Budget items in the small print that the Chancellor didn’t mention in the House

Well that’s the budget over and done with.  You heard it all in the budget speech in the House of Commons.  Didn’t you?  Well no you didn’t.  There are a number of items that never came to light in the budget speech, but are published in the small print that maybe, just maybe, the Government doesn’t want people’s attention to be drawn to.

As always, the devil is in the detail and here’s some of what was in that small print

And guess what? Some of it will leave you and your family worse off.

Here’s a few things you might not have spotted.

The welfare, housing and justice departments are all being slashed

Philip Hammond made a big play of pumping more money into defence and the NHS, but there is no new money for key departments such as The Department for Work and Pensions whose budget is being cut from £6bn to £5.4bn in 2019/20 (not including benefit payments), The Ministry of Justice whose budget is being cut from £6.3bn to £6bn and the Housing and Communities section of Whitehall whose budget is being cut from £2.6bn to £2.3bn.

That’s despite a welfare crisis, a prisons crisis and a housing crisis.

That plastic tax will take FOUR YEARS to come in

Philip Hammond is not going to become a “world leader in tackling the scourge of plastic” any time soon.

Chancellor Philip Hammond claimed he’d become “a world leader in tackling the scourge of plastic littering our planet.”  Not only did he resist any call to tax plastic cups, his big signature move – a tax on packaging that doesn’t have at least 30% recycled plastic – will only come in April 2022.

The tax on Amazon, Google and Facebook will cost tech giants a ‘pittance’.

According to the OBR forecast, Google and other online giants could pay a mere £30m each under teh Chancellors’s new tax.   But the new tax won’t come into force until 2020!

The maximum stake on fixed-odds betting terminals (FOBTs) will be reduced to £2 under new rules unveiled by the government.

But the move to slash maximum stakes on gambling from £100 had been expected to come into force next April.  But the Budget small print revealed the move will not take place until October.

Even The Queen got a Rise

The Sovereign Grant – the money paid by the government to support the Queen in her royal duties is going up. Again.

Last year the figure was 76.1m – this year it’ll go up to £82.4 million.

The Government have finally admitted they’re delaying Universal Credit

Ministers have finally admitted they’re delaying Universal Credit, the small print reveals.

The rollout of the six-in-one benefit will officially end in December 2023 – the ninth delay after its last end date of March 2023.

But it may only finish in June 2024, because the Office for Budget Responsibility “assumes” it will take six months longer than the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) says.

And one cut that isn’t even in the small print

This one is not in the Budget itself, but the report from the Office for Budget Responsibility.

It says capital spending – long-term one-off hits on building projects and the like – has been cut, and the Treasury hasn’t spelt it out.

The OBR says: “Departmental capital spending has also been cut from 2019-20 onwards, a decision that does not appear on the Treasury’s scorecard of policy measures.”