News - Page 16

Stoke-on-Trent City Council has named Nick Degg as Centenary Poet Laureate ahead of the city’s 100th anniversary next year.  The North Staffordshire wordsmith, who is from Porthill, was appointed to the honorary position at a city council meeting and will represent the city through poetry throughout the centenary year in

A free Diwali celebration is taking place in Stoke-on-Trent this weekend featuring traditional music, dance and crafts.  The Potteries Museum in Hanley is set to host the event in honour of the Hindu and Sikh festival of lights on Saturday, November 2, from 11am to 5:30pm.  Professional artists and local

Nobel Prize in Literature winner, Abdulrazak Gurnah, will visit Staffordshire to give a public reading from his work at Keele University.   Gurnah, who became the first black African writer in 35 years to win the prestigious award in 2021, will spend time working with Keele University’s Creative Writing students on

Staffordshire businesses across a range of sectors responding to yesterday’s budget described a mixed bag of bad and good news, plus a few surprises thrown into the mix. Liam Nicholson, Associate Director at RSM UK, Tax based on Festival Park, offered the following post-budget reaction: “My initial response to the

Businesses will bear the brunt of chancellor Rachel Reeves’ much anticipated (and leaked) first budget as she introduced a £40billion tax hike. £25billion of that will come from a jump in employer’s national insurance contributions. Reeves announced it will go up by 1.2 percentage points, to 15%, from April next

Markets got the jitters after an initial calm response to the chancellor’s announcements while she was speaking in the Commons. Analysts had drawn comparisons with the disastrous Liz Truss mini-budget two years ago which spooked the markets with unfunded tax cuts. Predictions of a calm response were followed by a

The UK’s public finance and spending watchdog concluded that Rachel Revees had delivered “large increases in spending, tax, and borrowing” with the country reaching a record tax take. In its response to the budget, the Office for Budget Responsibility confirmed: • The Budget increases spending by £70 billion annually, with two-thirds on

Everything you ever wanted to know about Labour’s first budget in almost 15 years is contained in the Red Book, published by the Treasury. You can read it here.

Plans for a brand-new multi-million-pound Home Office base in Stoke-on-Trent have been scrapped.  As reported by Daily Focus and hailed as a ‘great investment for the city’, the government department had been in talks with Stoke-on-Trent City Council about building a brand-new base in the city which would house all of