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For those who listened to this years Budget and are in business, it didn’t sound too bad. Here are the main points from the Chancellor’s speech:

  • 1p cut from fuel duty from 6pm tonight
  • annual 1p fuel increase scrapped until 2015
  • no inflationary rise in fuel duty until 2012
  • personal tax allowance to rise a further £630 to £8,015 in April 2012
  • 2011 growth forecast down from 2.1% to 1.7%, revised down for the next 4 years
  • Public borrowing down £2.5 billion, to £146 billion for year
  • Road tax duty for HGV’s frozen
  • Private jet users to pay passenger tax
  • Rise in air passenger duty to be frozen this year
  • Corporation tax to be cut by 2% in April, instead of 1%
  • £100 million to help repair potholes
If your a business, this should all make relatively good reading, especially on the fuel front. The Chancellor has also said that they would be implementing the fair fuel stabiliser scheme to help relieve the burden of high fuel costs. This should be good news for all manufacturers who have suffered over the last few years with enormous diesel bills.

On a personal level, millions are going to benefit from a higher tax threshold – OK it’s only £45 on average, but that’s the equivalent of a weeks worth of fuel for a family car!

Growth however has been revised down. This is significant as the Government is relying on the private sector to help soak up the job losses from the public sector. So to combat this they are setting up 21 ‘enterprise zones’ across England. These are designed to get people’s entrepreneurial juices going and new businesses off the ground. And the Chancellor has said that they will be improving again the amount of credit available to small and medium businesses – though he’s said this before and the business community has still said they’re suffering from a lack of credit.

It wasn’t a big news budget, the 1p decrease in fuel duty was really the only major surprise in his speech. In a years time, when the effects of what he’s announced have been felt, only then can we make an accurate assessment of how successful this Budget was.