-time. [...] The economic changes wrought by the pandemic hit the self-employed particularly hard; for example, earnings in construction – which employs a sixth of all self-employed people in the UK – were slow to recover relative to the economy overall, with wages in the sector growing by 9.7% from 2019-2022 compared to an average of 14.6% economy-wide.74 A further challenge is a lack of workplace benefits su.
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- United Kingdom
