By Jessica Frank-Keyes
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has repeated his promise to continue cutting taxes ahead of a March 6 budget.
Sunak told the Sunday Telegraph his plan was to cut taxes further in 2024 by taking action to “control public spending… [and] control welfare”.
In a hint at a potential future drop in income tax, he told the paper: “When I say that I want to keep cutting taxes, that’s what we’re going to deliver.
“I’m going to be crystal clear. My priority is cutting taxes.”
It comes as the UK prepares for the general election campaign to – unofficially – get underway as MPs return to Westminster on Monday, with just two months before the Chancellor is set to deliver his Spring Budget.
Speaking on the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, Sunak described Saturday’s cut of two percentage point cut in the main rate of national insurance, from 12 per cent to 10 per cent, as “meaningful” and said it was “going to make a difference” to people’s wallets.
“For those on the lowest incomes we raised the national insurance threshold, the personal allowance, so you can now earn £1,000 a month without paying any tax or national insurance,” he said.
“That disproportionately obviously benefits the lowest paid. The national living wage has gone up by record amounts last year and this year, and the proportion of people in the lowest pay is the lowest on record.
“And you talked about tax cuts… an average person earning £35,000 from this weekend is seeing a tax cut worth £450, that is meaningful and it’s going to make a difference.”
But Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, who is also readying his party ahead of expected manifesto commitments later this spring, criticised Sunak’s comments on funding tax cuts by lowering welfare spending as “self-interest[ed]” and aimed at “dividing lines”.
He told Sky News on Sunday: “He has run out of ideas. They are desperately thrashing around and trying to find the dividing lines to go into the election.
“It is not part of a strategy for growing the economy, it is simply picking tax cuts that [he] thinks might create a dividing line going into the election. That is the wrong way to govern.
“Whichever party you are in… to simply go down the road of desperately picking anything that creates a divide rather than having a strategy for the country is characteristic of what has gone wrong over the last 14 years.”
