For a statement which the Treasury like to bill as not being a full fiscal event, it feels like a lot happened yesterday. Fuel duty was not only frozen but cut by 5p for a year. A big increase in the National Insurance thresholds will lift millions out of paying any tax at all and […]
Conservatives have recognised for a long time that inflation is a scourge which hits the poorest hardest. It was the great economic crusade of the Thatcher Government in the 1980s to finally get to grips with the high inflation which had bedevilled British governments for decades. Our latest inflationary problems mean we are all going […]
Last month, well over a quarter of a million people sought advice from Citizens Advice, more than in any month since the pandemic began, and a new record. The number of people the charity supported with debts relating to their energy bills is also the highest on record – and the average amount people owe […]
More than a million people have gone missing. Well, I exaggerate slightly – they’ve not vanished completely, but they have dropped out of the UK labour market. There’s no single reason for this (there are a number of factors in play), but it is the major change in the UK jobs market over the last […]
Universal Credit has been a colossal undertaking for the state. Already a decade in the making, the system is still not fully rolled out. Once complete, it will account for roughly £80 billion of public spending. In the Budget yesterday, the Chancellor finally set out a plan to achieve what Universal Credit was always designed […]
The UK has traditionally prided itself on being one of the best places in the world to invest and do business. Particularly in the Cameron-Osborne era, the Conservatives focused on heavily on making Britain competitive and business-friendly, with significant cuts to the headline rate of corporation tax. And in his recent Tory conference speech, Boris […]
Predictably, an increasing number of politicians, charities and campaign groups are again calling for the Government to cancel the planned ‘cut’ to Universal Credit (UC) scheduled for September. When the pandemic hit, the Chancellor announced a temporary increase in the UC standard allowance of £20 per week for one year – later extended by a […]
We didn’t hear very much about welfare yesterday. As had been trailed before the Budget, the £20 Universal Credit uplift has been extended for six months. That is a more sensible move than some of the other ideas being floated, but it was the easy option and it kicks several cans down the road. This […]
For some time now, the Conservatives have struggled to talk about welfare. After a decade of stories such as the bedroom tax, cuts to tax credits, controversies over disability benefits and the rollout of Universal Credit, it feels like many on the centre-right would like to quietly put welfare in a box and shove it […]
It has become very fashionable in certain quarters to lay into Rishi Sunak. The stop-start approach to some of the economic support measures put in place by the Treasury, and initiatives such as the Eat Out to Help Out scheme, have attracted ever more criticism as the second wave has spread across the country. But […]
It wasn’t a huge shock yesterday when the final report from a body called ‘the Wealth Tax Commission’ came out in favour of a wealth tax. The more cynical among us might suggest this feels like a group of fairly left-wing academics claiming Covid as a reason to implement something they have always supported anyway. […]
It’s become a bit of a cliché in recent months to say that the situation we are in is ‘unprecedented’ or that we are in ‘uncharted waters’, but the Office for Budget Responsibility’s latest update really does illustrate this in stark terms. The UK’s debt-to-GDP ratio is set to soar well above 100% and be […]
As far as it’s possible to say such things in the harrowing circumstances in which we find ourselves, Rishi Sunak has had a good crisis. It has been telling that Labour have struggled to land any meaningful blows on the Government over its economic response. The initial policy response was phase one: freeze the economy […]
There’s been much talk this week of how pessimistic the Office for Budget Responsibility are about the likely economic impact of coronavirus. Most media outlets ran with the headline that the pandemic “could see the economy shrink by a record 35%” in the second quarter, and the OBR are predicting that for 2020 overall GDP […]
Is there anything worse than watching someone being smug about something they’ve actually got very, very wrong? In his parting interview as Labour Leader with the BBC, Jeremy Corbyn took the opportunity to claim the current coronavirus crisis had entirely vindicated him over public spending. ‘I was denounced,’ he scoffed, ‘as somebody that wanted to […]
The first budget after an election is rarely the time that governments start cutting taxes. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, on average over the last three decades tax rises worth £13 billion have been announced in the first year of each parliament. Governments often come in on the back of major spending pledges […]
One of the biggest problems in government policy is that it tends to be written by people who have no experience of how it will actually affect the day-to-day lives of people on the ground. Added to this is the tendency for new laws and regulations to be piled on top of each other, by […]
One of the great success stories of the modern world has been the sustained increases in life expectancy we have seen in recent decades, and which are projected to continue for the foreseeable future. The fact we are living longer, healthier lives is something to be celebrated. It does, however, raise a number of tricky […]
You could be forgiven for not having noticed, but on Wednesday the Chancellor delivered his Spring Statement. This is essentially just a response to the biannual fiscal updates which the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) is mandated to issue, giving its assessment of the health of the economy and the public finances. True to his […]
At first glance, yesterday’s report on poverty from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation looks like pretty grim reading. “In-work poverty has risen faster than employment.” “Four million workers in poverty.” “People in poverty now more likely to be working than not working.” There are indeed some sobering conclusions to be taken from the report – but […]
