It’s UK Budget Day and George Osborne has been strutting his stuff, playing to his party and to the world stage. Amongst the usual increases to Duty on cigarettes, beer etc. one of the small, but possibly important points is the removal of maintenance grants for students from September 2016 onwards. These were available to […]
Category: Finance
David Cameron: Tax and Legislation
In the news today, apparently David Cameron has pledged to pass a new law guaranteeing there will be no rise in income tax, VAT or National Insurance during the lifetime of the next parliament if he is elected. Whilst this might sound like a good thing, here at The Internet Sheep, we disagree. So, in […]
Bob Diamond – A Question?
Now that Barclays (ex) Chief Executive Bob Diamond has gone, there seems to be an unanswered (or even, unasked) question left hanging about what he did or did not know. From the open letter written on the 28th June 2012 to Andrew Tyrie, Chairman of the Treasury Select Committee and published on the Barclays website […]
Correlation != Causation
I caught a snippet of an interesting article this morning, where it appears an industry expert was commenting on a recent report that shops could raise the average spend of customers by approximately £10 (or 39% if I remember the figure correctly) by improving their customer service. Without knowing the exact details of the report […]
Computer Says No – You Can’t Start Your Car
Professor David Nutt of Imperial College, London and president of the British Neuroscience Association has proposed that every car should have an alcohol sensor fitted, preventing anyone from starting their car should the sensor decide they are over the legal limit (known as an alcohol ignition interlock). Speaking to the BBC, Professor Nutt said that […]
What Is Wrong With Insurance Companies?
Insurance is a requirement of living in the modern world. Most people will personally need household insurance and/or car insurance, and owners of businesses have a whole load of additional insurance products aimed at them such as professional indemnity and liability insurance, some mandatory, some optional. Given that this produces a large, fairly captive market, […]
Surrey University to charge £9000
Surrey University has announced it is to charge the maximum £9000 tuition fees for students, blaming the requirement on cuts to its teaching funds and capital grants. It joins Oxford, Imperial College, Durham and Exeter in announcing it will charge the highest level of fees. As covered by our earlier article “Tuition Fees: The Law […]
Why do we pay VAT on petrol?
Driving home from work yesterday, and noticing that I will have to fill up (again) soon, I was struck by the question, “why do I have to pay VAT on petrol”. VAT is considered to be a “luxury” tax, a tax on non-essential items. The only way for me to get to work and back, […]
Tuition Fees: The Law of Unintended Consequences
The law of unintended consequences, sometimes defined as “a perverse effect contrary to what was originally intended (when an intended solution makes a problem worse), such as when a policy has a perverse incentive that causes actions opposite to what was intended.” (thanks to Wikipedia there) has swung into effect on the governments university tuition […]
VAT hits 20%
So, here we are waiting for VAT to go up to 20% and despite the Labour opposition lobbying for a delay, it’s pretty certain to go ahead. Of course this will push up fuel prices still further, as for some reason we have to pay VAT on fuel duty (where’s the value in that?). Now […]