Rachel Reeves has admitted she was “wrong” to say higher taxes were not needed during the election campaign – as she warned businesses may have to make less money or pay staff less to cover a tax increase.
A month before Labour won the July election, Ms Reeves said “we don’t need higher taxes, what we need is growth”.
On Wednesday, the chancellor raised taxes by £40bn, the highest amount since 1993, prompting a jump in the cost of government borrowing that had calmed by Friday evening.
She told Sky News’ Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips: “I was wrong on 11 June, I didn’t know everything, because when I arrived at the Treasury on July 5, so just under 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.”
She accused the previous government of having “hid it from the country, they hid it from parliament and indeed, they hid it from the official independent forecaster, the OBR”.
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The lion’s share of the £40bn in tax rises will be shouldered by businesses as employers’ national insurance (NI) will go up by 1.2 percentage points to 15% from April, while the earnings threshold at which employers start paying NI has been slashed from £9,100 to £5,000.
Ms Reeves said this will raise £25bn over the next five years.
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The tax rise has been heavily criticised, however the chancellor defended her decision as she said the government “made a choice” to get employers to pay the rise instead of employees.
She told Phillips: “Yes, businesses will now have to make a choice, whether they will absorb that through efficiency and productivity gains, whether it will be through lower profits or perhaps through lower wage growth.”
The Office for Business Responsibility (OBR), which monitors the government’s spending plans and performance, said most of the burden from the increase will be passed on to workers through lower wages, and consumers through higher prices.
It estimated the employers’ national insurance hike would reduce the average time worked by the equivalent of 50,000 hours.
The OBR’s budget review found the £40bn in tax rises would not translate to the growth Labour promised in its manifesto.
But Ms Reeves said she is “not satisfied with those numbers, those aren’t the summit of my ambition”.
“I think we can grow our economy faster than those numbers, and that’s my job now, to get those growth numbers up,” she added.
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Rachel Reeves delivering the budget on Wednesday. Pic: House of Commons
The chancellor reiterated what she told Sky News earlier this week, that the government will never have to do a budget like Wednesday’s again.
Asked if she was committed to not raising income tax, national insurance and VAT, as promised in the manifesto, she said: “It’s an absolute commitment, but let me just say, we have now wiped the slate clean under the mismanagement and the chaos of the previous government, it’s now on us.
“We’ve put everything out into the open and we have set the spending envelope for the course of this parliament. We don’t need to come back for more.”
