There are reports that the bingo industry will see the amount of tax it pays reduced from 20 per cent to 15 per cent in a bid to woo the game’s legions of female fans. Carlisle MP John Stevenson and Workington MP Sir Tony Cunningham have both been pushing for that.
The Sun newspaper reckons it will be halved to 10 per cent.

While I take a brief break to boost my caffeine level, I'll leave you with a question: If you were Chancellor, what one thing would you do to improve peoples' lives?

Shadow chief secretary to the Treasury Chris Leslie responded: “Once again the Tories are desperately trying to tell people facing a cost-of-living crisis that they’ve never had it so good.
“In fact the latest figures show that under David Cameron real wages have fallen by over £1,600 a year.
“This analysis is totally out of touch with the real world. It ignores the one third of full-time workers who have not stayed in continuous employment and the 27% who work part-time.”

A childcare tax break for working parents will be more generous than expected and expanded to older children more quickly, it's already been announced.
The new scheme – due to come into force from autumn 2015 – will be worth up to £2,000 per child, compared with the £1,200 originally proposed.
It will apply to all children under 12 within its first year of operation rather than the seven-year programme envisaged when it was first announced by George Osborne a year ago.
Around 1.9 million families could benefit, twice as many as under the present voucher scheme which is only available where adopted by an employer.
The policy has, though, faced criticism for excluding couples where one parent does not work and being available to high-earning households with a joint income of up to £300,000.
In a bid to counter criticism of a boost to better-off families, there will be a £50 million boost for nurseries looking after the most deprived three and four-year-olds.
And in what children’s charity Barnardo’s hailed as a “double victory” for the poorest families, it was confirmed that families claiming Universal Credit will have 85 per cent of childcare costs met, up from 70 per cent.

Locally, Graham Poles, tax partner at chartered accountant Armstrong Watson in Carlisle, believes the prospect of a General Election in 2015 will prompt the Chancellor to act.
“This is the last budget that can have a significant effect on the economy before the 2015 General Election, so the Government will be looking to leave some impact on individuals," he said.

There's to be a £6 billion extension of the Government’s Help to Buy scheme, it is reported.
Britain needs to “get building” to ensure working families currently priced out of the property market are finally able to buy a home of their own, said Mr Osborne.
He added that a major housebuilding expansion would help to secure the recovery as the economy continued to gather strength.
Extending the equity loan element of Help to Buy, covering new-build homes, for an additional four years to 2020, would provide support for the construction of 120,000 more properties.
But shadow chancellor Ed Balls warned that unless action was taken to curb the mortgage guarantee element of Help to Buy, it would simply serve to stoke property prices.
He said that taxpayer support for home-buyers should be restricted to properties worth less than £400,000 rather than £600,000 at present.

Ahead of the Budget, the Chancellor has announced the creation of a new 'garden city'. In the south of England.

It's not all about a new coin. We've been speaking to a few local people ahead of the Budget statement.

Bizarrely, mention of the threepenny bit has suddenly prompted office chatter about the good old days, 'proper' money and warm school milk...

So, all of that out of the way, we might as well start with details about the newly-revealed 12-sided one pound coin, based on something called the threepenny bit. The new coin is said to be the hardest in the world to fake.

Feel free to dip in and have your say. It'd be great to hear what you'd like to see in today's announcement and what you think post-statement.

We'll be bringing you a mix of local and national stuff ahead of Chancellor George Osborne getting to his feet in the Houses of Parliament and making his statement at 12.30pm.