Will the Spring Budget bloom with good news?
The business news that matters
Hello and welcome to the latest edition of Off to Lunch…
It’s the final countdown until the Budget next Wednesday. This promises to be a particularly significant Budget given it could be the last big fiscal event in the UK before the general election.
Ahead of the big day, Business Leader has pulled together a list of all the policies that Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, is reportedly considering. You can find that list here.
There will be a special edition of Off to Lunch next Wednesday in which we will round-up all the Budget announcements, reaction and what actually matters to you. This will be in your inbox shortly after the chancellor has finished speaking at around 1.30pm.
There will be more news and leaks about what is coming in the Budget over the weekend. Apparently Hunt disagrees with Rishi Sunak, the prime minister, about one of the key announcements. At least that’s according to George Osborne, the former chancellor. Osborne says that Sunak wants to cut the lowest rate of income tax from 20 per cent but Hunt wants to cut national insurance instead. The chancellor wants to focus on national insurance because it is cheaper and less likely to stoke inflation.
Osborne made the comments on his Political Currency podcast with Ed Balls. You can find that below:
Sunak has also been answering questions today about whether the government could scrap the non-dom tax status…
For those interested in the media logistics behind the Budget, Labour is breaking with tradition this weekend and the shadow chancellor won’t be commenting in advance of the speech…
For some further reading on the Budget I recommend Chris Giles’s latest column in the Financial Times. He writes about why the lasting legacy of Liz Truss may be that radical economic policies are given a bad name. The UK economy does need radical reform, he adds, but Truss was incompetent in the way she went about it. You can read that piece in full here
The new Business Leader…
The new Business Leader website and magazine have now launched. We are building a new inspirational, aspirational and agenda-setting business publication for the UK. You can read our analysis, interviews and expert columnists on our website by clicking the image below. Our new magazine is now in shops and you can subscribe to your own print or digital version by clicking here.
Other stories that matter…
1. House prices in the UK are up year-on-year for the first time since January 2023, according to the latest report from Nationwide. House prices rose 0.7 per cent month-on-month in February, meaning they are now up 1.2 per cent year-on-year. This is a notable improvement on the figures for January, when house prices were down 0.2 per cent year-on-year. You can read Nationwide’s report here
2. Mohsin Issa has given a rare interview to the BBC. He discusses how he and his brothers Zuber built a multi-billion pound petrol station business, bought Asda and now want to hire a chief executive for the supermarket chain. Mohsin Issa also denies reports that he and his brother have fallen out. "We talk to each other probably two or three times a day,” he says. “We've been very, very privileged. We have been on a journey and we have got a long way still to go.” You can read the piece here
3. Elon Musk is suing OpenAI and its chief executive Sam Altman. The Tesla boss has filed a lawsuit claiming that OpenAI’s deal with Microsoft is a breach of its original aim to be an “open source, non-profit company”. You can read more from Reuters here
4. Molson Coors, the owner of Carling, Madri and Aspall, is to offer equal parental leave in the UK. All new parents will be offered up to 52 weeks of leave, including 26 fully-paid. The company employs 2,200 people in the UK and operates four breweries. You can read more on that here
5. Promising businesses outside London find it as difficult to get funding now as they did in the 1930s, according to a new report by the consultancy firm Oliver Wyman for the government’s Levelling Up Advisory Council. The graph below shows the areas where the funding gap is most pronounced for equity and debt…
You can find the report here and a story by The Times on the report here
Podcast…
The latest episode of our Business Leader podcast is the second part of our look at how B&M became one of the biggest retailers in the US. In this episode we follow B&M’s transition from a promising medium-sized business to a FTSE 100 giant. This is a transition that many businesses fail to make. For B&M, it was about keeping your focus despite constant distractions. But it was also about learning and evolving - in terms of strategy and people. We also speak to Simon Arora about why he stood down as B&M’s chief executive and what may come next for him and the business.
You can listen to the episode on Substack here, Spotify here and Apple here
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