
Budget bonanza
Despite the general political wackiness of the past few years, the Tories’ later Budgets were, from a personal finance PR perspective, a bit of a damp squib. Even the notorious Mini-Budget offered little for the private client lawyer, business tax specialist or financial adviser to get their teeth into.
The days when George Osborne or Gordon Brown would announce a wholesale overhaul of pensions taxation, or when the Chancellor’s pronouncements relating to capital gains tax would spark a mini boom for the country’s corporate finance advisers as entrepreneurs raced for the exit before a tax hike, have felt like a distant memory for quite some time.
Any big changes that have been made post-Covid have been, frankly, too wide-ranging and easy for everyone to understand. So, by-and-large, the media have reported them and moved on to the next story, with little in the way of detailed dissection (which is where comments from specialists would usually have been used).
Rachel Reeves’s first Budget, on 30 October 2024, might be about to change that. It is, for example, no secret that, for months now, business owners have been instructing advisers to help them sell their shareholdings before an anticipated capital gains tax walloping – which if nothing else means an imminent flurry of press releases to be written about M&A transactions (you know where to find me when you need me!).
Attention to detail
To be fair, most professionals won’t have a cat in Hell’s chance of being quoted about any of the major Budget headlines unless they work in the tax practice of a big four accountant.
However, with a Budget on the scale we have been led to expect, there will almost definitely also be measures that will have a significant impact that aren’t mentioned in the speech but are squirreled away in the detail of the Treasury’s Budget document, or the related HMRC documents, published online the moment the Chancellor sits down.
Modern news cycles work very, very fast but if you know what you’re doing it should be possible to trawl through these petty quickly (they’re PDFs, so you can search them for key terms) and find the nuggets that will clobber enough of any given publication’s readers for it to be worth pointing them out to the relevant media, along with some brief commentary.
Back in the olden days it was usually the section entitled “Fairness” that contained all the tax increases for business and the wealthy. If nothing else, on 30 October we’ll learn the Treasury’s current euphemism of choice.
Of course, even if a professional firm does everything right, there’s no guarantee that it will get coverage in the media – it’s going to be email carnage that afternoon. But nothing need go to waste, and once you have identified the measures that are going to affect your clients you can put together a quick email briefing, and get it out to them that afternoon, or the following morning, so they hear the bad news (and ideally your solutions to it) from you before they read it in the papers.
Pic: Lauren Hurley/No 10 Downing Street