The Budget could have been a lot worse, but it could have been a lot better, too

Where to start on the Budget? I don’t worry about who said what when and to whom. You have to go back a long way to find a chancellor who was forced to resign as a result. In 1947, the then Labour chancellor Hugh Dalton resigned after bumping into his old friend John Carvel, a journalist, on the way to the chamber and telling him what was in the Budget he was due to deliver an hour or so later.

‘No more on tobacco; a penny on beer; something on dogs and pools, but not on horses; increase in purchase tax, but only on articles now taxable; profits tax doubled.’ That was enough. Carvel published the detail in The Star, and Dalton was gone the same day.

In my time, the Budget was still pretty tightly guarded and there are suggestions that during the Blair years, Gordon Brown didn’t even tell Tony what was in the Budget until they were listening to it in the Commons.

What really matters is what Rachel actually said and what the implications are for the property world in particular. Frankly, it could have been a lot worse. We all know the so-called ‘Mansion Tax’ will hit central London hard where a modest three-bed home can be over £2m, but the rates mean the extra cost is about double the current council tax and there can be few complaints from those with properties worth over £5m who will pay an extra £7,500.

The whole issue of how to tax homes fairly based on their value is bedevilled by the fact that no government has wanted to face up to a revaluation since prices were last set in April 1991. It’s ludicrous that a resident in Central London could be paying the top band of tax on a home worth not much over £800,000 and someone living in one worth north of £20m is paying the same.

One of the areas this government is likely to find less than helpful is increasing tax on landlords. The government don’t seem to understand that making renting less attractive, as the new Renters Rights Act does, and the extra 2% tax from 2027 does, makes it more likely the landlord will simply shut up shop and sell. Generations of us saw buying a property to rent as a decent way of providing someone a home and earning a reasonable if not wildly excessive return. Those days are simply gone, and with them the ability of many young people to find a home of their own until they can afford to buy.

Amateur landlords will very soon be a relic of times past and a generation of young people will be the losers. In truth, this was a Budget that made some people not in work up to £5,000 a year better off, paid for by working taxpayers and those in employment. Raising the minimum wage yet again is more likely to lead to layoffs than riches. Unemployment has risen in every month since this government was elected and looks certain to go on doing so.

Abolishing the two-child benefit cap, which is actually very popular with voters of all parties by a big margin, is all about paying those on benefits at the expense of working people. And why? Because this chancellor and prime minister are duty bound to keep their left-wing back benchers happy – the same MPs who stopped a mere £5bn being shaved off the benefits budget, which in 2024 to 2025 cost a staggering £313bn.

I was critical of Michael Gove, Rishi Sunak’s last housing secretary, for clinging on to NIMBYism and ignoring housing need. I blamed him for the extra staircase nonsense and the Building Safety Act. But my goodness, with this government, it really is difficult to know where to start. God help us, because I doubt this government ever will.