With the Conservative Party leadership election hotting up, practice owner Carrie Stokes joins the podcast team to discuss whether the UK’s business community value candidates’ tax cut pledges or if stability and clarity win the day.

With leadership election fever in the air, there’s been lots of talk about cuts to NI, fuel duty, VAT, corporate tax and many others, fuelled by calls to be bold by business bodies and institutes.

To meet the successful candidate’s pledges, another emergency budget may be looming, so the podcast participants discuss whether tax cut plans resonate with businesses battered by the past two years, or whether they would prefer a period of calm.

Carrie Stokes, director of Spotlight Accounting in Shropshire, joins stand-in host Tom Herbert and AccountingWEB’s editor at large John Stokdyk to discuss this and plenty more besides.

Stokes recently spoke at a roundtable event organised by former home secretary Lord Blunkett to raise the lack of public awareness that the term ‘accountant’ is not a protected name - and offers her take on a much-debated issue in the profession.

The pod panel also tackle the generational divide in accountancy, look at why firms should be doing more than just dishing out tax returns, and assess the software vendors’ roll of the dice on technology to help landlords with the MTD ITSA transition.

Links to resources discussed in the show:

Do businesses care about tax cuts?

Generational divide

Landlord technology

Find out more about Spotlight Accounting

Podcast team: Tom Herbert, Carrie Stokes, John Stokdyk

Podcast producer: Will Cole