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Today, 18th March 2015, is the final budget before the General Election. At Umbrella.co.uk we will be reporting all the changes that will affect contractors, freelancers and umbrella companies.
Because this is the last budget pre-election many hope that it will be an opportunity for good news as the Tories will be keen to gain support.
HMRC has published the cost of administering IR35 and an estimate of the tax they think they’d lose if it was abolished. This despite the cost of administering IR35 greatly outweighing the cash collected from IR35 investigations.
The report estimates the cost of administering IR35 to be £16m and the tax that would be lost if it was abolished to be £550m.
Only one week to go until the Chancellor, the Rt Hon George Osborne MP, delivers his 2015 budget.
The budget will be delivered to Parliament at 12.30pm on Wednesday, 18th March. Live coverage is on BBC2.
The good news for the average tax payer is that because it is an election year (Thursday 7th May) then the Conservative Party should be keen to spread the feel good factor and cut taxes in order to maximise votes!
HMRC have a series of webinars coming up for the benefit of contractors and subcontractors that use or want to use the Construction Industry Scheme (CIS).
A webinar is an hour long presentation that also allows those watching to participate in a questions and answers session.
The umbrella sector is, in many ways, something of an unsung hero for the UK economy. With over 400,000 employees working ‘under the umbrella’, and a yearly contribution of over £11billion to the Treasury coffers, surely this enterprise is substantial – and positive enough – to earn the respect of the Government?
The Government have announced that the new national minimum wage (NMW) will be £6.70 from 1st October 2015 (an increase of 20 pence).
The increase of over 3% is aimed at protecting low paid workers from exploitation although critics of the NMW would argue that an increase can actually have adverse effects by putting some low paid jobs at risk. This is the biggest real term rise in the last 7 years.
Umbrella Companies featured in Treasury Questions this week with 2 questions from Labour MP’s.
The questions appear to show a misunderstanding about how compliant umbrella companies operate.
A group representing umbrella companies and employment intermediaries held a lobbying event on 11th March at the Houses of Parliament which has hopefully gone some way to clarifying these inaccuracies for those MP’s that attended.
Today, 10th March 2015, representatives of the Umbrella Company industry and of Employment Intermediaries will be meeting a number of MP’s at the House of Commons to discuss the HMRC review of Tax Relief on Expenses.
A glance around the UK’s media landscape reveals certain themes to the column inches and news clips we consume. In particular, the subject of pensions takes up a daily residency in our economic news diet.
News across the oil and gas landscape has been a little jittery (to say the least) in recent months. With prices continuing to drop, the industry body Oil & Gas UK reported that overall in 2014, the sector had managed to spend over £5billion more than it managed to earn. Other lowlights from the report showed that production fell slightly at a 1% rate, that only 8 new fields had been sanctioned and that production revenues peaked at £24.4billion – the lowest rate since 1998.
