Chancellor Jeremy Hunt will deliver his autumn statement at around 12.30pm, after prime minister’s questions
Harriet Baldwin, the Conservative MP who chairs the Commons Treasury committee, told GB News that she thinks Jeremy Hunt has “headroom” of around £20bn to use for tax cuts. She said:
If you look at the numbers that the Office for Budget Responsibility has been publishing each month, we think that there’s probably about £20bn of headroom and that’s because you and I, through those frozen tax levels and also businesses, we have actually ended up paying more tax this year than was planned in last year’s budget.
So I think that today gives the chancellor an opportunity to give some of that back to the hard-working businesses and people of this country so that we can grow the economy more rapidly next year.
The “headroom” you’re hearing about – the one to allow for tax cuts – is almost entirely fictional.
It’ll be predicated on real-terms cuts to services in the next parliamentary term that no-one thinks are deliverable, at all.
It’s a stunt.
We’re back with Chris Whitty at the Covid inquiry, and still in mid-March 2020. Even then with 500+ UK cases, Whitty says, many in No 10 still did not realise how fast things would move: “This was a lot of people really not getting what exponential growth was going to mean.”
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