How Do We Pay for the UK?
The Briefing Room
BBC
4.8 • 731 Ratings
🗓️ 11 May 2017
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
David Aaronovitch presents the need-to-know facts on where taxes come from and how they're spent.
This edition is a politician-free zone, with non-partisan analysis on how we pay for the UK and the prospects for public services in the future.
CONTRIBUTORS:
Emily Andrews, senior researcher at the Institute for Government
Helen Miller, associate director, Institute for Fiscal Studies
Ben Page, director, IPSOS-Mori
Producer: Neal Razzell Research: Sarah Shebbeare.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the BBC. |
| 0:02.0 | Hi, welcome to the briefing room with me, David Aronovich. |
| 0:07.0 | On this week's programme, I'll be getting briefed on whether we can afford good public services in Britain, |
| 0:13.0 | and if so, how will we pay for them? |
| 0:20.0 | One promise you won't hear in this election campaign, we'll make public services worse. |
| 0:28.3 | Yet there's a developing worry that worse may be what they will become. |
| 0:32.9 | Our needs are growing, but are our means of satisfying them. |
| 0:42.3 | So today, I'll be getting briefed on how to pay for our public services. Not from politicians, partisans or party campaigners. |
| 0:46.3 | This being election time at the BBC, if we have one, we'd have to have them all. |
| 0:51.3 | Today, I'll be listening to the experts and the people who think |
| 0:54.4 | about this stuff all the time. The people leaders need to go to when they want to understand |
| 0:59.4 | what's going on. I'll be asking them, how do we pay for the UK that we want? Step into the |
| 1:06.1 | briefing room. Now, is this you? |
| 1:14.5 | I sort of just don't understand it. |
| 1:16.2 | I don't understand half of where my tax is going. |
| 1:18.8 | We don't get what we pay taxes far in the first place. |
| 1:22.5 | We do pay a lot of taxes, but I don't see where the text goes to. |
| 1:26.5 | So I don't know when money's going to. |
| 1:28.9 | So first, very basically, where do their taxes go? |
| 1:33.7 | Neil Resel's been counting the pennies, and here's his 90-second guide. |
| 1:40.2 | For every pound you give the government, it spends about 30p on Social Security. |
| 1:49.0 | That's pensions, tax credits, disability and housing benefits, and so on. |
... |
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