We’re now only two weeks away from this cabinet’s first budget, the biggest milestone in their term so far. Rachel Reeves and her team have been surround by much speculation, so we’re going to summarise what we know so far.
- Black hole
Fixing the £22bn blackhole in the country’s purse. How will she fix this without breaking manifesto pledges?
- Closing the tax gap
It has been suggested this will be achieved in practice by ‘more boots on the ground’ at HMRC. We’ll look at specific taxes later.
- Business Rates
Reforming business rates was a key manifesto pledge, specifically tackling the disparity between physical and service-based businesses.
Specific taxes
Capital Gains
This has been much banded around over the past week as the headline change to property-based taxes, along with its bedfellow, Inheritance Tax. CGT looks a dead-cert to be reformed, possibly by increasing it by a few % points. Will be interesting to see what affect this has on the Private Rental Sector.
Inheritance Tax
Two possible changes that have been guessed at are changes in non-dom rules, including UK residences, rather than just on a domicile basis, also looking at the inclusion of pensions in the estate.
Our prediction across all tax reforms is they will be based on closing reliefs, rather than increasing baseline rates. Another interesting aspect will be what happens with National Insurance.
Stay tuned for our post-budget run through!