Does your credit or debit card have this symbol on it?
If so it is equipped with the latest wheeze for speeding up the way we pay. It is called ‘contactless’ payment and if the retailer has the right equipment – look for a similar symbol – then you can pay just by waving your card over the terminal rather than slotting it in and entering your PIN.
The system only works for a transaction up to £15. So it is ideal for buying a coffee and a cake, a few small items, or just paying for a newspaper. No PIN or signature is needed so of you lose your card anyone who finds it can use it at your expense. However, a security device means it will ask for a PIN if it has been used a number of times without being put into a normal chip and PIN or ATM machine. That should limit the losses on a stolen card and, as long as tell the bank at once and have not been careless, you will not have to pay the cost.
Barclays is now incorporating the new technology into all its plastic cards – including Barclaycard – and other banks are also rolling it out. But the number of places you can actually use contactless cards is limited. Retailers have to pay for the new technology. Shorter queues and lower transaction charges may not be enough incentive to make them do so.
Pure coincidence?
The new Government has scrapped the 50p a month broadband tax due to start
on fixed line phone bills in October. But BT and TalkTalk are putting up the
monthly rental they charge in October by the same amount and keeping the money.
BT line rental will rise from £11.54 a month to £12.04 from 1 October (add £1.25 to each if you have paper bills). The only way to avoid the charge is to pay for your line rental in advance for a year rather than the normal three months. That will bring the cost down to £10.99 a month but has the disadvantage that you cannot move to another telecoms supplier within that period without losing the payment you have made. BT is also raising the cost of calls outside your monthly pricing package by up to 10%. A spokesman told Saga Magazine “We review our charges from time to time and rebalance prices. There is absolutely no connection at all with the Government cancelling its broadband tax.”
Another supplier of landline phones, TalkTalk, is also putting up line rental charges from October by 50p a month. No doubt that is a coincidence too.
Rent aid cut
More than 200,000 people aged 50 or more will lose on average £9 a week from
the help they get with their rent when changes to the system start next year.
The people affected are those in private rented accommodation whose rent is
subsidised through what is called Local Housing Allowance. The package of
changes was announced by the Chancellor in his emergency Budget in June and will
be saving the Exchequer £1.75 billion by 2014/15.
The biggest change is a reduction in the amount of rent that is paid. At the moment the maximum rent payable is fixed at a level where 50% of the rents in the area for the same size accommodation are higher and 50% are lower. That is called the ‘median’. But from October 2011 the maximum rent will be cut so that 70% of rents of higher and 30% are lower – called the ‘30th percentile’. The new rule will be applied to everyone who is on Local Housing Allowance as their annual review comes up. It will result in an average cut in the money paid towards their rent of £9 a week or more than £450 a year. Other changes – some of which start next April – will cut the rent paid by a further £3 a week on average. Many older people are protected from the change because they have been in their accommodation since before April 2008 when local housing allowances began. They are paid under the older housing benefit system and no change to that is planned at the moment. But if they move or take a new tenancy then they will be subject to the new rules and face a severe cut in their money. People in council homes or with housing associations are not subject to any of the new rules and will continue to get housing benefit as they do now.
Check that tax code
The Revenue helped itself to £238 million it was not entitled to in 2009/10
as a result of the worsening problems in calculating the tax due on our pensions
and pay. The amount of tax wrongly snaffled by its computers has risen from £96
million in 2008/09 – an increase of 148%. Those same computers also failed to
collect £132 million which was owed by other taxpayers, a rise of 16% on
2008/09.
The fault lies, you guessed it, with a new computer system intended to solve the long-standing failings of the PAYE system through which the Revenue helps itself to a share of what we earn before we see it. But the new computers have struggled to make sense of inadequate and incompatible data from five different systems and seem programmed to err on the side of collecting too much rather than too little tax.
The Revenue says simply that everyone should check their tax code and the tax deducted and query anything that seems wrong. Good advice as far as it goes. But if a brand new £389 million computer system cannot cope with the calculations what hope has flesh and blood?
The simple rule is that if your tax code has changed, if you have been sent more than one tax code, or if your tax has gone up for no apparent reason then contact your tax office and get it checked. Known problems are occurring with married couples allowance if one partner was born before 6 April 1935, people with more than once source of income, anyone who has had a new source of income during the tax year, and employees who have a company car or other taxable benefits. Expect a long wait – the Revenue is currently working its way through more than 18 million customer reviews which it is dealing with at the rate of 1.2 million a year. The National Audit Office claims that those cases may result in £3 billion repaid to millions of taxpayers and about half that recovered from millions of others.
e-mail Paul Lewis on paul@paullewis.co.uk