IT WAS never going to be a ground-breaking Budget speech. All the big cost-cutting measures were introduced last year. This year’s Budget was destined to be a relative non-event.

Indeed, it was such a non-event that former Chancellor Ken Clarke is said to have fallen asleep during George Osborne’s speech. Nor did it help that this relatively uninteresting Budget was punctuated every couple of sentences by a very evident frog in the Chancellor’s throat.

Nevertheless, Mr Osborne made the best of a difficult predicament yesterday. He made it sound like he was doing something significant while in fact delivering a fiscally neutral Budget.

As a result, we heard a great deal about cutting red tape and making Britain more enterprising – all measures that cost very little to implement. It seems the consensus is that Mr Osborne succeeded in delivering a strong speech while spending no money.

There were a couple of surprises in the Budget. Big cuts to corporation tax rates over the next few years address a problem that the previous Labour government ignored, namely the migration of some of our biggest companies overseas to avoid our tax regime. Now, with corporation tax set to fall to 23% over the next few years, it is claimed Britain will have a lower tax rate than the US, France and Germany. This is undoubtedly crucial to persuading not just British businesses, but foreign businesses too, that this country is serious about competing for jobs.

The other big surprise in yesterday’s Budget was the measures to tackle the rising cost of fuel. Not only are the scheduled increases in the fuel duty escalator to be scrapped, but the current rate of duty has been reduced and measures are to be introduced to stabilise prices at the country’s petrol pumps.