Tories should apologise for breaking manifesto pledge says minister

The majority of Britons back increasing National Insurance rates for self-employed people, a Sky Data poll reveals.

“The Chancellor has ducked the desperate need for reform”, said BADA CEO Marco Forgione.

For small businesses coming out of rates relief, there will be a cap, meaning their bill will not increase by more than £50 a month.

A number of Tory politicians have spoken out about Philip Hammond’s decision to raise National Insurance contributions for self-employed Britons.

The Resolution Foundation think tank – which campaigns for low-income workers – hailed the NICs rise as “welcome and progressive”, while the influential Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) said it would go only a “small fraction” of the way to redressing an imbalance in the tax system in favour of the self-employed.

However, senior figures in the care home industry claim that previous attempts to pump money into social care have failed and are concerned the same will happen again.a year ago councils were given the power to increase council tax through a precept if the extra funds went to social care providers. “This means a transparent and fair system of valuation and appeals is vital to provide greater certainty of cost and income to businesses and allow councils to release the money now put aside to cover the risk of appeals to invest in vital local services”.

Delivering his budget statement just weeks before Prime Minister Theresa May is expected to kick off the process of leaving the EU, Hammond said Britain’s economy had “continued to confound the commentators” with its growth in 2016.

The national insurance changes will impact roughly 2.84 million people in the United Kingdom, who will on average be £240 per year worse off as a result, a Treasury source told Business Insider.

“The self-employed are half as likely to take sick days as employed people and they often cite lack of sick pay as a problem”, he said.

The personal allowance will also rise again, meaning people will not pay tax until they earn more than £11,500, a move he said meant 29 million would be better off.

The increase in tax on self-employed workers has been attacked as a broken manifesto promise by some Conservative backbenchers.

“But our job is to do what needs to be done to get Britain match-fit for its future”.

Labour has criticised the move, saying there is “nothing fair” about it.

More than a dozen Conservative MPs have criticised the £2 billion national insurance hit, including Iain Duncan Smith, John Redwood, Anna Soubry and Dominic Raab.

And he pledged £70m to “keep the United Kingdom at the forefront of disruptive technology such as biotech, robotics systems and driverless vehicles, a technology I believe the party opposite knows something about”.