THE Conservatives, Labour and Lib Dems have all begun setting out their stalls for wooing voters at the next Westminster election, with the first clear blue water emerging between their tax plans.
Labour has highlighted the need to build more affordable housing as a key priority. The Conservatives are committed to helping the family via new tax and benefit breaks in the hope of healing "broken Britain". And the Lib Dems have announced a radical tax-cutting budget, but one which could see two million families paying more tax.
Labour
Prime Minister Gordon Brown has pledged to build three million more homes across Britain by 2020, with more emphasis on shared equity.
However, critics have questioned whether this target is achievable, and have suggested that even if it is, the properties will simply go to meet the insatiable demand of buy-to-let investors.
The government also wishes to see more 20-year and 25-year fixed mortgages. However, these were first announced in 2004 after a study of the housing market by Professor David Miles.
Although a number of lenders subsequently launched longer-term products, neither borrowers nor brokers showed much appetite for them.
Nevertheless, the Nationwide has launched a new 25-year fixed deal at 6.39%. Brokers, though, warn anyone opting for this deal could be fixing their repayments near the top of the current interest-rate cycle.
The government also confirmed that there would be a new pensions bill implementing its reform programme. However, this coincided with new data showing that the pensions crisis is deepening. The number of employees covered by workplace pension schemes has fallen by 1.3 million, to a new low of just over four million.
This follows the closure or winding up of almost half of all private occupational pension schemes, many of which offered generous pensions, now only available to public sector workers.
Conservatives
The former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith's social justice group spent 18 months visiting communities from Glasgow to Brighton, Birmingham to Devon and London to Manchester and concluded that the five pathways to poverty were family breakdown, educational failure, economic dependence, indebtedness and addictions. Only by tackling these could we improve social mobility.
The group believes shoring up the family through additional financial support, particularly when children are young, is the best way of encouraging stability, easing debt problems and giving young people a fair chance in life.
The report says: "As the fabric of society crumbles at the margins, what has been left behind is an underclass where life is characterised by dependency, addiction to debt and family breakdown. This is an underclass in which a child born into poverty today is more likely to remain in poverty than at any time since the late 1960s.
"Glasgow's Bob Holman summed it up when he said that the inner city wasn't a place, it was a state of mind - a mentality of entrapment where aspiration and hope are for other people, who live in another place."
The Tories' solutions include allowing married couples, with or without children, to transfer their personal tax allowance between each other. However, this will only help couples where one stays at home: for example, to bring up children or care for an elderly relative.
There will be no extra support for marriage, such as the old married couple's allowance, where both partners work.
The report further suggests helping families with young children by what it terms "front-loading" child benefit. Mothers could receive up to three times normal benefit in the early years, which would be clawed back at a later stage.
But the group also believes getting people back into work is vital for their own health and wellbeing, as well as that of wider society. Lone parents would be required to work full-time when their youngest child reached the age of 11. Similarly, the unemployed and long-term sick will be required to look for work as appropriate.
The report points out that five million people of working age rely on state benefits at a cost of £80bn a year to the taxpayer and says: "By not expecting people who can work to do so, the government is failing the very people it claims to be helping."
Debt, which now stands at £1.38bn, or £54,452 for every household, is seen as a major obstacle to ending injustice and the report is highly critical of door-to-door lenders, who can charge interest of up to 150%. Furthermore, it warns the industry that it has reached the "last-chance saloon" and must clean up its act.
The report argues: "We are frankly dismayed that the industry is doing less than it should to respond to criticism. It seems as if it has succumbed to a culture of complacency in which it is unable to understand the frustration which many sympathetic observers feel."
It recommends combating indebtedness by supporting credit unions and helping them to expand and introducing a statutory bank customers' charter to strengthen good practice and end the current disillusionment over unfair charging.
Finally, it proposes increasing the tax on alcohol to end binge-drinking and associated problems.
Liberal Democrats
The Lib Dems are promising to cut the basic rate of tax by 4p to 16p, its lowest since 1916, which could help millions of low-paid workers.
Furthermore, they are committed to abolishing council tax and replacing it with a local income tax.
They plan to squeeze the super-rich, while lifting the stamp duty threshold on property to ensure the burden is eased on those paying less than £500,000. The party also plans to raise the inheritance tax threshold to £500,000.
However, accountants at Grant Thornton estimated that while some lower and moderate earners will be better off, as many as two million households could be seriously out of pocket.
Couple are cautious about commitment
FIRST-TIME buyers Richard Aird, 27, and Emma Crawford, 23, may not have tied the knot yet but they both believe strongly in the institution of marriage. Yet like many young couples they are cautious about rushing into any commitment, writes Teresa Hunter.
They moved into their new home, a one-bedroom flat in Dumbarton, in May. Although they consider it jointly their home, the mortgage and the deeds are in Emma's name only.
Richard, a senior officer at West Dunbartonshire Council, where Emma too works as a bibliographer, said: "We have worked out the total cost of everything and are splitting the bills down the middle. We even have a joint account. But we thought it best to put the flat in just Emma's name in case things didn't work out.
"This way, if something goes wrong with our relationship, she will be able to afford the bills on her own."
Yet Richard said they both believed in marriage, and it was something they wanted to do at some point in their lives.
He said: "Our own relationship hasn't reached that stage yet, and it would be nice to think that a day might come when we were ready to formalise it. But I do support giving married couples all the help you can.
"I'm strongly in favour of the Tories' marriage proposals and think couples should be given a financial incentive to get together and stay together."
He said a tax break of £20 weekly would wipe out his student debts, so he would consider it a worthwhile amount.
However, he was less sure about Labour's proposals for 25-year mortgages, even though they have bought their flat with a five-year fixed deal with Nationwide.
"I would be nervous about locking into a mortgage for 25 years in case interest rates dropped and I was trapped in an expensive deal," he said.
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