Regular contributor Philip Salter, founder at The Entrepreneurs Network, dissects the Sprint Statement; pulling out the key things every UK tech entrepreneur needs to know about.
It could be worse. The top-line figures from the Office of Budget Responsibility announced in the Spring Statement are less bad than was previously expected. Growth will be 1.4% this year, 0.1% higher than forecast, with the forecast for 2019 and 2020 unchanged at 1.3%. And the forecast for borrowing of £45.2bn in 2017-18 has been revised down from £49.9bn, which is equivalent to 2.2% of GDP. The Chancellor understandably put a positive spin on this.
However, keep your Brexit-compliant English Fizz on ice. As Paul Johnson from the Institute for Fiscal Studies – an organisation so respected for their views on the economy that their website crashed during the Statement from the demand of everyone wanting to know what they thought – tweeted: “To be clear – against a long term trend of at least 2% a year growth, after poor growth since 2008, and compared with growth across rest of OECD, these are not encouraging forecasts.”...