Relief for families as tax credit cuts abandoned

There was delightful moment for campaigners and Conservative MPs after Osborne abandoned the tax credit cuts saying he is not going to phase in the controversial £4.4bn cuts.

The county council is already half way through a programme to deliver £170m in cuts – one third of its budget – by 2020.

“I’ve been asked to help in the transition as Britian moves to the higher wage, lower tax society the country wants to see”.

The think tank’s director Torsten Bell said the changes announced in the July Budget and yesterday’s Autumn Statement risked undermining universal credit, the Government’s flagship welfare reform programme. “We f***** up. We didn’t mean to cut tax credits, it was a complete accident”, an advisor to a Cabinet Minister told Business Insider UK last month.

He said the extra stamp duty, to be introduced next April, would raise nearly a billion pounds by 2021, adding: “We’ll reinvest some of that money in local communities in London and places like Cornwall which are being priced out of home ownership”.

Devon and Cornwall Police had been braced for further huge cuts to its budged, warning that cuts of £52m over the next four years could see “bobbies on the beat” and neighbourhood police officers become a thing of the past. “We are ready for whatever storms lie ahead”, he said.

Osborne said they reflect the wisdom of his policy to cut government spending since coming to office in 2010.

The Chancellor revealed the major U-turns as he outlined spending plans for the Government over the next five years.

“We are moving in the right direction and we are making billions of pounds of savings in the welfare budget”.

Paul Johnson from the Institute for Fiscal Studies said: “He’s got a bit lucky with some of the changes to tax receipt forecasts”.

And so it was that shadow chancellor John McDonnell chose to lighten the atmosphere by taking out a copy of Mao’s Little Red Book, quoting from it to tease Osborne about his enthusiasm for doing business with China.

He also said he would borrow £8bn less than forecast while funding £12bn in capital investment and infrastructure. Under the new benefit, spending on welfare for working-age Britons would fall to a 30-year low as a share of national income.

“We need to tackle the long term drivers of benefit spending – such as low pay and high housing costs – rather than rationing decency by cutting benefits”. As the Chancellor said: “Frankly, people buying a home to let should not be squeezing out families who can’t afford a home to buy”.

Measures include direct funding for developers and a change in planning rules to open up land for the creation of 200,000 new starter homes with a 20 per cent discount for first-time buyers under 40.