George Osborne announces £1bn boost for small businesses ahead of the Autumn Statement December 2, 2014 George Osborne has announced a lending package worth nearly £1bn for the UK's small and medium-sized businesses ahead of tomorrow's Autumn Statement. The Treasury will give £400m to expand Enterprise Capital Funds, which invests in fast-growing small and medium size enterprises. It will also guarantee up to £500m of new bank lending to these kind [...]
Only £4,327 for HMRC despite Facebook UK’s £105m revenues October 11, 2015 FACEBOOK paid just £4,327 in corporation tax last year – less than the annual cost of travel for some people commuting to London from Brighton each day. The social media giant rewarded its UK staff with an average of £210,000 in pay and bonuses, and spent £35.4m on shares for 362 London employees, bringing the [...]
Micro Focus’s HP deal hailed as post-Brexit statement of confidence from British business September 8, 2016 British company Micro Focus revealed an $8.8bn (£6.6bn) takeover of the software division of US giant Hewlett Packard yesterday, with the audacious swoop hailed as an assertion of post-Brexit confidence and a landmark deal for the UK tech sector. City analysts said the deal also signalled a “change from the post-Brexit dialogue of UK businesses [...]
Autumn Statement 2014: George Osborne could pull a small rabbit out of the hat November 30, 2014 STAMP DUTY George Osborne could choose to reform stamp duty on Wednesday – a crowd-pleasing policy that wouldn’t have to hit Treasury coffers hard. The most likely option for the chancellor would be to change the slab-like structure of the tax by only charging a higher rate on the amount spent over each threshold, rather [...]
Autumn Statement 2014: £2bn cash boost for NHS is not enough, says Labour November 30, 2014 Chancellor George Osborne announced a £2bn boost to NHS spending yesterday, ahead of formal plans which will be set out in the Autumn Statement. However, Labour hit back almost immediately, arguing that the extra cash is nowhere near enough to plug a hole in the healthcare budget. Speaking on the Andrew Marr show yesterday the [...]
Theresa May warned that police cuts could “reduce very significantly” the UK’s ability to respond to a terror attack November 20, 2015 Police cuts that are widely anticipated to be announced in next week's Autumn Statement could "reduce very significantly" the UK's ability to respond to a Paris-style terror attack, home secretary Theresa May has been warned in a document prepared for her. Chancellor George Osborne's axe is set to fall on a number of departments, including [...]
London mayoral election 2016 candidates Zac Goldsmith and Sadiq Khan warn chancellor George Osborne on police cuts November 19, 2015 Conservative London mayoral candidate Zac Goldsmith said last night that the government is likely to back down on police funding cuts in the wake of the Paris terror attacks. Chancellor George Osborne is widely expected to swing the axe on policing in next week's Autumn Statement but pressure is mounting on him to back track [...]
With public borrowing in October at a six-year high, will deficit reduction be a three-parliament issue? November 22, 2015 Samuel Tombs, chief UK economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, says Yes. The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) will revise up its borrowing forecasts in this week’s Autumn Statement, and the surplus predicted for 2019-20 probably will be reduced to just £5bn from £10bn. But even after these revisions, it is doubtful that borrowing will fall as [...]
HMRC is failing to answer its phones and is not doing enough to tackle tax fraud December 17, 2015 No matter how bad your commute has been, your morning is still probably better than that of HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) – after two separate reports highlighting the UK tax authority's shortcomings were released today. The National Audit Office (NAO) concluded that, while taxmen and women had come a long way in their compliance efforts, there [...]
Autumn Statement 2014: Northern Ireland to control own corporation tax if talks go well December 3, 2014 Northern Ireland will be permitted to set its own corporation tax rate as long as the nation proves it can manage the financial implications of the change, the chancellor announced yesterday. Following weeks of intense talks, George Osborne signalled that if talks go well, Northern Ireland will be free to cut its corporation tax level [...]