vivweb01blog

  Our brand  new chancellor has now delivered his much-heralded 'mini-budget'....how do his tax changes really look,  now that the market has responded and the dust has started to settle ? Although advancing the planned 1% reduction in the basic rate to 19% to April 2023 is of course welcome, it only represents an annual increase in take home pay of a maximum of £375 for someone earning £50,000, and proportionally less for those lower down the earnings scale. It comes against a backdrop of spiralling inflation, which is likely to undo all its potential gains before it even kicks in.  The reversal of Sunak's ill-judged  NI increase will help some of the working population, but will mainly benefit the better-off earners. Anyone  earning below £12.5k will get nothing out of either change; pensioners of course won't get any benefit from the NI change - they have already paid for their state pension and healthcare during their working lifetimes, and quite rightly aren't

  In the past few weeks the UK supermarket  ‘majors’ have finally started to take stock of consumer responses to the cost of living crisis. ASDA were one of the first to act on their budget ranges earlier this summer, largely in response to their ‘shaming’ by campaigner Jack Munro, whose efforts earlier this year  effectively exposed their policy of only offering their full ‘Smartprice’ range in their biggest superstores. ASDA, I suspect fearing a social media ‘storm’ in response to Jack's revelations, quickly extended most of their ranges to their medium-sized stores at the time, and (so far) seem to have maintained reasonable stock levels on most of these items. Other majors are now following their lead with scale-ups of their own budget ranges, increasing both availability and restocking levels to cater for projected demand for lower priced items. The latest twist in this tale is that ASDA have now started limiting their budget ranges to 3 items per person.  This, they say,  i