Using national insurance to fund social care is regressive and unfair | Letters

If fairness were the criterion for judging a tax (Editorial of September 3), we would never really have implemented national insurance. It is both an income tax and an employment tax; it is regressive; it is not paid by those who have exceeded the legal retirement age; it encourages the construction of imaginative schemes for avoiding subcontractors; and it requires its own collection and registration system.

Why not, in the name of efficiency and fairness, abandon the NI and replace it with simpler income and profit taxes? This would ensure that those with the broadest shoulders bear the heaviest burden (since income tax is progressive). This would broaden the tax base – income, whether from work or a pension, becomes taxable, regardless of the age of the recipient, and employers become taxable according to the profits they make , rather than the number of employees. Of course, income tax rates will increase, but the resulting tax would be more evenly distributed among all taxpayers (particularly because replacing a regressive tax with a progressive tax ensures that the less well-off pay less ).

If in the search for NHS and social care funding there is a real debate over whether to use the NI or income tax then perhaps now is the time to get out of these limits and do what is right: stop pretending that the NI is an insurance system, accept that it is just another tax, decide to simplify the whole system, to make it fairer and ensure that its collection is more effective.
Adrian Darnel
Durham

As for the plan to increase national insurance to fund rising health and care costs (Report, September 3), it is always the poor who pay for the poor. Are the poor now paying for the middle classes to keep their homes?
Janet Briffet
London