Institute for Fiscal Studies says budget ‘looks like the same silly games’ as seen under the Conservatives
Rachel Reeves is now being interview on ITV’s Good Morning Britain.
She is being interviewed by Ed Balls, the former Labour shadow chancellor who is now a TV presenter. He asks her to confirm that workers will end up losing out because of the employers’ national insurance contributions (NICs) increase.
Continue reading...Reforms to inheritance and capital gains taxes could reduce £20bn shortfall and combat UK’s widening wealth gap
Rachel Reeves could quickly find around £10bn a year to plug half of the fiscal hole left by the Conservatives if she were to raise taxes on soaring levels of unearned wealth, according to leading economists.
New research by the independent Resolution Foundation published today finds that Britain is a country of “booming wealth” but “busted wealth taxes”, leaving ample potential for the chancellor of the exchequer to raise desperately needed funds by raising taxes on the richest.
Continue reading...Opposition in wealthier areas is likely and overcoming it is essential, says Resolution Foundation
The government will need to “take on net-zero nimbys” and ramp up public investment to decarbonise Britain’s homes, transport and electricity system, a leading thinktank has said.
With Keir Starmer promising a rapid transition to decarbonise the power system by 2030, a report by the Resolution Foundation said achieving the target would require more government spending and private investment.
Continue reading...Average 13% increase by 2027 will put millions of households under further pressure, says thinktank
Rent rises in Britain are forecast to outpace wage growth, despite having already surged at the fastest pace on record after the Covid pandemic and the cost of living crisis.
The Resolution Foundation expects added pressure on millions of households and said average rents could increase by 13% over the next three years as current high growth in the private rental market work their way through existing tenancies.
Continue reading...PM says ‘people trust me on these things’ and refuses to be drawn on whether government would forgo entire £46bn raised from measure
Keir Starmer has accused Jeremy Hunt of repeating the budget mistakes made by Liz Truss during her disastrous premiership.
In comments on the budget during a visit to a building site this morning, Starmer focused on Hunt’s proposal to abolish employees’ national insurance over time, saying that this was a bigger unfunded tax promise than those in Truss’s mini-budget. (See 9.28am.)
How humiliating was that for the government yesterday?
We’ve argued for years that they should get rid of the non-dom tax status, they’ve resisted that. And now, completely out of ideas, the only decent policy they’ve got is the one that they’ve lifted from us.
Nothing that Jeremy Hunt did yesterday, nor anything the OBR said, changes anything very significantly. Which is a shame. Because that means we are still:
-heading for a parliament in which people will on average be worse off at the end than at the start,
Continue reading...Thinktank says juicy cuts this year follow far bigger increases in 2023 and precede planned ‘chunky rises’
Jeremy Hunt’s expected pre-election giveaway budget will be sandwiched between £20bn of tax increases already implemented and a further £17bn of hikes pencilled in for after polling day, a thinktank has said.
The Resolution Foundation said it expected Hunt to freeze fuel duty and cut income tax on 6 March but warned the chancellor’s “tax sandwich” was based on the “fiscal fiction” of £30bn of spending cuts in the next parliament.
Continue reading...Resolution Foundation calls for auto-enrolment into saving schemes, as millions have no ‘rainy day’ fund
More than 11 million working-age people in Britain don’t have basic “rainy day” savings of at least £1,000, according to a report that warns that the poorest households are struggling to build up financial resilience amid the cost of living crisis.
The Resolution Foundation said people across Britain faced a “triple savings challenge” of insufficient savings, an inability to cope financially with major life events such as family breakdown, and inadequate retirement incomes.
Continue reading...Resolution Foundation report underlines lack of progress by Tories but Labour proposals seem woolly
Britain’s economy is broken. That was the simple message given by the Resolution Foundation thinktank in the final report of its long-running look into the state of the nation.
Monday’s conference to launch the report was a high-powered affair, containing past and present members of the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee, the head of the Office for Budget Responsibility, Richard Hughes, and other members of the great and good.
Continue reading...Home secretary to announce big hike in salary requirement for migrants to the UK as Rishi Sunak tries to cut net migration figures
Hunt says the government wants to speed up the time it takes to get a connection to the national grid by 90%.
Zanny Minton Beddoes, the editor of the Economist, is interviewing Hunt. She says he has mentioned the 110 policies, but she wants to know what the growth strategy is.
Continue reading...The chancellor’s potential inheritance tax cut in Wednesday’s budget would aid millionaires amid a cost of living crisis
Jeremy Hunt faces a backlash from “red wall” Tory MPs if he uses a fiscal windfall of up to £20bn to deliver tax cuts for the rich rather than to help ordinary families with the cost of living, the Observer has been told.
The chancellor and Rishi Sunak are this weekend finalising an autumn statement on Wednesday that could include a major reduction in inheritance tax – four-fifths of which would benefit those with more than £1m at their death, according to a new report from the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS). Each person with more than £1m would receive an average tax cut of £180,000, the IFS states.
Continue reading...Country needs successful firms to grow and struggling ones to shrink, says Resolution Foundation
The UK needs more businesses to fail, or at least shrink, to solve the economy’s long-running productivity crisis, a study has argued.
The country’s lack of “economic dynamism”, whereby weaker firms or lower productivity sectors shrink, and more productive ones grow, has caused GDP to be 4% lower between 2008 and 2019 than it would otherwise have been, according to a paper published on Monday by the Resolution Foundation.
Continue reading...Resolution Foundation report says much of industrial action ‘fuelled’ by public sector workers’ anger over falls in real-terms pay
About 3.9m working days have been lost to industrial action in the past year, more than at any point since the 1980s, according to a new analysis.
The Resolution Foundation, which focuses its research on low- to middle-income households, said many of the strikes were “fuelled” by anger among public sector workers over real-terms pay declines, which amounted to an average cut of more than 9% since 2021, adjusted for inflation.
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