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Category Archives: Government Policy
What Budget Should Osborne Deliver On Wednesday?
The Government’s coffers are pretty bare certainly, and this seems to be encouraging many people to assume there’s not much he can do in the Budget to kick-start economic activity and strengthen the recovery. With little money he can’t spend much. With little money, his scope for immediate tax cuts is limited. However, the Chancellor still has some good options.
The best things in life are free
This morning the IoD published it’s ‘freebie’ growth plan. We continue to support the Treasury’s plans to tackle the deficit, but the Government should also be looking at measures it can take to promote growth. We have come up with some practical steps which would boost the economy and cost next to nothing. Some of the main policy suggestions include:
Don’t go wobbly George
The student protests which have been taking place across the country in the last few weeks are only the beginning of what may well be a long, cold winter of discontent. George Osborne will need to show a lot of backbone if he is to stick to the course set out in the Spending Review. But no amount of opposition from the public sector unions, or pressure from within Parliament, should make him back down on the vital project of deficit reduction, as IoD Chief Economist, Graeme Leach, explains in a new report.
All governments say they are pro-enterprise, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating
It has become very fashionable recently for politicians to say they are standing up for small businesses. Ed Miliband claimed in his speech to his party conference that he would ‘make Labour the party of enterprise and also the party of small business.’ David Cameron said at the beginning of November that he wanted to help more people set up their own companies, and was appointing Lord Young as his ‘enterprise Tsar.’ At the IoD we are obviously pleased with the sentiment, but there is a huge gulf between political gestures and real action which benefits entrepreneurs and small business … Read More »
Spending Review – will it get the UK out of the red?
Last Wednesday George Osborne delivered the statement which was billed as the defining moment of this Coalition Government. It followed months of difficult discussion between Whitehall departments and the Treasury, some of it very public, but when the outcome of the Spending Review was announced it was clear that the Chancellor had stuck to his plan: public spending will be cut by £83bn over five years in order to tackle the huge budget deficit.
Better late than never – 35 CEOs back public spending cuts
On Monday the Daily Telegraph published a letter signed by 35 business leaders supporting the Government’s plans to eradicate the deficit by 2015. About time too, the IoD has been arguing this for months. The 35 argued that “Reducing the deficit more slowly would mean additional borrowing every year, higher national debt, and therefore higher spending on interest payments”
