Here at IMS Property we are always on the lookout for the latest announcements by the government and it was an important day today with the chancellor Jeremy Hunt giving announcing the budgets.
Here are the key highlights.
- Universal Credit and other benefits to increase by 6.7% from next April
- Alcohol duty – the tax on alcohol – to be frozen until 1 August but tobacco duty to increase
- Pensions to increase by 8.5% to £221.20 a week from April as triple lock maintained
- £450m allocated to local authority housing fund to deliver “2,400 new homes”
- Consultations to take place on giving savers a legal right to ask new employers to pay pension contributions into an existing pension pot
- Government to “explore options” for potential NatWest share offer in next 12 months
- Business rates frozen for small business for a year as well as 75% discount for retail, hospital and leisure companies
- Class 2 National Insurance to be abolished – saving “average self-employed person £192 a year”
- Class 4 National Insurance to be cut by 8%
- 30 hours of free child care for working parents with children aged between one and two to still be rolled out in April
- National living wage to increase by 9.8% to £11.44 an hour
- “Full expensing” tax break for businesses to be made permanent
- National Insurance to be cut by 2 percentage points from January
- Mandatory work placements for people on benefits for more than 18 months
