What are your thoughts of the Governments temporary 2.5% VAT cut?

From a consumer point of view I feel it could help a little, whilst you'd need to spend a lot of money to really notice the reduction it is still a reduction and so it does help a bit. Of course businesses would need to actually make the reduction for you to notice it, although the VAT rate has dropped, the law doesn't state that businesses who give an inclusive of VAT price must reduce that price by 2.5% (for example supermarkets, high street stores etc where the price you see includes the VAT).

From a business owner point of view the reduction doesn't really make much difference - Yes we may only have to charge our customers 15% VAT and therefore only pay that 15% to HM Customs & Revenue but we can only claim back 15% on our purchases - So from our point of view the VAT cut means we charge customers, pay HMRC and claim 2.5% less than we do now, not really any significant difference.

The only thing this VAT reduction means to me as a business owner is I have less than a week to change all our price lists, website and computer systems to account for the new rate and of course this is between the general day to day running of company - Thanks for the notice Alistair Darling.

So my verdict on the VAT cut - Damn pointless, as for this being one of Labour's ways of trying to help the UK out of the recession as far as I'm concerned it's too little too late - To make any difference to the economy the reduction should've been by 5% instead of 2.5%.

To Jae & J7, wasn't sure if this would belong in Kavar's or Hot Topics so I placed it here as it could start discussion about how useless the Labour Party really are.

--Stream

I think it will certainly help, as you say, a little. But not much more than that. It'll still be a tough Christmas for everyone. Jobs are still going to be lost, and people are going struggle for quite a while longer it seems.

I think it's just a delay tactic, to make it seem like they're doing something. So much for Brown's proclamations that he's the man to save the world's economy.