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UK to charge soda tax on sugary drinks

Schools themselves will be rewarded for increasing the number of hours students come to learn.

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– Motorists. Yet again, Mr Osborne has frozen fuel duty, meaning van drivers will save £12 each time they fill their tank, compared to what they would have paid under the escalator in force in 2010.

The government will now consult on the implementation of the tax. This will come as a boost to the Solent devolution deal expected to be announced this summer.

He offered 3.5 billion pounds ($6.6 billion) in cuts by 2020, including $1.8 billion out of supports to the disabled, to achieve his target of balancing the books in the face of weaker global economic growth.

The Climate Change Levy will rise in 2019 when the government is still collecting money from about half of the participants in the final year of the CRC, he said. In addition, the budget decision to cut corporation tax to 17 per cent by 2020 will mean greater competition for this State in attracting foreign direct investment.

The U.K. government announced a new tax on sugary drinks Wednesday, in an attempt to tackle childhood obesity.

Craig Harman, a tax specialist at Perrys Chartered Accountants in Tunbridge Wells, said small businesses “look to be the big winners from the budget”.

But over 300,000 people have signed a petition calling for sanitary items to be exempted from tax altogether. She also said local healthcare professionals will welcome the sugar levy and the fact it will be spent on more sport in schools.

Osborne has created an image for himself as the unflinching guardian of Britain’s public finances, and his latest plans showed he was still aiming for a budget surplus by the end of the decade equivalent to 0.5 percent of GDP.

Mr. Osborne also introduced new restrictions on how far companies could offset past losses and debt-interest payments against their tax bills, as well as a further clampdown on tax avoidance by multinationals.

Chris Sanger, head of tax policy at accountants Ernst & Young, said that while small firms would welcome the move, larger business would be disappointed to enjoy only a small portion of the savings. Osborne has been criticized too for sticking to his plans to ease the income tax burden on Britain’s higher earners by raising the threshold at which people start to pay the top rate.

Anti-sugar campaigners welcomed the news. Growth would be stuck at 2.1 percent in the next three years. County education official Peter Edgar said he was extremely anxious by the findings. “We did it!!! A profound move that will ripple around the world”, tweeted celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, who has led a high-profile campaign for action. Mr Osborne sought populist applause by freezing duties on beer, spirits and most ciders.

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He said: “It was a very good thing that the Chancellor was blaming the last government because he was the Chancellor in the last government”.

'By hitting the rental sector with higher taxes and lower reliefs the chancellor is making renting more expensive and getting on the ladder even harder