Thursday newspaper round-up: Budget, PwC, Asda, Barclays

Small businesses were big winners in the Budget, with a host of tax cuts and other support. Emma Jones, founder of Enterprise Nation, a small business adviser, described it as “incredible”. “There’s reduced corporate tax, tax relief for sharing economy and no business rates for 600,000 small businesses.” The Federation of Small Businesses also said the measures were welcome. – Financial Times

Professional services firm PwC has become the first business to take up space in a vast new redevelopment of Birmingham city centre, three years before the first building is finished. The company will move in to Paradise Birmingham in early 2019, having agreed to relocate its 1,400 members of staff in Birmingham to a brand new office. – Telegraph

Hurt your friends and hug your enemies: George Osborne’s Budget strategy at least had the virtue of originality. Those multinationals and business lobbyists who have been so supportive of the Government’s anti-Brexit campaign must be ruing the day they signed their names on the dotted line, staking their reputations on such a divisive cause. They have been rewarded with a major tax assault by an ungrateful Chancellor, with the UK’s largest firms set to lose heavily from a series of radical changes that will redefine in arbitrary and often incoherent ways how companies are levied. The cost will be at least £9bn over the next few years, inflicting profound damage on Britain’s competitiveness. – Telegraph

Retailers have warned that an overhaul of the controversial business rates system that will lead to a £7bn tax cut for small businesses is not enough to help high streets across the country. George Osborne announced in the budget that 600,000 small businesses would no longer have to pay business rates and that he would change how the levy was calculated for those who still had to pay it. – Guardian

Asda has confirmed plans to cut up to 500 jobs in stores and 250 at its head office in Leeds as the retailer battles to protect profits while sales slide. The supermarket chain is to close staff canteens in all stores and axe some shopfloor services such as photo processing and pizza-making as part of a turnaround plan called Project Renewal. – Guardian

Barclays is being sued by the former boss of Tullett Prebon over accusations that the bank failed to transfer hundreds of thousands pounds of the financier’s money into his investment fund so that he missed out on a more than doubling in its value. Terry Smith, founder and chief executive of Fundsmith, which manages more than £5 billion on behalf of himself and other investors, is claiming nearly £220,000 from Barclays for negligence after it took nearly three years to transfer money from a company controlled by him to buy additional units in the fund. – The Times