Rt Hon Alistair Darling MP
WEST EDINBURGH TIMES (Budget 2007, Financial Asst. Scheme, Partnership for jobs with major retailers)
Gordon Brown has delivered his eleventh Budget which targets help at those who need it most: families with children and pensioners.
Child Benefit will be increased over the next three years to £20 a week. Child Benefit was £575 a year in 1997 and will be worth over £1,000 a year by 2010.
When the Government was first elected most families received only child benefit. Today many families also get Child Tax Credit and there will be an increase in the child element of the Child Tax Credit by £150 per year. This is over and above the commitment to increase it in line with earnings to the end of this Parliament. This raises the child element to £2080 a year. Already over 2000 families in South West Edinburgh benefit from tax credits.
The basic rate of income tax will be cut from 22 pence to 20 pence from April 2008 - the lowest basic rate of tax for 75 years.
As a result of the budget, households will be £100 a year better off; households with children in the poorest fifth of the population will be, on average, £300 per year better off.
Almost 600,000 pensioners will be taken out of tax altogether so that only 43 per cent of pensioners will pay any tax. By April 2011 no pensioner over 75 will pay any tax on income under £10,000.
The increase to the Financial Assistance Scheme will also help pensioners. The Scheme was set up by the Government in 2004 to assist those who lost significant sums in pension schemes that wound up under funded between January 1997 and April 2005 due to employer insolvency. The scheme has now been extended from helping 45,000 people to helping all 125,000 people affected due to the Chancellor’s announcement to increase its present budget of £2 billion to a total of £8 billion.
There are over 2.6 million more people in work now than in 1997. In the Budget, the Chancellor outlined plans to double the number of jobs created through his partnership for jobs with major retail companies. The deal with major employers like Tesco, Asda and Marks and Spencer will create 10,000 retail jobs in Scotland and 100,000 in total across Britain. He intends to extend similar partnerships for jobs to other key sectors of the economy such as construction.
We are now moving to a changed political world. At the Council in Edinburgh. At Holyrood and a new Prime Minister. More next month.
