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Autumn Budget 2017
Education and skills
Schools will get £600 for every extra pupil who takes A-Level or Core Maths and £350,000 of extra funding a year will be given to every specialist maths school that is set up.
£34m will be allocated to teaching construction skills. £30m will go towards digital courses using artificial intelligence. A National Retraining Scheme will be launched with the aim of helping people to acquire new skills. It will be overseen by the government, the Trades Union Congress and the Confederation of British Industry. They will decide on other areas of the economy where new skills and training courses are needed.
What they said... 'I report today on an economy that continues to grow, continues to create more jobs than ever before and continues to confound those who seek to talk it down.’ Philip Hammond, Chancellor of the Exchequer ‘We have had the rhetoric of a long-term economic plan that never meets its targets when what all too many are experiencing is long-term economic pain - and the hardest hit are disabled people, single parents and women.' Jeremy Corbyn, Labour Party leader 'Britain has gone from top of the growth league to deep into the relegation zone, with each person set to be £687 worse off per year.' Vince Cable, Liberal Democrats leader
A political background to the Budget Philip Hammond began his Budget speech in March by noting that the previous Chancellor to deliver the ‘last Spring Budget’ was Norman Lamont, who was sacked ten weeks after doing so. ‘Wish me luck!’ joked Mr Hammond, but in the days and weeks that followed he may have wondered if he had needlessly tempted fate.
He was forced into an immediate U-turn on the Budget’s key announcement – a rise in national insurance contributions for some self-employed workers – after backbench Tory MPs complained that it contradicted their manifesto commitments.
Then came Theresa May’s snap General Election in June, in which the Conservatives unexpectedly lost their overall majority and were forced into a supply-and-confidence agreement with the Democratic Unionist Party.
More recently, Mr Hammond created unwelcome headlines when he referred in an interview to the EU's Brexit negotiators as ‘the enemy’ – a remark he subsequently described as ‘a poor choice of words’.
So the lead-up to Mr Hammond’s first Autumn Budget has been far from easy, and his announcements will be intensely scrutinised. Despite all this, there has been some encouraging economic news for the Chancellor. Unemployment is at a 42-year low and productivity increased by 0.9% in the latest three months – the strongest growth rate for six years. But Mr Hammond was always unlikely to want to tempt fate again by being overconfident. As he said recently to the BBC: ‘I always operate on the principle – I think it is a sound and cautious principle – that everyone is sackable.’
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