Chancellor George Osborne\u2019s sixth and final Budget of this Parliament highlighted Britain\u2019s impressive growth following the recession, as well as the rise in employment and falling debt.<\/p>\n
He emphasised that difficult decisions had been taken and he called for the country to stay on course, with current forecasts indicating that Britain will have a Budget Surplus in 2018\/19.<\/p>\n
Reinforcing its existing policies, the Government pledged to close the remaining loopholes relating to tax avoidance and evasion.<\/p>\n
Some of the other <\/strong>headline announcements included an increase in the personal tax-free allowance (up to \u00a310,800 next year, rising to \u00a311,000 in 2017), which will help 27mn people; the introduction of a Help to Buy ISA for first time buyers, which will see the Government contributing \u00a350 to every \u00a3200 saved by a first-time buyer for their deposit; and a new measure that will grant pensioners the freedom to sell their annuities for a cash lump sum.<\/p>\n A fuel duty increase, originally scheduled for September, has also been cancelled, which will result in the longest duty freeze in 20 years.<\/p>\n The Chancellor also confirmed an increase in the threshold at which people pay the higher tax rate, which will rise from \u00a342,385 to \u00a343,300 by 2017-18, above the rate of inflation.<\/p>\n In a move to help businesses, the Government will cut corporation tax to 20 per cent \u2013 one of the lowest rates of any major economy in the world \u2013 while self-employed individuals will no longer be required to pay Class 2 National Insurance contributions during the course of the next Parliament, with the annual tax return also set to be abolished.<\/p>\n A new Personal Savings Allowance will take 95 per cent of taxpayers out of savings tax altogether by allowing a tax-free allowance of \u00a31,000 or \u00a3500 for higher rate payers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Chancellor George Osborne\u2019s sixth and final Budget of this Parliament highlighted Britain\u2019s impressive growth following the recession, as well as the rise in employment and falling debt.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/698"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=698"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/698\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":699,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/698\/revisions\/699"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=698"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=698"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=698"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}