Money news

Wednesday

Ross Clark

Philip Hammond’s fiscal fix? A tax on cheap cider, fags and diesel cars

So where are the nasties? Philip Hammond’s Budget speech can be summed up as follows:  £2.8 billion for the NHS, £44 billion of capital funding and loan guarantees for housing, £400 million for a new charging infrastructure for electric cars, £2.3 billion investment in research and development, £1.5 billion worth of changes to Universal Credit, an extra £2 billion for Scotland – all to be paid for, apparently, with higher taxes on super-strength cider, fags, a few of the smokiest diesel cars and the end of indexation for allowances on corporate capital gains tax. A modern Budget would not be a Budget, of course, if it didn’t partially unravel thanks to

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Five things you need to know about Hammond’s Budget

After months of Tory nerves, Philip Hammond has just finished presenting his Autumn Budget in the Chamber. Among the main giveaways, the Chancellor announced more funding for the NHS as well as pitching to the young with his housing proposals and 18-30 railcard. He also announced measures to ease out the rollout of Universal Credit – including a one week reduction to the wait time. However, although the Chancellor was at pains to sound optimistic and shake off his Eeyore image, this was made difficult thanks to some grim statistics from the OBR. The OBR has revised down its forecast for annual growth quite significantly –  lower than envisaged after the Brexit

The Spectator

Live: Autumn Budget 2017

Philip Hammond avoided any disasters in his second budget of 2017. Here are the headline announcements: Growth forecasts downgraded: Britain’s economy is now expected to grow by 1.5 per cent in 2017, down from the prediction of 2 per cent made in March Stamp duty scrapped for first time buyers on homes costing up to £300,000 £3bn set aside for Brexit preparations Millenials’ railcard confirmed; National Living Wage up; VAT threshold for small businesses maintained; £2.8bn more for the NHS; 100 per cent council tax on empty homes; target to build 300,000 new homes by 2020s Tobacco duty up; beer and wine duty frozen; No fuel duty rise for petrol and

Steerpike Steerpike

Revealed: Universal Credit director wins award for… project management

You don’t have to be a member of Her Majesty’s Opposition to conclude that something has gone wrong with the Universal Credit rollout. After a series of issues including a six week wait for first payment and an expensive helpline to supposedly deal with said issues, the government is under pressure to put the scheme on pause. Matters weren’t helped in recent weeks when Neil Couling – the man in charge of the Universal Credit programme – tweeted pictures of cakes celebrating the scheme at a time when some claimants on are said to be living on the breadline as a result of the bungled rollout. So, Mr S was curious

Tuesday

Katy Balls

Why the millennials’ railcard isn’t such a bad idea

It’s Budget day tomorrow and there’s growing concern among Tories that the Chancellor may be about to bungle the Budget. Only rather than housing, the NHS or education, the issue that has got everyone hot and bothered is a plan for an 18-30 railcard. Nicknamed the millennials’ card, the Chancellor is expected to announce that discounted train travel will be extended to people up to 30-years-old. Currently, the young persons’ railcard – which costs about £30 and means a third off ticket fares – is just for the 16-25 age bracket. The move comes after a trial of the 26-30 year-olds card took place in East Anglia which led the Treasury

Steerpike Steerpike

The tin-eared chancellor: Philip Hammond’s ten worst gaffes

Tomorrow is D-day for Philip Hammond. As the Chancellor puts the finishing touches to his Budget, Tory MPs wait nervously – hoping it will be a day free of gaffes. Unfortunately, history suggests that this is unlikely. Over the years Hammond has earned a reputation for being tin-eared and ham-fisted. To get readers in the mood for his Budget, Mr S has compiled a list of the Chancellor’s worst gaffes: 1. There are no unemployed people Just this weekend, Hammond proved why he makes his colleagues nervous. Appearing on the Andrew Marr show, the Chancellor managed to turn one of his party’s top achievements into a toxic issue. Asked about

Sunday

Steerpike

Philip Hammond bungles his Marr interview

Oh dear. As Budget day looms, there is growing concern among the Conservatives that Philip Hammond may be about to do something stupid. However, few expected him to step into disaster before Wednesday. In an interview on the Andrew Marr show this morning, the Chancellor created a pre-Budget row as he bungled his way through the exchange – dropping a series of clangers. First off, Hammond managed to turn one of his party’s top achievements into a toxic issue. Asked about unemployment – which is at a 42-year low – Hammond claimed that ‘there are no unemployed people’: "There are no unemployed people" claims @PhilipHammondUK. #marr pic.twitter.com/YrtvcRtCNG — The Andrew

Friday

Tom Goodenough

What should Philip Hammond announce in his Budget?

Next week’s Budget could be the government – and Philip Hammond’s – last chance to snatch the political momentum away from Labour. So what should he announce? Today’s newspaper editorials have some advice for the Chancellor: Not too long ago, John McDonnell’s ‘alternative budget’ would have been announced ‘in complete obscurity’, says the Daily Telegraph. Not so now, and the Tories clearly need ‘big ideas’ to see off a resurgent Labour party. This should not mean they resort to borrowing the party’s ‘Left-wing solutions’ – or, indeed, trying to outspend Labour, however. But they cannot rest on their laurels. On housing, for instance, Hammond must ‘do far more’. Scrapping stamp

Thursday

James Forsyth

Michael Gove’s cabinet critics should go and do some reading

The Times‘ Matt Chorley has succeeded in getting everyone talking with his story about Michael Gove supposedly using cabinet meeting to audition for the role of chancellor. Gove reportedly talked about ‘the obscure Markets in Financial Instruments Directives’ two weeks ago and has cabinet sources complaining that at this week’s meeting he used ‘lots of long, economicky words’.  So, what were those ‘long, economicky words’? Well, according to one cabinet minister present, Gove talked about Schumpeter and creative destruction and raised the question of whether the Bank of England’s monetary policy was creating zombie companies. The argument is fairly simple: if interest rates are so low, a flood of borrowed

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Whatever happened to the Brexodus?

Vegetables are rotting in the fields for want of Eastern European pickers, patients are being left untreated thanks to a haemorrhaging of EU nurses, our universities are in peril as European academics flee from a xenophobic Britain which no longer wants them. That, at least, is the picture that is continually presented to us by the rearguard Remain lobby, which wants us to think that the EU nationals who make our economy go round have had enough and, as the Guardian says of nurses and midwives, are ‘leaving in droves’. There is one problem with this analysis: it is directly contradicted by the facts. Figures released by the Office of

Katy Balls Katy Balls

John McDonnell’s Today interview shows the economy remains Labour’s Achilles heel

John McDonnell has busied himself today on the airwaves setting out Labour’s five key demands for the budget. His call for an end to austerity would mean pausing the roll-out of Universal Credit, ditching the public sector pay cap, more money into infrastructure, health, education, and local government along with a large-scale house-building programme. All very well. Only the shadow chancellor’s Today programme interview took a turn for the worse when McDonnell tried to explain how his party would fund this. He appeared to concede this would mean borrowing – along with a mega-crackdown on tax avoidance and changes to corporation tax. But the most telling point in the interview came when he was

Wednesday

James Kirkup

The Tory tide is turning against austerity

Tom Tugendhat, the Tory MP for Tonbridge sometimes called a rising star, finds himself making front page news today as a ‘Brexit mutineer’. That strikes me as a novel term for a man who spent several years in the British Army fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, but such are the terms of British political debate these days, I suppose. The MP hasn’t responded to that headline, but used a question at PMQs to talk about something else, which I think is worth a little more attention than the latest round of name-calling over Brexit. Given that Britain’s deficit is well down from crisis levels, and given that gilt auctions are oversubscribed,

Friday

Kate Andrews

The gender pay gap is largely a myth

The Fawcett Society would have you believe, as part of its Equal Pay Day campaign, that today is the day “women effectively stop earning relative to men”, highlighting the gender pay gap, which they place at 14.1 per cent for full-time workers. If that number seems high to you, or not reflective of your working environment, that is because this 14.1 per cent can only be achieved by including outlier salaries that skew the figure towards high earners. Rather than using the Office for National Statistic’s official figure of 9.1 per cent (calculated using the median hourly earnings of full-time workers), Fawcett uses the ONS’s mean calculation instead, to achieve a

Tuesday

Ross Clark

Has Brexit really made us all happier?

Apparently we’re all getting a little happier – if a little more anxious. The government’s official happiness index shows that we rate our overall life satisfaction at an average of 7.7 out of 10. We think our lives are 7.9 out of 10 worthwhile. We rate our happiness yesterday at 7.5 out of 10 and our anxiety rating at 2.9 out of 10 – a slight rise on early 2015 when national anxiety reached a low but still much less than when the index started in 2011.  Does it mean anything though? The Guardian seems to think so, publishing a story today which appears to hint that people in England are

Monday

Toby Young

When will the Guardian investigate the offshore trusts used by Guardian Media Group?

I wrote this piece last year when the Guardian published its first story about the Panama Papers, but if you substitute the word ‘Paradise’ for ‘Panama’ it could just as easily apply to today’s Guardian splash about the use by the Queen’s private estate of an offshore tax shelter in the Cayman Islands. If anything, this takes the Guardian’s hypocrisy to new heights. After all, the Queen is not legally obliged to pay income tax – she is a voluntary tax payer – so this could not be described as tax avoidance by any conceivable definition of the term, whereas the Guardian Media Group is obliged to pay tax and

Thursday

Ross Clark

Why can’t the Bank of England admit it was wrong to cut interest rates?

It took all of five minutes for news of the Bank of England’s first rise in base rate for over a decade to be blamed on Brexit. The Guardian’s live blog, for example, suggested that the rise was ‘to prevent the cost of goods bought in the UK from spiralling further’, following the fall in sterling. Well no, actually. The explanatory notes from the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) explain that it voted 7-2 to raise rates because the slack in the UK economy has fallen. With unemployment at a 40 year low, it fears that inflation could run ahead of itself unless dampened by an interest rate rise. The inflationary

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The Bank of England has finally raised interest rates. More, please

Finally, interest rates are back on their way up. The Bank of England’s rise today – from 0.25 per cent to 0.5 per cent – is the first rise for 10 years and long overdue. Ever since the Brexit vote, there has been much hyperbole about the underperformance of the UK economy when in fact employment has soared to ever-greater highs and economic growth has steadily continued. There is no need for emergency interest rates, and hasn’t been for quite some time. There is pretty much no spare capacity left in the economy, we are at any sensible person’s definition of full employment. Mark Carney had allowed his Brexit gloom

Wednesday

Matthew Lynn

If the City can’t replace 75,000 jobs, it has bigger problems than Brexit

The wine bars will be spookily empty. The lap-dancing clubs will be abandoned, and Savills will have to start working out how to sell mansions within an hour’s commute of Frankfurt and Paris instead of London. Just about every day brings another dire prediction about the impact of leaving the EU on the City’s mighty financial services industry. Only this week the Bank of England, which has turned itself into a semi-official  chorus of doom on the issue, joined the fun, with reports that it was predicting 75,000 job losses. No one denies that would be serious. The City is one of the most dynamic parts of the British economy,

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

How benefit reforms could close more women’s refuges

Last week at Prime Minister’s Questions, Theresa May pleased MPs by telling them that the government will not place the same housing benefit cap on supported housing as for private rented accommodation. Supported housing includes long-term accommodation for people with severe disabilities and chronic conditions, as well as short-term housing such as hostels, women’s refuges and safe houses. This sounded sensible at the time, as domestic abuse charities had been warning that capping the housing benefit paid to the women staying in refuges would mean they would have to close (at an even greater rate than they have already been shutting down). But the temporary relief was followed yesterday by

Tuesday

Steerpike

The £350m line on the Brexit bus was wrong. The real figure is higher

The most regular attack-line used against leading Brexiteers is that they misled the public over how much money could be used to fund the NHS if Britain left the EU. Throughout the referendum campaign, Vote Leave said that we send £350 million a week to Brussels – a gross figure, applied before a rebate etc. But no one knew the real 2016 figure because the data is compiled in arrears. Only today do we have the data, published by the Office for National Statistics. Its figures show… Payment to Brussels, net of rebate and money returned to the UK: £9.4 billion a year, or £181 million a week. Payment to