Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has unveiled his Spring Budget in the House of Commons. This budget was to address the Tory cost-of-living crisis. 

Instead, this will be the Tory-led ‘Cost to Moray’ budget. With tax rises dramatically impacting our local economy in Moray.

Whilst support for energy bills has been extended, the Chancellor announced an end to the alcohol duty freeze to help fund his proposals. The freeze will come to an end in August this year.

This upcoming tax rise comes despite the Chancellor promising to freeze alcohol duty only in November last year. 

Jeremy Hunt did announce a freeze to ‘draught duty’ for beer in pubs, but this is not expected to be applied to spirits, meaning that the whisky industry will be hit hard by the increase in alcohol duty in August.

With the budget released, the Chancellor included mention of future “Alcohol Duty Reform” which will include “changes to the duty structure for alcoholic products, creating standardised tax bands based on alcohol by volume.”

So put bluntly, not only has the government decided to hit Moray’s distilleries hard now, it plans to reform alcohol duty so that ‘high alcohol volume’ products (like whisky) will pay more in tax.

The Scotch Whisky Association estimates that this will be the highest tax hike to the whisky industry in decades.

The Tory cost-of-living crisis has now become the Tory-led ‘Cost to Moray’ crisis. Moray deserves far better than being hit the hardest by this government.

The whisky industry is vital to Moray, and with the upcoming end to the alcohol duty freeze in August, every one of our home distilleries will have higher costs and face cut backs. The price of a Dram will go up, sales will go down. Lower sales and higher costs could threaten jobs in our area.

Things could have been so different. The Moray Lib Dems support Ed Davey’s plan to put a windfall tax on the profits of energy companies to help struggling families, and not punish other sectors, like our whisky trade, unfairly.

It’s not as if it’s just decisions being made on a national level that are impacting working families in our area. Conservative councillors also showed they have no empathy for struggling families as they only recently passed a council budget that increased council tax by more than the budget planned for, whilst increasing the cost of rent for council homes.

Increased council taxes, higher council rents, our biggest employers facing higher costs – the picture in Moray is looking pretty bleak with current Conservative policy decisions.

How much harder do they think they can press us in Moray? We are being taken for granted and it’s hard-working families who are picking up the tab for their Cost to Moray budget.

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