July Budget 2015: Living wage bill hurts retailers and small firms July 8, 2015 Retail and hospitality industry insiders warned yesterday that their sectors face a huge rise in labour costs after a Tory pledge to introduce a minimum wage of £9 for over-25s by 2020. From April next year, businesses will be required to pay £7.20 per hour to workers over the age of 25, rising to [...]
July Budget 2015: Buy-to-let tax relief cut hits housebuilders as Foxtons, Barratt, Crest Nicholson and Berkeley Group share prices slide July 8, 2015 Shares in housebuilders and estate agents slid yesterday as the chancellor announced plans to curb the booming buy-to-let sector by cutting tax relief. While homeowners had mortgage interest relief withdrawn 15 years ago, buy-to-let landlords have continued to reap the benefits, with the wealthiest able to reclaim 45p of every £1 they pay in [...]
July Budget 2015: Are you an entrepreneur, an apprentice or a single parent? What does George Osborne’s statement mean for you? July 8, 2015 THE SINGLE PARENT Catherine Gannon, 51Managing partner at law firm Gannons Gannons Commercial Law continues to do well, with profits and earnings up on last year. Catherine is commercially savvy and has restructured the business from an LLP to a limited company, illustrating that she is a smart operator in a segmented legal [...]
July Budget 2015: George Osborne cuts benefits and the family tax credit July 8, 2015 Chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne announced major cuts to welfare spending yesterday, using the summer Budget to set out how he planned to save the Treasury a further £12bn in the next three years. The chancellor said that his Budget was designed to take Britain "from a low wage, high tax, high welfare [...]
Greek debt crisis: IMF’s Lagarde says debt restructuring needed July 8, 2015 IMF chief Christine Lagarde has stressed Greece's huge debt pile needs restructuring and said the organisation remains "fully engaged" with the cash-strapped country. "Greece is in a situation of acute crisis, which needs to be addressed seriously and promptly," she said during a speech at the Brookings Institution think-tank in Washington. Earlier today Greek Prime Minister [...]
June 2015 FOMC Minutes: The Fed is worried about Greece July 8, 2015 Minutes from the Federal Reserve's June meeting show officials want to see further evidence the economy is picking up before they hike rates, and are concerned about the Greek debt crisis. The minutes from its meeting June 16-17 show officials have been pleased by positive economic developments such as strong consumer spending and signs wages [...]
July Budget 2015: Inheritance tax threshold to rise to exclude £1m homes July 8, 2015 The chancellor has increased the inheritance tax threshold, allowing £1m homes to be passed down to children after death to be free of tax. As part of today's July Budget, George Osborne announced that, from 2017, there will be a new £175,000 allowance on homes left to children or grandchildren. The new allowance is in addition [...]
July Budget 2015: Osborne axes student grants and replaces them with loans July 8, 2015 Chancellor George Osborne has announced that student maintenance grants will be scrapped and replaced by loans, as part of his July Budget. "From the 2016-17 academic year we will replace maintenance grants with loans for new students – loans that only have to be paid back once they earn over £21,000 a year," he said. [...]
July Budget 2015: Here’s what Twitter said about George Osborne’s speech July 8, 2015 Before George Osborne even posed for the cameras with Budget box in hand, the pre-Budget buzz on Twitter had already reached 200 tweets per minute – then when he stepped up to the despatch box, that rocketed to more than 1,000 tweets per minute. The biggest talking point of the day was the student maintenance [...]
July Budget 2015: George Osborne’s spending plans in charts July 8, 2015 The first fully Conservative Budget in 18 years has arrived, and chancellor George Osborne hasn't been afraid to flex his muscle. Osborne paraded a new national living wage, committed himself to defence spending, promised £250m funding to help HMRC combat tax avoidance and evasion, abolished non-dom status and treated corporations to a tax cut. Here's [...]