The CJRS furlough scheme is now running through to April 2021. On 17 December 2020 the Chancellor announced a further one-month extension of financial support under the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS) to the end of April 2021. As currently, the government will pay 80% of the salary of employees for hours not worked up [...]
An extra £4.6 billion in lockdown grants has been directed at the worst affected sectors. New one-off grants for closed retail, hospitality and leisure businesses have been announced. The new grants are in addition to all other forms of support, such as the Lockdown Restrictions Support Grant (LRSG (Closed) Addendum) which applied to businesses that [...]
The Chancellor’s November ‘Financial Statement’ revealed more spending and more government borrowing, but no mention of tax rises. The UK budgetary cycle is in something of a mess at present. In 2019, unusually the was no Budget thanks to December’s general election. For the same reason, the three-year Spending Review which should have been accompanied [...]
The latest phasing of State Pension Age (SPA) increase is now finished. On 6 October 2020, the SPA reached 66. Unless current legislation is changed, it will remain there until 6 April 2026, at which point the next increase, to age 67, starts to be phased in over the following two years. Thereafter the move [...]
Deposit rates are continuing to fall. On 24 November, the interest rate cuts that National Savings & Investments (NS&I) announced back in September took effect. The headline change was a drop in Income Bond rates from 1.15% to just 0.01%. Reports suggest that NS&I has seen predictably heavy outflows, although savers have struggled to find [...]
A recent report could herald changes to capital gains tax. Last July the Chancellor asked the Office of Tax Simplification (OTS) to undertake a review of capital gains tax (CGT) “in relation to individuals and smaller companies”. The request was something of a surprise for two reasons. Firstly, there had been no suggestion that Mr [...]
November was an exciting month for the world’s stock markets. November was an exhilarating month on the world’s stock markets, as the graph above illustrates. It cannot be said that many experts – bar room or otherwise – expected it look like this. Cast your mind back to Halloween and, apart from trick or treat, [...]
New HMRC data show the popularity of this traditional perk could be waning. There was a time when the company car was the fringe benefit that every employee wanted. You had ‘made it’ once you had the keys to a car with no worries about servicing, insuring or, sometimes, even fuel costs. It could also [...]
The Chinese stock market broke the $10 trillion barrier in October. The total value of China’s stock markets in Shanghai and Shenzhen surpassed $10 trillion in October. For comparison, the UK market was worth about $4 trillion at the end of September 2020. However, this was not the first time that Chinese markets had reached [...]
New research shows the majority of the self-employed are not saving for retirement. Here’s a quick quiz: Are you self-employed? If so, have you contributed to a private pension in the last year? The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) examined the answers to these two questions and found the probability of answering yes to both [...]
