Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has reiterated the government’s commitments to make benefits sanctions harsher – while also committing to raising the national living wage above £11 an hour.
In his speech to the Conservative Party conference in Manchester, the senior minister also revealed a plan to save £1bn by freezing the expansion of the Civil Service and reducing the level of staffing to pre-pandemic levels.
Mr Hunt‘s intervention comes around six weeks ahead of his autumn financial statement.
While not as tumultuous as his predecessor’s party conference speech last year – where Kwasi Kwarteng had to admit his party was U-turning on a key part of his mini-budget – Mr Hunt is still under pressure.
Many voices within the Conservative Party want him to cut taxes, including cabinet ministers.
Speaking to Sky News’ Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips, Levelling Up Secretary Michael Gove said he would “like to see the tax burden reduced by the next election”.
Mr Hunt on Saturday said the government was “not in a position to talk about tax cuts at all” – but all bets are off when it comes to party conferences.
The government has been eyeing welfare changes as a way to cut down on spending, and also encouraging people back into work in a bid to grow the economy.
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Image: The chancellor will address conference today
Mr Hunt told the party membership in Manchester: “Since the pandemic, things have been going in the wrong direction. Whilst companies struggle to find workers, around 100,000 people are leaving the labour force every year for a life on benefits.
“As part of that, we will look at the way the sanctions regime works. It is a fundamental matter of fairness. Those who won’t even look for work do not deserve the same benefits as people trying hard to do the right thing.”
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3:49
Government divided over tax
The chancellor also announced that Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride would look again at the benefit sanctions regime to make it harder for people to claim benefits while refusing to take active steps to move into work.
And a spokesman confirmed the proposals would be set out in the upcoming autumn statement.
Speaking last month, Mr Stride said that he was consulting on changes to the Work Capability Assessment, the test aimed at establishing how much a disability or illness limits someone’s ability to work.
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1:11
Tories tight-lipped on tax cut prospects
Mr Hunt also confirmed a new policy that could seek people looking for new jobs, with a freeze on the number of civil servants.
“We have the best civil servants in the world – and they saved many lives in the pandemic by working night and day,” said the chancellor. “But even after that pandemic is over, we still have 66,000 more civil servants than before.
“New policies should not always mean new people. So today I’m freezing the expansion of the civil service and putting in place a plan to reduce its numbers to pre-pandemic levels. This will save £1bn next year.
“And I won’t lift the freeze until we have a proper plan not just for the civil service but for all public sector productivity improvements.”
But the move was criticised by the Public and Commercial Services union general secretary, Mark Serwotka, who said: “Thirty seconds after praising civil servants for their work during the pandemic, Jeremy Hunt announced a freeze on recruitment.
“Shrinking an already-overstretched and under-resourced civil service will inevitably result in cuts to vital services that people depend on.”
He added: “As usual, a Conservative government is seeking to blame working people for the incompetence of their own ministers.”
Raising the living wage
On the national living wage, Mr Hunt said the government was going to accept the Low Pay Commission’s recommendation to raise the baseline to at least £11 an hour from April 2024.
Resisting sizeable pay increases in the public sector has been part of the government’s strategy to keep spending and inflation under control.
Mr Hunt said: “Since we introduced the national living wage, nearly two million people have been lifted from absolute poverty. That’s the Conservative way of improving the lives of working people. Boosting pay, cutting tax.”
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Ahead of the speech, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, said: “I’ve always made it clear that hard work should pay, and today we’re providing a well-earned pay rise to millions of people across the country.
“This means a full-time worker will receive an increase of over £1,000 to their annual earnings, putting more money in the pockets of the lowest paid.
“We’re sending a clear message to hard-working taxpayers across the country; our Conservative government is on your side”.
Hunt struggles to be heard above tax cut hollers
The chancellor’s speech usually sets the agenda at conference, but today, Jeremy Hut was playing catch up.
He’s been struggling to be heard among the clamour within his party for tax cuts.
Today he attempted to regain control of the narrative – chiefly that bringing down inflation is the “best tax cut” the government can give to the public.
“We’re getting there,” he said. “The plan is working and now we must see it through – just as Margaret Thatcher did many years ago.”
It was a rebuke to members of his own party as much as it was to Labour, as just hours earlier, former prime minister Liz Truss was leading the charge on the issue.
Speaking at a packed fringe event, she said that tax cuts were the key to making the Tories “the party of business again” and “unlocking economic growth”.
And she urged the government to cut corporation tax to 19% at the autumn statement.
But during his appearance, the chancellor warned that while it was easy to support a high growth and low tax economy, it was “harder to make it happen”.
Labour’s shadow work and pensions secretary, Liz Kendall, said her party “believes in responsibility – that those who can work, should look for work and take jobs when they are offered”.
But she said the government also had “a responsibility to create real opportunities and not write people off”, adding: “This is something the Tories have utterly failed to deliver.
“We now have record numbers of people out of work due to long-term sickness, which is costing taxpayers an extra £15bn a year just since the pandemic.
“[Labour] will tackle the root causes of economic inactivity by driving down NHS waiting lists, reforming social security, making work pay, and supporting people into good jobs across every part of the country. Real opportunities matched by the responsibility to take them up – because that’s what fairness is all about.”
Sky News’ deputy political editor Sam Coates and Politico’s Jack Blanchard are back with their guide to the election day ahead.
This is day 40 of the campaign. Jack and Sam look at where the parties are now as the election approaches, with Labour’s attack ads and the Conservatives pushing back against Reform UK.
Plus, the reaction to the first round of the French elections which has seen the far-right make significant headway.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) says there’s a conspiracy of silence at this election – that all of the major political parties aren’t being honest enough about their fiscal plans.
And it has a point. Most obviously (and this is the main thing the IFS is complaining about) none of the major manifestos – from Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Conservative parties – have been clear about how they will fill an impending black hole in the government’s spending plans.
No need to go into all the gritty details, but the overarching point is that all government spending plans include some broad assumptions about how much spending (and for that matter, taxes and economic growth) will grow in the coming years. Economists call this the “baseline”.
But there’s a problem with this baseline – it assumes quite a slow increase in overall government spending in the next four years, an average of about 1 per cent a year after accounting for inflation. Which doesn’t sound too bad – except that we all know from experience that NHS spending always grows more quickly than that, and that 1% needs to accommodate all sorts of other promises, like increasing schools and defence spending and so on.
Image: NHS spending grows more quickly than the ‘baseline’
If all those bits of government are going to consume quite a lot of that extra money (far more than a 1% increase, certainly) then other bits of government won’t get as much. In fact, the IFS reckons those other bits of government – from the Home Office to the legal system – will face annual cuts of 3.5 per cent. In other words, it’s austerity all over again.
But here’s the genius thing (for the politicians, at least). While they have to set a baseline, to make all their other sums add up, the dysfunctional nature of the way government sets its spending budgets means it only has to fill in the small print about which department gets what when it does a spending review. And that spending review isn’t due until after the election.
The upshot is all the parties can pretend they’ve signed up to the baseline even when it’s patently obvious that more money will be needed for those unprotected departments (or else it’s a return to austerity).
So yes, the IFS is right: the numbers in each manifesto, including Labour’s, are massively overshadowed by this other bigger conspiracy of silence.
But I would argue that actually the conspiracy of silence goes even deeper. Because it’s not just fiscal baselines we’re not talking about enough. Consider five other issues none of the major parties are confronting (when I say major parties, in this case I’m talking about the Conservative, Labour and Lib Dem manifestos – to some extent the Green and Reform manifestos are somewhat less guilty of these particular sins, even if they commit others).
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First, for all their promises not to raise any of the major tax rates (something Labour, the Conservatives and Lib Dems have all committed to) the reality is taxes are going up. We will all be paying more in taxes by the end of the parliament compared with today.
Indeed, we’ll all be paying more income tax. Except that we’ll be paying more of it because we’ll be paying tax on more of our income – that’s the inexorable logic of freezing the thresholds at which you start paying certain rates of tax (which is what this government has done – and none of the other parties say they’ll reverse).
Second, the main parties might say they believe in different things, but they all seem to believe in one particular offbeat religion: the magic tax avoidance money tree. All three of these manifestos assume they will make enormous sums – more, actually, than from any single other money-raising measure – from tightening up tax avoidance rules.
While it’s perfectly plausible that you could raise at least some money from clamping down on tax avoidance, it’s hardly a slam-dunk. That this is the centrepiece of each party’s money-raising efforts says a lot. And, another thing that’s often glossed over: raising more money this way will also raise the tax burden.
Image: Should the Bank of England be paying large sums in interest to banks? File pic: AP
Third is another thing all the parties agree on and are desperate not to question: the fiscal rules. The government has a set of rules requiring it to keep borrowing and (more importantly given where the numbers are right now) total debt down to a certain level.
But here’s the thing. These rules are not god-given. They are not necessarily even all that good. The debt rule is utterly gameable. It hasn’t stopped the Conservatives from raising the national debt to the highest level in decades. And it’s not altogether clear the particular measure of debt being used (net debt excluding Bank of England interventions) is even the right one.
Which raises another micro-conspiracy. Of all the parties at this election, the only one talking about whether the Bank of England should really be paying large sums in interest to banks as it winds up its quantitative easing programme is the Reform Party. This policy, first posited by a left-wing thinktank (the New Economics Foundation), is something many economists are discussing. It’s something the Labour Party will quite plausibly carry out to raise some extra money if it gets elected. But no one wants to discuss it. Odd.
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Anyway, the fourth issue everyone seems to have agreed not to discuss is, you’ve guessed it, Brexit. While the 2019 election was all about Brexit, this one, by contrast, has barely featured the B word. Perhaps you’re relieved. For a lot of people we’ve talked so much about Brexit over the past decade or so that, frankly, we need a bit of a break. That’s certainly what the main parties seem to have concluded.
But while the impact of leaving the European Union is often overstated (no, it’s not responsible for every one of our economic problems) it’s far from irrelevant to our economic plight. And where we go with our economic neighbours is a non-trivial issue in the future.
Anyway, this brings us to the fifth and final thing no one is talking about. The fact that pretty much all the guff spouted on the campaign trail is completely dwarfed by bigger international issues they seem reluctant or ill-equipped to discuss. Take the example of China and electric cars.
Image: Brexit has barely featured in the election. File pic: Victoria Jones/PA
Just recently, both the US and European Union have announced large tariffs on the import of Chinese EVs. Now, in America’s case those tariffs are primarily performative (the country imports only a tiny quantity of Chinese EVs). But in Europe‘s case, Chinese EVs are a very substantial part of the market – same for the UK.
Raising the question: what is the UK going to do? You could make a strong case for saying Britain should be emulating the EU and US, in an effort to protect the domestic car market. After all, failing to impose tariffs will mean this country will have a tidal wave of cars coming from China (especially since they can no longer go to the rest of the continent without facing tariffs) which will make it even harder for domestic carmakers to compete. And they’re already struggling to compete.
By the same token, imposing tariffs will mean the cost of those cheap Chinese-made cars (think: MGs, most Teslas and all those newfangled BYDs and so on) will go up. A lot. Is this really the right moment to impose those extra costs on consumers?
In short, this is quite a big issue. Yet it hasn’t come up as a big issue in this campaign – which is madness. But then you could say the same thing about, say, the broader race for minerals, about net zero policy more widely and about how we’re going to go about tightening up sanctions on Russia to make them more effective.
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Think back to the last time a political party actually confronted some long-standing issues no one wanted to talk about in their manifesto. I’m talking about the 2017 Conservative manifesto, which pledged to resolve the mess of social care in this country, once and for all.
It sought to confront a big social issue, intergenerational inequality, in so doing ensuring younger people wouldn’t have to subsidise the elderly.
The manifesto was an absolute, abject, electoral disaster. It was largely responsible for Theresa May‘s slide in the polls from a 20-point lead to a hung parliament.
And while most people don’t talk about that manifesto anymore, make no mistake: today’s political strategists won’t forget it in a hurry. Hence why this year’s campaign and this year’s major manifestos are so thin.
Elections are rarely won on policy proposals. But they are sometimes lost on them.
They came in their droves: thousands of Reform supporters poured into a vast hall in a Birmingham conference centre on Sunday to hear Nigel Farage.
His backers brought with them Union Jacks, and brandished Reform placards. There were even one or two red baseball caps emblazoned with the slogan “Make Britain Great Again”, which seemed fitting for an event that felt quite Trumpian in style and tone.
Mr Farage came onto the stage to pounding music, smoke machines, fireworks, and a sea of “it’s time for Reform” placards to a 5,000-strong crowd with a speech that spoke about how Britain was broken and it was time for Reform.
He said his party would be the “leading voice of opposition” as he attacked ‘the establishment’ in all its guises, from the Conservative Party to Labour, the BBC, and Channel 4 to the Governor of the Bank of England.
While detractors describe Mr Farage’s platform as a type of dog-whistle politics that does little but to stoke grievances and division, there is an audience for him and his policies that politicians in larger parties should ignore at their peril.
When I spoke to many people in the hall afterwards, they were overwhelmingly former Conservative voters disillusioned with their old party.
One woman, who had travelled over from Hull for the rally told me she thought there were a lot of “silent people who may be frightened to say they are voting Reform”.
“I think it’s going to be shock,” she said.
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Image: The crowd in Birmingham. Pic: Reuters
2024 is the election for ‘the other parties’
The rise of the ‘other’ parties is a clear theme of this election campaign as the Liberal Democrats, who won just 11 seats back in 2019, now eye getting back to the levels of seats they enjoyed – in the 1940s or 1950s – before it was wiped out in 2015 on the back of the coalition years.
Nigel Farage’s Reform, meanwhile, is on 16.2% in our Sky News poll tracker, just behind the Tories on 20%.
Mr Farage likes to make the argument that Labour could be heading to a landslide on a lower voter share.
Recent analysis in the Financial Times suggested Labour could win a record 450 seats – about 70% – on just 41% of the votes, lower than the figure Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour achieved in 2017, while the Lib Dems could pick up 50 seats with a lower share of the vote than Reform with just a few seats at best. If it turns out anything like this, prepare for plenty of noise from Mr Farage.
Whether undecided voters or those leaning to Reform stick with them on Thursday is a big unknown of this election. Tories are nervous, knowing that big Reform votes piling up in their constituencies could cost them their seat.
In 2019, the majority of Conservatives did not have a threat from the right, as the Brexit Party stood down candidates with a Brexit-backing Conservative candidate. They stood but 275 or 632 seats.
This time around, Reform is everywhere and no one feels safe: one poll put James Cleverly’s Braintree constituency, supposedly the 19th safest Conservative seat, on a knife edge as Reform clocks up an estimated 22% vote share in his Essex constituency.
Image: Pic: Reuters
Tories in all-out war
The Conservatives, who began this campaign trying not to get into a fight with Mr Farage (perhaps for fear of further alienating their traditional voters) are now at all-out war as they try to salvage as many seats as they can.
On Sunday the party said if “just 130,000 voters currently considering a vote for Reform or the Lib Dems voted Conservative, it would be enough to stop Labour’s supermajority”.
The prime minister, meanwhile, has become increasingly vocal in his criticisms of Reform and Mr Farage as the party looks for a way to pull voters back.
Mr Sunak has been vocal in his criticism of Mr Farage as a “Putin appeaser” after the Reform leader suggested Ukraine enter peace talks – something which Ukraine has emphatically ruled out unless Russia retreats from its territory.
The prime minister also spoke of his “anger and hurt” over revelations – contested by Reform – in a Channel 4 undercover report of a Reform canvasser calling Mr Sunak a “f****** P***”.
This, combined with a Reform organiser making homophobic remarks and candidates being suspended for racist, antisemitic and sexist views has caused difficulties for Mr Farage in recent days.
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1:29
Sunak ‘hurt’ over Reform race row
Tensions around Farage starting to show
In our interview in Birmingham on Sunday, some of those tensions were beginning to show.
For a start, the politician who had appeared with right-wing Tories such as potential future leader Dame Priti Patel at the Conservative Party conference last October, and openly toyed about returning to the fold, now ruled out any sort of tie-up.
Having spoken but a month ago about a reverse takeover of the Tories and refusing to rule out one day rejoining the party, on Sunday he was clear he would not rejoin, and wanted nothing to do with the Conservatives.
Image: Pic: Reuters
It comes after a clutch of senior figures, including Dame Priti, indicated that Mr Farage would now not be welcomed back into the party in the wake of the backlash over his claim the West provoked Russia to invade Ukraine and the racism row engulfing Reform.
He equally was more equivocal than he had been about Andrew Tate in the past, making it clear to me that he “disavowed’ him, and was also highly critical of Reform events organiser George James who made homophobic remarks, saying he was “furious” when he saw the footage (also in the Channel 4 report) of Mr James describing the Pride flag as “degenerate” and criticising the police for displaying the flag.
“They should be out catching the n***** not promoting the f******”,” he said in the report.
Mr Farage said Mr James was “crass, drunken, rude and wrong” and told me he had been asked to remove his membership. But he also said he was “down a few drinks” explaining: “We could all say silly things when we’re a bit drunk.”
When I asked him if people really say things like this when they are drunk, Mr Farage said: “People say all sorts of things when they’re drunk and often don’t remember. But it was awful.”
So awful that one Reform candidate announced on Sunday evening they were standing down and would instead back their local Conservative in the constituency of Erewash.
The question for Reform is whether their potential voters, looking at some of the controversy surrounding the party, decide it’s not for them after all.
What is absolutely clear is Reform’s performance will help determine that of the Conservatives on Thursday night as the election results come in.
If he’s successful, Mr Farage will be heading for parliament, not only giving him a bigger national platform but a democratic mandate. That spells trouble for a Conservative party already in turmoil.