What to expect from today’s Budget

The art of delivering a good Budget – in a political sense at least – is to give everyone the impression that while you’ve had to do some really difficult things, you’ve miraculously managed to find some nice things to do too that will distract people for at least one round of newspaper front pages. George Osborne did manage that for his summer Budget after the election – only for the row about cuts to tax credits to blow up later.

So we might expect a range of measures that generally make for good headlines, such as:

• Raising the threshold for higher-rate tax payers to help the 1.6 million people who have been pulled into the 40p rate since 2010.
• Extending the school day – which will upset teaching unions and the like but please parents who want their children to attend state schools that compete with the private sector.
• Housebuilding – more measures to increase the supply of housing, including opening up public sector land, which is fast becoming the planning equivalent of saying you’ll fund a new spending commitment through cracking down on tax avoidance.