Rishi Sunak has hinted at help at next week’s mini-budget for households struggling with the cost of living crisis, telling Tory activists: “Where we can make a difference… I’m always going to do that.”
The chancellor is coming under intense pressure ahead of Wednesday’s spring statement to extend his earlier £9bn package of support for energy bills, which has been dwarfed by the scale of inflation in bills for heating, petrol and food facing consumers in the coming months.
But speaking to the Consrervative conference in Blackpool, he gave no pledge to deliver more help and no details of how he might help households with bills.
And he admitted that the global inflationary pressures – including the Ukraine war – which are driving up prices in the UK were “out of my control”.
The chancellor said he had “enormous sympathy for what people are going through” as a result of rocketing prices, but added: “I can’t solve every problem. No government can solve every problem, particularly when you’re grappling with global inflationary forces. They are somewhat out of my control.
“But – as we saw a month or so ago when we announced a significant intervention to help people meet some of the additional costs of energy bills -here we can make a difference, of course I can, I am always going to do that and we’ve done it over the last two years.”
Despite raising taxes to their highest level since the 1960s, Mr Sunak insisted that he was a “low-tax Conservative” and insisted that his “priority going forward” is cutting taxes.
He cited his hero Margaret Thatcher, who he said had delayed the introduction of tax cuts until after she had dealt with the deficit which she inherited in 1979.
“I did not get into this job to put up people’s taxes,” said Mr Sunak. But I also take really seriously my responsibility to you, our kids and to the nation’s finances, and making sure that we fix the problems that coronavirus caused where our borrowing went up to levels that we haven’t seen since World War Two, and our debt was forecast to just grow and grow and grow.”
Mrs Thatcher showed that “you have to tackle the deficit first and once you’ve done that, then you can start the work of cutting taxes, and you could do that only if you were being careful with public spending” he said.
“That’s what I’ve had to do, and it was not easy, but I do believe it was the right thing to do
“But I made this very clear at the Budget, that is done. We’ve made the difficult decisions. My priority going forward is to cut taxes.”
Changes to the Universal Credit taper rate worth £1,000 a year to low-income households were “just the start”, he said.
My plan over the course of this parliament is to keep cutting taxes, get the tax burden down. That’s what we believe.
“We want people to keep more of their own money, we want to grow the economy. But I want to do that in a responsible and sustainable way. But I now believe we are on the road to doing that and I’m confident we will get there.”
