Download or read book HC 1189 Budget 2014 written by Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Treasury Committee and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2014-05-09 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this report the Treasury Committee makes recommendations on pensions, savings, HMRC debt recovery powers and housing. The greater flexibility and choice provided by the proposed pension reforms is welcomed. The 'guidance guarantee' is an important part of making sure that consumers benefit from increased choice. It should be measured against a set of recommended principles to ensure its effectiveness. The pensions reforms are also likely to lead to financial innovation. Following the financial crisis, and the mis-selling scandals, the reputation of the industry is under scrutiny. With regard to savings - double taxation has long been a deterrent to some forms of saving. With the enhanced flexibility for those saving there may now be scope in the long term for bringing the tax treatment of savings and pensions together to create a 'single savings' vehicle. The proposal to grant the power to HMRC to take money directly from people's bank accounts is extremely concerning. Exceptional powers such as this require prior independent oversight. With regard to housing, the Help to Buy scheme, at least in the short-to-medium term, could raise house prices. There is also the risk that withdrawal of Help to Buy may have a distorting effect on the housing market. The need to address these difficulties places a particular responsibility on the FPC, as well as the Government, for detecting and addressing the financial stability risks arising from the housing market. There are also reservations about any extension of retrospection in the tax system. Retrospection should be considered only in wholly exceptional circumstances
Download or read book HC 881 Press Briefing of the FCA s Business Plan for 2014 15 written by Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons. Treasury Committee and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2015 with total page 87 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the evening of 27 March 2014, the Daily Telegraph published an article on its website describing a forthcoming thematic review by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) into the life insurance market. The same story appeared in the print edition of the Telegraph the following day. The story, based on an advance briefing given by the FCA to the Telegraph earlier that week, gave a misleading impression of the scope of the life insurance review, and was published before the FCA had made any official announcement of its own. When the markets opened on 28 March, the share prices of several leading life insurers began to fall heavily. Only when the FCA published a clarifying statement about the scope of the review - several hours later that day - did share prices begin to recover. On the day following the publication of the Telegraph article, the Chairman of this Committee called for a "full and transparent explanation about how such an apparently serious mistake came to be made by our financial services watchdog--the body appointed by Parliament to enforce high standards of conduct". Simon Davis, Partner at Clifford Chance LLP, was subsequently appointed to conduct an investigation, and reported his findings in December 2014. The Committee records its thanks to Mr Davis for undertaking this work and for the evidence he gave to it.
Download or read book HC 870 Autumn Statement 2014 written by Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons. Treasury Committee and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2015 with total page 88 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Treasury has again been unable to provide all the information needed by deadlines agreed with the OBR. The Government may, as the Chairman of the Office for Budget Responsibility suggested, have decided that for political reasons this was a "price worth paying." This would set an undesirable precedent. The work of the Office for Budget Responsibility depends on the Treasury meeting the agreed deadlines. The Committee welcomes the OBR's innovation of providing uncertainty ratings for policy costings. The Committee recommends in future that the OBR publish a breakdown of the uncertainty rating assessment against the three criteria for all announced measures at Autumn Statements and Budgets. The Committee also welcomes the Government's continued publication of the distributional analysis of the Government's policy changes and recommends that the next Government continue with this important aid to transparency. The current inflation target set by the Government is symmetrical, and is 2 per cent at all times. Several witnesses alluded to the risks of very low inflation and subsequent deflation, including the Chancellor. The Chancellor has publicly welcomed the current level of inflation. This is not likely to help anchor inflationary expectations. The Governor of the Bank of England is required to write to explain to the Chancellor why inflation has fallen below 1 per cent. It is important to avoid mixed messages on inflation targeting. The Bank of England should undertake research on the effect of net migration, and the potential for future net migration, on the supply of labour and wage growth as part of the work on meeting the MPC's remit. The Treasury should ensure that discussions within Government on immigration policy fully consider the requirements of the economy.
Download or read book HC 891 The UK s EU Budget Contributions written by Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons. Treasury Committee and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2015 with total page 24 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On 17 October 2014, the European Commission informed HM Treasury that the UK would have to make an additional contribution to the EU budget of approximately 2.1 billion euro. This additional contribution had been prompted by revisions to EU Member States' historic Gross National Income (GNI) data, dating back to 1995. Member States make several annual contributions to the EU budget, by far the most significant being a levy on GNI. This levy is charged as a percentage rate on Member States' annual GNI, with the rate set at a level designed to cover exactly the portion of the EU Budget which remains unfunded once the other sources of income - namely Traditional Own Resources' and VAT-based resources - have been taken into account. The result is that an individual Member State contributes to this portion of the budget in proportion to its share of total GNI across all Member States. In 2013, GNI-based contributions amounted to 74 per cent of the EU's total budget. Emerging from the ECOFIN summit of 7 November 2014, the Chancellor claimed to have "halved the bill" of £1.7 billion demanded by the EU. He later described this as the result of "hard-fought negotiation" with the Commission to ensure that the consequential change to the UK's rebate would apply. The calculation of the rebate, and the circumstances in which it applies, are embedded in EU law. This is set out in detail in Council Decision 2007/436/EC and the supporting Council document on the UK correction. These documents establish the precise method for calculating the rebate. On the basis of the evidence the Committee has seen, it should have been unambiguously clear to the Treasury, well in advance of ECOFIN on 7 November 2014, that the UK was entitled to a rebate on any additional budget contributions that could arise from the GNI revisions.
Download or read book The Office for Budget Responsibility and the Politics of Technocratic Economic Governance written by Ben Clift and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-03-14 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Office for Budget Responsibility and the Politics of Technocratic Economic Governance is about the politics of economic ideas and technocratic economic governance. It is also a book about the changing political economy of British capitalism's relationship to the European and wider global economies. It focuses on the creation in 2010 and subsequent operation of the independent body created to oversee fiscal rectitude in Britain, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR). More broadly, it analyses the politics of economic management of the UK's uncertain trajectory, and of British capitalism's restructuring in the 2010s and 2020s in the face of the upheavals of the global financial crisis (GFC), Brexit and COVID. A focus on the intersection between expert economic opinion of the OBR as UK's fiscal watchdog, and the political economy of British capitalism's evolution through and after Brexit, animates a framework for analysing the politics of technocratic economic governance. The technocratic vision of independent fiscal councils fails to grasp a core political economy insight: that economic knowledge and narratives are political and social constructs. The book unpacks the competing constructions of economic reason that underpin models of British capitalism, and through that inform expert economic assessment of the UK economy. It also underlines how contestable political economic assumptions undergird visions of Britain's international economic relations. These were all brought to the fore in economic policy debates about Britain's place in the world, which in the 2010s centred on Brexit. This book analyses OBR forecasting and fiscal oversight in that broader political context, rather than as a narrowly technical pursuit.
Download or read book HC 204 Conduct and Competition in SME Lending written by Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons. Treasury Committee and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2015 with total page 117 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) form a large part of the UK economy. According to official statistics, there were 5.243 million private sector businesses at the start of 2014. 5.236 million had 0-250 employees and are classed as SMEs, of which 5.204 million had fewer than 50 employees and are classed as small businesses. SMEs account for 60 per cent of all private sector employment, and registered an annual turnover of £1.6 trillion at the start of 2014-47 per cent of the private sector total. A large majority of SMEs are sole traders-76% of all businesses are non-employers. The Government believes that access to finance for SMEs is 'key to the recovery and long term growth of the economy'. Research by National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) in 2009 found that the '6 per cent of UK businesses generated half of the new jobs created by existing businesses between 2002 and 2008. This report offers a number conclusions and recommendations covering: the state of the SME lending market; RBS Global Restructuring Group (GRG); mis-sale of Hedging Products; and alternative finance
Download or read book HC 768 Implementing the Recommendations of the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards written by Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons. Treasury Committee and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2014 with total page 86 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book HC 1044 Re Appointment Of Dr Donald Kohn And Martin Taylor To The Financial Policy Committee written by Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons. Treasury Committee and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2015 with total page 20 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book HC 728 II Project Verde Volume II written by Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons. Treasury Committee and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2014 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most significant consequences of Co-op Bank's near-collapse, from a public policy perspective, was the collapse of Lloyds Banking Group's planned divestment under Project Verde. Co-op Bank's withdrawal forced Lloyds to resort to its fallback option of an Initial Public Offering. The result is a new bank, TSB, which, not having an existing banking presence of its own, consists solely of the business divested by Lloyds. Accordingly, it has a personal current account market share not of 7 per cent, but of 4.2 per cent. There is a risk that a bank of this size might struggle to grow significantly and to act as a true challenger in the market. Had Co-op Bank's resulting capital shortfall been uncovered earlier, it is likely that the bank would not have progressed so far with Verde. As it was, the rapid and late emergence of the capital problem led to Co-op's withdrawal from the Verde process at a relatively late stage. The Committee recommends that the FRC investigation and the independent inquiry into the events at Co-op Bank consider the role of KPMG and the FSA in relation to the late emergence of loan impairment and IT losses. On the basis of these findings, the independent inquiry into the events at Co-op Bank should also form a view on whether Co-op's Verde bid could or should have been halted sooner. While it may not have been fully transparent from the start that Co-op Bank's bid was doomed to failure, it was beset by problems from an early stage. But it was not these problems that killed the deal-it was the capital shortfall that emerged only late in the day. It is important, from every angle to determine why the capital shortfall was not uncovered earlier.
Download or read book HC 97 Private Finance 2 written by Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Treasury Committee and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2014-06-09 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written evidence is contained in Volume 2, available on the Committee website at www.parliament.uk/treascom
Download or read book Budget 2014 written by Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons. Treasury Committee and published by . This book was released on 2014-08-01 with total page 22 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Responses to HC 1189, session 2013-14 (ISBN 9780215071996). The Budget 2014 published as HC 1104, session 2013-14 (ISBN 9780102988116)
Download or read book National Audit Office Universal Credit Early Progress HC 621 written by Great Britain. National Audit Office and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2013-09-05 with total page 60 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This report concludes that the Department for Work and Pensions has not achieved value for money in its early implementation of Universal Credit. The Department was overly ambitious in both the timetable and scope of the programme, took risks to try to meet the short timescale and used a new project management approach which it had never before used on a programme of this size and complexity. It was unable to explain how it originally decided on its ambitious plans or evaluated their feasibility. Nor did it have any adequate measures of progress. Over 70 per cent of the £425 million spent to date has been on IT systems, and £34 million of its new IT systems has been written off. The existing systems offer limited functionality - the current IT system lacks a component to identify potentially fraudulent claims so that the Department has to rely on multiple manual checks on claims and payments. Problems with the IT system have delayed national roll-out of the programme, which will reduce the expected benefits of reform and - if the 2017 completion date remains - increase risks by requiring the rapid migration of a large volume of claimants. The source of many problems has been the absence of a detailed view of how Universal Credit is meant to work. In addition, poor control and decision-making undermined confidence in the programme and contributed to a lack of progress. The Department has particularly lacked IT expertise and experienced frequent changes in senior management.
Download or read book Disease Control Priorities Third Edition Volume 6 written by King K. Holmes and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2017-11-06 with total page 1027 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Infectious diseases are the leading cause of death globally, particularly among children and young adults. The spread of new pathogens and the threat of antimicrobial resistance pose particular challenges in combating these diseases. Major Infectious Diseases identifies feasible, cost-effective packages of interventions and strategies across delivery platforms to prevent and treat HIV/AIDS, other sexually transmitted infections, tuberculosis, malaria, adult febrile illness, viral hepatitis, and neglected tropical diseases. The volume emphasizes the need to effectively address emerging antimicrobial resistance, strengthen health systems, and increase access to care. The attainable goals are to reduce incidence, develop innovative approaches, and optimize existing tools in resource-constrained settings.
Download or read book Budget of the United States Government written by United States. Office of Management and Budget and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Parenting Matters written by National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2016-11-21 with total page 525 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Decades of research have demonstrated that the parent-child dyad and the environment of the familyâ€"which includes all primary caregiversâ€"are at the foundation of children's well- being and healthy development. From birth, children are learning and rely on parents and the other caregivers in their lives to protect and care for them. The impact of parents may never be greater than during the earliest years of life, when a child's brain is rapidly developing and when nearly all of her or his experiences are created and shaped by parents and the family environment. Parents help children build and refine their knowledge and skills, charting a trajectory for their health and well-being during childhood and beyond. The experience of parenting also impacts parents themselves. For instance, parenting can enrich and give focus to parents' lives; generate stress or calm; and create any number of emotions, including feelings of happiness, sadness, fulfillment, and anger. Parenting of young children today takes place in the context of significant ongoing developments. These include: a rapidly growing body of science on early childhood, increases in funding for programs and services for families, changing demographics of the U.S. population, and greater diversity of family structure. Additionally, parenting is increasingly being shaped by technology and increased access to information about parenting. Parenting Matters identifies parenting knowledge, attitudes, and practices associated with positive developmental outcomes in children ages 0-8; universal/preventive and targeted strategies used in a variety of settings that have been effective with parents of young children and that support the identified knowledge, attitudes, and practices; and barriers to and facilitators for parents' use of practices that lead to healthy child outcomes as well as their participation in effective programs and services. This report makes recommendations directed at an array of stakeholders, for promoting the wide-scale adoption of effective programs and services for parents and on areas that warrant further research to inform policy and practice. It is meant to serve as a roadmap for the future of parenting policy, research, and practice in the United States.
Download or read book Equity and Healthcare Reform in Developing Economies written by Songül Çınaroğlu and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-10-29 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ensuring equity in healthcare is the main concern of health policymakers in order to provide a sustainable health system. This concern is more prominent in developing countries due to the scarcity of resources. This book provides a comprehensive analysis and discussion on the distributive pattern of out-of-pocket pharmaceutical expenditures under the health reforms in Turkey and makes comparisons with pharmerging countries. Turkey’s health reforms began in 2003 to address shortcomings related to financial protection and to improve health outcomes and the quality of healthcare services. The primary motivation was to ensure equity in the distribution of health resources, and this transformation process led to profound changes in how these resources were used, and in health financing in general. However, there is a lack of knowledge regarding the long-term effect of health reforms on the distribution patterns of health expenditures and health service use. This book offers a thorough equity analysis of the health financing system, affected by this health transformation program. Index and curve approaches are used in the equity analysis of pharmaceutical expenditures. The book examines the long-term effects of health system regulations on the health spending characteristics of households and improves the current understanding of equity in this context. It includes extensive international comparisons of healthcare services across a range of developing countries and highlights the significance of ensuring equity for emerging economies. The author explores the existing evidence as well as future research directions and provides policy and planning advice for health policymakers to contribute to establishing a more equal health system design. Additionally, the book will be of interest to scholars and professionals in the fields of health economics, public health management and health financing.
- Author : W. Tad Pfeffer
- Publisher : Frontiers Media SA
- Release : 2018-11-08
- ISBN : 2889456196
- Pages : 160 pages
Melt Water Retention Processes in Snow and Firn on Ice Sheets and Glaciers Observations and Modeling
Download or read book Melt Water Retention Processes in Snow and Firn on Ice Sheets and Glaciers Observations and Modeling written by W. Tad Pfeffer and published by Frontiers Media SA. This book was released on 2018-11-08 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Melt takes place where the surface of glaciers or ice sheets interacts with the atmosphere. While the processes governing surface melt are fairly well understood, the pathways of the meltwater, from its origin to the moment it leaves a glacier system, remain enigmatic. It is not even guaranteed that meltwater leaves a glacier or ice sheet. On Greenland, for example, only slightly more than 50% of the meltwater runs off. The remainder mostly refreezes within the so-called firn cover of the ice sheet. This eBook contains 11 studies which tackle the challenge of understanding meltwater retention in snow and firn from various angles. The studies focus both on mountain glaciers and on the Greenland ice sheet and address challenges such as measuring firn properties, quantifying their influence on meltwater retention, modelling firn processes and meltwater refreezing as well as unravelling the mechanisms within the recently discovered Greenland firn aquifers.