Beverage brands are poised to sue to United Kingdom government over chancellor George Osborne’s new sugar tax which will add 24p a litre to products containing a high sugar content.
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The independent forecasting body, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), revised the United Kingdom growth forecasts down for the next five years in Wednesday’s Budget, and Mr Osborne warned the outlook for the global economy was “markedly weaker” with the United Kingdom “not immune” to a slowdown.
Meanwhile, another think tank, the Resolution Foundation, warned that the richest British households would be the greatest beneficiaries from tax changes.
This takes effect from 17th April with personal allowances also increasing from £11,000 to £11,500. The personal tax threshold for income tax will rise to £11500 from next year and the band at which people payer the top rate of tax will rise from £42385 to £45000.
“Mr Osborne had three fiscal rules – the welfare cap; the rule which said debt should fall as a fraction of national income every year; and the rule to get to budget surplus by 2019-20”. Johnson only gave him a 50/50 chance of hitting his target of a £10bn surplus on the public finances by 2020.
But the respected Institute for Fiscal Studies thinktank said that overall the Budget delivered “measures that will increase tax revenues and cut spending ” .
Mr Osborne played down suggestions he would be forced to find more spending cuts or put up taxes to balance the books.
Mr Johnson also said the chancellor had “managed to shift quite a lot money around” to try and meet his target but he can only “get away with this once ” “.
The Government hopes to achieve the surplus through a combination of spending cuts, pension contribution increases from public sector employers, the tightening of the disability benefits system and changes to the timing of corporation tax payments.
“There is a commitment to reach a budget surplus in normal times”, he said. “This is the last chance, this is the last time he’s going to be able to get away with moving things around like this”. The Chancellor was asked this on the Today programme this morning, with John Humphrys needling him on the economic targets on debt and deficit that he set himself and asking whether if he could miss two out of three of those targets and potentially be on course to miss a third, ‘what’s a bloke got to do in your job to get the sack?’
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Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn described Mr Osborne’s Budget as the culmination of “six years of his failures” and said it had “unfairness at its very core” because it offered Capital Gains Tax cuts for the rich at a time when disabled people are losing benefits.
