A Small-Scope Budget Of Wi-Fi And Church Roofs

There are two main takeaways from this Budget.

The first is that there has been a significant change, since the Autumn Statement in December, in George Osborne's public spending plans should he remain Chancellor for another five years.

In the Autumn Statement, Mr Osborne was assuming the Government would be running a surplus of £23.1bn in 2019-20.

He has now forecast that the Government would have a surplus of just £7bn in that year.

Austerity is going to come to an end, in the next parliament, a year earlier than expected.

The reason, one must assume, is that the frequent claims by the Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls that Mr Osborne intended to "return Britain back to the 1930s" have hit home.

Certainly the Government now plans to shrink the state to no smaller than it was in 2000 - when Tony Blair was in 10 Downing Street and Gordon Brown was Chancellor.

The other big takeaway is just how small this Budget has been in its scope.

The largest single Budget measure is the changes Mr Osborne has announced to the taxation of savings and the new flexibility introduced to ISAs.

These will total just over £1bn during the 2016-17 financial year.

Overall, though, this Budget is fiscally neutral. The new tax year will see a net tax increase of just £745m, which is tiny in the overall scope of a £1.9trn economy.

Many of the measures were small scale.

It is hard to imagine some of Mr Osborne's illustrious predecessors, such as Stafford Cripps, Rab Butler, Roy Jenkins, Geoffrey Howe or Nigel Lawson, padding out a Budget speech with pettifogging measures about Wi-Fi in public libraries, Agincourt anniversary celebrations - has a joke in a Budget speech ever cost £1m before? - and church roof funds.

Commanding heights of the economy, it ain't.

The measures aimed at helping business, in so far as they go, will be welcomed.

The most significant of these is the cut in taxation for North Sea oil producers and the increased investment allowances they will receive.

But they will only help those North Sea producers who actually pay tax and are unlikely to address the wider structural issues faced by such producers.

And, of course, they will not bring back the jobs of the many hundreds of North Sea oil workers who have already lost their jobs.

Of the other measures aimed at supporting business, the previously-announced cut in corporation tax to 20p will be welcomed, as will the abolition of Class 2 National Insurance contributions for the self-employed - many of whom are small business owners.

There was also a lob for farmers, many of whom may have been flirting with voting for UKIP, while boosts for transport infrastructure will also have pleased business.

However, the Chancellor is also bashing some parts of business, with the banks hit with an increase in the annual levy.

This is partly a reflection of the fact that the banking levy is raising less money for the Government because the banks are - at the behest of Government regulators - having to shrink their balance sheets.

And some moves are downright unwelcome.

Mr Osborne presented the decision to cut the lifetime allowance for pensions savings from £1.25m to £1m as a move that only hits rich savers - but that sum, when turned into an annuity, buys a pensioner and their spouse an annual income of barely £22,000 apiece.

People taking home that sum every year can scarcely be described as "rich". It was a measure all about hobbling Labour - which wants to raid pensions tax relief for better-off savers to fund a cut in tuition fees - rather than anything more considered.

Such savers, along with the pensioners whom the Chancellor has spared having to buy an annuity, are now likely instead to pour a larger part of their retirement savings into areas such as buy-to-let property.

This places them in direct competition with the first-time-buyers Mr Osborne purports to want to help with his new Help to Buy ISA.

In essence, then, this was a Budget with no huge pre-election giveaways - there is just not the scope for that - but plenty of small ones, relatively thinly spread.