I hope you are enjoying your penny off a pint of beer, as proclaimed in the Budget, possibly the most pathetic 'giveaway' announced in any Budget I can recall.

(Incidentally the price of most other alcoholic drinks is going up, including a 2p rise on a 500ml bottle of beer).

I really don’t know what possessed Ms Reeves to make such a puny change to the price of beer and dress it up as some sort of giveaway, but I digress.

We need to look at the Budget as a whole and she had a least flagged up the tax rises coming across many areas. These will hurt, particularly business which will end up paying £25bn more in tax due to the Employer NI changes. Ms Reeves admitted that some employers may need to scale back pay rises to pay for it.

Not such good news but it could well open the door to a lot more interest in salary sacrifice, both from an employer and employee point of view. Financial Planners and employee benefit consultants can only benefit.

Overall the tax take will be rising and I suspect it will not be long before some families are cursing, for example, the decision to add IHT to unused pensions, ending a rather useful loophole. To be fair, she had a point in saying that the IHT relief on pensions was never intended to be some sort of estate planning benefit. Even so.

There were some positive moves. A commitment to at least not extend the unwelcome freeze on income tax beyond 2028 after some had feared an extension to 2030. To be fair this was more of a case of a threat not being carried out than a giveaway.

The freeze on income tax thresholds, in fact, is the biggest personal threat to incomes and should be eased as soon as practical. It is, to a degree, linked to paying for the Covid measures which cost a fortune but the freeze should be ended as soon as it can be otherwise most of the population, and many millions of retired people, will end up being higher rate taxpayers.

Listening to the Budget, I thought Ms Reeves started well with her call to “invest, invest, invest”. Exactly right I thought but then she went on to mention mostly infrastructure projects and very little in the way of incentives for business to invest, which is what we need.

I checked her speech, by the way, and she mentioned “invest” or “investment” 58 times. Sounds great but when you drill down some of this was a misuse of the word “investment” as it included promises to “invest” in school breakfast clubs. Spending taxpayers’ money on breakfast clubs is a worthwhile exercise and I support it but it’s not an investment by any definition I know.

The speech was littered with over use of the word “invest” and its confusion with “spending.” I hope she will be more careful in her use of the word in future.

At least some of the rumoured threats to cut the pensions lump sum and the like did not materialise, which was some relief.

One threat that was promised and will be implemented in January is VAT on private school fees. This is a vindictive and silly measure which will hit many families on modest means who choose to send their children to private school. This will only raise £460m a year, which is peanuts against a backdrop of a need to raise £40bn from extra taxation.

Overall I’m disappointed with all this. The Budget gave the impression of settling a few scores (extra 50% tax on private jet usage anyone?) rather than leading Britain into a golden economic future.

To be fair there were some useful efforts to raise new money for infrastructure investment and the National Wealth Fund sounds interesting but really it was just a Budget of missed opportunity.

We must, however, take on face value that Ms Reeves' main priority was to ensure economic stability and fix the black holes in the government’s Budget plans, mending the roof before it rains if you like. It will take time to see if the measures work and we need to be patient but an underwhelming start. 

There was plenty of pain in this Budget, let's hope we soon see more gain and less pain. Taxpayers deserve a break.

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Kevin O’Donnell is editor of Financial Planning Today and a journalist with 40 years of experience in finance, business and mainstream news. This topical comment on the Financial Planning news appears most weeks, usually on Fridays but occasionally other days.  Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. Follow @FPT_Kevin >Top Tip: Follow Financial Planning Today on Twitter / X @_FPToday for breaking news and key updates