Budget 2013: a transfer of wealth from pensioners to small business New support for homebuyers was among pro-business reforms, writes Jonathan Guthrie Have a house. No, go on. You know you want one. Britons can never get enough dirty, sexy property. Government-assisted homebuying made this nation great (and coincidentally, kept it Tory) in the 1980s. George Osborne hopes to repeat the trick - or at least deliver a small lift to weak confidence. New support for homebuyers was among a slew of pro-business reforms. Construction, with a historic 9 per cent share of gross domestic product, has suffered a 17 per cent peak-to-trough fall in output. The chancellor is giving succour to underemployed brickies and to house purchasers by extending a shared equity scheme at a cost of £3.5bn. The government will put up one-fifth of the price of a new-build home for those moving up the housing ladder, as well as for first-time buyers. Unfortunately the original scheme, supplemented with loan guarantees, has failed to raise housing starts. These fell 11 per cent last year to 100,000, some 60 per cent below estimated need. Extending guarantees to new mortgages on second-hand homes at an estimated upper liability of £12bn will meanwhile benefit estate agents rather than hod carriers. Moreover, housebuilding represents only 12 per cent of construction output, according to the Construction Products Association. Spending has slumped in the huge, dusty hinterland of infrastructure. The City has been reluctant to contribute to a £20bn fund proposed by the government. Paul Deighton, who did such a great job arranging Olympic security when he ran Locog, gets the task of turning the programme around. A corporation tax cut to 20 per cent in 2015 was more obviously positive for business. One wonders sometimes whether Mr Osborne is a double agent for the CBI, loyal to shadowy controllers at the Centrepoint Lubyanka. Total UK business taxes were never worse than mid-table under Labour but the employer's body always emphasised the shaming headline rate. The chancellor has obligingly reduced this to the lowest level among big developed economies. An increase to the bank levy will help pay for this. The competitiveness of UK banks apparently matters less than that of UK corporations. Similarly, the potters of Stoke get tax breaks on energy bills while the pips of overtaxed North Sea oil companies will go on squeaking. This Budget's neutrality was only mathematical. Fund managers do not, as yet, figure as political hate figures. They were validated by the abolition of double stamp duty on UK-domiciled funds. Small businesses might, for their part, have complained that their own tax rate had stalled at 20 per cent. Except Mr Osborne is exempting them from the first £2,000 of employer's national insurance at a cost of £1.5bn yearly. This represents a transfer of wealth from big employers and pension savers, most of them in the public sector, to hard-pressed small business owners. Good switch. The abolition of stamp duty on Aim shares was a fillip for ventures of a more ambitious kind. Stock exchange boss Xavier Rolet will now dreamily imagine the day when the 0.5 per cent transaction tax is removed from main market stocks. The measures to energise small business suggested the chancellor is losing faith in the Funding for Lending Scheme, through which banks swap collateral with the Bank of England to lower their own costs of credit. Chris Sanger of Ernst & Young counted 41 new measures in a Budget that defied its billing as an eye glazer. Reform of the FLS was not among them. Critics say that the scheme has improved the cost but not the availability of money to enterprise. The UK remains less an aspiration nation than a nation in need of an aspirin and a lie-down. Profitable companies of all sizes are reining back capital expenditure, either to hoard cash or return it to shareholders. They have a low appetite for the investments that might raise tax receipts. But the government is of a similar mind. Mr Osborne stuck to his programme of austerity in this Budget, instead of tanking up on debt to finance public spending or slashing personal taxation. Labour, for all Ed Balls's Keynesian bombast, would do little different. Its stimulatory plan includes such milk-and-toast measures as a small cut to sales tax. The animal spirits of business are no more elevated, even after successive tax reductions. Bosses prefer government austerity with feel-good frills to the risk that a stimulatory bet big enough to make a difference might fail. That, after all, is how they are running their own fiefs. With growth forecasts tumbling, the chancellor resembles a failed escapologist who cannot spring free without assistance from spectators who, sadly, decline to help him. So marvel as the Great Osbo struggles impotently in his fiscal fetters! Glance at your watch as he applies a tiny monetary lever to the intractable padlock of low confidence! Yawn discreetly as he explains that he will wriggle free later rather than sooner! The election is only two years away.