MP

I have moved from being shocked and disappointed at the Treasury to being angry. I spent some time with an elderly client today who is confused and distressed over what to do, and a huge portion of responsibility for her upset rests with unprofessionalism from the Treasury. Starting from a manifesto that promised not to raise national insurance they then tried to argue that didn’t include employers’ national insurance. Then non-doms, private school fees and the craziness of the IHT changes and pension charges, none of which will actually raise any money if you adjust for the economic impact and uncertainty. All alongside the winter fuel debacle and failure to actually cut welfare costs. And then, within six months of the Budget, came the Treasury Insiders and Well-Placed Sources leaking crazy plans and half-baked ideas to test the political water. Wealth tax, extending PETs, gifts of own income, reductions in pension allowances, caps on pensions, NICs on rental income and dividends, shifting income tax up but extending NICs, capitals gains alignment with income rates, tax hikes for lawyers, accountants and GPs, oil and gas and banking levies, additional costs on landlords and employers, VAT increases, mansion taxes, every awful idea that has ever had economists sitting bolt upright in bed at 3am in a cold sweat, this Treasury has embraced them all, leaked them to the papers and sat back to watch the slow motion catastrophe as their strategy paralyses the markets and dries up investment. In my 30-odd years in practice I have never experienced such a devastatingly incompetent budget process that over the course of 12 months has, in my view, inflicted such horrific damage to business and consumer confidence. Tax should be boring, not front page news every week. It currently feels like an angry school council has been given the economic reigns to the country and it has no idea what it wants to do beyond “Rich people bad”. This morning, I tried to calm down an upset elderly woman and reassure her that as best we could we will help her through this. I place the blame for this awful situation wholly at the door of the Ministers currently in charge of the Treasury. They should be ashamed of themselves.