LIVE: George Osbourne delivers Budget 2013

Updated 8:56am Thursday 21st March 2013 in East Lancashire

This live event has finished

Latest

  • Income tax threshold to be raised to £10,000 by next year
  • Beer duty cut by 1p a pint
  • Planned fuel duty rise scrapped
  • The first £2,000 to be taken off all employers' National Insurance bill
  • Chancellor George Osborne promises £3bn for infrastructure
  • Economic growth is forecast to be 0.6% this year
  • Service personnel to be exempt from public sector 1% pay rise cap
  • Public sector net debt will fall by 2017/18, the Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts
  • The Chancellor has slashed the official growth forecast in half as he admitted the recovery was taking "longer than anyone hoped".
  • George Osborne said the economy would grow by just 0.6% this year - down from the previous forecast of 1.2% - and would be slower than forecast next year at 1.8% compared to the 2% forecast at the time of the Autumn Statement.
  • He described the package as a "Budget for people who aspire to work hard and get on". But he added: "Today, I'm going to level with people about the difficult economic circumstances we still face and the hard decisions required to deal with them."

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Osborne says it is sometimes claimed that borrowing has gone up under the coalition.

The opposite is true, he says.

• Deficit has fallen from 11.2% of GDP in 2009-10, to a forecast of 7.4% this year. Osborne says that is a fall of a third.

• Borrowing forecast to be £108bn next year, then £97bn in 2014-15, then £87bn the following year.

• Government on track to meet its borrowing target a year early, he says.

But he says he is not on course to hit his debt target.

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Comments(10)

district01 says...
3:21pm Wed 20 Mar 13

Isn’t politics interesting?

But standing back from the turmoil all is quite simple. What would you get from the opposition is the only question you need to be asking?

Looking at the only opposition that we now have reminds me of visits to Blackpool many years ago and the Punch & Judy entertainments on the sands. Puppets displaying their angry judgments very loudly were the routine. But today during the Budget show they were making a complete ‘Balls’ of everything. Seeming still to have Tony Blair‘s New Labour hand firmly up there backsides. Who in there right minds would vote for a shower like that?

If only we had a ‘Labour Party’ back again!

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liddle 'un says...
6:43pm Wed 20 Mar 13

district01 wrote:
Isn’t politics interesting?

But standing back from the turmoil all is quite simple. What would you get from the opposition is the only question you need to be asking?

Looking at the only opposition that we now have reminds me of visits to Blackpool many years ago and the Punch & Judy entertainments on the sands. Puppets displaying their angry judgments very loudly were the routine. But today during the Budget show they were making a complete ‘Balls’ of everything. Seeming still to have Tony Blair‘s New Labour hand firmly up there backsides. Who in there right minds would vote for a shower like that?

If only we had a ‘Labour Party’ back again!
Heard Miliband on the radio today, post budget, and it is clear that the sneering buffoon really hasn't got a clue

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Good call says...
6:53pm Wed 20 Mar 13

Both labour and the conservatives have senior members who have Bilderberg Group, an annual meeting of the political, finance and corporate elite, they are just puppets of said group.

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sean_brfc says...
8:09pm Wed 20 Mar 13

I have no comment on the budget, other than nothing much changed from the last one. However, please can someone tell the Telegraph to check for mistakes, especially in titles.

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Trawdenite says...
8:26pm Wed 20 Mar 13

All those millionaires on the Conservative front bench getting a nice tax cut, still, we are all in this together, aren't we?

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Trawdenite says...
8:27pm Wed 20 Mar 13

All those millionaires on the Conservative front bench getting a nice tax cut, still, we are all in this together, aren't we?

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Stone Island: says...
11:43pm Wed 20 Mar 13

Some people are so poor, all they have is money.

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Excluded again says...
6:16am Thu 21 Mar 13

The policy is not working. The economy is not growing. Taxes are increasing. People are worse off. The country's debt is not coming down. What to do? Continue with the same policy which is not working.

Einstein defined madness as keeping on doing the same thing and expecting a different result. By this definition, the government is mad.

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Kevin, Colne says...
7:24am Thu 21 Mar 13

The budget does not alter one jot the reality that we’re navigating a crisis that represents a new era of massive increases in the prices of essentials, stagnating wages and falling living standards.

We know that overall the budget was fiscally neutral but my best guess is that most beneficiaries with additional money in their pocket will experience a welcome rest-bite from financial pressure that will prove to be short-lived as prices of food and fuel continue to increase unabated.

The big question is whether Chancellor Osborne’s succeeds in his attempt to re-ignite the house-price boom. Well, we’ll just have to wait and see on this one.

My concern for the immediate future is that if this prolonged period of cold weather continues much longer then there must be a very high likelihood that domestic farming will be severely damaged, if it has not been damaged already. The mainstream media are giving this precious little attention but this is par for the course – the national press is usually behind the curve.

If, as I fear, domestically produced food runs into trouble then we will have to increase food imports and the effect on prices in the shops could be very marked indeed. This would throw a real spanner into the prognosticatians of the mainstream economic commentariat.

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Ex-Darrener says...
8:59am Thu 21 Mar 13

Another LT website headline with a name spelt wrong. It's Osborne.

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