Marcus Wood

Why the Budget was a particular blow 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.

Two groups suffered disproportionately from increased tax and reduced concessions and they were:

1) People without children earning less than £18,000 per annum who lost the 10p tax rate and
2) Smaller incorporated businesses whose tax rates increase from 19 to 22p in the £.

Torbay is an economy that is dominated by small, local businesses including privately owned shops, service business and especially hotels and inns.

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 gorups with a tax increase while dishing out tax cuts that benefit global corproations and the richest 10% of income earners.