Budget 2017 live - key points: Tories pivot to public spending in bid to keep out Corbyn
Follow all the latest updates as Chancellor presents his 2017 Budget
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Your support makes all the difference.Welcome to The Independent’s liveblog with coverage of the response to Philip Hammond’s Budget.
The Chancellor was forced to admit that growth and productivity forecasts had been downgraded, with the Official for Budget Responsibility (OBR) predicting lower growth than at any time in its history.
It comes after the UK’s finances unexpectedly worsened last month after the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said public sector net borrowing – stripping out state-owned banks – jumped by £500m to £8bn in October.
Despite this, Mr Hammond used the Budget to announce a splurge of new investment, including £3bn set aside for preparing for Brexit, an immediate £350m cash boost for the NHS, a £2.5bn investment fund and £500m support for the tech industry. This can partly be seen as a response to Labour's shock performance at the polls earlier this year, which has forced the Tories to do more to address rising anger at inequality, and try to quell support for Jeremy Corbyn.
Follow the 2017 Budget as it happened below
A series of small giveaways had earlier been trailed by the Treasury, including extending discount railcards to 25-30 year-olds from next Spring and tackling overpayments of student loans.
This was a Budget in which Mr Hammond could not afford any major slip-ups. Tory MPs were nervous of a repeat of the excruciating U-turn on a key announcement in the Budget in Spring, where the Chancellor was forced to pull the plug on his plan to raise taxes for the self-employees through increased national insurance contributions after considerable pressure from Conservative MPs.
If there is any repeat of this, Mr Hammond's position in Number 11 will be very precarious indeed.
Here's the - slightly surreal - moment when the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland handed Her Majesty's Chancellor of the Exchequer a packet of Strepsils...
As Business Editor Josie Cox reports, the pound fell against a slew of currencies after Philip Hammond said that the Office for Budget Responsibility had dramatically slashed its forecast for UK’s growth over the next years and productivity would be lower than previously expected.
Sterling was recently trading around 0.2 per cent lower against both the euro and the US dollar after the announcement. It also slipped against other major global currencies, including the Swiss franc and Japan’s yen.
Talking about the Grenfell Tower disaster, Hammond says funding will be made available to help councils complete fire safety works on residential buildings. Many councils, however, have previously said their requests for additional support have been rejected by the Government...
NEW: Announcements on housing. Councils will be given the power to levy 100% council tax rate on empty properties.
£28 million will be invested in pilots to help tackle homelessness.
Rough sleeping will be eliminated by 2022 and eliminated by 2027, Hammond says. Ambitious given recent trends...
NEW: Hammond saves the housing goodies until the end. He announces::
- That stamp duty will be abolished for first time buyers
- A £400m fund for estate regeneration
- The lifting of borrowing regulations for some local councils
- A total of £44 billion to be invested in the housing market to help deliver 300,000 homes per year by the mid-2020s.
The Chancellor says that, unless more homes are built, prices will simply go up and make matters worse. Many commentators say that has been precisely the impact of recent Conservative policies such as Help to Buy.
More on the announcement of an immediate £350m fund to help the NHS cope with the winter crisis - significantly less than health service bosses asked for. This from our Health Correspondent Alex Matthews-King:
The Stamp Duty cut will come into effect from today. It will remove stamp duty for 80 per cent of first-time buyers, Hammond says.
That's it - Hammond again promises "a Britain fit for the future" and sits down to loud cheers from the Tory benches. We'll recap all the new announcements for you shortly, but removing stamp duty for first-time buyers was the change most likely to dominate the headlines.
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