Rishi Sunak – Plan B will not involve furlough
This Wednesday will see the Chancellor’s second budget of the year. As always, the contents are hotly anticipated, but Rishi Sunak was reluctant to give too much away this morning. It has been reported that the new Health Security Agency is sounding out local authorities about the implementation of the government’s ‘Plan B’ for trying to control the coronavirus over the winter months. Andrew Marr asked Sunak if Plan B meant a return to a scenario very much like the one experienced this time last year:
RS: The Plan B that we’ve set out does not involve the same type of very significant economic restrictions that we saw previously, so [furlough] won’t be necessary.
£7 billion transport announcement is really £1.5 billion ‘top-up’
Trevor Phillips began his interview with Sunak by discussing the government’s plans for ‘levelling up’ transport networks in cities outside London. Sunak confirmed that most of the money earmarked for this purpose was not new, and was non-committal about whether the Leeds leg of High Speed 2 would get the green light:
RS: We’ve previously announced £4.2 billion for that. What we’ve actually done is top that up, as you said, by £1.5 billion.
I do stand for lower taxes
Phillips also challenged Sunak with a graph from the Institute for Fiscal Studies showing the UK’s tax burden as a percentage of GDP since the Second World War, with the current level at almost the highest rate since 1950. Despite telling Phillips that he stood for lower taxes, Sunak still refused to rule any tax rises out ahead of his statement this week:
RS: I do stand for [lower taxes], and of course I want to deliver, [but] I’ve got to take the world as it comes.
Rachel Reeves – Government should bring in Plan B now
Marr also spoke to Sunak’s opposite number, the Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves. Marr sought Labour’s feeling on if and when the government should implement their Covid Plan B. Reeves’ response was that they should do so right away:
RR: The government’s dither and delay risks storing up problems for the future… We should introduce those things that the scientists say.
The North is ‘sick’ of announcements without delivery
On the content of the upcoming budget, Reeves accused the government of talking the talk but not walking the walk when it came to levelling up:
RR: What we see from this government is lots of announcements… What we’re sick of in the North is having announcements without delivery.
‘Ripping up’ Sure Start was an ‘act of criminality’
When discussing the government’s latest plans for investing in early years education and ‘family hubs’, Reeves bemoaned the scrapping of the Sure Start scheme that had been in practice under the last Labour government:
RR: Thousands of children’s centres and Sure Start centres… have long gone… It really was an act of criminality to rip that all up, only to now… create a pale imitation of it.
Katherine Henderson – The NHS is already ‘in a terrible place’
And finally, Dr Katherine Henderson, the President of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, told Phillips that the NHS was in a parlous state:
KH: We’re already struggling to cope… This is not something that’s coming in the next couple of months. We’re already in a terrible place.
Comments