British business leader welcomes new goverment budget

The leader of Britain's largest business representative body has welcomed in Wednesday government's move on budget to boost trade and energy cut to bolster economic recovery. John Cridland, Director General of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), told Xinhua Wednesday afternoon, "Our membership of 200,000 businesses -- small, medium and large -- will be really encouraged by this Budget." British Finance Minister and also Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne revealed several business-friendly policies. Exporters get a boost with a doubling of loans available to them to three billion pounds (about 4.9 billion U.S. dollars), and a cut of 33 percent in the rate of interest they pay on those loans. Britain is a services-dominated economy, with manufacturing representing less than eight percent of GDP, but more than half of total exports. Energy bills for manufacturers will fall after Osborne capped the carbon price floor, a tax on electricity generated from fossil fuels, at 18 pounds (about 29.7 U.S. dollars) per tonne. In addition, an already existing compensation scheme for energy-intensive industries has been extended by four years. The investment allowance on corporation tax has been doubled to 500,000 pounds (about 827,569 U.S. dollars). This will benefit small and medium sized companies who will now pay no tax on money used for capital spending. Cridland said, "This budget has got behind businesses -- backing them for investing, and they need to invest if they are going to sell, and it has got behind them as exporters. So, I think this is a good budget for British business playing its role in the world economy." He added, "In the domestic economy, the Chancellor has relieved us of energy costs that were becoming a real constraint on keeping manufacturing here in Britain." "What we were finding was our energy costs were becoming higher than the Americans, French, or Germans," he added. Cridland continued, "Businesses have had four pretty flat years, but now the British economy is the fastest growing economy in the Western world and those entrepreneurs want to get on planes to the far-flung parts of Asia to start selling Britain's goods and services to people who have money to spend on products."