The focus was squarely on yesterday’s Autumn Budget statement in the papers this morning.
Rishi Sunak has scaled back a cut to universal credit by £2bn a year and reduced business rates in a Budget that set out a longer-term “moral” mission to halt the growth of the state, cut taxes and restore fiscal discipline (The Financial Times £).
Rishi Sunak has put Britain on course for its biggest tax burden since the 1950s in a heavy spending Budget that delivered £150bn of extra commitments and stoked speculation of an early General Election (The Telegraph).
The impact of Brexit on the UK economy will be worse than that caused by the pandemic, according to the chairman of the UK fiscal watchdog (The Guardian).
The cost of living could rise at its fastest rate for 30 years, the UK’s spending watchdog has warned (BBC News).
An editorial in The Telegraph says “this could easily have been a Labour Budget”.
Teetotal Chancellor Rishi Sunak was toasted by investors after he unveiled tax cuts for pubs, restaurants and airlines in the Budget (The Mail).
The chancellor has announced a sweeping overhaul of UK alcohol taxes that will reduce duty on many lower-strength drinks and cut charges on draught beer drunk in pubs, which have suffered from pandemic restrictions on socialising (The Financial Times £).
Taxes on sparkling wine, draught beer and cider are to be cut, but will rise for stronger drinks such as red wine following a shake-up of alcohol duty (BBC News).
A photocall in which Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak brandished beer barrels to promote a cut in the duty charged on draught beer has fallen flat, after it was pointed out that the kegs would not qualify for the tax relief under current proposals (The Guardian).
The price of a pint of beer would have to rise by as much as 30p to help pay for higher wages and energy costs, one pub company warned ahead of the Budget (BBC News).
Retailers, pubs and restaurants will have their business rates bills cut by £1.7bn as the Treasury readies a new online sales tax to level up the playing field between the high street and online giants (The Telegraph).
The government has cancelled a planned increase in business rates next year but ruled out any radical reform of the property tax, prompting criticism from some industry groups (The Financial Times £).
Retailers and property owners have bemoaned the lack of wider reform on business rates and said the chancellor’s selective measures to cut the levy by £7bn failed to live up to the government’s promise of a fundamental review (The Times £).
Staff at stores selling tools, groceries and toys give their verdict on the Budget (The Guardian).
Advertisers are expected to spend almost £1bn more marketing their products this festive season than last year, marking the return of the annual big-budget Christmas marketing battle (The Guardian).
Heineken sold less beer in the third quarter as the return of lockdowns in Asia cut into drinking and socialising, hurting sales at the world’s second-largest brewer (The Financial Times £).
France will ban British seafood imports from next week in retaliation for what Paris says is the UK’s failure to deliver a full quota of licences for French trawlermen (The Times £).
France’s EU affairs minister, Clément Beaune, has said Paris will “now use the language of force” in an escalation of a row over post-Brexit fishing rights, as French maritime police seized a British trawler found in its territorial waters without a licence (The Guardian).
Freight traffic from Great Britain to Dublin Port has dropped by a fifth since Brexit while business with the EU has leapt by more than a third, a report shows (The Guardian).
John Lewis has axed its controversial home insurance TV advertisement that shows a boy trashing a house after it was slapped on the wrists by the financial watchdog (The Telegraph).
It was attacked as everything from a crass cultural lecture to a treatise on sexism (The Guardian). John Lewis’s latest home insurance ad, in which a young boy rampages around his home to a Stevie Nicks song while wearing a dress, became the latest front in a seemingly never-ending culture war this month.
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