Portrait of the week | 4 December 2010

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The Office for Budget Responsibility said it thought economic growth for 2010 would be 1.8 per cent, not 1.2 per cent as it had previously predicted. It expected 330,000 public sector workers to lose their jobs over the next four years, not the 490,000 it forecast in June; 1.1 million jobs would be created in the private sector. ‘The bulk of this revision results from the action we have taken to cut welfare bills rather than cut public services,’ George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, told the Commons. A lower 10 per cent rate of corporation tax would be levied from April 2013 on the profits of hi-tech firms from newly commercialised patents. Tax on beers stronger than 7.5 per cent is to increase from the autumn of 2011. The £400 a week housing benefit cap is to be delayed by six months to October 2011.

Snow swept the land.