And Council Tax Benefit: Fill & Download for Free

I can answer for the UK.NHS spending comes from general taxation - not, as is commonly believed, from National Insurance contributions (these mostly go towards the state pension and unemployment benefits), so that means the vast majority of the money comes from income tax, VAT and council tax.The rates of income tax in the UK range from 0% (on earnings up to £11,500) to 45% (on earnings above £150,000). People on an average salary of, say, £35,000 a year pay £392 a month in income tax. An unspecified portion of this will go towards NHS funding.VAT in the UK is charged at 20% on most items. A small portion of this will go towards the NHS.Council Tax is paid by property owners or tenants, and is analogous to a property tax in the US. Most of it pays for local services (police, schools, road maintenance, refuse collection, etc) but a small amount of it goes towards local hospitals and medical centres.Some additional funding comes from other forms of taxation that not everyone has to pay, such as inheritance taxes, capital gains taxes and financial services taxes.The net result is, regardless of how much you pay into the pot in income tax and VAT, you and your family are fully covered for all eventualities, including GP and hospital care, A&E (emergency room) care, fixed-price prescriptions (free in Wales and Scotland) and subsidised dental care.Quite simply, everyone is covered and everyone gets the same comprehensive coverage.If you feel this is insufficient, private insurance is also available that allows you to jump the queue for some types of care, gets you discounts on elective procedures, and also allows you to use private hospitals that have a bit more of a hotel-esque feel and private rooms. Some higher-paying jobs provide this as a perk. However, you’ll usually be dealing with the same doctors and specialists who work at the local NHS hospital who moonlight in private practice.

I had moved into a one-bedroom apartment in London and I had just lived there for a month when I got ill. The landlord was a friend and colleague of mine and we had come to an agreement about the rent and what was and wasn't included but he hadn't given me a tenancy agreement yet. I had asked him about it but he hadn't had the time to put it into writing but he promised I would get it before the end of the month. Short before the end of that month my boss called me asking me when I was coming back to work again. I explained the situation and that I was due to get surgery the following week and that recovery would approximately be 4–6 weeks. She told me she would get someone from an agency to cover for me until I was fully recovered but a few days after the surgery I received a letter from her that since I couldn't give her an exact date for my return to work she had no choice but to let me go. I got in touch with the Citizens Advice Bureau and apparently she was in her right to let me go while I was on sick leave. So I had to apply for benefits until I would be able to look for another job. I told my landlord that I needed the tenancy agreement for my application for housing benefits. He wasn't happy that I was going to apply for benefits but I told him since I wasn't living there for free I had no choice. So reluctantly he said he would have the tenancy agreement ready the following day. And true to his word I got it with the mail the next day. He had added a note that I had to sign one copy and return that to him. Before signing I read it and the first thing I noticed was that instead of the £700 per month we had agreed on he had put in the agreement that the rent was £850 per calendar month. We had also agreed that the rent would be included water and council tax but according to the tenancy agreement the rent was NOT including anything. If I would sign it I would have to pay him £850 per month and I would be responsible for the water and council tax bills. Of course I wasn't going to sign so I called him to let him know. He said that since I was going to apply for housing benefits it wouldn't make a difference for me if the rent was £700 or £850 because the council would pay my rent. I replied that I wasn't going to stay on benefits forever and that if I signed it and then find a new job after recovering I was stuck with the higher rent. He said he would come in the following weekend to discuss the situation with me. I had an appointment at the job centre for my application so I took the unsigned tenancy agreement and told them what the landlord had done. He didn't get the £850 rent he claimed but he made sure the water and council tax bills were signed over to my name. Apparently a landlord can just to that and even though an oral agreement is binding I couldn't prove that those bills were supposed to be included in the rent so I was left responsible for paying those bills.It would soon become clear to me that he was the worst landlord I ever had because things only got worse. It's needless to say our friendship came to an end.

How long is a piece of string? There is literally no “right” answer to this question.A person on £40,000 gets a £12,500 tax-free allowance, and pays 20% income tax on the remaining 27,500, i.e. £5,500. They also pay National Insurance of 12% of earnings above £7,956 so that’s another £3,845. However, in practice these calculations are based on earnings after the deduction of any workplace pension contributions. For example, if the employee on £40,000 is paying £1,800 in pension contributions, they pay 20% income tax on £25,700.How much VAT a person ends up paying is entirely dependent on what they spend their money on. Certain goods and services are taxed at the full 20%, but a lot of others are either zero rated, or attract a reduced rate. Domestic fuel, for example, is only 5%, but rent is free of VAT. For many people, VAT will only be in hundreds of pounds per year, not thousands. Ditto vehicle-related taxes.Similarly, how much Council Tax they pay will depend entirely on, a) where they live, and b) the value of the property they live in. The person actually living in a property is liable for Council Tax, so usually tenants also have to pay, although some landlords might include it in the rent for certain types of property. We rent a house worth around £650,000 in London, and the Council Tax is around £1,460 per year.Conversely, things that are counted as reliefs in other tax regimes are essentially dealt with outside the UK system, so that the vast majority of people don’t need to fill in a tax return. For example, if you have children, you can apply for Child Benefit, while the government will also top-up any payments on childcare to make up for the tax previously paid on it at the base rate of 20%. How that works in practice is that for every £1 you pay into a government account, it gets topped up by another £0.25, and you then pay the childcare provider directly from that account.