• Fuel duty cut by 1p and fuel duty escalator scrapped
• Corporation tax cut by 2p – not 1p as expected
• Annual growth forecast revised down from 2.1% to 1.7%
• National insurance and income tax may be merged
George Osborne has levied a £2bn windfall tax on Britain’s North Sea oil companies to pay for a cut in petrol duties for motorists struggling because of the soaring price of crude oil on global markets.
The chancellor said he wanted his budget to “put fuel into the tank of the British economy”.
He told the Commons he was scrapping the previous Labour government’s plans for automatic above-inflation increases in fuel duties and would instead be cutting 1p a litre from forecourt prices from tonight.
In the sort of flourish that was Gordon Brown’s trademark at the end of his budgets, Osborne announced the fuel duty cut at the climax of a 56-minute speech built around the theme of boosting growth and rebalancing the economy. The cost of “filling up a family car such as a Ford Focus has increased by £10″, he said, and he wanted to do something to help.
He said he was cutting corporation tax by 2p in the pound this year rather than the 1p reduction previously planned, and announced a shake-up of planning laws and a bonfire of regulations in an attempt to stimulate enterprise.
However, the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, said Osborne’s claim to have delivered a budget for growth was undermined by a cut in the growth forecast for 2011 from 2.1% to 1.7%.
Osborne cast his second budget since becoming the chancellor in May as an “urgent call to action” in which the government would move from “rescue to reform and from reform to recovery”, building on the deficit reduction measures of 2010.
He said it was a fiscal plan designed to create an economy built on private sector growth and the “march of the makers” rather than using government spending and debt to encourage a recovery.
He added that his budget measures would be “fiscally neutral across the period, neither raising tax nor offering giveaways”.
The chancellor presented a package of measures to boost business and make Britain more competitive, help consumer confidence and claw revenue back elsewhere.
Osborne said Britain had “lost ground” in the world’s economy and needed to catch up. His budget set “four economic ambitions” for Britain: being the most competitive tax system in the G20; being the best place to “start, finance and grow a business”, with a more balanced economy and a more educated and “flexible” workforce.
Measures included a further 1% cut in corporation tax to make clear that “Britain is open for business” and an annual £1bn clampdown on tax avoidance.
“Today’s budget is about reforming the nation’s economy so that we can have enduring jobs and growth in the future, doing what we can to protect families from the high cost of living,” he said.
Presented against a deteriorating economic backdrop of rising oil prices, public sector austerity and low consumer confidence, the budget sought to appeal to Britain’s “squeezed middle” by announcing help for first-time home-buyers, and a boost for 25 million income taxpayers by raising the threshold on the personal tax allowance to £8,075 by April 2012.
With household bills and retail prices rising, the chancellor concentrated much of the money he has to play with on cutting fuel prices as the cost of petrol and diesel reached all-time national average highs (£1.33 and £1.40 respectively) to increase consumers’ spending power and help business.
The rise in fuel duty planned for next week will be delayed until 2012, and the fuel duty escalator that adds 1p to fuel duty on top of inflation each year to be cancelled for the rest of this parliament.
A fair fuel stabiliser to help keep costs down in future is to be funded by an increased levy on oil and gas production.
Osborne told MPs that helping families with the cost of living and backing enterprise and introducing “far-reaching reforms” to help the economy grow were “one and the same thing”.
He said: “It is the central understanding of this government – and core to our strategy – that these are not two separate tasks. They are one and the same thing.
“We are only going to raise the living standards of families if we have an economy that can compete in the modern age.
“So this is our plan for growth. We want the words ‘made in Britain’, ‘created in Britain’, ‘designed in Britain’, invented in Britain’ to drive our nation forward.
“A Britain carried aloft by the march of the makers. That is how we will create jobs and support families. We have put fuel into the tank of the British economy.”
But his package received short shrift from Miliband, who told him his economic strategy for Britain was “hurting, not working”.
Miliband challenged Osborne’s claim to have delivered a budget for growth, saying the government’s cuts were damaging the economic recovery.
“Every time he comes to this house, growth is downgraded,” he said. “One fact says it all, and he couldn’t bring himself to say it: growth down last year, this year and next year. It’s the same old Tories – it’s hurting, but it isn’t working.”
Other measures to protect the money in people’s pockets in Osborne’s budget include:
• Raising the income tax personal allowance by £630 next year, which comes on top of the £1,000 rise next month and lifting the threshold at which income tax is payable to just over £8,105 from April next year, a real terms increase of £48 a year (or £126 in cash terms) for those earning up to £115,000 a year.
The 550,000 taxpayers who earn more than £115,000 will lose £45 a year because they no longer have a personal allowance.
The latter measure will see a further 250,000 people taken out of income tax altogether, in a move that brings the coalition a step closer to its promise of delivering a £10,000 tax threshold by the 2015 general election.
• A £250m shared equity scheme for new homes, funded from the bank levy, to help 10,000 families. Those with a household income of less than £60,000 a year who can put down a 5% deposit on a new home will be eligible for an equity loan worth up to 20% of the value of the property jointly funded by the government and housebuilders.
The loan will be interest-free for five years and only be repayable when the house is sold.
In a budget designed to shift away from spending cuts to reduce the national debt to growth-enhancing measures, Osborne also published his growth strategy for business.
His bid to boost the private sector includes:
• The removal of £350m worth of regulation on businesses.
• A three-year moratorium on new domestic regulation for all businesses employing fewer than 10 people.
• New planning rules to require planners to prioritise growth and jobs with a new presumption in favour of sustainable development, while retaining existing controls on green belt land.
• Small business relief extended to October 2012, at a cost of £370m.
• Funding for 21 new enterprise zones.
• Funding for 40,000 new apprenticeships for unemployed young people.
The chancellor presented gloomy figures based on data from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) which confirmed that the recovery would move at a slower pace than previously forecast.
He said GDP growth estimates for 2011 had been cut from 2.1% to 1.7%, while 2012 was revised down to 2.5% from 2.6%.
He stressed that the long-term outlook was more upbeat as estimates for 2013 were held and forecasts for 2014 and 2015 were revised upwards to 2.9% from 2.8% and 2.8% from 2.7% respectively.
Osborne also revealed that the rate of inflation, currently at 4.4%, is not expected to drop back to the government’s 2% target until 2013, contrary to the Bank of England’s belief it will fall back by 2012.
But the chancellor said the government was on track to deliver a balanced structural budget and falling national debt by the end of parliament.
“Our fiscal mandate is to achieve a cyclically-adjusted current balance by the end of the rolling five-year forecast period – which is currently 2015-16,” he said.
“We have supplemented that with a fixed target for debt: so that debt should be falling as a proportion of GDP by the year 2015-16 as well.
“I can report to the house that the OBR confirm that on their central forecast we will meet both these objectives – a balanced structural current budget and falling national debt by the end of the parliament. Indeed, the forecast remains that we will meet both these objectives one year earlier.”
On tax, Osborne announced plans to make Britain’s tax system more competitive and simpler:
• Corporation tax will be reduced by 2% from April 2011 – rather than 1% as previously announced – and to fall by 1% in each of the next three years to reach 23%. In a bid to offset the effect of the reduction on banks, the bank levy rate will adjusted next year.
• “No less than 43 complex tax reliefs” would be abolished as part of a simplification of the tax system, Osborne said.
As part of the move, he confirmed widely trailed speculation that he would consult on scrapping the divide between income tax and national insurance as part of a drive to simplify taxation for business.
He said this would be a way for people to see more clearly how much they are being taxed, rather than to raise them, and make the system “fit for the modern age”.
Osborne balanced giveaways with fresh tax-raising measures, which included:
• The charge on non-domiciled taxpayers to increase from £30,000 for those here for seven years to £50,000 for those in the country for 12 years, raising more than £200m.
• A clampdown on the “injustice” of tax avoidance. Osborne said three forms of stamp duty land tax avoidance would be closed, capital gains rules for companies would be tightened and the practice of disguised remuneration, which sees highly paid employees offered tax-free, lifetime loans that are never repaid, would come to an end.
“In total, on the numbers audited by the independent OBR, the tax avoidance measures in this budget raise around £1bn a year – that’s £4bn over the parliament,” he added.
“We are doing more today to clamp down on tax avoidance than in any budget in recent years. And that gives us more resources, in a fiscally neutral budget, to help those families who do pay their taxes, but who are struggling with the daily cost of living.”
Never has London’s atmosphere as a rich city-state felt so extreme | Ian Jack
Saturday, April 16th, 2011Geographically, never mind socially, we are not all in this together. Life in London feels different to anywhere outside
In Bradford on a winter’s night 25 years ago, I stood in front of an estate agent’s window and made a calculation. For the price of our terrace house in north London – two up and two down and a bit of garden at the back – I could buy 10 similar houses in Bradford. This month I read that Burnley has the lowest property prices in England, and made another calculation. For the price of our London house I could buy 40 houses in Burnley that were averagely cheap and 80 of the very cheapest. This doesn’t mean that the differential in house prices between London and northern England has grown by more than 400% since 1986. I live in a bigger house now, and Burnley isn’t Bradford. But the gap is certainly widening: according to Halifax figures, houses in Newcastle-on-Tyne cost on average 28.8% less than they did in 2007, while in Islington they’ve risen 9.7% in the past year after changing very little – up or down – in the previous two.
I look at pictures of the cheap houses in Burnley. They’re Victorian terraces. Their doors open straight on to the street, but they look solidly built from Pennine stone, no frills, but handsome. I imagine workers came home to them from cotton mills. Our house is certainly more imposing, three floors rather than two, with bow windows and ornamental red brick. But it has shallow foundations in London clay, so whether it’s sturdier is doubtful. I imagine someone who earned money in a suit, a senior clerk or a shopkeeper, first moved in when the terrace was completed in 1890. Without substantial inherited wealth, not even two-income families in the modern equivalent of those jobs could move in now. Newspapers sometimes write that the coalition cabinet contains “18 millionaires” as though it were a peculiar outrage, but everybody who’s paid off their mortgage in my street is a millionaire, if property is counted among their assets. And I stress that this is an ordinary street; until 30 or 40 years ago, a schoolteacher or a Fleet Street sub-editor could have afforded a house here.
What explains my good fortune? To some extent many of my generation share it, especially if they worked in a trade or profession that blossomed in the 1980s (better, on the whole, to have been a national-newspaper journalist than a mechanical engineer). Most people I know have grander homes than their parents, no matter where they live in the United Kingdom. If they live in favoured parts of cities such as Edinburgh and Leeds, their homes are often enviable for their architecture and space. Only the very grandest of them, however, could be swapped for 40 cheap houses in Burnley. Above every other consideration – career, age – the combination of judgement and happenstance that made me a London house-owner is what explains my relative wealth.
To a certain degree, this is an old story, and common to every metropolis. Moving to London four decades ago, I discovered one-bedroom flats were double the price of those I’d left behind in Glasgow. But then the 1980s arrived and the British economy’s centre of gravity shifted sharply (and to date, permanently) south. Between 1979 and 1986, jobs in manufacturing industry declined by almost two million; 94% of jobs lost in every sector in those years were north of a line drawn between the Wash and the Bristol Channel. The traditional idea of Britain – one taught in school geography books – was a country that made its money in the midlands and the north (including Scotland, and not forgetting Wales) and spent the profits mainly in the south. But now both the generation and consumption of wealth grew concentrated in the same place, and the north-south divide suddenly marked something more fundamental than dialects and traditions.
It was during this time, soon after the miners’ strike, that I stood with a notebook in a Bradford street and worked out the house price ratio. I wondered then if it could last. It didn’t seem possible that it could get worse – and for several years around the turn of the century it didn’t. Public spending financed by European grants and taxes raised in the City of London secured for many northern towns at least the suggestion of a viable future, if viability is measured in warehouse conversions, art galleries, warm cappuccino and rising property costs. The crash has since jeopardised all these simulacra of metropolitan living. The odd thing – the unfair thing, considering where the crash originated – is that the metropolis itself is immune. Geographically, never mind socially, we are not all in this together. Life in London now feels different to anywhere outside, as though you leave through city gates at turn-offs on the M25. Never has its atmosphere as a rich city-state felt so extreme.
“Revenues have bounced back and we are again seeing strong sales growth. The outlook for the UK as a whole may be gloomy but I think the long-term prospects for London, especially with the Olympics, are very good.” These are the words of Des Gunewardena, who runs a chain of expensive restaurants (Le Pont de la Tour, Quaglino’s) and I read them last week in the Evening Standard, underneath the headline, “Surge in dining out feeds a flurry of restaurant launches”, next to a picture of Sienna Miller arriving at Sheekey’s. Each in the list of a dozen new restaurants still to open has the name of a chef attached. One of those already opened, the Pollen Street Social in Mayfair, took 5,000 calls looking for reservations in its first day.
Beyond the hope that manufacturing industry can rebalance the economy, and the faraway prospect of a high-speed rail line to Birmingham, no government strategy exists to spread this wealth further north. The political tone is southern – look at the party leaders, or many of the Labour candidates parachuted to northern seats. It has been left to the BBC to do a little social engineering by – bravely or foolishly – relocating departments to Salford, Cardiff and Glasgow, so that half of its output will be produced outside London by 2016. Will better programmes result? Very few BBC staff seem to think so; on the evidence of BBC2′s Review Show, now made in Glasgow, extra expense in travel and hotel costs looks the likeliest difference. But three formerly great industrial cities will have BBC budgets and salaries added to their troubled economies; there will be job opportunities; the middle class in each place should grow a little larger.
The staff who refuse to go are easily mocked. Haven’t they heard about the better quality of life, the Lowry, the easily accessed countryside, the “creative buzz” that’s now reported along the banks of the Clyde and the Manchester ship canal? Their reluctance to move is usually expressed in personal and professional terms: of not wanting to interrupt their children’s education, or being too far away from their show’s guests. But perhaps among their worries there’s something less easy to define; that by quitting London they’re removing themselves from its cultural, political and economic heft, which has grown so remorselessly and, whether or not BBC Breakfast gets done in Salford, will carry on regardless. The country’s centrifuge: both awful and interesting.
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