The Scottish agriculture sector requires future funding certainty due to the long term nature of investment decisions and long lead-in time for farmers, crofters and land managers, says Rural Affairs Secretary Mairi Gougeon. Ms Gougeon has written to the new Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Steve Barclay to congratulate him and ask for an early meeting to discuss priorities for Scotland.
Payments of up to £600 are landing directly in the bank accounts of around 11.5 million UK pensioners for the second year running. Comes as part of extensive Government package helping people of all ages, including recent £300 Cost of Living payments to more than seven million eligible households.
Environment Secretary addresses Kyiv conference and announces further support for Ukraine food security initiatives. Environment Secretary Steve Barclay set out a package of support for Ukraine while addressing the international community at the Kyiv International Summit: Grain from Ukraine today - showing the UK's solidarity with Ukraine in the face of Russia’s unprovoked assault.
Dingwall and Highland Marts Ltd,. (November 24th) sold 15 sheep dogs at their first Highland Sheep Dog Sale.
Ronach House was officially opened by Emma Roddick MSP, Minister for Equalities, Migration and Refugees, on Friday 17 November. The base will provide corporate office space for our Procurement, Transport and Business support teams, an accessible base for our fleet vehicles and a warehouse facility for all NHS Highland supplies.
The Chancellor unveiled a much bigger-than-expected tax-cutting package in his Autumn Statement 2023, along with promises of more to come. Having been handed a forecast from the Office for Budget Responsibility that showed a cumulative improvement in borrowing of nearly £90 billion.
The team at Fraser of Allender Institute look at how the Autumn Statement affects Scotland's consequentials. Just after the release of the OBR's documents, we tweeted out our calculations of the effect of the Autumn Statement on Scotland's finances in 2023-24 (£233m) and 2024-25 (£281m), adding up to £514m for the two years.
It became clear on Wednesday that the proposals in the UK Government's Back to Work Plan contain a confusing mixture of devolved and reserved responsibilities, which leave us slightly mystified as to exactly how this is all going to work in practice. In his speech, the Chancellor said: "...
In 2019 we introduced a permanent easement on reporting PAYE information in real time. We are aware some employers pay their employees earlier than usual over the Christmas period.
For those of you with stamina to look at the Autumn Statement from the Institute for Fiscal Studies in more depth this video is about 33 minutes long. This week, the Chancellor delivered his Autumn Statement.
We hop in the car to get groceries or drop kids at school. But while the car is convenient, these short trips add up in terms of emissions, pollution and petrol cost.
The Chancellor yesterday delivered an Autumn Statement with a few big ticket pre-election giveaways, and welcome policy measures to address problems such as our tax system's bias against working-age earnings, our benefit system’s failure to keep pace with fast-rising rents, and firms’ weak incentives to invest. But the Autumn Statement failed to end a wider economic stagnation that, for the first time, will see households poorer at the end of the parliament than they were at the start, according to the Resolution Foundation’s overnight analysis of the Chancellor’s election-focused fiscal event.
Giveaways rely on post-election plans for implausible austerity and growth-sapping investment cuts. The Chancellor has spent almost all of the near £90 billion of fiscal good news handed to him by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), mainly on tax cuts well-targeted at investment and earnings.
The UK chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, as announced a raft of changes to the tax and benefit system as part of the government's autumn statement. They included: main employee rate of national insurance cut from 12% to 10% from January 6 2024, saving someone on the average salary £450 class 2 national insurance to be abolished, saving the average self-employed person £192 a year.
The two main tax measures - lower NICs and making full expensing permanent - are UK-wide, and apply automatically in Scotland. Some other measures announced are England-only, and therefore bring with them additional funding for the Scottish Government through the Barnett formula, totalling £233m in this financial year and £281m in the next.
Implementing a permanent extension to FE is expected to lower corporation tax receipts by £10.9bn by 2028-29, while only raising capital stock by 0.2%. This is forecast to increase potential output by 0.1% in 2028-29 and just under 0.2% in the long run.
Energy regulator Ofgem has today (Thursday 23 November, 2023) announced the energy price cap for the first quarter of 2024. The bottom line is energy cost will rise.
Record levels of investment will see an additional 153 trainee doctor posts created next year in what will be the largest annual expansion on record. This level of expansion represents a 2.3% increase above the current whole time equivalent workforce of 6570 trainees.
The government also announced today its plans to spend £3.2bn on five different measures to increase employment by around 50,000. The first of these measures is the change to the Work Capability Assessment.
The Chancellor has announced the permanent extension of their ‘full expensing' (FE) policy, temporarily introduced for three years in March 2023. This policy allows companies (not including unincorporated businesses such as self-employed, sole traders and partnerships) to immediately write off the full cost of investment in new plant and machinery, classified as a ‘main rate' asset, against taxable profit in the year that the investment cost incurred.
