Tax Partner James Bailey reminisces on how the Budget documents used to arrive in Cornwall.
As we were finalising the arrangements to ensure we would say something useful to our clients at our Budget Breakfast this year, I was struck by what a difference the Internet has made to the way we cope with the Budget.
In the 1980s the Budget documents were made available as soon as the Chancellor sat down, but in the form of hard copies published by HM Stationery Office and available from their premises.
Getting these documents to Cornwall involved sending one of our trainees up to London on the train armed with a bottle of whisky for our contact in HMSO. Our tame civil servant would throw the first set of Budget documents he could get his hands on out of the window to our guy waiting below with a taxi, who would then dash to Paddington Station, probably wondering why it takes three years’ training to do this job, and head west.
When he finally arrived we could sit down to plan the presentation the following day and produce “transparencies” for the overhead projector – no PowerPoint to play with then.
I got very little sleep on Budget nights but I have fond memories of the excitement when our man arrived at the door with the first news of which particular devils were in the detail of that year’s Budget.
I suppose only a tax adviser could possibly be nostalgic about the Budgets of yesteryear!
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