Everyone will be paying “a bit more tax” after the autumn budget, the chancellor has said, as he asked everyone to make sacrifices.
Warning of severe cuts to public services, Jeremy Hunt said there would be “very difficult decisions” made but claimed his plan would show the way through “difficult times”.
Hunt faces his biggest test as chancellor on Thursday, following the chaos of Liz Truss’s mini-budget. The Resolution Foundation estimated on Saturday that “Trussonomics” had cost Britain about £30bn.
He told Sky News: “Well, we are all going to be paying a bit more tax, I’m afraid … but it is not just going to be bad news.
“I think what people recognise is that if you want to give people confidence about the future, you have to be honest about the present and you have to have a plan and this will be a plan to help bring down inflation, help control high energy prices and also get our way back towards growing healthily, which is what we need so much.”
Hunt said he hoped to make the coming recession, forecast to be the longest in history, “shallower and quicker”.
“I think it is fair to say this is going to be the first rabbit-free budget for very many years,” he said in an interview with the Sunday Times. “I’m Scrooge who’s going to do things that make sure Christmas is never cancelled,” he said.
Hunt said the government would crack down on an “outrageous” waste of public money, mitigate the “tragedy” of Trussonomics and deliver certainty to families and businesses.
Hunt is thought to be looking to cut household energy bills support from £60bn to just £20bn from April, and his plans could include an extended freeze on income tax and national insurance thresholds.
The shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, called on him to avoid putting the entire burden on “ordinary working people who are already struggling”.
“Public services are already on their knees,” Reeves told Sky News’s Sophy Ridge on Sunday programme. “Seven million people are waiting for an NHS operation or support … I don’t believe that austerity 2.0 after the austerity that we’ve gone through for the last 12 years is the right approach.”
In an interview with the Sunday Times, Hunt said Britain was a “compassionate country” and that the richest would also have to pay their fair share. “People with the broadest shoulders will bear the heaviest burden,” he said.
Austerity during the 2010s targeted the welfare budget, stripping £37bn from benefits and introducing high-profile social security cuts such as the two-child limit and the benefit cap. England’s largest councils have said that any more cuts to their budgets would be “worse than austerity” and lead to devastating reductions to local services.
The chancellor is understood to be looking at a package of support to shield the most vulnerable, including pensioners and those on benefits, from April, according to the Sunday Times.
The chief secretary to the Treasury, John Glen, said the government could be “turbo-charging” plans to digitise public services.
Writing in the Sunday Telegraph, he said: “To continue delivering the things people care about in the face of inflationary pressures, without making the problem worse through extra spending across the board, we have to take difficult decisions and make government more efficient. That means rooting out waste.
“It’s outrageous that public money – your money – is being soaked up by the system when it could be channelled towards areas that really need it.”
Simon Clarke, who was secretary of state for levelling up, housing and communities under Liz Truss, has called for the balance of the budget to be met by spending cuts rather than by raising taxes.
Clarke told Sky News: “I would urge Jeremy to make sure we do as much as we can from spending reductions as opposed to tax increases, noting tax is at a very high level, and faced with the recession risk.”
