EAST Lancashire financial experts were unimpressed after Alistair Darling’s pre-Budget report yesterday.

As expected, the Chancellor enforced a clobbering 50 per cent tax on bank bonuses worth more than £25,000.

Mr Darling said a 0.5 per cent rise in national insurance from April 2011 would raise around £3billion a year for Treasury.

However, Annie Wilson, senior tax manager at Blackburn-based Pierce Group, said that it would punish employers.

She said: “It is very disappointing that the rates of national insurance contrib-utions are to increase over and above the increases already announced last year.

“Many in the business community will see this as a tax on employment, at a time when many organisations may just about be looking to take on new members of staff.”

Martin Wright, chief executive of the North West Aerospace Alliance, based in Nelson, blasted the pre-Budget report as a “damp squib”.

He said East Lancashire’s world-leading aerospace sector had been snubbed by the speech and “interesting” ideas, such as measures to get 10,000 graduates into industry, lacked detail.

He added: “While acknowledging aerospace as a key industry, the Government mainly kept to support in words only.

“There were no big shocks or brave decisions so a general election must be due.”

For non-businesses, two of the most eye-catching proposals were the scrapping of stamp duty holiday on certain properties from next month, and putting VAT back up to 17.5 per cent from January 1.

Jane Parry, a tax partner at Blackburn and Burnley chartered accountants PM+M, said she expected a boost in high street sales on the back of the VAT rise.

She said: “Anybody planning a big spending spree ought to do so before January 1 to avoid spending more than they would have done just a few days earlier.”