Chancellor Jeremy Hunt is expected to set out billions of pounds of savings and U-turns on the Government’s disastrous ‘mini Budget’ after announcing an emergency statement on Monday.
Mr Hunt, who was appointed on Friday after predecessor Kwasi Kwarteng was sacked by Prime Minister Liz Truss, had been due to speak on the Government’s medium-term fiscal plan on October 31 but will announce some measures today to “ensure sustainable public finances underpin economic growth”, the Treasury said.
After saying at the weekend that Mr Kwarteng’s plan had gone “too far, too fast”, Mr Hunt has met the Prime Minister over the weekend, as well as the Governor of the Bank of England and the Head of the Debt Management Office to brief them on the plans.
Read more: NatWest to close 43 branches
The move comes as Ms Truss faces huge unrest within her own party, with three MPs publicly calling for her to stand down only weeks into her Premiership.
After Mr Kwarteng’s original fiscal plan sent the markets into meltdown, the Government U-turned on plans for a tax cut for high earners, while on Friday Ms Truss said she would not go ahead with plans to reduce corporation tax.
It is expected that Mr Hunt will reduce other tax cutting measures today, after indicating over the weekend that Government departments would have to find more spending cuts.
The scramble to calm the markets comes after a new poll, first published in the Guardian, predicted a landslide for Labour and wipe-out for the Tories. The poll, by Opinium for the Trades Union Congress and using the MRP method to estimate constituency-level results, put Labour on 411 seats compared to the Tories on 137.
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has called on the Prime Minister to appear before the Commons today, saying she is “in office but not in power”.
READ NEXT:
* Royal Mail to cut 10,000 jobs
