Budget 2014: Our podcasters were right on the money!

The Sunday Post podcast rightly predicted plenty of the Budget’s contents.

If you were looking for an accurate guide to what was going to be in the Chancellor’s 2014 Budget you could’ve done a lot worse than listen to The Sunday Post’s pre-Budget podcast.

Our writers called all the big issues right.

Personal finance writer Gavin Sherriff predicted that reform of tax free Individual Savings Accounts would be high on the agenda and from the off George Osborne emphasised his determination to help savers.

Sure enough he changed the ISA to a nicer NISA allowing people to save more, up to £15,000, before the taxman took a slice.

Something else he started his speech with was repeating the Tory mantra “long term economic plan” just as we predicted.

Gavin also reckoned pensions were ripe for reform citing industry expert Ros Altmann’s demands that the system of annuities is altered.

The Chancellor announced what he claims is the biggest reform of the pensions industry since 1921 scrapping the necessity to buy an annuity at all and allowing pensioners much more flexibility on how and when they draw down their pension.

Altmann is delighted with the changes. Gavin’s delighted with another correct prediction.

And he had a few more hits we reckoned there would be action on housing and Gavin raised the prospect of a housing bubble.

Osborne only alluded to worries about an overheating housing market. The independent Office for Budget Responsibility did not. In their forecasts to accompany the Budget they warned housing costs could leap 30% within around five years. Expect future Budgets, and maybe podcasts, to deal with this growing potential problem.

As we predicted, the threshold at which workers start paying basic rate tax went up, to £10,500.

I said it would be hard to predict what the Chancellor would do about the 40% threshold and so it proved. He upped it just a little by a few hundred pounds.

I confidently claimed the booze duty escalator would get scrapped and it was. But the Chancellor didn’t cut duty on whisky as I thought he might, instead he pulled a surprise and took a penny off the cost of a pint instead.

He did tinker with energy bills as I thought he might. The average family should see a cut to their bill of just £15.

Still, that’s better than an increase of £15 and will go some way to tempering the huge hikes imposed by energy companies increasing their prices.

He didn’t go as far as I thought he might on petrol duty. Instead of cutting it he scrapped a planned increase in the rate due to come into force in September.

But I said in the podcast, it was a cast iron guarantee that he’ll cut fuel duty before the general election next year and, for now, I’m standing by that!

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Budget 2014: Our podcasters were right on the money!