Pat McFadden says ministers have discovered new information about government’s spending liabilities since taking officeGood morning. After three weeks as chancellor, Rachel Reeves will today present the most significant policy announcement of the new Labour government so far. Think of it as an inverse budget. Budgets are all about how the government intends to spend money. According to the extensive briefing about this statement, instead it will mostly focus on what the government won’t be spending, on projects it is cancelling because supposedly the last administration kept them on the books without having the cash to fund or finish them.In policy terms, it will tell us more about what the government wants to prioritise. (Reeves will include recommendations from public sector pay review bodies in her list of Tory “spending black hole” measures. She is expected to accept the recommendations for above-inflation pay increases which the Tories had not approved.)What we have discovered since taking office a few weeks ago is things were even worse than we thought and the previous government was certainly guilty of running away from the situation. Let me give you a couple of examples.We were told, for example, that the Rwanda scheme was going to cost £400m. We have now found that it is £700m, with billions more to be spent in future.One of the very revealing things that has happened since the election is that the now shadow chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, has admitted to his shadow cabinet that that £17bn pounds of unfunded tax cut promises at the heart of the Tory manifesto could not have been implemented this year. That is not what they were seeing during the election. It is a profoundly revealing admission. And it shows that they knew more about the public spending situation during the election than they were telling the election. Continue reading…
Source link : https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2024/jul/29/rachel-reeves-statement-treasury-taxes-public-finances-uk-politics-latest
Author : Andrew Sparrow
Publish date : 2024-07-29 10:22:23
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