In this Institute of Economic Affairs podcast, Maeve Halligan is joined by Lord Hannan, Director General, and Dr Valentin Boboc, Chief Economist at the IEA.
This week, the discussion opens with a closer look at Chancellor John Healey’s Budget: 98 small measures, each with little impact, paid for with more borrowing. Is the new £100 winter heating payment for households in council tax Bands A to D a sensible support, or a costly and untargeted handout? Why is the Government using more intervention to fix high energy costs it helped create? Drawing on Perón’s Argentina and Ceaușescu’s Romania, we ask whether Britain is becoming an electorate that rewards visible handouts even as they leave it poorer. Can it still change course, as the IEA’s Alternative Budget proposed, or will the markets force a correction?
The discussion then turns to the Budget’s new surcharge on rental income, and to tribunals that now decide the “market rent”. In one case, a landlord who tried to raise the rent by £50 a month was ordered to cut it to £200 below the original level. Alongside new powers to take over empty properties, does this mark a retreat from Britain’s long commitment to property rights and free contract? We also look at how minimum wage rises have pushed youth unemployment to its highest level since 2011.
The discussion closes with Dr Boboc’s prediction that this will be the largest tax-raising Budget in history, with frozen income tax thresholds alone bringing in over £30 billion this year.
The Institute of Economic Affairs is a registered educational charity. It does not endorse or give support for any political party in the UK or elsewhere. Our mission is to improve understanding of the fundamental institutions of a free society by analysing and expounding the role of markets in solving economic and social problems.
The views represented here are those of the speakers alone, not those of the Institute, its Managing Trustees, Academic Advisory Council members or senior staff.
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