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Before I go Quote "Theexang there are over 200000 individuals earning over £100k pa, obtaining PIP, this information was released by the Dept very recently ."

@Cevodniya You are conflating individual earnings with total household income.

The recent DWP figures you are referring to actually state that there are nearly 200,000 households with a combined annual income over £100,000 where someone receives PIP. That is a massive distinction.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/comments/1tz2vgw/number_of_middleclass_families_claiming/#:~:text=questions%20or%20concerns.-,coldbeers,%E2%80%A2%20Edited%204d%20ago

A household income of £100k doesn't mean a wealthy individual is getting a handout; it frequently means two ordinary working parents earning £50k each, who happen to have a severely disabled child or adult dependent living at home.

PIP is explicitly designed to cover the high, fixed physical costs of long-term disability (specialist equipment, adapted transport, or personal care). It is deliberately non-means-tested so that families aren't financially penalised for working and earning an average middle-class salary while managing a severe disability under their roof.

The numbers still don't support your argument. Punishing working households that care for disabled family members by means-testing PIP won't fix the state's balance sheet—it just pushes middle-income families with heavy care burdens straight toward a breaking point.

@Cevodniya If you have a SIPP in excess of £2 million, you are in a highly fortunate position to be able to view the State Pension as optional. However, remember that any drawdowns from that SIPP are fully subject to Income Tax, meaning it won't compensate for a guaranteed baseline pound-for-pound.

The fundamental flaw with suggesting an asset-based means test for the State Pension is that capital does not equal liquid cash flow. Like many investors, my capital is predominantly tied up in fixed, productive assets: a farming estate, rental properties, a smallholding in Pembrokeshire, and land in France. My cash and Stocks & Shares ISAs provide liquidity, but personal tax liabilities are entirely driven by asset disposal and reinvestment.

This introduces the exact same structural issue seen with the recent Agricultural Property Relief (APR) tax changes. A farm might be valued in the millions on paper due to the sheer cost of land and infrastructure, but it doesn't mean the business has the liquid cash to pay a massive tax bill.

If you means-test the State Pension while people are still alive based on their asset wealth rather than their actual liquid income, you create an identical, destructive mechanism. You end up forcing asset-rich, cash-poor citizens to systematically liquidate productive assets, family land, or businesses just to survive day-to-day.

On a personal note, I will be divesting soon and placing all my assets into my daughter's Disabled Persons Trust. She requires 24/7 care, so her needs are entirely greater than my own; this step ring-fences our assets for her lifelong benefit and future security. Once that is established, we will likely relocate to France full-time. I am highly self-sufficient and do not personally need most of what I have, but the current legislative landscape actively forces anyone looking at long-term multi-generational planning to restructure and move capital away from the UK baseline.

Signing off now to watch a film then retire if I dont fall asleep watching the film.

"You could take a machete too benefits, stop making it a lifestyle decision."

@Cevodniya Yes, because drawing the State Pension, Pension Credit, PIP, or DLA are obviously just "lifestyle decisions."

I suppose they are, if you consider the alternative lifestyle to be living in a cardboard box under a bridge begging for your next meal, or relying on a council-funded pauper's burial.

These are basic safety nets and earned entitlements designed to prevent absolute destitution and offset the severe, fixed physical costs of long-term disability. Framing statutory entitlements and vital disability support as a lifestyle choice ignores the basic reality of what these funds actually prevent.

@Cevodniya The State Pension is not a means-tested welfare benefit; it is a statutory entitlement built on decades of contractual National Insurance contributions. The same applies to disability benefits like PIP and DLA, which are intentionally non-means-tested across the entire population to address the uniform physical costs of severe, long-term conditions.

The claim that 200,000 individuals earning over £100,000 are drawing welfare benefits is factually incorrect. In the UK system, breaching the £100,000 threshold actually triggers a strict fiscal cliff edge where individuals are immediately stripped of state support, including Tax Free Childcare and the 30 free hours childcare allowance. Standard working age welfare like Universal Credit is tapered down to zero long before an income ever approaches six figures, with all eligibility cut off entirely if capital and investments exceed £16,000.

If you are suggesting that 200,000 people are bypassing these structural limits to draw billions from the social security budget, please provide the official DWP or HMRC data source supporting that figure. Following the actual numbers shows that the system is already explicitly locked down against high earners.

As for your historical comparison regarding what benefits Far East POWs or concentration camp survivors received: they never received standard state welfare benefits for their internment. In the 1950s, survivors received modest compensation from liquidated enemy assets. Decades later, the UK government introduced dedicated, tax-free ex-gratia schemes (such as the £10,000 FEPOW scheme in 2000). Crucially, the state explicitly legislated that these payments were completely disregarded from the benefits system, ensuring their basic entitlements were protected rather than replaced.

When I was medically discharged from the Armed Forces after being injured in action, I received an Army pension which, is an earned contractual entitlement, not welfare.

Which specific benefit do you currently receive—State Pension, Pension Credit, PIP, DLA or expect to rely on in the future that you would like to see abolished?

Stripe is a good company to deal with, I've had an account with them for years for card payments. I would assume troubleshooter does too for his online sales. Much better than the merchant bankers Lloyds used to use for their small business payment processors and cheaper too.

Right now, there are too many shares requiring massive volumes to have any real impact on pushing the price upward. Once the consolidation is complete (if approved on July 1st), it could help the stock take off on positive news. A 20% gain today is nice, but multibagging would be even better. We will have to hope the intellectually challenged amongst us learns to count and sees the benefit of a lower share count in maintaining and increasing positive volume on good news days and equally the next batch of good news waits until after the proposed consolidation.

@TheCowboy246 independent data from the National Audit Office (NAO) and parliamentary select committees consistently identify multi-billion pound structural deficits and write-offs. Between 2010 and 2021, the MOD officially incurred at least £13 billion in wasted taxpayers' money which equates to £1.18 billion per year. This waste was primarily driven by cancelled contracts (£4.8 billion), administrative errors (£64 million), and severe cost overruns on major projects (£5.6 billion).

"Ok, capital gains tax on main residences or an extra £175k per adult with an investment portfolio eather than property."

@Cevodniya

Regarding your suggestion, treating residential property under the same capital gains framework as business assets is a logical step. Currently, Private Residence Relief completely insulates primary homes from CGT, which historically incentivises the public to view residential housing as a primary investment vehicle rather than just a home.

Applying Capital Gains Tax to main residences upon sale mirroring commercial property rules would shift investment capital away from housing stock, dampen speculative demand, and help stabilise property prices over the longer term. It addresses the asset imbalance far more effectively than carving out minor exemptions at the margins. This is why when you view commercial properties over time any increase in value moves very slowly between successive purchasers rather than 3% or 4% a month.

For the 2023/24 fiscal year, HMRC valued the CGT relief given on residential properties at £31 billion. In the 2025/26 projections, it sits at approximately £32.9 billion. I have a significant rental and property portfolio all, including the house I'm sat in classed as commercial so if I ever chose to sell any I would pay CGT on all UK properties at the higher rate.

@Cevodniya Not my political posts I'm asking questions and replying why there are difficulties with the solutions offered.

The thread is relevant because national security and defence spending are entirely dependent on fiscal realities how we manage the state's balance sheet dictates what we can afford to deploy.

Your figures on disability are accurate; DWP and House of Commons Library data show that the disability benefit caseload rose by 1.8 million claimants between 2020 and 2025. Analysts point to two primary drivers behind this sharp trajectory. First, the profound psychological and physical toll of the pandemic lockdowns, where the population effectively experienced prolonged, enforced containment. With the greatest effect amongst the young and young adults. This has triggered an unprecedented surge in working age mental health and long term illness claims. Second, the structural reality of an ageing population, which has expanded significantly over the same period, naturally driving up health related dependency.

However, means testing the State Pension or tightening inheritance tax rules still doesn't solve the broader macroeconomic arithmetic. The State Pension accounts for well over £140 billion annually. If you remove the State Pension completely from anyone with an occupational income over £100k, you only claw back a fraction of the budget. Official HMRC data shows that fewer than 1% of UK pensioners (around 77,000 to 100,000 individuals) have incomes at this level. Stripping them of the pension would save roughly £1.25 billion annually, a drop in the ocean against a total pension bill exceeding £140 billion, and barely a dent in an additional £60 billion defence target.

To generate the kind of revenue required to fund massive national commitments, a means test cut off would have to be set aggressively low, likely targeting individuals with occupational incomes of just £25,000 to £30,000, hitting millions of average middle income retirees.

The point stands: if the objective is to fund a significant, permanent expenditure like a £60 billion defence boost, minor adjustments to the margins of inheritance tax or high earner pension clawbacks won't generate the necessary scale. You either need structural GDP growth that outpaces current global trends, or broad based tax rises. Following the numbers shows there are no easy shortcuts.

@Nappers Welfare could be reformed, but it is important to look at where that money actually goes. Currently, around 55% of all UK social security expenditure goes to pensioners, with the State Pension alone accounting for well over £140 billion annually as the single largest item in the entire budget estimated to rise to £195 billion by 2029. Any meaningful "welfare reform" intended to fund major commitments would inevitably hit pensioners. Given that reality, how much do you suggest should be removed from the State Pension, or are you advocating that it should be means-tested?

Relying on "encouraging economic growth" also runs into immediate mathematical and structural hurdles. UK tax revenue tracks at roughly 37% of GDP. To fund a £60 billion defence allocation purely through growth without raising tax rates, the economy would need to expand by roughly £162 billion requiring an immediate GDP surge of about 5.4%. In a global economy where businesses are actively opting to automate and deploy AI rather than expand payrolls, that pace of growth simply isn't happening.

As for reallocating other budgets, most departmental spending has already endured well over a decade and a half of deep cuts. There is no surplus fat left to slice; cutting those services further at this stage means dismantling them altogether.

@Nappers How do you realistically encourage healthy people out of work into jobs when the broader economic reality is that employers are trimming headcount rather than recruiting?

Even if you could miraculously find immediate employment for every single frictionally unemployed person, it completely misses the scale of the arithmetic. An extra £60 billion a year for defence represents a near doubling of the current Ministry of Defence core budget (which sits at roughly £62.2 billion for 2025/26). Finding £60 billion annually requires a structural shift in public finance, not just marginal efficiency gains.

Your suggestion of national or civic service to "kill two birds with one stone" and cutting illegal immigration costs to fund this deficit overlooks the actual numbers on the government balance sheet

It is vital to separate illegal residency from the statutory asylum system. Illegal immigrants do not receive state benefits or hotel accommodation. The actual public money spent on illegal immigration is strictly limited to the enforcement and removal apparatus. The entire Immigration Enforcement budget is roughly £830 million a year, with direct removal costs accounting for around £480 million. Even if you eradicated illegal immigration entirely and brought enforcement costs to absolute zero, a saving of roughly £1.3 billion leaves a £58.7 billion annual black hole in the demanded defence budget.

The current UK unemployment rate sits at 5.2% (representing roughly 1.87 million people). Managing even a fraction of this population via national service demands a colossal bureaucratic machine. Training frameworks, uniforms, equipment, medical screening, and physical accommodation all require an enormous dedicated budget. None of this comes cheap.

People do not work for free. If you place individuals into state mandated national service, their wages must be paid directly out of the public purse via taxation. Furthermore, state funded wages return far less to the Treasury in income tax and National Insurance than they cost to pay out. It is a structurally tax negative enterprise that drains the public purse rather than replenishing it.

Relying on unemployment reduction or national service schemes to fund a major geopolitical defence deficit is fiscally impossible. You cannot fund a massive state expansion in military hardware and personnel by creating another massive, state funded workforce infrastructure.

"✔️ Giving the Armed Forces the resources they need."

The only way to do that is by increasing taxes, as they claim they need at an extra £60 billion a year, which is twice the current total defence budget, and if they got it, they’d likely ask double again. Where do you propose they should increase taxes to provide the capital.

@Sheephatch If a single Falcon 9 launch consumed 14% to 18% of that daily global supply, it would require 2.3 to 2.9 million cubic feet of helium per flight. In reality, a Falcon 9 carries its helium in a few Composite Overwrapped Pressure Vessels (COPVs) submerged inside the liquid oxygen tanks. The actual amount of helium loaded per launch is estimated to be around 150,000 to 250,000 standard cubic feet (scf)

Consolidation should come first if we want to avoid a repeat of today. Had we consolidated before today’s news broke, we’d be sitting much higher now.

I’m hoping the BoE goes for a rate increase, though the consensus is for no change. I’d like to see a 25 basis point hike. The consensus for unemployment is flat, and while inflation might tick up slightly due to the Middle East dynamics, there is still a chance it could soften a bit more first. We’ll see.

The RNS delivers:

confirmed helium

confirmed reservoir quality

confirmed pressure

confirmed fracture success

confirmed new oil discovery

confirmed early production potential

The only missing piece is final helium flow rates

Sixty-five people isn’t much when you consider the total number of shares issued, unless you’re suggesting each holds 38 million. As the company grows, so will the share count, we’re only at the first step, haven’t even crossed the first milestone, and we’re already at 2.47 billion shares There’s nothing negative about sharing facts, only the perception of negativity from those who refuse to accept them.

Lets see if the framework goes ahead before counting chickens.

It'll be an interesting day today. Well done chaps!

Do you seriously believe somebody ticking a post gives a measure of interest in a share. Virtually nobody reads these boards and only a tiny proportion of the greater market even knows of its existence. If you're under the misguided belief most investors are here to ticj a post then we should be seeing a raft of TR-1's come Monday opening.