BORING is good - and Chancellor Gordon Brown's budget was boring all right.

That was the broad reaction today from regional businesses in York and North and East Yorkshire.

Penny Hemming, director of the Yorkshire CBI, said: "I called for a boring budget and thankfully that's what we got."

But she warned that York and North Yorkshire, a region which tended to have more small businesses than any other in the country, would be especially hard hit by closure of the loophole which allowed small businesses which had incorporate themselves to be free of tax on the first £10,000 of income.

"It's true that a lot more people took advantage of the ruling than he anticipated, and where Chancellors see loopholes they tend to close them.

"It was unwelcome, but not a surprise."

Simon Williams, chairman of the 650-member York branch of the Federation of Small Businesses and regional secretary for North Yorkshire, echoed her sentiment, describing the budget as "a bit of nothing".

He was pleased that the VAT threshold for turnover had risen from £56,000 to £58,000, but apart from that, there was little that leaped out as a boost to small businesses. "But in a way no news is good news," he said.

Len Cruddas, chief executive of the York and North Yorkshire Chamber of Commerce, said: "It wasn't a bad budget - as you would expect from the last budget before the election. It offered little, but at least it maintained the macro-economic stability of a "nice, boring economy".

But Chancellor Gordon Brown's commitment to make the UK the best country for research and the sciences in the coming years was positively welcomed by the University of York.

Simon Newton, assistant regional director for external relations at the university, said: "Mr Brown has already announced that he has set aside £3 billion over 2005 and 2006 to improve scientific research.

"That is particularly good news given that we are a key partner with the City of York Council in Science City where on top of the 9,000 jobs created, we are committed to generating another 18,000 by 2021.

"We believe that the present expansion of the university into the new campus and the expansion of our science and technology departments are fundamental to achieving that and this sort of support can only help."

The Chancellor's endorsement of the Lyons Review, which recommends moving 20,000 civil service jobs out of the south-east and into the regions, was applauded by Imelda Havers, chief executive of york-england.com, the extended inward investment board, which tries to attract jobs to York and a large part of North Yorkshire.

She said: "It has got to be a good thing for us. We are in a very strong position to attract those jobs, building on the fact that there are Government departments which have set up here already.

"The Gershon Review, which will report this spring on civil service efficiencies, should go hand-in-hand with these plans."

More critical was Kevin Hollinrake, director of Hunters estate agents in York. He accused the Chancellor as "not being as bountiful as he was making out to be" by freezing stamp duty and increasing inheritance tax threshold by three per cent to £263,000.

"The fact is that the housing market has risen in price by between ten and 15 per cent both last year and this year, depending on where you are in the country. It therefore means that his receipts will rise. But I don't think he will have a profound effect on the market."

Stuart Taylor, business development director for Potter Group Limited, the road and rail logistics group with a base in Selby, said that the extra sulphur fuel tax was bound to affect road vehicle users, particularly heavy goods vehicles "and there is a danger that these extra costs could be passed on all the way down the chain to the consumer".

A spokesman for Coors, which owns Tadcaster Brewery, said: "We are disappointed that the Chancellor has decided to increase beer duty despite the Government's own figures that show that past freezes in beer duty actually increased the Treasury's revenue from beer sales.

"When duty was frozen in the Budgets of 1996, 2001 and 2002, tax revenues rose on average by 5.2 per cent. When beer duty was increased in the Budgets of 1995, 1997 and 1998, Treasury revenues only rose by an average of two per cent".

Updated: 12:08 Thursday, March 18, 2004