Hammond keeps his job with Budget for snowflakes, techies, SMEs and the regions

The best way to tell if a Chancellor has come up with a decent Budget is studying the faces of those on the opposing green benches. Today those Labour faces looked rattled, really rattled, and Jeremy Corbyn’s tetchy response – if you could bear to listen – was one of the poorest from an opposition leader in decades.

What will have rattled Corbyn and his party so badly is that Philip Hammond will be the one earning the headlines with a great Budget for the Snowflake generation – exactly those Millennials who supposedly worship JC as the new Messiah.

Now the Snowflakes don’t have to wait for the second coming. This was a Budget aimed at them rather than their silver-foxed parents and will help them immediately with cheaper – and hopefully – better quality homes, rail cards, cleaner air and more funds for those studying maths and the new T-qualifications. Even the geeks get more money for innovation.

Scrapping stamp-duty for first-time buyers on properties up to £300,000, and lowering it for those buying houses between £330,000 and £500,000, was a brilliant move which should hopefully ease the pain for the young struggling onto the property market.

While the amount may sound relatively low for those used to sky-high prices in the south east, it is worth remembering that the average house price in the UK is £223,000. It’s just a pity that Hammond was not bold enough to scrap stamp duty on all house purchases, the one measure which would have surely got people moving again.

As Hammond acknowledged, there is no single magic measure that can solve the housing shortage so there has to be a pincer assault. Which is what he has tried to launch by announcing a combination of new tricks to keep up the pressure on local councils and land developers to keep building new homes – and new affordable homes.

Interesting too that Hammond attacked one of Labour’s favourite bogeymen – the land developers who allegedly store up land with planning consent, waiting for prices to rise. He’s hired the ex-private equity supremo, Sir Damon Buffini, to review the market to see if land developers are indeed stockpiling and report back. Expect a proper review. Buffini is no fool.

It is a small detail but the switch from naming the Homes & Communities Agency to Homes England could also presage a more dramatic move by the organisation to help release land more quickly onto the housing market.

Continuing to give greater autonomy and more funds to the nations and regions – and making a positive case for the Northern Powerhouse and cities across the North and the Midlands – was smart too.

The health and well-being inequality of so many of the population living in the regions is one of the great tragedies of modern day Britain. It’s a tragedy that can be addressed with well-targeted training schemes and tax incentives, as the new money going to the former Redcar steel works will hopefully demonstrate.

Small business owners should have liked the Budget too, mainly because there was no fiscal tinkering or new taxes on the self-employed. Best of all, he did not reduce the VAT threshold, at which point firms must become VAT-registered. It would have been an act of pure suicide that angered small businesses.

Refreshingly, the Chancellor also showed himself to be more of a true blue than he has revealed to date. He has been listening to entrepreneurs and investors. His moves to help SMEs with business rates, raise the R&D tax credits and double EIS for tech innovation were all good. Sometimes what Chancellors don’t do are the cleverest moves. Which is why allowing VCTs to carry on investing in growth companies, in a manner that is highly transparently, was important.

As Modwenna Rees-Mogg, founder of Angel’s List, put it bluntly:“Giving private investors tax breaks to take risks is just the right strategy. Boosting the R&D tax credits scheme will make a significant difference to all sorts of innovative companies, not just those that are SMEs. The Chancellor really is putting his money where his mouth is.”

Quite. He also did so with another £2.5bn of investment in the British Business Bank to kickstart the UK’s lacklustre productivity. There’s also another £500m in a range of initiatives from artificial intelligence, to 5G and full fibre broadband, a new regulator’s pioneer fund and a new geospatial data commission to develop a strategy for using the government’s location to support economic growth and to help our tech start-ups reach scale.

Hammond’s emphasis on boosting maths and computer science training was spot on. So too was the news that the education department is working with the TUC and the CBI on a national training scheme, just the sort of non-partisan approach the government must do more of to ensure the workforce has access to new skills and retraining – and that such measures are seen as national rather than party issues.

But the $64,000 question is whether these measures are enough to get business chiefs and the country’s 5.5m SMEs owners investing seriously again? It’s only by improving productivity in a significant manner that GDP will pick up and wages will start growing in a sustained fashion again.

There were some signs that Hammond may have given them enough confidence to do just that. It’s about time – UK companies have about £1bn in cash on their balance sheets just waiting to be spent.

Hammond may also have saved own his job too. With the promise of more Brexit contigency money – £3bn plus the promise of a transitional period – business leaders should now have more of the certainty they crave to start investing despite the lower than expected growth forecasts from the OBR.

That is, if the OBR forecasts turn out in the end to be anywhere close to reality. It is noticeable that they are much below the Bank of England’s own forecasts, prompting one business leader to suggest that maybe the bar is being set too low so that the Chancellor can beat them in the coming years. The market is not easily fooled.