Jeremy Hunt to set out next budget on 22 November
Jeremy Hunt will set out his next budget on 22 November, the chancellor has told MPs.
He has commissioned an Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) forecast, which will be presented alongside the Autumn Statement.
The lack of an OBR forecast at his predecessor’s mini-budget last September spooked the markets and sparked a huge economic fallout, pushing up government borrowing costs and putting certain pension funds on the brink of collapse.
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Mr Hunt was drafted in to clean up the mess and retained his position after ex-prime minister Liz Truss resigned just 44 days into her premiership.
Since then he and Rishi Sunak have made it their mission to halve inflation, amid a series of Bank of England interest rate rises.
Speaking in the Commons, Mr Hunt insisted progress was being made as inflation is nearly 40% below its 11% peak.
Confirming the new budget date, he said: “On Friday, the Office for National Statistics published an update to the UK’s GDP growth figures which shows the UK economy was 0.6% larger than pre-pandemic levels by the fourth quarter of 2021.
“It means our economy had the fastest recovery from the pandemic of any large European economy, thanks to decisions such as furlough that protected millions of jobs.
“For that growth to continue we now need to halve inflation, which I am pleased to report is now nearly 40% below its 11% peak. I can also tell the House I will deliver the Autumn Statement on November 22.”
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Mr Hunt is likely to face pressure from Tory MPs to commit to tax cuts ahead of the next general election, as the party languishes behind Labour in the polls.
The Spring budget in March – which handed a tax cut to wealthy pensioners – led to warnings that people will be hit with the biggest fall in living standards since records began.
Mr Hunt, pressed over lowering taxes, told Treasury questions that “as a Conservative I want to bring taxes down as soon as we can afford to do so”.
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The Treasury and new Defence Secretary Grant Shapps are also likely to come under pressure over defence funding.
Mr Shapps’s predecessor, Ben Wallace, who stepped down from the role last week, had long made clear his desire for greater spending on the UK armed forces.
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Safeguarding minister Jess Phillips has told Sky News that councils that believe they don’t have a problem with grooming gangs are “idiots” – as she denied Elon Musk influenced the decision to have a national inquiry on the subject.
The minister said: “I don’t follow Elon Musk’s advice on anything although maybe I too would like to go to Mars.
“Before anyone even knew Elon Musk’s name, I was working with the victims of these crimes.”
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Elon Musk. Pic: Reuters
Mr Musk had called Ms Phillips a “rape genocide apologist” in one of a series of inflammatory posts on X in January and said she should go to jail.
Mr Musk, then a close aide of US President Donald Trump, sparked a significant political row with his comments – with the Conservative Party and Reform UK calling for a new public inquiry into grooming gangs.
At the time, Ms Phillips denied a request for a public inquiry into child sexual exploitation in Oldham on the basis that it should be done at a local level.
But the government announced a national inquiry after Baroness Casey’s rapid audit on grooming gangs, which was published in June.
Asked if she thought there was, in the words of Baroness Casey, “over representation” among suspects of Asian and Pakistani men, Ms Phillips replied: “My own experience of working with many young girls in my area – yes there is a problem. There are different parts of the country where the problem will look different, organised crime has different flavours across the board.
“But I have to look at the evidence… and the government reacts to the evidence.”
Ms Phillips also said the home secretary has written to all police chiefs telling them that data collection on ethnicity “has to change”, to ensure that it is always recorded, promising “we will legislate to change the way this [collection] is done if necessary”.
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Operation Beaconport has since been established, led by the National Crime Agency (NCA), and will be reviewing more than 1,200 closed cases of child sexual exploitation.
Ms Phillips revealed that at least “five, six” councils have asked to be a part of the national review – and denounced councils that believed they don’t have a problem with grooming gangs as “idiots”.
“I don’t want [the inquiry] just to go over places that have already had inquiries and find things the Casey had already identified,” she said.
She confirmed that a shortlist for a chair has been drawn up, and she expects the inquiry to be finished within three years.
Ms Phillips’s comments come after she announced £426,000 of funding to roll out artificial intelligence tools across all 43 police forces in England and Wales to speed up investigations into modern slavery, child sex abuse and county lines gangs.
Some 13 forces have access to the AI apps, which the Home Office says have saved more than £20m and 16,000 hours for investigators.
The apps can translate large amounts of text in foreign languages and analyse data to find relationships between suspects.
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