Why the Budget was a particular blow for Torbay

Local Conservative candidate Marcus Wood has claimed that last weeks budget was especially damaging for Torbay.

"If you had wanted to design a budget specifically to harm our economy you'd have been hard pressed to have come up with anything better than this Chancellor managed last Wednesday." says Marcus.

"We have done a special analysis of the budget proposals and concluded that the overall effect of this budget is the most damaging to two sectors of the economy that are especially prevalent in Torbay."

Two groups suffered disproportionately from increased tax and they were:

1) People without children earning less than the national average who lost the 10p tax rate. A single person without children earning £16,000, like an NHS maternity care assistant, hotel housekeeper, restaurant or a retail store manager, would pay more a year in tax, and not gain from tax credits.

Everyone earning between around £5,000 and £18,000 will pay more income tax, and many will become more dependant on the complex tax credits system.

2) Smaller companies will be hit by a double whammy from this Budget. The smaller companies’ rate of corporation tax is going up by 3 per cent. Changes to allowances are also skewed to benefit service sector businesses with significant cash flows, harming smaller firms that can afford to invest less like guest houses and hotels.

"Torbay is an economy that is dominated by small, local businesses including privately owned shops, service business and especially hotels and inns who have low profits but need high levels of investment.

"Furthermore Torbay has a much higher than average percentage of single people and couples without children on relatively low earnings -often the employees of the hotel and leisure businesses on which the bay depends"

"Quite why these two groups should be so drastically clobbered remains a mystery but the fact is that Torbay (and other coastal resorts like us) will be more seriously hit by these measures than anywhere else."

"I am appalled that a Labour chancellor would hit struggling small businesses and the lowest paid worker groups with a tax increase while dishing out tax cuts that benefit global corporations and the richest 10% of income earners."