The devil is in the detail – as George Osborne is finding out to his cost. Following the Chancellor’s 2016 Budget, delivered to the House of Commons on Wednesday, companies, financial experts and journalists have been poring over the fine print. In a damning verdict, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) warned that Britons should ‘all be worried’ about the risk of job cuts and lower wages amid growing concerns of another economic downturn. The economic think tank added that Osborne ‘won’t be able to sleep at night’ because of the likelihood of him not now meeting his pledge to balance the nation’s books by 2020.
Meanwhile, the prospect of a Tory revolt over cuts to disability benefits gathers pace. The IFS calculates that the changes would hit 370,000 people, with an average loss of £3,500 a year, leading a number of Tory MPs to write to the Chancellor asking for a rethink. The government had announced it was changing the way it calculated the daily living component of Personal Independence Payments from January 2017, while Budget documents have made clear it would save the government more than £4 billion by 2020-21.
Homeowners breathed a sigh of relief yesterday as the Bank of England kept interest rates on hold for the 84th month in a row.
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