The Conservatives’ budget does nothing to help struggling families
Sarah Olney reacting to the 2023 Budget from Jeremy Hunt:
Families were looking at this Budget for support, but many will be left bitterly disappointed.
Mortgage bills are up, energy bills sky-rocketing and inflation rampant, all as a result of Conservative chaos.
This Government have proven just how out of touch they are.
A party press release adds:
The freezing of income tax thresholds will lead to a tax bombshell of £12 billion in 2023-24, the latest forecasts from the OBR show. This compares to the cost of almost £3 billion in 2023-24 of extending the Energy Price Guarantee for three months.
The Conservative government’s freezing of tax thresholds will lead to a total stealth tax grab of £29.3 billion by 2027-28, or a total of £120 billion over the coming five years, with 3.2 million people dragged into paying income tax and 2.1 million into the higher rate.
The Liberal Democrats are calling on the Chancellor to publish an assessment of how much these stealth tax hikes will cost families across the country, including a breakdown by constituency.
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The ‘full expensing’ provision as a counterbalance to the increases in corporation tax rates looks like a return to the 1980’s. At that time asset leases were used effectively to transfer large capital allowances from an unprofitable activity with high gearing to a profitable business elsewhere needing tax shielding. This might result in a company in UK having a civil aircraft on its books as an asset which it leased on a fifteen year term to an airline somewhere else in the world, even though its own core business was nothing to do with civil aviation. This does not lead to growth in the UK but to another route by which tax can be avoided using an international loophole. Other assets could be leased such as plant and machinery, and there was talk of so called ghost leasing, in which an industrial plant high in the hills somewhere was the subject of a lease agreement even though nobody had ever visited it.