Speculate to (not) accumulate

We have been waiting all this fortenight:
Now help us, lord, since it lies in thy might

I’m rather inclined to think that pushing the Autumn Budget back from the end of October, as it was last year, to the end of November, was, on balance A Not Good Thing.

I get why the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, wanted more time to try and go through the books with her red pen and calculator, trying to work out the depth of the fiscal hole, and the amount of monetary ballast required to fill it. I am only too familiar with the need, when faced with a deadline, to push something back in order to work further on it, to tweak it. Even, dare I say, actually come up with something to write.

So, if publishing the Budget on November 26^th means that Reeves will have discovered that, in the interim the economy has improved so that the nasty medicine might not need to be quite as unpalatable as we feared, then that would be A Good Thing, surely?

What do we think, boys and girls, are the chances of that? Yeah, me too. Yes,  there was some talk in the financial press that the threatened manifesto-breaking tax rises might, after all be surplus to requirements. However, no matter how much spare change Reeves or the Office for Budgetary Responsibility has found down the back of the Downing Street sofa, the fact remains that the economy isn’t growing at the rate we need it to, and that something has to be done.

The trouble with the tardiness of the Budgetary tidings, is that it just gives everyone more time to mither about what may or may not happen. It really doesn’t help that the media, and, yes, I am aware of the irony, has spent the extra time speculating. Which means everyone else speculates, and wonders, and worries, and puts off spending on things that they really ought to be spending on – “until we know what’s happening with the Budget”.

Plus, the fact that it is the last week in November means it might take a couple of weeks to process whatever changes are announced and then we are mid-December, and the C word (or whatever other mid-Winter festival you choose to celebrate) brings its usual slow-down for the best part of a month.

There has been speculation about the possible limitations to be imposed on salary sacrifice schemes, which, if true, could impact badly on householder and consumer confidence. Those of us with retirement in our sights have long been told that one of the best ways to fund it is to pump as much as you can into your pension pot before tax and NI gets taken off. Adding NI to anything above a certain level will still make it tax-efficient I suppose, but not as much as before. And the rumours are that it will start at a low enough level to catch a great many people, not just the big buck earners.

In the interest of not talking down the market though, it was good to hear that the Boiler Upgrade Scheme has been expanded to include air-to-air heat pumps, and heat batteries. We need to move our housing stock away from our complete reliance on fossil fuels. Extending the number of alternative heating technologies that households can get Government support for installing, is a no-brainer. Legislating  and making heat pumps mandatory will only go so far, it’s important to also make the upfront costs of low carbon technologies more affordable, and offering a suitable variety of choices is vital in encouraging uptake.  One of the important things about air-to-air heat pumps is that, because they use the same technology as air-conditioing, householders have a vague familriarity with the principle.

We’ll see what happens next week. What’s the worst that could happen….?