What does the budget mean to me? Me personally? It means nothing. Absolutely nothing. After looking through every different list in the media of 'wha...
Who were my thighs kidding? I haven't been inside my gym's hallowed walls in... 18... no, maybe 30 months... Some gyms just do not want you to leave, as soon as you try to cancel they look you up and down with judgement in their eyes and tell you all the reasons you should stay.
While many clothes companies have been associated with the Dhaka factory tragedy, low-cost, fast fashion provider Primark has taken the culpability cr...
The future is a scary concept. Whether you're a school leaver, the family breadwinner in the prime of your career, or about to enter retirement, it's natural to have concerns about the years to come. Money is the primary area of worry for most people, but there are simple and painless ways to prepare without winning the lottery.
Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, will commit at least £300, 000 of the £16.8m allocated for the Greater London Authority's (GLA) rough sleeping budget for 2013-15, to support London's homeless veterans.
If the government is to have any hope of meeting its legal duty to eradicate child poverty by 2020, it must closely monitor how the benefits cap affects the wellbeing of the UK's poorest families.
Most government departments have been told to prepare for cuts to their budgets of around 10%, it has emerged. Schools, the NHS and international a...
Small businesses are the engine room of the UK economy and whilst I applaud Chancellor Osborne's intent to help them more must be done in the long-term if small businesses are to truly drive economic growth and job creation.
Why on Earth, a visitor from another planet might ask us, has an incompetent dilettante been made Second Lord of the Treasury? We'd have to admit it's because his equally inept chum from uni has been made First Lord of the Treasury. How silly would that make us look?
Motorists spared next autumn's planned fuel duty rise have been handed more good news. First, supermarket Sainsbury's said it was reducing the pric...
There is a money tree, and it's called the Bank of England.
Treasury Chief Secretary Danny Alexander has again slapped down calls for welfare to bear more of the burden of the coalition's austerity cuts. The...
Amidst this week's economic gloom were two bright spots of the jobs market. First, new stats from the ONS led to widespread reports that employment had again reached record levels, with the number of people in work rising 131,000 in the quarter to 29.7 million. Then the OBR upgraded its forecasts for employment over the next few years.
Disappointingly, but not unsurprisingly, yesterday the Chancellor stuck to his short-sighted plans to increase the UK's Air Passenger Duty (APD) for yet another year. It flies in the face of new evidence from PwC pointing to the economic benefits of abolishing APD...
There were some tactics to stimulate growth including a £130billion guarantee for mortgages in an effort to boost the ailing housing market, an increase in the personal tax allowance for the starting rate to £10,000 and a reduction in corporate national insurance tax. However none of these measures are likely to give the economy the boost it needs to get through this 'difficult' year, in which the economy is likely to fall back into a 'Triple Dip' recession.
Measures in the Chancellor's budget - not just the cancellation of the 6p beer duty rise, but the further 1p cut, as well as the scrapping of the beer duty escalator- are a welcome step to help protect the livelihoods of our publicans. However, borough councils also need to step in with stricter planning policies that favour protecting pubs as community hubs.
The most welcome element of Osborne's budget is the introduction of the Liberal Democrat policy to raise the personal tax allowance to £10,000 next year, taking the poorest earners out of income tax altogether. The rest, I'm afraid, fails to be sufficiently progressive to satiate the social liberal majority within the Liberal Democrat party membership.
For me as an ex business owner and entrepreneur one of the most important aspects of any budget is how it helps our business sector grow. In my view the budget delivered yesterday by the Chancellor is one that is great for business.
Chancellor George Osborne had failed to deliver an anti-poverty budget that would boost living standards and ease the strain on poor families. We needed an anti-poverty budget to help struggling families, but what we heard yesterday was a standstill budget for a go-slow economy.
As always, it's the policy pronouncements that attract the attention on Budget day. A cheap pint is much more interesting than the minutiae of OBR figures. But the big story on Wesndesday in terms of its impact on households didn't come from the Chancellor.
From the working families who have to wait until 2015 for help with the costs of childcare, to a 2.4% drop in real wages over the lifetime of this parliament, life is getting more expensive and more difficult for most Britons.
George Osborne started his budget speech by saying it was "a Budget for people who aspire to work hard and get on". Given that we know single parents absolutely aspire to work hard and want to get on, what was there in the budget to help them?
What a difference a year makes. From #grannytax and #omnishambles to #AspirationNation and widespread support from the commentariat, George Osborne should give himself a pat on the back before the elephant in the room that is the eurozone recaptures his attention in the morning.
Beer drinkers may raise a glass to the Chancellor tonight, and drivers filling their cars with petrol will be pleased to hear that there will be no further increase in fuel duty, but people aspiring to become home owners are the real winners of this year's budget statement.
Budget 2013 live : Follow George Osborne's announcement here with our 'At A Glance' guide to all the big decisions on the economy. Corporation tax ...
