Should we hike the income tax-free allowance to £15,000?

0:02Welcome to This Is Money Podcast, sponsored by Trading212. Download the Trading212.com.

0:30And if so, how would we pay for it? Also today, how the heck did the UK's energy costs get so high? Can you still make a profit from buy to let? Yes, but only if you hit this magic number. We talk Airbnb privacy and Simon rage baits me, sending me a piece on working from home. But are we slackers really ruining it for everybody else? Don't forget yourself today with all the latest breaking money news. Just go to thisismoney.co.uk or download the app. But first, Simon, 5.01%. That is the biggest figure I've read out at the top there. Is that right? It is right. And there is another cash iso battle going on.

1:11And this is the trading 2.12 rate has moved up really substantially. Anybody listening to this podcast, paying attention to the start of it each week will have noticed this. This is the highest rate since way earlier in 2025. It reflects what's going on in terms of interest rate expectations and what's going on in the bond market. But after we talked about how bad the big banks are at passing on higher rates to savers and how many people are sitting on legacy low rates or insult accounts, as we like to call them on the This Is Money podcast, this is in stark contrast to this. and it is an illustration of why you need to check your savings rates and move to a better rate.

1:53Meanwhile, the speculation continues apace ahead of next month's budget. This week, CGT was making the headlines, but also the threshold at which people start paying income tax. Now, the government is said to be considering upping the income threshold at which earners start paying tax from£12 ,570 to£15 ,570. Now, it's been stuck at that£12 ,000-ish figure since around 2021 and will remain there until 2031, unless, unless it doesn't. But will it really happen? And if so, how the heck are we going to pay for it? So, Helen, Simon, welcome. Helen, the personal allowance, just a reminder, what is it?

2:37Who gets it? Why is it even there? Sure. So this is the baseline amount under which you don't pay any tax. At the moment, as it stands, if you earn less than£12 ,570 in a year, then you don't pay any tax on your income. Obviously, lower earners, people who perhaps work part-time, pensioners who only run on the state pension, may not have to pay any tax on their earnings if they don't go above that level. Once you earn more than that, income tax kicks in and then goes up in different increments. So once you qualify for paying tax, it's 20 % between£12 ,571 and£50 ,270. Above that, the higher rate of income tax comes in, which is 40%.

3:34And that's on earnings up to£125 ,140. And then anything above that is taxed at 45%. And you're known as an additional rate taxpayer. it. So it depends on band. Your salary or your income is essentially taxed in slices. So even if you fall into the higher rate band, it's only on the amount of your salary that goes above the higher rate level. Yeah, it's been in place. It's been frozen at this level for quite some time. So this rumour that's come out this week that it might be changed and changed quite significantly could be quite a big deal. So just to be clear, this is a bump to the personal allowance.

4:13This wouldn't be any unfreezing of the bans or anything like that. It's just, I mean, it gets us around that whole state pension brouhaha that we talked about a couple of weeks ago, doesn't it? Yes, exactly. So this would be effectively raising the personal allowance. So essentially the band under which you don't pay any tax to£15 ,570. So no changes as we understand it to the higher rate tax bans, it would just sort of raise the threshold at which people start to pay tax. Simon, how are we going to pay for this? Will this even go ahead? And if it does, how will we pay for this? Well, I think, firstly, there's an important thing people need to remember about the real problem with these frozen thresholds, which is the reason why there used to be a principle enshrined in the tax system, and it was literally enshrined in the tax system, that allowances went up by at least inflation, was so that people, when people's incomes rose, if they went up with inflation, they didn't lose out.

5:19And it's not just those people who earn less than the personal allowance and just tip over it, like the people we're talking about who purely get pension income, for example, who are affected by this. Everyone is affected by this because freezing the allowance means that you are getting less every year compared to inflation. So if you've got someone, for example, who is in that basic rate 20 % band, so they earn between£12 ,570 and£50 ,270. If their employer decides to give them an inflation matching pay rise right now. Their employer says, right, inflation is 3.1%. I'm going to give you an inflation matching pay rise.

6:04That person has not got any richer. All that's happened is the purchasing power of their income has been maintained. They haven't really had a pay rise. It's just maintained the level that it was at last year, what that money is worth. But once you take into account the fact that that pay rise falls into the 20 % pay bracket because the personal allowance has been frozen and they haven't had an uplift underneath that bracket, then they're actually only getting 2.48 % because you've got to take 20 % off the 3.1 % they're getting. And then you go on to the 40 % tax bracket where actually you're only getting 1.86 % of it.

6:53Now to go back to your question of will this really go ahead and how will we fund it? I think it's really interesting that this has cropped up now at exactly the same time as there's suddenly been talk of an early election. The polls are showing that there's a fresh poll out today as we're recording this, showing that reform are now polling slightly behind both Labour and the Tories. uh there is an argument that were andy burnham to decide it would be worth calling an early election then it would be a good idea to do so before a potential cost of living spike kicks in um energy prices are forecast to go up 25 next january uh there's talk of donald trump blocking diesel uh exports from the us and the price of diesel going up as high as three pounds you know it's looking like all this stuff off the iran war is actually going to bite us harder and for longer than we think so there's an argument you know get in there ahead of time so it's really interesting that this has been raised now because this was definitely not something that was being talked about as being on the cards like over summer i mean it's a big big jump in one go but it has been frozen for some time how would we fund it now this is the problem because ultimately you don't need to be totally plugged into the whole political economical grid to have worked out that actually we're short of cash not flush with cash at the moment there's talk that the headroom john healy has based on the rachel reeves's fiscal rules that he said he will abide by has shrunk substantially from 24 billion to maybe under 10 billion.

8:46He also has to find more money to spend on defense because we've got this commitment to raise defense spending. There is an unwillingness to cut back on welfare spending. Welfare spending is going up. We had some pretty ugly figures on debt interest this week. We borrowed way more money in August than it was thought we were going to do. More to the point, you're paying 300 million pounds a day in debt interest now. We're basically paying more interest on our debt and then having to borrow money to pay the interest on the debt. Not really the backdrop that you would think for a tax cut. However, the NIEESR research says increasing the allowance would cost about 20 billion.

9:31Dale Vince, left-wing entrepreneur, founder of the Ecotricity Energy Company, said we can pay for it, by making the tax system fairer, starting with capital gains and the billions we currently hand to banks in interest. If only life was that easy. I want to get into sort of how you might restructure the tax system or sort it out, Simon. But I just want to be clear about this personal allowance. The idea is obviously you think that that will impact the poorest households the most, right? Those on the lowest income. But, you know, there's been plenty of research that says actually that is not the case.

10:10I mean, New Economics Foundation is one of those. Okay, so the argument here is that there are better ways of doing this. And if you have a limited pot of money available to fund something, then you'd be better off funding something else that is only targeted at the low earners and doesn't also benefit everybody else. however it is also true to say that this would deliver the same benefit basically to everybody but that that benefit would have more impact if you are a lower earner if you raise the personal allowance by three thousand pounds then people won't pay 20 on that three thousand pounds anymore that is worth£600.

11:04And it is true to state that everyone, everyone would get that£600 whose income is above that new£12 ,570. So actually, you're giving money to people who potentially don't need it at the top, and you've got a limited pot of money to do that. But it is also true to say that that money would have more impact on the people at the bottom. If you give someone whose income is only£12 ,570,£600, it's going to have a much greater impact than the 600 pounds that you would give to me you or helen and also you get buy-in for it it's a universal thing and this is one of the things i think we forget nowadays is like there is an argument for having things that are universal because then everybody supports it if you do this through the benefit system then you get people going well i go out and i work hard and i have to earn my money and i'm paying loads of tax so why are they just taking it off me and giving it someone else.

12:02So that's the argument for doing it, actually, I would say. So how would you sort out this sort of tax system situation, Simon? What would you do? Okay, so Labour is completely hamstrung by the daft promise they made in their manifesto not to raise income tax, national insurance, VAT and corporation tax as well. That was in there. They made that promise in order to get themselves elected when they didn't need to make that promise to get themselves elected, they were probably going to get elected anyway. They also made it off the back of the Tories, having made two cuts to national insurance that the country really couldn't afford.

12:40So it wasn't a smart promise to make. However, they made that promise and quite rightly, once you make a promise in a manifesto, you should stick to it. This has led to lots of tinkering around the edges. Everybody knows that the UK's tax system is in a mess. there is widespread agreement amongst economists actually both on the left and the right they just disagree with how to fix it that the tax system involves lots of weird little bits that are bad for growth and skew economic behavior arguably what we need to do is sort out the tax system and we need we need to make a start as soon as possible i go back to a point that i regularly make.

13:21There is a cottage industry for people earning more than£100 ,000 in this country trying to earn less money. That is clearly stupid. And also, you know, the frozen tax thresholds things that we were talking about. So there is a way potentially that you could sort of get away with breaking the manifesto pledge, but arguing you're not breaking the manifesto pledge and the raising of the personal allowance is key to it. So this is my off the wall idea of how you can try to start sorting things out. You raise the personal allowance from£12 ,570 to£15 ,000, right? That's a big jump. That gives everybody£486.

14:08pounds at the same time you raise the basic rate of income tax from 20 to 21 now a hugely unpopular move but if you're also giving people that lifting the in the personal allowance raising the basic rate of tax from 20 to 21 is worth a maximum of 350 you're taking a maximum of 353 pounds off people who are in that basic rate band. So anywhere between that new 15 ,000 person allowance and the current higher rate allowance. Okay. You're raising the tax rate, but you're giving people more money than that. So you can say, well, look, we said we wouldn't raise taxes, but we haven't raised taxes. We've actually given you money here, but it starts to, to, to correct the course and do something that people have been arguing, which is that we need to raise the basic rate of income tax.

15:02And we need to broaden the tax base because it's too skewed towards one chunk of society, the higher earning chunk of society. You also, at the same time, remove the 60 % tax trap. You just get rid of it. Gone. Okay? You don't take the personal allowance of people anymore above£100 ,000. It's skewing behavior. It's massively outdated. If the£100 ,000 had risen with inflation, it would be like nearly£170 ,000 or something like that. It's just a bad bit of tax. It was an emergency measure after financial crisis. spin it off. Now, the argument against doing that is that you are effectively then giving higher earners a load of money.

15:41And in fact, the full cost to someone who goes all the way through that£100 ,000 to£125 ,146 % tax drop is£5 ,208. But in order to make it look like you are not, you know, gifting money to higher earners and that you are also saying, no, everybody's got to pay, you drop the 45 % tax band to£100 ,000. So now tax levels go up to£15 ,000 tax-free, 21 % to£50 ,270, 40 % from there to£100 ,000, and then 45 % above that. You also get rid of the stupid childcare thing that's stopping people doing it. And that is a way that you start correcting the course of the tax system and you have actually put up tax but you haven't put up tax i don't genuinely think that they would do this by the way no i don't think so either but is there an argument just to make things a bit more complicated to have um go a bit more scottish chuck an extra band in there because it feels really quite cliff edge the 20 to the 40 maybe just throw a 30 in there as well well that's okay so that's a very good point but what you have to remember is that people already are paying 30 pretty much because you need to add national insurance onto the income tax because we have effectively have two income taxes in this country we have income tax and we have national insurance the thing you could do with something like this is you could just not do it all in one go you could do it gradually for example you could if If the removing of the 60 % tax trap is too much of an issue, you just start chipping away at that and you say you're going to get rid of it within three years.

17:34And then that makes the numbers look better in terms of when people start running the numbers of what, oh, so-and-so is going to get this, so-and-so is going to get that. Or you kick it way up the scale. You go, okay, we're going to raise the personal allowance to£15 ,000, but we're going to kick that 60 % tax trap up to 200 grand next year. and then the year after that we're going to kick it up to 250 you know and you do something like that so you kick it so far up um that by the time people get hit by it it makes much less of a difference to their income and there's much less people caught by it so it's skewing the but it's skewing the behavior of far fewer people well it's a lovely idea simon but we need some radical thinking we need we need this kind of radical thinking we are absolutely stuck and we need this kind of radical thinking.

18:22And actually, this is a point where if he did call an early election, it would do him a favour because they can have a new manifesto that doesn't have the promise not to raise those taxes that shackled them in and also doesn't have the promise on the triple lock, which is also causing them a massive headache. And all of a sudden, you start to make the UK's finances look a hell of a lot better. All right, then we shall see. Simon, we shall see. But let's turn our attention now to what on earth has happened to the price of energy, Helen. We're forking out almost 150 % more for our electricity than we were in 2010.

18:59That's according to a report from the IFS this week. And it leaves Britain with some of the highest household prices in the G7. Yes, look, we had COVID. We know that and all that disruption, but so did everybody else. So why so high. Helen, tell me about the report. How have electricity prices managed to rise? 147 % in the last 16 years. I thought renewable energy got loads cheaper, so therefore our bills should be coming down. Yeah, this is a really interesting report. And I think it highlights the sort of slow creep of energy bills over really quite a long time. So everyone thinks about since 2022, when we had the Russia invaded Ukraine and we had this big spike, bills went up.

19:43But actually, we're only now paying about 50 % more than we were then. For the years before that, energy bills were kind of creeping up as well. This is a really interesting report we've written up on the website. It's basically looking at why UK energy bills are so much higher than other countries. In the UK, we pay almost 30p per kilowatt hour for our energy per unit of energy that we use. People in France, that's just over 22p. People in Sweden, about 23p. And in the Netherlands, just 21p. So we're paying substantially more than other countries around Europe. Why is what we've looked at here.

20:27There's actually a variety of reasons. Some of them are things that are universal and that we can't necessarily help. As we've mentioned, things like the conflict in Ukraine and now in Iran, disrupting the supply of natural gas and, you know, playing havoc with the energy market. But there are also things that are kind of unique to the UK and the way that we generate and supply our energy, which are sort of different to other countries. So this is a report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies. And they say that basically, UK electricity prices might be so high because we produce a sizable chunk of our electricity from natural gas rather than, for example, nuclear power, which other countries tend to choose more.

21:21Modernising infrastructure as well is something that goes into our energy bills quite a lot. So we had this last year, this 28 billion plan to redo the UK's electricity networks and gas networks. That's all feeding into households bills and net zero as well is one. I think people are quite conscious of, you know, how much are these plans to remove fossil fuels from the UK electricity network by 2030, feeding into higher bills. So, yeah, there's plenty of different things to think about. Did they have a solution to this? What we as a country, not we personally can do, because we can all do little things to, most of us can do little things to lower our bills.

22:03But what about the country? Yeah, there's a few things. So we've sort of detailed the government response to this and they say that they've inherited a broken system, which in fairness in part is true. A lot of things were wrong with the energy market and there are a lot of sort of factors outside of our control before the current government got in. They are, of course, cutting VAT on energy bills from October. That'll only save people about£45 a year, but better than nothing, I suppose. One thing that is mentioned in this report is to encourage more people to use what are known as time of use energy tariffs.

22:43So this is things like Economy 7 and Economy 10, where you get a cheaper rate for using power at annoying times, for want of a better word. So, you know, over setting your washing machine overnight or charging your EV overnight and things like that, things like that aren't the whole answer. I think we need to, first of all, sort out how we sort of produce our energy so we're less tied to the sort of natural gas market, which, as we've seen over the last few years, it has so many ups and downs. And also we do need to accelerate that sort of push to greener energy because I think ultimately that's the only thing that's really going to make things cheaper.

23:26But the pain in the short term is obviously so high in terms of getting all the infrastructure in place. But hey, you know, country's getting hotter, so that'll be good for solar panels. I mean, there's two big problems, one of which, you know, is as Helen spoke about the way that we set electricity prices, because we set them based on, you know, the cost of producing the marginal unit. So the price of gas heavily influences the price of electrical power. So, for example, in the report, it said in 2021, gas accounted for 40 percent of total generation, but set the price of electricity 97 percent of the time.

24:06so gas is not producing that much of our electricity anymore but it's setting the price of it all the time now if gas is cheap that's not a problem if gas is expensive as it is at the moment then that is an issue and we probably need to try to sort out that that element which people are trying to sort out at the moment there's another thing which was a an ed miller band supported idea but was not popular and a lot of people were against it zonal pricing and i think this is something that's going to become potentially more important as we see the increasing electrification of the grid, but also this huge demand for power from data centers and stuff like that.

24:43And we are trying to push for data centers in this country. We're not going, we don't want data centers. And zonal pricing basically means you can charge different amounts for electricity in different parts of the country rather than having national pricing. And what that would mean is that, for example, the areas of the country that have lots more renewal energy could get lower electricity prices, particularly with that's then tied into time of use. So when there's an abundance of energy, they could get very, very cheap energy. And, you know, we've got it with the time of use tariffs where people have been paid to use energy.

25:17And the argument is, is that by adding zonal pricing to that, you would start seeing a scenario where those data centers are being pushed to those areas rather than into the areas where you're less likely to benefit. it. So for example, the greatest kind of push for building data centers at the moment, weirdly is in London. There's people trying to build data centers in London, most expensive place to build in the country, place where property is in most demand, etc. But place to the financial center, and they want all those quick connections, you know, read your Michael Lewis flash boys to find out more.

25:51Greg Jackson of Octopus, who we did an interview with on the podcast maybe early this year i think anyway he's got some really interesting thoughts on this as well worth seek if you're interested in this seek out that interview he's quite pro zonal pricing and he says it would basically encourage data centers to be put in places like the northeast and stuff like that but as i said before there's also quite a lot of opposition to it all right then simon thank you very much now we've got a new section in the pod the stock market story of the week sponsored by Trading212. Simon, what is your pick this week?

26:26What's caught your attention? What has caught my attention is that we are hopefully going to see the largest float on the London Stock Exchange for five years. It is a company called Airtel Money. It's a payments company and it is expected to be valued at between£6 billion and£7 billion. And it is part of Airtel Africa. Airtel Africa. What's that? Well, it's probably the biggest FTSE 100 company that you haven't heard of. Airtel Africa has seen its shares rise substantially in recent years, and it's cemented a place for it amongst the London Stock Exchange's biggest companies, but lots of people obviously haven't heard of it because, as the name suggests, it operates mainly in Africa not in the UK but the decision to list Airtel money in the UK is a is a very very big one and very important for the stock market and a year when it really needs some good news because companies keep getting taken over and not replaced and of course if you do want to invest in Airtel Africa or any other FTSE 100 stocks or stocks from around the world you can use this podcast sponsor Trading 2 on 2 to do so fee free all right then can you still make a profit from buy to let.

27:49Yes, but only if you hit this magic number, says your housing guy, Ed Magnus, who explains how much you need just to stay in the black when accounting for high mortgage rates, crippling taxes and the cost of upkeep on the property. But what is this magic number, Helen? Helen, we've talked a lot, haven't we, about pressures on landlords. What is this all about? So you're right, we talk an awful lot about how tough a time landlords are having due to things like going back some time, higher taxes, more recently, the Renters' Rights Act. It's basically harder than it used to be to turn a profit. We actually had another article on the website this week, which said that over 30 years, buy-to-let property in the UK has made investors more money than the US stock market, which is quite astounding.

28:38But landlords who've bought in more recently will be unlikely to be finding that that is the case, to put it mildly. But look, you know, there are still plenty of people that need to rent homes and we do need landlords to rent them out to them. So we've looked at the figure that landlords need to hit in terms of yield in order to make the sums add up and stay in the black. So yield for people don't know is essentially the profit you make every year on renting out a property. So it's the amount you bought it for compared to the amount of rent you make for it every year. That figure, our property expert Ed Magnus has crunched sums on, is 7.7%, which is quite high.

29:26It just shows the average gross rental yield is just over 6%. So it means that many landlords could be making a loss. So the example we've given is if you bought a house for£200 ,000, you need to collect£15 ,400 in rent every year to get a 7.7 % yield. So, you know, that's more than£1 ,000 a month in some areas of the country. That sounds like a pretty high rent. So I think it just highlights the difficulties for landlords in terms of just making any money at all. We tend to look at landlords and think, God, they're all rolling in it, you know, funging off tenants. But actually, if we look at it nowadays, the reality can actually be quite far from that.

30:13That said, you know, there are positives for landlords getting into the game now. There's tons of cheap property on the market, much cheaper than years gone past that savvy landlords are looking to snap up. but the other costs, stamp duty, higher mortgage rates, fees to letting agents and, you know, those sort of general maintenance costs that are all going up as inflation rises and the cost of materials and things and energy goes up. You know, it can be quite difficult to stay in the black. All right then, from one sort of renting to another. So read a question time. Someone's written in to Sally, your agony aunt, at the end of August.

30:54I stay for three nights in a chateau in Versailles with my husband and three young children. We booked through Airbnb for£1 ,500. We noticed several cameras inside the property, including one on the upstairs landing between the bedrooms and bathroom. None of the bedrooms were ensuite, so we all crossed that area in towels, partially dressed and sometimes naked, assuming the cameras were switched off. But on the last night returning to the property, we saw one of the indoor cameras powered on and operating in the dark. We worry we may have been filmed. Goodness me, Simon. What a question. Is it legal?

31:33Well, legal, I do not know in terms of French law and cameras. But what I do know is that it is not allowed on Airbnb. Sally Hamilton, our Sally Sortset, Agony Aunt, replied, your experience would make me cringe as it would anyone who feared their privacy had been invaded on a family holiday. Basically, indoor cameras have been banned by Airbnb since 2024. Hidden ones have never been permitted. Now, Airbnb investigated this, but said that the host had confirmed the cameras had been turned off and there was no footage taken or stored and offered a 50 % refund. But the host would say that, wouldn't they?

32:19If this was you in this position you wouldn't necessarily believe it and i must admit this has sort of occurred to me before sometimes when i've stayed places on holiday and there is like a security camera i've not seen security cameras inside apartments or houses but i have seen them outside and you think are they filming me right now and you can argue the whole well if you're not doing anything wrong you don't need to be worried about it but it it's your home for that period of time and if it being your home for that period of time involves walking around in a state of undress or naked then you know so be it and you shouldn't they shouldn't be filming you i don't think they should have cameras inside them at all to be perfectly honest and i think they should be very careful about having cameras outside particularly places uh where it's sunny and people might be sitting out in the garden and things like that.

33:12Sally checked Airbnb's rules and they say hosts are not allowed to have security cameras and recording devices that monitor any part of a home's interior, such as the hallway, bedroom, bathroom, living room or guest house, even if they are turned off or disconnected. These prohibitions also apply to the common areas and shared spaces of private room listings. There is also the mention of penalties for those who do not comply. In its community policy is the following. If these requirements are not met, the presence of cameras inside a listing may result in listing or account removal. Exterior cameras are permitted, but their presence must be spelt out on the listing so that guests can decide whether or not this is a deal breaker for their booking.

34:01So, for example, you could make a decision as to whether you were going to stay somewhere before you went and stayed there if, for example, you wanted to sit and sunbathe naked in the garden. I have done a little bit of research, Simon, while you were talking there. And in terms of Airbnb, very clear. But also in France, the French Penal Code, Article 226-1, says non, absolument pas. Violations can result up to one year imprisonment and a 45 ,000 euro fine. So is that what's happened to this Airbnb owner? No, it hasn't. And you're right that like increasingly countries are quite rightly, you know, cracking down on parts of their law where there were gaps that haven't kept up with technology on things like voyeurs and stuff like that.

34:51Anyway, on Sally's intervention, Airbnb reopened the complaint, recognising the breach of its own terms by the host, It reimbursed the remaining£750 cost of the person's stay. And a spokesman said, our initial handling of this report fell short of our usual high standards. We have refunded the guest in full, removed the listing from Airbnb. Indoor cameras are banned on Airbnb, regardless of their location, purpose or prior disclosure. In the rare event of a violation of this policy, we take action. so i guess my message to all our listeners is if you are staying in an airbnb property one you have found on airbnb and you see a camera you must complain because it's actually only by people complaining and doing something about it rather than just going oh well you know it probably wasn't filming me and i had my clothes on all the time it's only by complaining about this that it will get stopped.

35:50And cover it up. Yeah, and cover it up. Obvs. Finally, there's a row going on at Barclays about working from home. We're getting more of these, aren't we? Thousands of staff are pushing back against plans to increase office attendance from two days to three days. Their union, Unite, wants exemptions for some people with long commutes or caring responsibilities and a one-off payment to help cover the extra cost of going to work. But working from home measures were brought in during COVID. It was an emergency situation. And six years later, we've a neat crisis, anemic growth, and Britain's poor productivity continues.

36:22So isn't it time people just shut up, stop Skyping, and get back to the office? That's sort of what Ruth Sunderland argues in her latest column, the militant working from home lobby are living in a parallel universe. Simon rage baiting me there. Simon, go on. Note the militant work from home lobby, OK? Now I can see both sides of the coin here. Things changed dramatically in the pandemic. we told everybody they had to stay home and not go out and we did some quite serious psychological work on people as a country in order to make sure that they complied with that that i don't think the real impact and after effects of have ever properly been considered and we've decided to just sweep that one onto the carpet pretend it didn't happen and move on with life and it's especially bad for young people.

37:14Now, having said that, there are good arguments for why people might need to work from home sometimes. There are good arguments for why companies might say, do you know what? This is a work from home job. Okay. We don't need you in the office. They don't want to run an office. They meet up regularly. They do things like that. However, I have observed over the last six years, a degree of what I can only describe as taking the piss. okay right there are so many people in well-paid white-collar middle-class jobs who will still do anything to avoid going into the office i am astounded by the number of conversations i have with people who tell me that they're still only in the office like two days a week and these are not people who were hired into a job where it was two days a week these are people who quite often worked in that job and it was five days a week then they went to work from home and there is there is this element where companies or organizations try to get people in and make what to me would seem a reasonable request i don't think asking people to come in three days is like really pushing it you know if someone has a particular special particular reason that they need to request flexible working for example you know their children need extra help they've got caring responsibilities or something like that then that's fine if their commute is long that's a that's a difficult one right did they move out after they took the job you know if they took the job knowing the commute was long then the commutes on them or they moved further away while they were still working there then the commutes on them if they made their employer aware of it before they did and then the employer moved the goalposts after the event and i think it's on the employer But I don't think three days a week is really asking the world.

39:11I think, you know, it's really important for people to interact. It's really important to be able to have the conversations, the serendipitous conversations that people have, the ability to get stuff done that just does not work with Teams calls and Zoom calls and phone calls and things like that. and the collaboration and also the enjoyment of work the fun bit the bit where you get to chat to your colleagues and and meet interesting people and talk about interesting things or just daft stuff it just doesn't happen when you're at home all of the time okay now i do so i do think that it is important but i also as i said don't think that three days a week is asking the world of people.

39:54But there's companies that are struggling to get people in two days. My view is that unless there are particular special circumstances, as I said, if you can't make it into the office two days a week, which is what your employer wants you to do, you should probably have a bit of a hard look at yourself and maybe consider getting a different job where they're not fussed about you coming in at all. That's my view on it. And what I would say, Ruth's point is, there is an element here the militant work from home lobby who will push back against all reasonable requests who are ultimately spoiling it for everyone else they're spoiling it for the people who actually quite like the fact that they can do one day a week at home or two days a week at home but they're going to face a backlash from companies like the backlash we've seen from companies who finally go we've had enough you're all in five days look even though i am a person who i was about to say works from home, I work from literally anywhere, you would think that I would be rah-rah working from home.

40:52And to a certain extent, I am. As someone who has a spinal problem, going into work, especially with long commutes, every day in the past used to get incredibly tiring. So I do think the options for working from home, the flexibility that we've introduced now, especially for mothers, especially for people with disabilities, means that we can get, for older people, more people into the workplace that we need to. If you are not performing working from home, that's on the company to identify that and to sack you. A company should absolutely have the right, if they want to bring staff in five days a week, you crack on.

41:30But if you want the talent, there will be other options available that they can go to where they can go for three days a week. So that's something you have to balance. But I think we're stuck in this sort of Victorian-esque, and I don't know if I've got the right era here, way of working, of going in at nine or eight or seven, whatever, coming home at six o 'clock, doing the long commute, that doesn't work anymore. For certain tasks, and there is a lot of research about this, for much more considered in-depth tasks, working from home for a lot of people, not for everyone, lots of people hate being at home to work.

42:08I, as someone who's a broadcaster, but that's worked among proper journalists like you, Simon, I always look at you guys and think, how on earth can you write an article with all of that rubbish going on in the background, all of that noise, all of that people coming up to you all the time? I couldn't do that at all. I can do that at home, but I do love, and one thing I will say, I miss going into an office and just having, like you said, those serendipitous moments, the most engaged, most creative ideas have come from just having those coffee chats or whatever. But when I go into the office now, because I don't do it very often, that whole day becomes, you know, I haven't seen you in ages and you don't get any work done at all.

42:53So I just think it's this one size fits all doesn't work anymore. I agree. And I would say two things on that. One, I think I have a particular sympathy for people who are being told to come into the office, but they don't have a desk and they then don't end up sitting with their own team. So they just end up sitting with randoms and often then spend all day on Teams calls, just sitting with randoms on Teams calls to other people. I also think on your point about, I think companies need to look at like, you know, having quiet spaces to work. The open plan office has been a big driver of what's gone on over the last 20 years, But actually, there's a bit of a backlash against that.

43:36And I think that feeds into the work from home thing is, you know, big open plan offices. They're great. But people do need places to meet quiet spaces to work, places where they can concentrate and things like that. Now, interestingly, we had a poll in this story that I put in this story. Now, 3 ,637 people voted. The question was, what's the minimum you think people should have to come into the office? The options were every day, four days, three days, two days, one day, never. I didn't put six days or seven days. okay so the overwhelming uh leader in this poll was every day which attracted 40 of the votes followed by 19 for three days 14 for four days 10 for two days and 10 for never and 6 for one day now there are two comments i would make on that firstly okay actually what that poll shows is that whilst 40 of people think people should come in every day 60 of people think they shouldn't have to come in every day so so coming in every day is not the clear winner that you think there were more votes for people not having to come in every day secondly listeners to last week's podcast will remember my talk about least scientific polls ever.

45:05I did think after I wrote this that maybe I should have put in there, you're only allowed to answer this if you're actually employed. I can see all our retired readers see they go every day. Yeah. Seven days, eight days a week. Exactly. Lazy, feckless. When I was at work, we had to work eight days a week in the office. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. That's what I thought when I saw that. I actually said never because I think, again, it's up to the individual. It's up to the company. If you find something that makes it work for you, then you crack on. That's my view. Flexibility is the key. Simon, start of the week.

45:43£30. That is the extra cost of filling up a family car with diesel now compared to what it was in February before the US-Iran war kicked off, according to the RAC. £30 extra every time you fill the tank is a lot of money. That is a lot of money. Right. Thank you very much, Simon. Thank you very much, Helen. Thank you for listening. You can keep up to date with all the latest breaking money use just go to thisismoney.co.uk or download the app if you have any comments or questions to you anything you'd like to look into or any thoughts about the debate on working from home because that got us going didn't it simon simon yes actually tell us tell us your thoughts on that email us at podcast at thisismoney.co.uk come to thisismoney.co.uk forward slash podcast to join the debate and read the comments and if i remember i will stick the poll in the podcast notes story and you can come and try and skew the results super and if you like our podcast why not rate us wherever you found us it helps other people find us too