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Budget blinds5/21/2023 ![]() ![]() Not only can they now build an even bigger nest egg for their own old age, some may even be able to hand it down to their children. Except the beneficiaries won’t just be doctors, because apparently that would have been too complicated so anyone earning up to £240,000 a year and lucky enough to have a big pension pot stands to benefit, suggesting an unexpected tax break for some City types, the upper reaches of the tech industry and other highly paid professionals. (Currently, anyone lucky enough to have £1m stashed away in their pension pot – about 10 times the median pension savings for 55- to 64-year-olds – can’t stuff in any more without attracting tax penalties, which, combined with general post-pandemic exhaustion, has evidently convinced some doctors to hang up their stethoscopes). The big surprise of the budget was the chancellor removing the lifetime cap on tax-free pension savings, to stop NHS consultants retiring early on the grounds that their retirement savings are now so enormous that they’re attracting crippling tax bills. Rishi Sunak’s government suffers from the same fatal weakness that Liz Truss revealed by scrapping the 45p tax rate, and that’s failing to realise how bailing out the very wealthy looks to everyone else. But it also revealed that leopards don’t change their blind spots. This was a carefully calibrated budget from a Conservative party that is clearly now back in contention politically, if a long way from being back in the lead, and leaves no room for Labour complacency. And for hard-pressed red wall voters, there was more help with energy bills plus something vaguely Brexity-sounding about lowering duty on beer in pubs. Free childcare hours for the under-threes was the borrowed element, swiped from a Labour party that will (if it wins the next election) now have to stump up the extra money to make a wildly underfunded policy actually work, without necessarily getting the glory for it. His new idea was a fresh start on welfare, scrapping the hated work capability assessment and promising more help for people to get jobs (although with even tougher sanctions if they don’t).
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