Margareta Pagano: The Budget will have buoyed businesses

The Coalition must be wishing the election was happening this May after George Osborne dealt himself a full house with his smartest Budget to date.

The Chancellor's fifth Budget was a cleverly crafted package that should help working men and women as much as business. It featured the bingo tax, the penny off a pint, big incentives for pensioners and savers, and the boost to manufacturing industry. Unless you had a serious vice, there was something for everyone.

By far the most far-reaching of Osborne's reforms were the £7bn package to help manufacturers cut their energy costs to accelerate the recovery and an imaginative, long overdue shake-up of the tax system regulating the savings market.

The boosts for business were across the board and designed to tip the balance back to a manufacturing-led recovery. The Chancellor even dared to cheer up his LibDem colleagues by saying he was setting out a "modern industrial strategy" without hissing from his Tory colleagues and without actually picking out any winners.

Instead, and more pertinently, the energy cuts were well-targeted to be of most help to UK manufacturers, which are based mainly in the Midlands and North – slashing thousands of pounds off their energy bills, possibly up to £50,000 a year for many companies and £15 off the household bill.

As energy costs are by far the biggest bugbear for any business, this was music to the CBI's ears and should send Ed Miliband back to the drawing board for new ways to taunt the Chancellor. Who knows, the beer-drinking, bingo-playing Northern working man and woman, either in employment or looking for work, might even be tempted by Osborne's land grab for their votes. Smart stuff.

One of the more elegant bits of the Budget was the emphasis on support for the regions; apart from helping fill potholes in Northampton, there was the £1bn Cambridge Cities Deal, an enterprise zone for Northern Ireland, new housing in Ebbsfleet, Barking and Brentwood, and a tax freeze for Scottish whisky-makers and West Country cider-makers.

As well as freezing the price of the carbon floor to hold down energy costs, there's the doubling of the annual 100 per cent tax allowance for capital investment to £500,000 that should help larger companies plan for new plant and machinery for the longer term.

All companies that export will benefit also from the decision to double the amount of Government credit to £3bn to back up their overseas sales, while the interest rate they are charged on that credit has been cut by a third. There's also more support for apprenticeships, with backing for another 100,000 places, but everyone – government, schools and parents – needs to work harder at publicising these schemes as there are too many anomalies.

As expected, the long-term target for corporation tax – down to 21 per cent this April and 20 per cent next year – didn't change, but there was finally more help cutting national insurance: a £2,000 exemption for all businesses and charities, as well as for employees under 21.