The industry reacts to changes underlined by Rishi Sunak in Wednesday’s budget

  Posted by: electime      29th October 2021

Aiden Corcoran, personal tax expert at GoSimpleTax, said:

“If self-employed people were hoping for a nod from Rishi Sunak in this year’s Budget, they were to be disappointed. Business relief rates, rates discounts and income tax rates will all help the UK’s small and micro businesses, but support in the form of grants, extended furlough and tax breaks would all have been equally beneficial. Importantly, self-employed people had told us they wanted to see a simplification to tax self assessment – and nothing to this end was mentioned.

“This was a generous Budget for public services and large businesses – but for many self-employed people, it will not be enough.”

Jon Slowe, Director at Delta-EE shared the following comments:

“This Budget has shown a shortage of commitments that will bring the UK’s energy policy in line with its ambitious sustainability targets. With the current energy price crisis hitting consumers hard, no commitments were made to improving the energy efficiency of UK homes. By failing to invest in energy efficiency, the government has missed an opportunity to support an effective, sustainable and long-term approach to dealing with the energy crisis.”

“EVs used to be the headline makers, but now financial support is hidden in the detail of the budget documents. The UK is in an international race to attract EV manufacturing with over 25 gigafactories due to be active across Europe by 2025. The UK can’t let up in its commitments to become a global EV leader. As such, we are pleased to see £800m pledged to support Electric Vehicle manufacturing . Alongside EV policy seen in the Net Zero Strategy and 2030 petrol and diesel car ban – the UK is firing on all cylinders with EV’s. However, more investment will be required to ensure the chargepoint rollout continues at its current pace as vehicle sales are currently outstripping infrastructure installations and we predict the EV to public chargepoint ratio to increase by almost 40 per cent by 2030.”

 ECA’s Director of Workforce and Public Affairs, Andrew Eldred outlined the attributes of a highly skilled worker:

“While we welcome the relief for small businesses installing green technologies, creating a low carbon building is not just about new tech, it’s also about what goes on behind the scenes.

“Highly skilled workers are central to finding the right solution to make a building function efficiently. A skilled worker finds the right solutions to reduce carbon emissions, rather using a one size fits all approach.

“Fast-track training routes, such as bootcamps may be counterproductive. If an installer doesn’t understand how their technology interacts with the rest of a building it can prove expensive and even dangerous for the consumer.”

Andrew further reflected on the budget: “We’d have liked to see more about investment in green upskilling, and particularly about increasing our engineering and technical capacity to deliver the transition to a green economy. We remain concerned about the lack of nationwide planning for EV charging points, and critically there was little about encouraging the further decarbonisation of the grid with more renewable energy and by abolishing disproportionate levies on electricity.”