Money

It looks set to be a happy April for MPs who are in line for a 2.8 per cent pay rise, lifting their salaries to £93,904. Your reaction to that figure likely depends on how much you earn. So does mine – and since I’m about to argue that MPs are underpaid, it’s only fair I give a sense of my own finances. I’ll stay schtum about my books and biotech startup, but I’ll admit – no boasting intended – that this piece will net me, after tax, somewhere in the mid to high two figures. Can it be right that we pay our MPs significantly less than hospital consultants? As

If you have had your eye on a bungalow along the Devon coast, a cottage in the New Forest, or a tastefully painted terrace in one of the sea-facing villages in Norfolk, this could be your moment. Many holiday home owners are choosing to sell up to avoid a hike on council taxes. From next week, local authorities will be allowed to charge double the normal rate for second home owners. Average bills are set to rise from £2,280 to £4,560. This crackdown is likely to be popular. After all, who has sympathy with those who own two homes, when many young people are struggling to get on to the

Steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal is considering leaving the UK because of the Labour government’s abolition of the ‘non-dom’ tax regime. This confirms that Keir Starmer’s politics of envy is successfully destroying the British economy. Mittal would join tens of thousands of millionaires and billionaires – British and foreign – who have already abandoned Britain to avoid paying even more tax: all of them ranked among the 1 per cent of British residents, contributing 29 per cent of all the taxes raised by HMRC. These tax exiles had been willing to pay fair taxes, but many baulked at Starmer’s decision not only to tax their offshore income but also their foreign-based

Rachel Reeves wakes to a swathe of tricky front pages this morning after the Spring Statement in which the Office for Budgetary Responsibility (OBR) slashed next year’s growth forecasts. The Chancellor also announced extra welfare cuts in order to meet her fiscal rules. The verdict on the statement isn’t exactly positive, with Reeves facing criticism from both left and right. The Daily Mail brands Reeves ‘deluded’ and the Daily Telegraph warns of ‘five years of record taxes’. The Guardian splashes with ‘Reeves accused of balancing books at expense of the poor’ while the Financial Times says ‘Tax rise fears cloud Reeves’s fiscal fix’. Reeves could take some small comfort from the

There is perhaps no document more useful for understanding the state of the nation than the Office for Budget Responsibility’s ‘Economic and Fiscal Outlook’. The 180-page document, released as soon as the Chancellor sits down after a Budget or financial statement, can not only seal the fate of a government but also tell us where the country is heading. Today was no exception. The OBR’s outlook was filled with bombshell after bombshell. Here are five of the most shocking findings in the report: 1. The OBR’s housing forecasts suggest Labour is nowhere near to achieving its target of building 1.5 million new homes in this parliament – which Rachel Reeves already

Chancellor Rachel Reeves is seeking to trim £2 billion from the government’s £13 billion administration budget, with up to 50,000 jobs being cut in her Spring Statement. The Prime Minister Keir Starmer said the government was ‘looking across the board’ for savings. But do Reeves and Starmer really have the courage, and the political capital, to carry out such a purge? On paper, Labour’s task looks straightforward enough. Civil service numbers over the past 15 years have performed a bungee jump. Between 2010 and 2016, the coalition, followed by David Cameron’s majority Conservative government, succeeded in trimming civil service numbers from 492,000 to 384,000. Then they began to climb again,

Pursuing net zero is the ‘opportunity of the century’ which will create tens of thousands of well-paid green jobs and slash our energy bills. That is this Labour government’s official line, at least, as it was the last Tory government’s. Now we know, thanks to a leaked study, that is not quite how the Department for Business and Trade sees it. Rather, it seems, net zero threatens the recession of the century. The Macroeconomic Impacts of the Net Zero Transition, prepared by the Economic and Strategic Analysis team at the Department for Business and Trade in November 2023, warns that net zero targets could provoke an economic shock on the scale

The Bank of England has held interest rates at 4.5 per cent. The Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) voted eight to one to hold the base rate at its current level after reducing it by 0.25 percentage points six weeks ago. Markets and pundits had expected the decision, despite figures last week revealing the economy had contracted slightly in January. The Bank shares the government’s alarm at the lack of growth, warning in its report last month that ‘GDP growth has been weaker than expected, and indicators of business and consumer confidence have declined’. However, its fears that inflation may creep back up again – which the Bank predicts will peak

In more bad news for Rachel Reeves as the Chancellor prepares for next week’s Spring Statement, the OECD has downgraded Britain’s growth prospects. The organisation forecast the UK’s economy to grow 1.4 per cent this year and then just 1.2 per cent next year – compared with the 1.7 per cent and 1. 3 per cent that they’d previously estimated. In fairness, the whole world is seeing slower growth, according to the OECD’s estimates. America’s growth forecasts were also downgraded to 2.2 per cent this year, followed by 1.6 per cent in 2026 compared with the 2.4 per cent and 3.1 per cent that had originally been forecast. The report’s

There are, as Rachel Reeves keeps telling us, some tough choices to be made. Whether she is personally tough enough to make them is another matter. It seems as if the government is already retreating on proposed plans to freeze Personal Independence Payments (PIP) in the Spring statement in ten days’ time. A putative backbench rebellion has grown in size to a level at which even a government with a majority of 160 cannot be sure of success. There were also rumoured threats of ministerial resignations. It shouldn’t really come as a surprise. Many Labour MPs have it in their heads that they were elected to protect the poor and

Growth has ground to a halt, manufacturing is collapsing, and the government is desperately scratching around for ways to save some money so it can balance the books. There is not much to make anyone feel optimistic about the state of the British economy right now. Except, that is, for the healthy performance of the UK’s traditional, mid-market retailers. Marks & Spencer and Tesco are both in rude health. Now, John Lewis, which has reported a rise in pre-tax profits of 73 per cent to £97 million, is the latest retailer to demonstrate its ability to bounce back.  After years of steep losses under the hapless leadership of the former

Markets are not enjoying Donald Trump’s tariffs. Some 125 days have passed since his second election victory and the S&P 500 is on a clear downward trajectory thanks to Trump’s tariff policies and other poor US economic data. After the same number of days following Biden’s election, the S&P was up 13 per cent; for Obama’s second term it was up nine per cent; and at the same point in Trump’s first presidency it was up 11 per cent. For Trump 2.0 it’s down 3 per cent from election day. Trump has summoned Wall Street bosses to the White House in an attempt to calm nerves, but while US equities