Terry Paul

What’s the Chancellor’s rabbit going to be? A hare-brained scheme or a genuinely hopping good surprise? 🐇🐇🐇🐇🐇🐇🐇🐇🐇🐇🐇🐇 The most fevered Budget speculation centres on the personal allowance. From next April, the full new state pension is expected to rise to about £13,036 a year, above the personal allowance of £12,570 for the first time. The allowance is frozen until 2031. Ministers have promised that people living on the state pension alone will not pay tax on it, but have not said how. Raising the personal allowance to just over £13,000 would cost about £4bn. There is also speculation that Healey could reverse Reeves’s freeze of the Plan 2 student loan repayment threshold at £29,385 for three years from April 2027, following lobbying by Lucy Powell, the Education Secretary. The Treasury committee has called for the freeze to be reversed. The Department for Education has warned that doing so would reverse a £5.9bn saving. However, the Treasury has previously been cool on the idea. Another potentially popular move would be to ease the pressure on family farms by raising the inheritance-tax threshold, potentially taking “a whole slug of farmers” out of the tax. Other measures being discussed include a time-limited cut in national insurance for under-25s and an extension of the Great British Summer Savings scheme into the winter holidays. The summer scheme cut VAT on children’s restaurant meals and family attractions from 20 per cent to 5 per cent, at a cost of about £300m. From today’s weekend long read with @whazell Story 👇 inews.co.uk/news/politics/in…