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Tag: Budget

What can you do when a radical and unashamedly ambitious housing strategy isn’t enough?

What can you do when a radical and unashamedly ambitious housing strategy isn’t enough?

Listening to the Budget speech is often theatre, with oohs and ahhs. Reading the documents is more often a prosaic task punctuated with eh? and what? This Budget provided no exception. Even though it failed to light fires for the construction industry, it did provide interest. George Osborne’s Help to Buy scheme captured the imagination as he spoke. Sadly, unpicking the detail, such as it is, there is plenty of scope for both questions and concern. The Chancellor was not…

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Has the Office for Budget Responsibility misread the housing market?

Has the Office for Budget Responsibility misread the housing market?

There seems to be a fair chance the Office for Budget Responsibility’s view of the housing market may be badly awry. Why would that be that bad? 1. Because it potentially supports a complacent attitude among policy makers towards problems within the housing market. 2. Because it may well leave the Chancellor a few billion pounds light on stamp duty in a few years time. But before galumphing into why the OBR may be wrong it’s worth making a couple…

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Panorama points to earnings pain, but the worst is yet to come

Panorama points to earnings pain, but the worst is yet to come

The Panorama programme due to be aired this evening is rightly getting a lot of publicity with figures showing that people’s earnings have fallen in “real” terms by about 5% during the past two years. But you really don’t need particularly detailed analysis to show how hard people’s earnings have been hit. As this blog has shown before, while pay has been hit hard in real terms, construction folk have taken a much heftier hit than most.  Using the RPIX…

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Budget provides a shot in the arm for housing work, but there’s a sting in the detail

Budget provides a shot in the arm for housing work, but there’s a sting in the detail

A shot in the arm, said the Home Builders Federation release sent out after Chancellor George Osborne sat down. And the Budget certainly lifted the already rising share prices of the quoted builders quite nicely. It must be said that comment came as no shock, as this was yet another ask or two or three by house builders that have been favourably answered by the incumbent Government. Putting in a presumption in favour of sustainable development in the planning law…

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£10 billion less public cash for capital spending in second half of this financial year

£10 billion less public cash for capital spending in second half of this financial year

Just to get you in the mood for the savageness of the cuts to be announced later today here is an observation on today’s release on public sector finances. In the first six months of this financial year net investment, that is the envelope within which public sponsored construction broadly falls, has only dropped slightly on spending in last financial year. That means we haven’t felt any real shock yet. But if the Government is to stick to its spending…

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Budget figures confirm the urgent need for new sources of investment in construction

Budget figures confirm the urgent need for new sources of investment in construction

As if in compensation for all the anticipation before and excitement during the Budget announcement, we are left with the dull thud back to reality afterwards. Certainly, for construction the Budget itself changed little of substance. Alright the first-time buyer stamp duty holiday was an eye-catching cheeky move. But we all know its greatest impact will be in 20 months time when we will see a flurry of activity by those who don’t want to miss out on potentially saving…

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Stamp duty – a tax rise that looks set to win votes

Stamp duty – a tax rise that looks set to win votes

There is obvious glee within the housing market about the prospects of a two-year period free of stamp duty for those first-time buyers who purchase properties worth less than £250,000. The £250,000 threshold captures practically all of them, with significantly less than 10% of exceptions that will be mainly resident in London and the South East. And the cost of this “Budget giveaway” the Treasury puts at under £300 million annually at worst. This figure is of course a hypothetical resting on the…

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Comforting data ahead of the budget

Comforting data ahead of the budget

As the Chancellor Alistair Darling puts his final touches to the Budget he will be relieved by the recent spate of comforting data. Last Wednesday we had employment statistics showing that the unemployment was falling. On Thursday the figures on public finances were far healthier than expected, with the Institute for Fiscal Studies estimating that the level of borrowing for the financial year will come in £12 billion lower than forecast in the last Pre-Budget Report. Today we had the inflation…

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