Chancellor Rachel Reeves admits she was wrong to say she wouldn't have to raise taxes before election
3 November 2024, 11:43 | Updated: 3 November 2024, 14:08
The Chancellor has admitted she was "wrong" when she said she would not have to raise taxes before the election.
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Rachel Reeves said, blaming the previous government for hiding a "black hole" in the country's finances.
Referring to comments she had made during the election campaign, Ms Reeves told Sky News: "I was wrong on June 11, I didn't know everything.
"Because when I arrived at the Treasury on July 5, just over a month after I said those words, I was taken into a room by the senior officials at the Treasury and they set out the huge black hole in the public finances, beyond which anybody knew about at the time of the general election because the previous government hid it from the country, they hid it from Parliament, and indeed they hid it from the independent official forecasters at the Office for Budget Responsibility.
"So when I went into that Budget last week, I had to put our public finances back on a firm trajectory."
Reeves reiterated the Government would "absolutely" keep to Labour's election promise of not raising key taxes on "working people" through the current Parliament.
She told "our manifesto commitment not to increase those three taxes, so income tax, employee national insurance and VAT and we won't increase those."
The Chancellor added: "It's an absolute commitment."
Ms Reeves said the Government has "wiped the slate clean" on the "mismanagement and the chaos" of the previous Tory administration, adding: "It's now on us.
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"We've put everything out into the open, we've set the spending envelope of this Parliament, we don't need to come back for more, we've done that now, we've wiped the slate clean."
Pressed on whether she will return with more tax rises, Ms Reeves replied: "I'm not going to be able to write five years worth of budgets on this show today, but ... there's no need to come back with another Budget like this, we'll never need to do that again.
"We've now set the spending envelope for the remainder of this Parliament, we don't need to increase taxes further. We need to do two things now: we need to reform our public services to make sure they work better and we need to grow our economy."
