Although I have not seen the detail yet, the headline items seem sound and logical. I have long been annoyed at the distortion in the property market by buy-to-let landlords get tax relief. He has gone some way to addressing that, which shows some guts, although not far enough in my view. Other policies all seem rational - living wage (although will it be), although as I see it he's done nowt about the grossly distortive effects of the employers NI lockstep.

£6 in the left hand, £6 in the right hand.
Switch them around and we have the budget.
The concern is what may be "lost " during the switch and who benefits overall.

+ attempts to restrain the Buy To Let market, which is in London is contributing to ridiculous property prices
- attempts to restrain the Buy To Let market, which in other parts of the country is needed to encourage investment in dilapidated housing stock.
+ More devolution for the Republic of Mancunia. Hopefully paving the way for Leeds, Newcastle, Birmingham and dare I say it, Liverpool.
- Scrapping Uni grants and replacing them with loans - pulling the drawbridge up on the poorest.
+ The fact that I got out of contracting before Gideon tumbled the dividend tax game


- Further inheritance tax relief. Mainly of use to the already wealthy.

... and finally ...

- Labourites complaining about the Tories taking their policies and implementing them. What's more important, your personal power or your policies? Long may Labour stay out of power.

To think - the Chancellor's budget once heralded the creation of entire motorway networks, or naval fleets or nuclear power generation.

These days we'd struggle to afford a set of those cheap fake trees which adorn a Hornby train station.

Yet will continue to further distort the housing market by extending Right to Buy to Housing Association properties - houses that are owned by private, not-for-profit or charitable organisations.

He has usurped the term "Living Wage". The proposal to increase National Minimum Wage to £9.00 ph by the end of this parliament will still leave his "livfing wage" less than the current Living Wage in Scotland and London

Changing the term minimum wage to living wage was cynical but basically the Budget exposed the paucity of Labour's ideas and their incompetence _ Osborne incorporated their 'big' ideas (ie daft little ideas) do it's hard for them or their supporters to criticise. Furthermore, his cuts were less severe than he announced pre-election, a ticket on which his party gained election. So, for Labour supporter it must be the Tory budget of their dreams.

Some good stuff - the idea that businesses should be paying the wages of its employees rather than part of it is a good one. Restricting child allowance to two children is also a good policy. The stuff on non doms is good as is closing the dividend loop hole.

Surprised he didnt introduce a flat rate on pension contribution tax relief cant be long.

As a lefty, I was pleasantly surprised by the budget. Hard to disagree with much of what he's done, bit of smoke and mirrors with the whole "living wage" thing but all in all, not bad.

What kind of "lefty" are you?

Not sure where you get the idea that companies will pay their staff adequately from? A living wage = suitable hourly rate x hours. While the employers NI lockstep remains supermarkets and the like are artificially "incentivised" to offer part-time roles. Longer Sunday trading hours is presumably HMG's big idea to increase employment at a living wage (sic) by creating even more part-time roles,

As was written in The Times this morning - not sure the headline grabber of inheritance tax been abolished on houses worth up to £1 million is so good. As they said, was it really in anyone's top 100 needs / wishes for the UK to allow already relatively privileged middle class middle-aged people / kids inherit more tax free? How does it square with HMG's hard-working philosophy to give people hundreds of thousands of pounds they didn't have to work for? A cynical vote grabber with no logic whatsoever.

Around 13 million of the least well off will lose out under this budget according to the IFS. And some of the changes to Tax Credits and Universal Benefit will actually be a [idisincentive[/i to go out and work.

Changes to VED heralding the return of the gas guzzler.

An overall INCREASE in the tax burden, all done by 'stealth taxes' that the Tories used to bitch and moan about Labour using.

Yeah. Great budget. Not.

I did wonder

I'm not particularly involved with the payroll side of the business that I work for but I wonder if there is a scenario where the likes of one of the large supermarket chains would find it beneficial to cut its non-management roles (ie the infantry who stack shelves or drag pallets out of the warehouse) down to, say, 20 hours per week to minimise their exposure to NI and then introduce an agency to the business who will also employ those same staff on a casual basis to fill in as and when required ?

Can anyone answer the question of whether this will result in a saving to both employers in NI contributions, its certainly not illegal to hold down jobs with two employers and the employee will still be taxed at the same rate as if they were working for just the one so no change there, but will it make a difference to the employer(s) ?

I don't doubt for one minute that its being trialled at a supermarket somewhere.

The thing that's distorting the London property market isn't so much buy-to-let as the government allowing (encouraging?) thousands of billions of money from Russia and elsewhere to be laundered into obscenely priced property portfolios.

The world capital of money laundering.

B&M have taken it a stage further and don't even bother with the whole fanciful idea of paying people to do work for them. They just use free labour in conjunction with the local jobcentre.

Over the last 2 years (May/June 2013 - May/June 2015) our local B&M store has utilised the Work Trial, Mandatory Work Placement and the Work Programme schemes to the extent that they've had a total (so far) of 73 people do 2 weeks full time work for free under the various schemes.

Of the 73 people who did this work -
54 are still unemployed and receiving JSA
9 are currently sanctioned
5 left JSA to go into work
3 were moved from JSA on to "other benefits" ie disability etc
2 ended their JSA claims


None of the 5 who went into work are working at B&M.
That's 5,548 hours of work that at NMW of £6.50 would have cost them just over £36k.
A person doing those 2 weeks should have received just under £500. Instead they simply received their JSA of £142. Effectively they worked for 2 weeks for a wage of £1.89 per hour.

Rant over.

I get stick for my "conspiratorial" thinking. But you really have to wonder about how "neutral" the mainstream media is when the supposed "Best & Brightest" will obsesses over what is little more than the chancellor fiddling about the edges of the economy whilst major corporations and billionaires are working and living entirely at the public's expense.

Moreover, we really have passed the point where something needs to be done about "revolving door" politicians. I mean, what exactly is four or eight years of ostensible "public service" [uworth[/u if you then employ your knowledge AGAINST the interests of that very same public?

At the VERY LEAST there should be a ten-year public register kept on politicians moving into the private sector. Employer, role etc.

The DWP would justify all of that of course, I'm not sure how because I'd stop listening the moment that IDS opened his frog-like mouth but I'm sure it would be something like "...helping these people back into a work based frame of mind, blah, blah, blah, valuable experience, blah, blah, improves their CV and their chances of gainful employment, blah, blah, gets them off the unemployment figures and makes me look good".

No actually he wouldn't say that last bit but he'd be thinking it.

Please continue your rant because now B&M haver been highlighted for reducing the contracted hours of staff by up to 50%, the remainder is filled with DWP Workprogramme personnel. The upshot is: you go to Jobcentre Plus and tell them you're now working only 10 hours per week, so they give you a slip to send you back to B&M to work the other 10 hours for free.

I wouldn't shop with those 2@s in a month of Sundays

Looks a good budget on the whole and one that should continue to reduce the deficit and make it more attractive for people to work rather than rely on hand outs. The excellent Chancellor is finally free of those naive LibDems and can now get on with the Conservative plan to return the country to economic health - just as they were elected to do.

The pleasant surprise was Osbournes purloining of the "Living Wage" franchise and while his version is not quite what a "Living Wage" was pitched at, at least its a decent hike in the NMW and goes some way to removing the employers subsidy where employers shamelessly exploit existing Working Tax Credit rules to obtain and maintain cheap labour, I expect more squeals of anguish from the likes of the CBI and the rest as well as threats of reducing hours to compensate etc, but ultimately if a cheap shoddy supermarket wants to stay open while paying far less than what is considered to be an average UK salary to the people who keep it open, then they will have to pay whatever Osbourne requires, or close earlier.

One other thing to pitch in with - free childcare to increase from 15 to 30 hours per week where both parents are in work.

Sounds good - but I was at a client Day Nursery in a deprived area of Greater Manchester (certainly no leafy suburb and an area of largely immigrant families) three weeks ago and just happened to mention this in passing to one of the managers as it was a leaked possibility for the budget.

Now I had had the same conversation with the owner about 18 months previously about the 15 free hours and she complained then that the rate that was paid by the government was nothing like what she would normally have charged and that a lot of local families were using it as a a free 15 hours per week to get rid of the kids, a parent only has to work 8 hours in order to qualify so you'd get a mother working one shift per week and getting two free days childcare paid for, the owner was slightly miffed by this but accepted it because at least some of the families added to the 15 hours by paying for additional care especially after their child liked the experience.

Three weeks ago the attitude was pretty much the same, but worse, for now they would be having to offer 30 hours at government rates with little chance to top up on extra hours at what they considered to be their correct rate, they were actually quite fearful of it happening because they could be looking at closing if too many local families qualified and in their area most of them would.

I've noted in the press statements from their trade association that the government rate will be reviewed and increased, but at the moment there is no decision on this, so again we have a budget announcement that on the face of it looks to be good news aimed at getting parents into part time work, yet has a sting in the tail in that it "could" be unworkable for many nurseries - almost exactly like the old NHS vs private dental healthcare of ten or so years ago where dentists in their tens of thousands abandoned NHS rates because they were unsustainable for their business.