Digital minister Matt Warman warned cost-of-living crisis will hit higher up the income scales
(Picture: PA Archive)The Tory leadership contest has been “disruptive” to the government of Britain in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis, a minister admitted on Tuesday.
Digital minister Matt Warman made clear he would have liked the selection of a new Prime Minister to have been done more quickly.
He also warned that the cost-of-living crisis was going to hit people “further up those income scales” so a new package of support should include an element of “universality”.
Hustings will be held in London on Wednesday, with many of some 160,000 Tory members eligible to vote believed to have already cast their ballot.
But Tory party chiefs have come under fire for holding the contest throughout the summer.
Digital minister Matt Warman told Times Radio: “It was warned by many people, myself included, that this process would be disruptive at a time that it was going to be least helpful for it to be so.
“I do think that warning has come to pass.
“I do think, however, the Government of course has been getting on with a huge amount of work in the meantime while some decisions are rightly left for the future Prime Minister.
“For what it’s worth, I have had a large number of constituents saying why could you not have done this faster and I’m hugely sympathetic to what sounds like a common sense view.
“But we are now less than a week away from the new Prime Minister being installed ..that seems like light at the end of the tunnel.”
The new Prime Minister’s first priority will almost certainly be drawing up a new package of support for families hit by sky-rocketing energy bills, with the average set to jump from £1,971 to £3,549 in October, the level of the price cap.
Ms Truss has pledged tax cuts, including reversing the National Insurance Contributions hike, as well as targeted support for the less-well-off, with Mr Sunak also promising the latter and temporarily axing VAT from energy bills.
Mr Warman, who is backing Mr Sunak, said a “tenet” of the new support programme should be help for the most vulnerable.
“But it also needs to acknowledge, as the previous package did, that we do have a crisis that is going to push further up those income scales than we might previously have thought and that is why there is a degree of universality in the previous package and that is why I think we will need to continue some of that as well,” he added.
Ms Truss’s camp says she will not finalise her plans for cost-of-living support before receiving the “full support and advice” only available to the Government of the day.
Meanwhile, leading Thatcherite Sir John Redwood, who is tipped to get a ministerial job if Ms Truss wins, backed her reported plans to approve a series of oil and gas drilling licences in the North Sea as part of moves to boost the UK’s energy security.
He tweeted: “Good news that Liz Truss plans to get more gas out of the North Sea to ease the squeeze. More permits and some changes of rules can boost output.The answer to an energy shortage and sky high prices is more supply.”
However, Ms Truss has come underfire from both Mr Sunak’s team and Labour for pulling out of an indepth interview with the BBC’s Nick Robinson on Tuesday evening.
The ballot of Conservative Party members closes on Friday, with the winner to be announced next Monday and the new Prime Minister due to officially take office on Tuesday.
Outgoing Prime Minister Boris Johnson was on a broadband visit to Dorset on Tuesday in what was being dubbed part of his “farewell tour” and Chancellor Nadhim Zahawi, who is also expected to lose his job, was in the US for talks on the economic crisis.
Mr Johnson hailed the expansion of gigabit-speed broadband as he sought to emphasise his achievements as Prime Minister during his final week in office.
Work in Dorset is starting the first major contract under the Government’s Project Gigabit, the £5 billion programme to roll out more reliable broadband to hard-to-reach areas.
New data from the ThinkBroadband website will show gigabit broadband is now available to 70 per cent of UK homes and businesses, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport.
Coverage was just seven per cent in 2019, meaning nearly 20 million premises have been connected since then, according to the department. The Government aims to reach 85 per cent coverage by 2025.
Mr Johnson said he was “proud” of the expansion and that it demonstrated “levelling up”.
During his Dorset visit he was seeing preparations for the connection of 7,000 rural premises across the region by 2025 under a £6 million contract awarded by the Government to Wessex Internet.
