The Autumn Budget | Initial thoughts

Citywire asked a number of financial advisers for their immediate reactions to this week’s Budget.

Dan McKissock, one of our chartered financial planners was one of those interviewed. These were Dan’s thoughts:

The danger of a piecemeal approach with a budget of this type is it becomes impossible to keep track of what applies to who in which circumstances.

I think a key thing was the reform to the lifetime ISA rules on withdrawals. It has always been a bugbear where someone has taken out a lifetime ISA in good faith and effectively been caught out by rising house prices, and then under the old rules costing them money to take their own money out, which always seemed slightly perverse.

I think putting up tax on savings and property income may well end up being a little bit of a misstep, and we might see this is just a further twist of the knife for the small-scale residential landlord.

A lot of our clients are landlords and have been adjusting their expectations because of the new renters’ rights that came in recently, so this is a second hit to them in terms of additional tax on the resulting income.

However, I think the biggest story is probably what has not changed.

It is nice to see no further tinkering to those things that tend to worry clients with the level of assets that we deal with, surrounding pension tax-free cash, pension tax relief, and capital gains tax.

We are still working out how to deal best with the pension inheritance tax changes that are coming in from next year, so not having further complexity added was generally viewed as a good thing from our side.