Hot Topic – The Budget
Last updated on September 25th, 2019 at 4:47 am
So what did we think of the budget this year? It seemed like a good one for small businesses with the employment allowance and the reduction of corporation tax to name but two.
What about other areas relevant to our clients?
The personal allowance next year will increase to £10,000 although the basic rate threshold will reduce. ISA investments from this April are up to £11,520 – up to £5,760 in cash. JISAs are up to £3,720 and great news for me who you might remember was moaning about not being able to transfer my son’s CTF into a JISA – it seems quite a lot of us must have been as now there is to be a consultation on the very subject of options for transferring. Fingers crossed on that one.
Qualifying life assurance policies have had their contributions restricted to £3,600 – to stop all those huge contributions going into a fund that’s just taxed at the basic rate.
IHT – at last the £55,000 cap on transfers of assets to a non-domiciled spouse/civil partner is to be increased. The cap is to be increased to the ‘prevailing IHT nil rate band’ – and non-UK domiciled spouses will be given the option to be treated as UK domiciled for IHT purposes.
And finally from me, from next year 20 million taxpayers will get a personal tax statement – this will show how much someone has earned, how much income tax and NI they’ve paid and then it will tell us how our money has contributed to public spending. The example on the HMRC website shows someone earning around £25,000 will pay £5,702 in combined income tax and NI – this then gets spent examples of which are £1,900 on welfare (old age, sickness, families etc) £992 on health and £363 on national debt interest payments. Should make for quite interesting reading!