This includes maintaining the current MTD threshold at £30,000 and design changes to simplify and improve the system. These changes will take effect from April 2026.
The government is also legislating in the Autumn Finance Bill 2023 to ensure taxpayers, who join MTD from 6 April 2024, are subject to the government’s new, fairer penalty regime for the late filing of tax returns and late payment of tax.
9) Power to the people (at the DWP)
The Department of Work and Pensions might have been feeling left out of previous Budgets and Autumn Statements, with new powers always seeming to go to the City of London fraud squad or HMRC.
But this time, Hunt pulled some sticks for them out of his stocking ahead of Christmas, by legislating for the DWP to have "further access" to claimant data, to better identify fraud and error in the welfare system.
10) Help to Save
Although the government has improved flexibility for the Isa regime, without giving people financial incentives in the form of raising contribution levels, the government has pledged to reform the Help to Save scheme for low income workers.
According to Hunt, the government will publish proposals in a response to the consultation on Help to Save Reform, as well as consulting on delivery of the new scheme.
11) Northern Rock and Bradford & Bingley
The past, they say, haunts us continually and so, too, does the legacy of failed companies which went under in the credit crisis of 2008.
According to the Statement documents, the government is seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, however, and it's not the 8:01 coming towards us.
Instead it has highlighted "progress" towards winding down the UKAR interventions, in respect of the UK Asset Resolution pension schemes transfer.
The government expects the transfer of Northern Rock Asset Management and Bradford & Bingley pension schemes to central government to to be complete in 2025-26.
simoney.kyriakou@ft.com
