UK Finance News

The Federation Of Small Businesses (FSB) is urging the government to scrap the proposed increase in fuel duty by sharing its higher than predicted North Sea Oil proceeds with hard pressed consumers, motorists and small business owners.
The FSB is also calling for an automatic adjuster mechanism, whereby extra tax revenues from higher than predicted oil [...]

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Revenue and Customs are losing £2.8bn a year in tax, through people not filling in their tax returns correctly and it is not economic to get the money back.
The admission comes in a report by the Commons public accounts committee into the failure of Revenue & Customs to meet best business practise.
The report is scathing [...]

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Bank of England Governor Mervyn King has warned that “the nice decade is behind us” as inflation could hit 4% this year as the economic growth slows severely.
The gloomy governer  spoke this morning of house prices falling and house prices to earnings ratio’s etc, but spoke as a man with little confidence, giving the impression [...]

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Since allowing carry over of deceased spouses’ IHT allowances from last October, the HMRC has also had to review how this is assessed.
The IHT allowance - currently £312,000 - can effectively be passed over to a spouse
where it is unused or partly unused.
Qualification for the extra entitlement, up to £624,000 maximum, is reliant on survivors [...]

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Pensions specialist, Scottish Life, has issued a stark, if very logical warning over the mechanics of auto-enrolment to the pensions Personal Account scheme from 2012.
A quick survey of 277 IFAs estimates that up to 10,000,000 employees will not get anything other than generic advice before enrolling, with millions more potentially adrift looking for advice.
The survey [...]

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