The system of grants for students from poorer backgrounds is being scrapped in favour of loans to save £1.6 billion.
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Tax credits provided £2bn in additional cash to households in Scotland in 2013-14, with two-thirds going to help families in low-paid work with children.
The Scottish Conservatives said the £9 national living wage by 2020 went further than the £8.70 figure recommended by the SNP.
The new national living wage will then rise over the course of the Parliament, to more than £9 an hour by 2020, he said.
“Unequivocally, tax credit recipients in work will be made worse off by the measures in the Budget on average”, he said.
However, sick and disabled people on Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) who are likely to be able to return to work will see their payments reduced by about £30 a week to the level of Jobseeker’s Allowance, now £73.10 a week for those aged 25 and over.
Osborne confirmed there would be no change to income tax thresholds or value-added taxation for at least five years.
The government said about 140,000 workers in Scotland would benefit, with full-time workers on the new wage expecting to increase their earnings by about £5,200 more by 2020.
In a step that will intensify fury over plans to give MPs an 11% pay rise this year, public sector employees now face four more years with increases capped at 1%.
Cuts totalling £20 billion to Whitehall departments will be announced in the autumn, though Mr Osborne delighted Tory backbenchers – and the head of the armed forces General Sir Nicholas Houghton – by announcing that he will protect military spending and meet Nato’s target of spending 2% of GDP on defence every year to 2020.
Forecast for paying down the national deficit and running a surplus knocked back by a year from 2017/18 to 2018/19.
“I think that new contract, that new centre of British politics, is going to be a settlement that the country are happy with”.
Will budget consultation on pensions tax relief spell the end of salary sacrifice?
“These reforms follow a series of changes in recent years that make it increasingly hard to argue prime residential property is under-taxed”, Jamie Obertelli, a researcher at property consultancy Knight Frank in London, said in an e-mail.
Mr. Osborne also committed to spending 2% of the U.K.’s annual national income on defense, easing concerns the United Kingdom would fall short of its commitment as a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The change, predicted by The Independent last week, will affect new claimants from 2017 but not existing ones.
But the OBR calculates that forcing housing associations to reduce rents will have a knock-on effect to social landlords incomes “reducing their ability and willingness” to invest in new homes.
We asked some people who would be affected by different parts of the budget what they thought…
However, union leaders were quick to attack the Budget, describing it as a “beautifully crafted con trick”.
He said it was wrong for the taxpayer to “subsidise” wage bills through the tax credit system, adding: ‘Let me be clear: Britain deserves a pay rise and Britain is getting a pay rise.’.
” The question is where does that money come from?”
Scottish Green Party Co-convenor, Patrick Harvie MSP, slammed most of the measures.
‘This is a Conservative budget that can only be delivered because the British people trusts us to finish the job, ‘ said Osborne.
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Fifty-eight percent of families in Caerphilly County Borough have children in receipt of tax credit, with 24,900 children dependent upon it.
