This year’s Spring Statement was something of a surprise. For many years budgets and spending statements have been characterised by lack of the unknown. Anything vaguely contentious has been leaked ahead of time, possibly to give the Chancellor a chance to change his mind if there’s too much of a backlash.
This year we knew that because the public finances were perhaps a little ahead of where they were expected to be that the Chancellor had a little wiggle room to be more generous than the repeated years of austerity that we have all endured since the credit crunch.
Covid is officially over, although the consequences will be with us for a while, and the public sector debt mountain looks to be shrinking slowly according to Government projections.
However Chancellor Sunak has seen fit to gift us some small largesse in this budget with the first change in income tax rates for quite a while, and an increase in the National Insurance threshold for employed and self employed. Of course this is slightly giving with one hand whilst taking away with another, as we see a rise in National Insurance elsewhere.
The net impact for most of us will be small – but for the detail please download and read our highly informative guide to the 2022 Spring Forecast Statement.
