Another budget one. Sorry.

Sorry, I really fucked up this post.

I don’t agree with the Count yourself lucky comments. I think they are utter madness and completely heartless.

Farmers are making a lot of noise.

All family business's are being effected similarly. Your favorite local restaurant that has been family run for years, that garage round the corner that Bob took over from his Dad, the bakers and greengrocers, all at risk. Might be taken over by new people and improved, but may not. Profits in SME's in the UK are not massive, they are major employers and do pay a lot of tax. Often family owned and family run. Not enough profits to pay IT so will be sold off or just closed down. Either way, likely to change for good. Another kick for the independent parts of the high street. Its not a disaster, you can replace Roys of Wroxham with a few chain stores....but they will likely be manned by self service rather than actual people, so less jobs about and a little more romance will be stripped from life.

Omg..seriously?

Sorry, you misread me. I suppose I put it unclearly.

I don’t agree with the Count yourself lucky comments.

I think farmers are being fleeced so the land can be used for development.

According to a newspaper calculator, I will be 35p a year worse off. As pp have said that's not the whole picture though.

Workwise, it is likely to affect next year's pay rise. The rise in employers NI and minimum wage will need to be funded before pay increases can be considered. On the other hand, we may possibly be able to pick up additional contracts depending on what the NHS changes turn out to be.

Personally, costs will go up and so my bills and weekly shop will increase. I will avoid paying an extra £10 a month fuel duty though, as that has been left alone.

I'm glad to see investment in healthcare and education. It's what I voted for and what I expected to pay for. My main concern is what the detail is going to look like in the workers rights legislation. If it leads to businesses being reluctant to employ new staff, it will be a disaster for growth and employment.

@MeMyCatsAndI , Ms Reeves has stated this morning that the average worker will be £300.00 a year worse off. £100.00 extra to tax your vehicle or bus/train fare rises. Little prospect of pay rises you might otherwise have enjoyed for those not on minimum wage. Higher rents/mortgage payments. Higher prices on everything you buy. I would say £300.00 was (no pun intended) conservative.
Who are these ‘upper classes’ you speak of and how will they be affected?

Thank you for this measured response. My guess is that largely the public will back the budget. Lots of Conservatives will be upset. But they literally chose absolutely economically incompetence in the last five years. They gave this to Labour at the last election. I believe most of the country is small c Conservative. However to keep power you can’t elect a bunch of Tufton St fruitcakes. Small c the UK maybe but they want functional public services and low mortgages. If Labour deliver that then they will be fine.

You obviously have no idea about how farming assets work or care about food security. This WILL result in farms being sold off and not to other farmers as they won't be able to afford to buy them. So they will go to developers. Young farmers won't be able to afford to buy farms so you end generations of knowledge and skill. What happens when all the farms are sold off? Who produces our food?
Don't you understand how environmentally and economically damaging it is to rely on food imports?
Labour obviously don't. It only takes another Ukraine war to show us how precarious we are if we rely on imports.

That's just silly! Lots of HMRC spend goes on people answering the phone and administering the system. Another big chunk goes on compliance activities to get in the tax that isn't being paid. Are you really saying that these are pointless activities?

Of course there is inefficiency and not everyone does everything perfectly. But to say that no money is spend sensibly on any department is just being silly for the sake of it.

There will absolutely be redundancies at my work due to the NI increase. This will not only mean that my job is at risk, but if I manage to keep it I'll have to take on more work. It will also hit the public as we teach the future healthcare workforce. Quality of their education will undoubtedly be impacted by fewer staff, and that will impact the care people recover from nurses in the future. So disastrous all round really

The farmer thread is infuriating.

Count yourself lucky you will owe millions in tax. You are rich.

Utter madness.

She also slipped in social housing rents increasing by more than inflation for the next 5 years. The measures to punish landlords will result in some landlords selling up, resulting in fewer private rentals so the others will increase rents. The FTSE100 has dropped by 2% this week. Bond yields have increased which apparantly will result in interest rate rises. So if you rent or buy your property the costs will go up. The increased cost to business will result in some small businesses closing, some reducing staff numbers, some holding back on wage increases. The easiest way to cover these increased costs is to increase prices, so expect to see price increases across all sectors. She did not increase tax thresholds, so everyone who pays income tax will pay more. At the end of the day, the measures brought is to protect us during covid, lockdown, furlough, bounce back loans and grants, discounts on meals, reductions in business rates all have to be paid for, so the fact you can say that you will be better off as you are getting a pay rise shows that the gov continue to try to pull the wool over our eyes, and in many cases, it works.

I won't lose my job to a computer but I would bloody love a fully functioning and integrated records system which saves me hours hunting out-of-area patient's GPs, a system that would automatically generate letters with basic patient information filled out so I don't have to spend 10 minutes just copying patient's address, DOB and GP details into a referral form and a system which will scout records to summarise historical information for clinical reports. It would save me hours a week and I can see additional patients in these hours.
I am sure many GPs, clinicians, social workers, teachers and such will very much welcome losing this part of their job to a computer so that they can actually focus on human contact.

I'm not directly affected. I expect next year's payrise to be smaller than this year's to offset the increase in NI. But I'd have expected them to decline as inflation falls anyway.

The cost of goods and services may increase, but again it is to be expected. NMW increases every year and the impact to the cost of goods is relatively small.

Every year there are cries of horror about how businesses will lay everyone off and the dole queue will stretch from one end of the country to the other. But it hasn't happened. Even after the massive impact of lockdowns. So I choose not to buy into the hysteria.

I'm not against paying taxes on inherited pensions. I'm not against levying inheritance tax on farming assets, though understand the issue of it could lead to land being sold off.

I don't agree with the speed at which some of the changes are being implemented. Giving a couple of months notice of removing the WFA and then applying VAT to school fees doesn't seem fair, and I think should have applied from next winter and the next school year.

The thing is, the earners on 150k (which is alot I agree but not rich) will be making sacrifices like letting their cleaners go, no more personal trainers, no new car and such like to pay for their increased tax on things like school fees and the fact wages won't keep up with inflation because of the NI increase.

I don't know what the answer is, but to say it won't affect anyone who isn't a high earner is naive.

Great about your tax rise but that doesn't change that those lines which Labour relied on so heavily, and you just repeated, being incorrect

I think the employer’s NI increases might be an attempt to force Amazon et al to pay more tax on their UK operations (since they manage to pay very little in Corporation Tax by moving their profits elsewhere). They can’t avoid the taxes on employing staff. There is an attempt to mitigate the effect on small businesses by increasing employment allowance from £5,000 to £10,500. However I think it’s inevitable that businesses will pass their increased costs on to their customers, and/or respond by reducing staffing levels. So everyone will be affected by the resultant inflation/rise in unemployment or underemployment.

What's the alternative? Schools physically collapsing, councils going bankrupt, more and more people on NHS waiting lists unable to work? That doesn't sound great either.

I'm not sure what people think is actually possible. A budget that attempts to rescue the collapsing public sector and no one paying for it?

It will impact me. I'm a lone parent who decided to put my DD15 who has AuDHD into the private sector because of the shitshow SEN provision in local state schools.

I'm not wealthy. I can just about afford it. Local state schools are recently inundated with people moving their kids out of private because this has pushed them over the edge.

I am affected by this budget - but I expected to be. I will be paying more tax. This is not a surprise. I don’t even think it’s a surprise to the majority of the public who before the election thought tax was going to rise. We still got a Labour government.

If it works then the Conservatives will be toast for a decade.

Classic socialist policy ie make alcohol cheaper whilst raising taxes that will impact everyone yet pretending they only affect the "wealthy".
I believe Russia did this with vodka....

I say again, happy to pay if it were actually used wisely. It is not, in any department.

Do you work for an employer?