Budget 2014: What the papers say

FOLLOWING WHAT WAS UNDOUBTEDLY the most political Budget in years, the area that has drawn the most attention from the national press has been pensions.

Aside from the “savings revolution” around pensions and ISAs celebrated in the Telegraph, Times and City AM, the chancellor’s big ticket moves on tax have by and large been greeted with positivity.

After a term spent branding itself as a pro-business government, BDO tax partner Richard Rose wrote this delivery was more “aimed at blue rinsers, not business” in an opinion piece for City AM.

Turning his attentions to the “plethora of anti-avoidance measures”, Rose noted it is “unlikely to help tax simplification”.

The Guardian, though, applauded the anti-avoidance measures put in place by the chancellor, but queried the £4bn yield figure placed on the ‘pay up front’ scheme imposed on those involved in avoidance schemes.

The Independent was rather nonplussed by Osborne’s host of tax moves, suggesting “in macroeconomic terms they are neither here nor there”.

Despite that, the Evening Standard‘s Margareta Pagano was rather more positive and applauded Osborne’s “smartest Budget to date”.

“Unless you had a serious vice, there was something for everyone,” she wrote, adding the £7bn package to help manufacturers cut their energy costs to accelerate the recovery and an “imaginative, long overdue” shake-up of the tax system regulating the savings market were “by far the most far-reaching of [his] reforms”.